IT IS PART OF THE STRANGE DARK POETRY OF THE GREAT WAR
that the battle of Tannenberg, the most dramatic and complete victory achieved by either side in more than 4 years of bloody struggle, was fought in East Prussia.
This was sacred ground. Though the most remote and least developed region of the German federation-so remote that in 1914 it lay north of Russian Poland and today it is part of Poland-East Prussia was in a sense the heart of the Hohenzollern empire. It was the ancient home of a collection of families who were neither conspicuously wealthy nor particularly distinguished in any other way but regarded themselves as Germany's rightful leaders and were regarded as such by their king.
Hindenburg himself was a son of one of those families, which for him made the victory exquisitely sweet. He had saved the tabernacle from violation, overnight turning himself into a national idol. He had kept alive not only Germany's hopes of winning the war but his kinsmen's hope that their privileged place in the life of Germany wouldn't be lost, and that the weaknesses and contradictions of that special place-its absurdities, even-could continue to be ignored.
The Germany that Hindenburg and his kind dominated had come a long way since the Franco-Prussian War. Long regarded as the land of musicians and dreamy philosophers and Black Forest Elves, by 1914 it was the most modern, efficient, innovative, and powerful economy in Europe. Not only in industrial output but in science, even in the arts. Germany was a powerhouse. Militarily it was so strong that Britain, France, and Russia had good reason to fear that even in combination they might not be able to stand up against it.
Politically, though, Germany was a kind of Rube Goldberg device. Its system of government hadn't evolved like those of Britain and France, hadn't been passed down from time immemorial like Russia's or gradually improvised like Vienna's. Instead it was the creation of one man,
Germany's Iron Chancellor
"Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death"
He had designed it not so much to help Germany become a modern state as to keep modernity at bay-while, not incidentally, concentrating as much power as possible in his own hands. Its deficiencies had been serious from the start, and they grew more serious as the years passed, the world changed, and the Bismarckin system failed to keep pace. By the 2nd decade of the 20th century, with Bismarck long dead, those deficiencies had become dangerous. Ultimately they would render the system incapable of functioning under the strain of the Great War.
The root of the problem was that the empire, when it was declared in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in 1871, was completely dominated by Prussia, the most powerful of the German states and the one that had led the others to victory over France. Prussia King,
was proclaimed the 1st kaiser by a jubilant crowd of sword-brandishing princes and generals. It's not possible to understand the peculiar nature of Prussia, or why Prussia would ultimately not only fail but pass out of existence, without understanding what Wilhelm meant when he said that the creation of the new empire felt like a kind of death-that the day it happened was the most miserable of his life.
What he feared was the disappearance of "the old Prussia," a thing that since the Middle Ages had come to be holy not only to his Hohenzollern ancestors but to the kingdom's landholding gentry. The old Prussia was a place like no other in Europe, and its people were like no other. It arose in what is now northern Poland, east of where the Vistula River runs northward into the Baltic Sea, and originally it was the homeland not of Germans but of Slavs. In the 13th century the
an order of religious warriors created to participate in the Crusades, were invited to help ambitious German nobles seize the territories around the Vistula. The area east of the river was taken from Slavic tribe called the Prussians, who disappeared from history but left their name to be picked up by the early Hohenzollerns when they needed something to call the insignificant little quasi-kingdom that the Holy Roman emperor permitted them to establish on the outermost fringe of the German world.
Though the Teutonic Knights tried to recruit Germans to settle east of the Vistula, the soil was to poor and the climate too dank to be powerfully attractive. The Slavs were permitted to remain if they converted to Christianity. Gradually, as the generations passed, German and Slavic families intermarried and gave rise to an ethnically mixed local aristocracy that came to be known as the Junkers. The irony is that when Prussia became dominant in Germany and Prussia's military might made Germany one of the Great Powers of Europe, the world saw this half-Slavic Junker elite as the most Germanic of Germans. Some of the most Prussian of the Prussian-for example
who wrote the classic On War-bore names that were Slavic in origin.
The Junkers weren't, as a group, rich, and their estates weren't large. Life was often almost hardscrabble, requiring much labor and generating barely enough income to sustain a marginally aristocratic way of life. The people who grew up on those estates were, as a rule, neither particularly sophisticated. They were pious and provincial Lutherans, upright and sober, hardworking and hardheaded and often hard-hearted, with a deeply ingrained reverence for the law, for property rights, and for the class structure atop which they sat. What came to distinguish them above all was their almost mystic bond not to Prussia as a nation but to the Hohenzollern dynasty. This bond developed slowly, and what made it develop was the advantage if offered the Junkers. In return for their loyalty, they were assured nearly exclusive access to the more coveted positions in the Prussian army and civil service-opportunities for their sons to win a measure of power, snatches of glory, and sometimes, though not commonly, real wealth.
The Junkers evolved into Prussia's hereditary military elite. A culture emerged that was unlike any other in Europe, and army, it was said, that happened to have a country attached to it. This arrangement was threatened by the Napoleonic wars at the start of the 19th century and by the revolution that shook Europe in 1848.
horrified the Junkers by granting the revolutionaries a constitution, though this was rescinded at the 1st opportunity.
Having barley survived these upheavals, the Junkers emerged more conservative than ever, their hatred of change in any form deeply ingrained.
Kaiser Wilhelm I wasn't a man of great intellect, but it was perceptive of him to find little to celebrate in the creation of his empire. In the most visible ways, the empire was a glorious achievement, one that put him at the pinnacle not only of Germany but of Europe and appeared to multiply the opportunities available to the Junker elite. But on a deeper level the new situation was fraught with difficulties, especially for the Junkers. 1st among the problems was the question of legitimacy. The Junkers were determined to maintain their special connection to the crown and the prerogatives that came with it.
