The Rhetorical Function of Architecture in Gilbert of Limerick’s imago ecclesiae

Spring 2011 Editorial Board Editors-In-Chief Christian Bjørn Bak, Christ’s Faridah Zaman, Corpus Christi Managing Editor Lindsey Mannion, Trinity Hall Publishing Editor Matthew Eccles, Trinity Hall Senior Editor John Woolf, Downing Faculty Advisor Dr. William O'Reilly Peer Review Board Natasha Pesaran Alex Forzani Joshua Mills Alice Lilly Joseph la Hausse de Lalouvière

ABOUT US: The Cambridge Undergraduate History Journal is a bi-annual publication featuring scholarly articles written by Undergraduate students at the University of Cambridge. It is a primarily student- run publication with a blind peer review selection process, soliciting submissions from a range of faculties. Authors retain all rights to scholarship presented in the Journal. CONTACT US: [email protected] VISIT US ONLINE: http://www.cambridgehistoryjournal.co.uk SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: We encourage submissions from all Cambridge faculties, and students may submit work up to two years after the date of graduation. See page 94 for further details. Please direct any queries to: [email protected] We employ the principle of double blind review and therefore can only accept submissions sent via the following email address: [email protected]

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�Contents Letter from the Editors Dr. Colin Shindler on Film & the Historian

ANYA BURGON The Rhetorical Function of Architecture in Gilbert Limerick’s imago ecclesiae

NATASHA PESARAN Utopia and the New World: Early Modern Fact or Fiction

JOHN MUELLER The 1848 Revolutions and the German Nation

ANTONIO WEISS The civil rights movement and the African American in Hollywood

JOEL WINTON Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: The unexpected toast of the German public sphere

Submission Guidelines �

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2 Cambridge Undergraduate History Journal

Letter from the Editors FARIDAH ZAMAN & CHRISTIAN BJØRN BAK

Corpus Christi & Christ’s

Dear readers,

Welcome to the third issue of CUHJ. Our bi-annual journal has reached its first birthday, and continues to present you with stellar examples of the interesting and thoughtful work of Cambridge undergraduates. As you read on, you will find that this issue has a strong visual theme throughout. We have a fascinating piece on race and Hollywood by Antonio Weiss that dissects the representation of black people in motion pictures, from the era of Sidney Poitier to near-contemporary works involving the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry. It is accompanied, appropriately enough, by a special feature by Dr Colin Shindler (Cambridge) – the BAFTA-winning historian tells us in personal terms how films stir his own appreciation for history and why they are an incredibly valuable resource for the twentieth century.

The theme of ‘history through media’ is continued in the article by Joel Winton on Daniel J. Goldhagen’s controversial study, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). In this article Winton employs a plethora of press responses to evaluate how and why the German public sphere responded to this book, which dealt with the hugely emotive subject of the Holocaust, in wildly differing ways. He comes to see it as a critical indicator of the mentality of the age in which it was published.

Our three other articles are located beyond the twentieth century. Anya Burgon’s article is a study of an early twelfth-century illumination of a church, which she reads in relation to a text by the Irish reformer Gilbert of Limerick. She discusses eruditely how both sources act as models designed to edify through the visual metaphor of the church edifice. Natasha Pesaran deals also with the realms of imagination in her piece on early modern utopian thought as it related to the New World. She examines the boundaries between fact and fiction, knowledge and ideals, and understandings of oneself and the other. John Mueller finally writes of the construction of the German nation as a concept, with specific attention given to the 1848 Revolutions. Using pamphlets and a number of interesting visual sources dating from as early as the sixteenth century, he argues in favour of seeing the events of the mid-nineteenth century in much deeper historical long-view.

We hope you will enjoy reading this edition, and we look forward to showcasing more work in the not too distant future. Thank you to all authors whose work is featured here, and the many others who submitted theirs for consideration. Additionally, we would like to thank the entire editorial board for your tireless work and the fellows of St. John’s College for their generous financial support. Details for submission are, as ever, available on our website.

