Hewitson, Mark; (2020) Militärwesen. In: Eke, Norbert Otto, (ed.) Vormärz-Handbuch. (pp. 204-212). Aisthesis Verlag: Bielefeld.

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Abstract

Many historians of the early nineteenth century emphasize the diversity of the German lands and the continuity of their traditions. In the sphere of the military, continuity was purportedly – according to Ute Planert’s analysis – the result of the maintenance of existing practices of recruitment, deployment, supply and depredation within the German armies of the Napoleonic campaigns and – according to Ute Frevert’s influential account – it was a consequence of the Bürgertum’s continuing skepticism about the army and military service after 1815, effectively insulating it from the risks of war. In Germany, the Hohenzollern monarchy purportedly remained an exception. Here, the ‘strange duty’ of military service was largely accepted. In Prussia during the Vormärz, a rhetoric of military service as a civic duty and a means of social integration and cultural socialization developed, Frevert contends, in keeping with much of the existing literature on the army as a putative ‘school’ for loyal subjects, active citizens or, even, a German nation. In the rest of Germany, the question, which provoked debate until the late 1860s, was whether there were viable alternatives to the Prussian model of universal conscription. The consensus in the third Germany, it is held, was affirmative, leading to a rejection of ‘the Prussian model’ and an insistence on its own system of conscription and substitutions. After the hiatus of the revolutions of 1848-49, the states permitting substitution before the revolution retained it in the 1850s and 1860s. Doubts about the people’s readiness to take up arms lingered on, with the idea of a ‘Volksbewaffnung’ supposedly reduced to a rhetorical device. In a certain sense, the eighteenth-century critique of the military appeared to have survived in the majority of German states during the nineteenth century, limiting their ability and willingness to countenance armed conflict. Even in Prussia, criticism of the army had been audible in 1848 and remained widespread in the 1850s. On this reading of events, the wars of the 1860s, during which Prussian deputies were reconciled to the army, at the latest by 1866-7, represented a ‘tectonic shift in domestic and military policy’. Elsewhere, it was the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71 that put an end to the wrangling in the southern German about the form and purpose of their military organizations, it is claimed. This narrative of continuing skepticism of the army in southern and western Germany is worth re-examining.

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