The Hohenzollern dynasty wanted much the same thing. But if the Junkers had been a small slice of the population of Prussia, they were an even smaller part of the empire. In the new world of giant industries and great cities, they remained a tribe of provincial farmers without real economic power.
Inevitably, the Junkers came to seem an anachronism to the increasing numbers of Germans who knew how different things were in America, Britain, and France. As agriculture became a less important element in the economy, what little prosperity the Junkers traditionally had came under threat. The richer and more educated the German nation grew, the more prominent among the peoples of the world, the odder it seemed that East Prussia should dominate as it did.
What is most odd is how little resistance to Junker privilege other Germans displayed during the half century that the empire existed. Bismarck, again, made this possible. Though he had deep roots in Junkerdom and for much of his early adulthood had worked a family farm, Bismarck was never entirely trusted or accepted by his own class. (His mother, and outsider from the professional classes, had given young Otto an education that made him more cosmopolitan than was considered quite proper.) He was permitted to create the empire only on the basis of certain understandings. He made it not a centralized country but a federation in which Bavaria, Baden, Wurttemberg, and other states were allowed semiautonomy under their ruling families while Prussia stood supreme. He fashioned a constitution that concentrated nearly all political power in the hands of the monarch(who remained King of Prussia in addition to being Kaiser) and the officials he appointed. He did so with the tacit understanding that the Junkers would continue to be specially favored. And so they were. Though it would have been politically awkward to fill every important chair with Junker bottoms, the Junkers could always be confident of getting more than their statistically fair share. Bismarck's system made ample room for economic liberalism-that was good for revenues and so for the army-but made political liberalism, and above all democracy, impossible.
This wasn't a system well equipped to deal with the tensions of a modern capitalist and industrial society, and even Bismarck had trouble making it work. After he passed from the scene, his successors were sometimes barely able to keep its wheels turning. In a free market for agricultural products, the Junker estates would have sunk into bankruptcy; to save them, the government enacted so many tariffs on food imports that Germany became what has been described as a "welfare agency for needy landowners." There was a legislature, the Reichstag, but it had little power. As men infected with democratic and even socialist notions became increasingly common within the Reichstag, the Junkers kept them in check by joining forces with industrial interests in what came to be called the alliance of iron and rye. They were greatly helped by an electoral system that gave more votes to people with land and money.
In consequence, 1000's of Germans of professional attainment, people with education and talent, had no real voice in public affairs. The political life of the nation remained in an atrophied state. The Reichstag, though it did have a role in budget-making, was otherwise little more than a debating society. In England and France the members of the legislature-The House of Commons and the Chamber of Deputies-chose the prime minister. Thus they, and the people who elected them, had a real connection to the levers of power and could regard themselves as a kind of ultimate authority. Their counterparts in Germany were essentially impotent. Their parties, instead of being contenders for control of the government, were held at arm's length by a government that remained very nearly what it had been in feudal times; a collection of Junkers chosen by their king. The result, in the short term, was widespread public indifference to politics. In tougher times it was a recipe for alienation.
The problem of how the Junkers were going to keep intact what remained of the old Prussia extended into the army. With all their limitations and faults, the Junkers were never expansionist imperialists. They weren't even German nationalists; many of them cared little about Germany except as an extension of Prussia power. What they wanted was the little world of their forebears, and every new stage of growth, of expansion, made that world less sustainable. Even the expansion of the army, unavoidable in the arms race that gripped the great powers of Europe at the start of the 20th, deeply troubled many traditionalists. Just as for a good Junker the only thoroughly acceptable army officer was an East Prussian of acceptable family background, so too the only dependable recruit was an ignorant and docile East Prussian farm boy. The increasing numbers of alternatives-growing hordes of city dwellers and factory workers, many of them infected with modern notions-were aliens and not to be trusted.
Tensions associated with such questions cost Erich Ludendorff, himself an upstart whose father had sold insurance, his place on Moltke's planning staff just a year before the start of the Great War. He had become convinced that a larger army was essential of the Schlieffen Plan was to remain practicable in the face of increasing French and Russian strength, and he began pressing for the creation of 6 new army corps. When only half this total was approved, he continued to demand more. After being told to keep silent but refusing, he was banished from the staff. This was a blow; it meant that, in case of war, Ludendorff wouldn't become Moltke's chief of operations. He had brought this punishment down on himself by touching 2 sets of raw nerves. The government and the army didn't want to stir up resistance in the Reichstag by asking for too big an increase in military spending too quickly. And many influential Junkers knew that it wouldn't be possible to find nearly enough young aristocrats to fill the officer billets in 6 new corps. Outsiders in large numbers would have to be given commissions. The biggest army that Germany was capable of mustering wasn't likely to be the kind of army that the Junkers could continue to control.
While Lundendorff departed Berlin for Dusseldorf and command of a nonelite regiment(his not being given a unit of the Prussian Guard was seen as another rebuke), the man who would become his archenemy was rising almost effortlessly. 4 years older than Lundendorff, Erich von Falkenhayn had been a favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm's since 1911, the year he had become a regimental commander in the guard. Just a year after that he was made a major general, and in 1913 he was promoted again and made minister of war. Though surprising even to his fellow generals, this rapid ascent(and still the greater promotion that would soon follow) is explicable in terms of Falkenhayn's background. He was very nearly the ideal Junker. Tall and slender, haughtily elegant in bearing, he had been raised on a modest farm in easternmost East Prussia to a family that traced itself back to the 20th century and the Teutonic Knights and had produced one of Frederick the Great's generals. He was a pure product of the old Prussia, and Ludendorff's opposite in far too many ways.
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