Christian and Faridah Editors-in-Chief

June 2011

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Dr Colin Shindler on Film & the Historian Dr Colin Shindler Why is film so useful to the historian? My answer is that film, particularly fiction film, tells you things that conventional historical documents do not. Film is not a substitute for conventional historical documents but it is an extremely valuable addition. I have been running my course Hollywood & Race in the History Faculty at Cambridge for over ten years, in which I plot the changing nature of the African American stereotype as perceived by Hollywood films from Birth of a Nation (1915) to the time of Denzel Washington and Halle Berry. I have always championed the use of the fiction film as opposed to the use of newsreels possibly because its benefits to the historian, though more difficult at first to perceive, feel to me to be ultimately more rewarding. It might seem that the use of newsreels for the historian is self-evident. We have many of the key events of the twentieth century preserved on film from the jerky awkward actions of early motion pictures to the latest in high definition and satellite television news. We assume, certainly in the early newsreels, that what we see is what we get but a documentary feature length film like The Battle of the Somme (1917) which purported to show the genuine events of the battle turns out to have been partly "recreated" on Salisbury plain with British soldiers playing the evil Hun as well as themselves. There is one famous shot of a British soldier poised to go over the top of the trench and into No Mans Land when he is shot and killed, his body sliding helplessly back into the mud of the trench. It is extremely moving until you discover that the soldier was acting - rather well as it so happens. The American newsreel The March of Time, so brilliantly parodied by Orson Welles at the start of Citizen Kane, was famous for its recreations. Those poor nuns incarcerated by the evil Nazis in jail in the notorious Inside Nazi Germany segment (1938) were actually two cleaners in The March of Time offices in New York who were each paid $10 to wear a rented nun's costume. The "jail" was actually a square of cardboard held over the camera lens with vertical holes to give the appearance of jail bars. Give me the honesty of the fiction film every time! I first saw Frank Capra's 1936 masterpiece Mr Deeds Goes To Town in the Arts Cinema of blessed memory one June day shortly after Tripos had finished in June 1969. It was the time of student protests against the Vietnam War and the time of the year when Cambridge students are at their most "relaxed". The story involves Gary Cooper playing Longfellow Deeds, a kind, decent, unambitious man who unexpectedly inherits twenty million dollars from an uncle he barely knew in life. He moves from sleepy Mandrake Falls, a small town in Vermont, to his uncle's mansion in New York City. He is now part of the celebrity lifestyle of 1936 and as such perfect fodder for the tabloids. He is set up by the cynical but beautiful reporter played by Jean Arthur with whom the honest man falls in love believing her to be starving and homeless. What appear to be his antics are reported in humiliating detail for the delectation of Arthur's tabloid readers. One evening she asks him where he'd like to go next and he tells her he wants to pay his respects at Grant's Tomb so they travel to the unexceptional mausoleum where she tells him there's nothing of significance to look at. "That depends on what you see" he replies. "And what do you see?" she wonders aloud. Cooper goes off into a short but deeply felt speech about the Civil War General, later President, Grant, extolling his rise from poor Ohio ploughboy to his place as the successor to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. "I see men marching in the rain, I see General Lee with a broken heart surrendering, I see that poor Ohio ploughboy becoming president like Abraham Lincoln said." So far the speech is unexceptional but his final words are "Things like that can only happen in a country like America". Well, we had just been told about the My Lai massacre. The following year four students were


shot dead at Kent State University for protesting at Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia. If you were a 20-year-old student in Cambridge in June 1969 you didn't want to hear this paean of praise to the glories of American democracy. "LBJ, LBJ, How many kids have you killed today?" we chanted. When Cooper finished his speech the Arts Cinema erupted into catcalls. I should have joined in but I didn't. I was cross with the cat callers. Instinctively I realised that though the speech sounded trite and corny in 1969 it would have sounded very different to American ears in 1936. Frank Capra had emigrated with his family from Sicily in 1903 when he was six years old. He had sold newspapers on the streets of Los Angeles when he was aged seven otherwise his family would not have eaten. He had risen to become one of the top directors in Hollywood and he wanted to make it clear that he still believed in the American Dream even at the height of the Depression. Mr Deeds Goes To Town tells us things about America in 1936 that we can't get simply from a study of New Deal legislation. That's one example but there are so many Hollywood movies that are revealing for historians. I speak of Hollywood because that is what I know best but the principle applies equally well to say Ealing Cinema and the problems of post-war austerity in Britain and to the up and down career of Sergei Eisenstein. The Russian director of Battleship Potemkin was up or down depending on whether his films were endorsed by Stalin – apparently Stalin loved Ivan the Terrible Part One but hated Ivan the Terrible Part Two and that finished Eisenstein at a relatively young age. Period films in particular tell you far more about the period in which they are made than the period in which they are set, just as a nineteenth-century Whig historian will write a very different history of the English Civil War from a twentieth-century Marxist historian. The problems of historiography are well documented and the benefits have long been accepted but really there is very little difference between those lessons and the lessons that can be learned from shall we say different attitudes to Tudor monarchs. In 1937 Flora Robson played Elizabeth I in Fire Over England, a British film made by Alexander Korda at his Denham studios. She spoke the "I have the heart and stomach of a king" speech at Tilbury whilst attempting to rein in a rather frisky horse – a fine piece of acting all round. Three years later she was in Hollywood reprising the role for Warner Brothers in an Errol Flynn swashbuckler called The Sea Hawk. This time in the Tilbury speech there is no reference to problems of gender. Magically Elizabeth of England has morphed into President Franklin D Roosevelt as she carefully intones… And now, my loyal subjects, a grave duty confronts us all: To prepare our nation for a war that none of us wants, least of all your queen. We have tried by all means in our power to avert this war. We have no quarrel with the people of Spain or of any other country; but when the ruthless ambition of a man threatens to engulf the world, it becomes the solemn obligation of all free men to affirm that the earth belongs not to any one man, but to all men, and that freedom is the deed and title to the soil on which we exist. Firm in this faith, we shall now make ready to meet the great armada that Philip sends against us. To this end, I pledge you ships – ships worthy of our seamen – a mighty fleet, hewn out of the forests of England; a navy foremost in the world - not only in our time, but for generations to come. It's a fine speech stirringly delivered but because it was made in 1940 the film showcases the arguments of the isolationists and their interventionist ideological opponents. Roosevelt was running for re-election for an unprecedented third time in November 1940. For all his sympathy for Britain and the occupied countries of Europe he could not afford to be accused of being a warmonger when he was on the campaign trail. As that final speech makes clear, Elizabeth spends most of the film trying to avoid a confrontation with Spain. Only when Errol Flynn captures the plans of the Armada, unmasks the traitor at the heart of the English court and presents her with overwhelming evidence of Spanish aggression and duplicity does she change her mind and offer her support to the war party. Warner Brothers were fiercely anti-Nazi and their adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s 1915 novel was their plea for America to recognise the threat emanating from the Third Reich in 1940.

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If you want to know what America was really thinking during those fateful months between Hitler's invasion of Poland and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor watch The Sea Hawk – and The Great Dictator and Sergeant York and A Yank in the RAF and Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. Yes, they are "only" movies but it is a wise historian who opens his eyes and his mind to the possibilities offered by the study of the fiction film, even if it stars Buzz Lightyear, Woody, and Mr Potato Head.

Copyright Colin Shindler 2011


The Rhetorical Function of Architecture in Gilbert of Limerick’s imago ecclesiae

Anya Burgon Trinity Hall

This article examines the rhetorical function of architecture in the 'image of the church', an illumination accompanying a text by the Irish reformer, Gilbert of Limerick and dated circa 1190 from Durham. Focusing on the use of the architectural analogy, this article attempts to place this relatively unaccounted for northern English product within its twelfth-century pedagogical context, linking it specifically to the Victorine School in Paris. The edifice in the image is recognized as a visual mediator, acting as a model for spiritual or mental building. By showing how its appearance on the page is designed for its assimilation by the mind, the article aims to reveal the direct relationship made between edifice and edification. Introduction The fully coloured imago ecclesiae or Image of the Church now found in Cambridge University Library’s

MS.Ff.I.27 (figure 1) is a picture not easily accommodated by the modern mind. It is only via a reading of

its accompanying text, de statu ecclesie, by the Irish reformer Gilbert of Limerick that the illumination is

even revealed as showing the hierarchy of the church, along largely recognizable European lines.

Structured and contained by an architectural elevation of what looks like gothic arcading, the image offers

an intriguing interpretation of Gilbert’s architectonically useful employment of the word ‘pyramid’ to

articulate his system of working up from the smallest to largest units of church organization, from parish

to Pope. Indeed it is this interpretation that makes use of the architectural metaphor that the present

study endeavors to explain.

The illumination has proved difficult to date, but is most likely from twelfth-century Durham,

and copied from a simpler version of Gilbert’s diagram still in the Cathedral’s library (figure 2) by a scribe

with comparatively greater pictorial concern.1 The exact motivation for a reproduction of the diagram,

and particularly along such elaborate lines, remains unclear. Indeed, before it was separated from its sister

manuscript now in the form of Corpus Christi Library’s MS66, it was accompanied by several other rather

sophisticated diagrams.2 While these will be shown to offer parallels, they do not exploit the specific visual

analogy between scripture and building found in the imago ecclesiae. Here, it will be argued that this places

1 For further information as to the origin of MS.Ff.I.27 see C. M. Kauffman, Romanesque Manuscripts 1066-1190, Survey of Manuscripts illuminated in the British Isles, volume III (London; Boston, 1975), no.102; B. Meehan, ‘Durham Twelfth Century Manuscripts in Cistercian Houses’, in D. Rollason, M. Harvey and M. Prestwich (eds), Anglo-Norman England 1093-1193 (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 439-449; C. Norton, ‘History, Wisdom and Illumination’, in D. Rollason (ed.), Symeon of Durham: Historian of Durham and the North, (Stamford, 1998), pp. 61-105; N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books (London, 1964), suppl. 5, pp. 16, 177, 335; D.M. Dumville, ‘The Corpus Christi Nennius’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 25 (1974) pp. 369-80; P. Jones, ‘The Medieval Encyclopedia: Science and Practice’, in P. Binski and S. Panayotova (eds), The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West (London, 2005), no. 146. 2 For the literature on MS 66 see references in Jones, ‘The Medieval Encyclopedia’, p. 307.

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the image in the light of a distinctly twelfth-century school of thought that stretched far beyond the

confines of the Durham scriptorium: tying aesthetic concerns with an ecclesiastical end of reform and

renewal, its agenda is particularly akin to the work of the Victorine School in Paris.

Hence the illumination has a bureaucratic function, and will be explored in this article as a

rhetorical site rather than representational in the normal artistic sense. Indeed, one would not be wrong

to find it a puzzle: the image was designed mnemonically and forces an act of reading to in order to be

understood. This understanding, one must build or erect in the mind: the edifice depicted serves to edify,

encouraging our own spiritual (Augustine’s word for ‘mental’ or ‘cognitive’) building, or aedificium.3

The argument will be organized around a rebuilding of this mental process, via an exploration of

the ways in which the architectural analogy plays an amplificatory role as a visual mediator, by translating

its appearance on the page to its assimilation by the mind. Indeed first, its very basic, formal function will

be addressed, and how this was intended to work upon the mind as an ordering device, aiding

understanding and memory. Following this, I will consider how the architectural metaphor acts

associatively as a cue for mental (or ‘spiritual’) invention, setting the mind in play and the reader as

exegete. These processes will then be shown to give way to a creation out of the image personal (and as

we shall see, communal) moral value. Via this consideration of the material and spiritual edifice, the image

of the church might be seen to take on rhetorical character like that of Hugh of Saint Victor’s Ark, a

model for spiritual building designed as that ‘which your eye may see outwardly so that your soul may be

built inwardly in its likeness’.4

I. Construction: form and content First then, the use of architecture as a rhetorical device in the imago ecclesiae can be explained by its

role as a formal representation of, and aid to, the construction of memory. The image acts as an apparatus

that in both its known transmissions precedes Gilbert’s statute in the sense that it is held in the mind as

one reads the text, as well as leaving its imprint long afterward. It is key to remember that one could not

depend on continuous access to such material; as Aristotle had famously stated, memorizing was to be

regarded as an ethical imperative.5 The edifice, by storing, condensing, and dividing the wider concept

into its basic elements or component parts, and aligning these within an ordered context, can be revealed

3 Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford, 1998), p. 89. 4 The phrase ‘material and spiritual edifice’ is taken from the rubric heading ‘De templo materiali et spirituali’ to one of the manuscripts of Grosseteste’s Templum Domini, described in R.D. Cornelius 1930: The Figurative castle: a study in the medieval allegory of the edifice with special reference to religious writings (Pennsylvania, 1930), p. 4; For the Ark see Hugh of Saint Victor, De Archa Noe Morali, I, pp. iii, 236-238, cited in M. Carruthers and J. M. Ziolkowski (eds) 2002: The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 5 See Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence, trans. J.I. Beare and G.R.T. Ross (Digireads.com, 2006).


as bestowing increased clarity and therefore persuasive force on its contents. For, ‘orderly arrangement

illuminates the intelligence and secures memory’.6

Before this arrangement can be scrutinized, it seems necessary to show the need for spatializing a

concept such as Gilbert’s, and how this aids its mental accommodation. The use of the word

‘accommodate’ is perhaps particularly helpful: memories occupy the ‘space’ of the mind in the same way

that words occupy the space on a page. Mary Carruthers has explored the metaphorical translations of this

conception since antiquity: the honeycomb, money pouch, cella, and the Ark are just a few.7 What they

have in common is their implication of storage.

Hence it will come as no surprise that the building metaphor can be added to the list, made

popular since its advocation in Cicero’s discussions of memory training. In his De Oratore, the character

Antonius recounts a story in which Simonides, having left a banquet just before the roof fell in, could

reconstruct the guest list by remembering the seat order.8 In the Ad Herennium, this idea is extended to

the architectural locus, which could come in the form of a house, a recess, an arch or an ‘intercolumnar

space’.9 While here, however, the reader is advised to base these on recognizable buildings, the imago

ecclesiae represents a medieval preference for immediately perceptible backgrounds or external ‘memory

pictures’. Thus Gilbert’s diagram, which probably alludes to arcading, can be described as entailing a

likeness for purposes of recollection, rather than imitating real architecture.

The imago ecclesiae’s value as a diagram lies not in its accuracy to life, but in the ease with which

one could commit to it an orderly array of images and ideas, so that they are clearly visible and easily

recalled. It is interesting to compare its value as a diagram with that in Durham’s MS.B.II.35, which

lacking pictorial attention and even clear architectural form is more effective formally. But while the

Durham version articulates the concept more clearly, it lacks the sort of rich associations that as we will

see are attachable to the more decorative Cambridge image.10 The arcade-derived motif in Gilbert’s

diagram therefore acts as a spatial mediator, housing the concept externally so that it can be transferred to

the rooms of the mind.

This housing of the concept, or at least its basic organization, is committed to the spaces of the

image as follows: beginning from the bottom left and under the blue arches, are the seven offices of the

6 Hugh of Saint Victor, The Three Best Memory Aids for Learning History, trans. Carruthers, The Medieval Craft of Memory, p. 33. 7 M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 18-56. 8 For the story of Simonides see Cicero, De Oratore, II, pp. 86-87. 9 Unknown author, Rhetorica ad Herennium, III, pp. 15-24; See F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), p. 22. 10 The diagrammatic versus artistic concern in each is pointed out by Norton, ‘History, Wisdom, and Illumination’, p. 89.

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parish from the priest down, set level to the monastery or nunnery, headed by an abbot or abbess and also

divided into seven ranks. These are then divided into three more categories: those who pray (oratores),

those who plough (aratores) and those who fight (bellatores) which make up the laity, male and female,

marked by the initials V. and F. One will notice that the monastery only houses the first of these. The

next unit, which governs both the parish and the monastery, is the diocese, represented by the red arch,

headed by the bishop, who in turn is supervised by the archdiocese and its archbishop. Above the

archdiocese presides the primate, and the Church is finally headed by the Pope, ‘Papa’, whose type is

Noah and over whom presides Christ. Each of these ecclesiastical ranks finds its correspondence in the

secular hierarchy, so that the priest is aligned with the soldier, the bishop with the knight, the archbishop

with the duke, the primate with the king, and the Pope with the Emperor.

The image is thus one of summary, for as Gilbert writes, it, ‘contains the first letters of the names

for the names themselves because it does not have the space for writing the names in full’.11 While it

might seem far-fetched to give such a practical comment conceptual significance, it is this very practicality

that places the method within a wider intellectual trend, for the memory was known to delight in brevity,

and to retain material by working visually from single units.12 By memorizing the image, and therefore

also these letters, one should be able to track down the words, and therefore the things, that they stand

for.13 The writing of these initials serves to emphasise the necessity of reading the image; the image of the

cherub in MS 66 (figure 3) uses a similar technique of inscription. Gilbert goes on to say that, ‘not only is

the overall outline of the church arched, but each entity within it is also enclosed’.14 Architectural members

used as frames or borders serve to catalogue the memory, geometry being the ‘fount of perceptions and

the origin of utterances’.15 This basic idea is found in canon tables (figure 4), where columns and arches

act as enclosures but also suggest concordances between the narratives of the four Evangelists. This is a

fine example of formal amplification, as lists intended to correspond laterally are understood as easier to

read if they are deployed in a framework that makes the parallels explicit. Our Durham designer builds on

this Eusebian idea, used most simply at the level of the parish and monastery, where the columns

articulate a ‘visual grammar’.16

11 J. Fleming, Gille of Limerick (c.1070-1145): Architect of a Medieval Church (Dublin, 2001), p. 147. 12 See Hugh of Saint Victor, The Three Best Memory Aids for Learning History, trans. Carruthers, The Medieval Craft of Memory, p.37. 13 For letters as signs of words see John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, I, pp. 13, 24-26, trans. in McGarry, The Metalogicon: a twelfth-century defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium, (Berkeley, 1955). 14 Fleming, Gille of Limerick, p. 147. Emphasis added. 15 Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon II, p. 15, cited in M. Evans, ‘The Geometry of the Mind’, Architectural Association Quarterly, 12, 4 (London, 1980), p. 34. 16 Evans, ‘Geometry of the Mind’, p. 39.


Paul Binski has noted that this desire for visual coherence in fact manifests a fine example of

what Erwin Panofsky called the ‘principle of progressive divisibility’.17 While this addresses a slightly later

scholastic mindset, Gilbert’s image can perhaps be seen as an early example of this trend in which the

orderliness of logic and thought became palpably explicit in both the work of the scholastics and church

architecture. The image would seem, in the light of what has been discussed above, to engage with this

wish to systematize information via the uniform division and subdivision of its structure, so that the

‘whole is thus composed of smallest units’.18 Therefore, the use of the edifice in the diagram exercises a

special formal pull, in an age obsessed with the categorization of religious information.

By virtue of its spatial association, the arcade-like motif forms an effective setting for the text-

summary, and facilitates its transfer to the spaces of the memory. As both a storage place and an ordering

device, the architectural form allows its reader to comprehend better Gilbert’s hierarchy; in its image, the

reader is encouraged to cultivate a filed memory. The edifice, though, is not as prescriptive as these formal

characteristics might suggest: we may have constructed its concept but we have not yet responded to its

invitation. For the image also acts as a cue, for the invention of associations living in the inventory of the

monastic mind.

II. Invention: integration and overlapping In addition to its formal powers, the edifice is rhetorical in its function as a cue for mental

expansion and interpretation. It acts an invitation to the reader to make his own associations and to attach

to the edifice not only the contents of the text, but also the inventions of the mind. Here, we will see how

it not only reproduces but also elevates the word, by pointing to universal equivalences that set the ‘mind

in play’, with the aim of persuading a community as opposed to encouraging individual meditation.

Indeed, it is in this way that the text is to be transformed and placed within an existing memorial network,

for we must be able to attach it to something else in our inventory for it to find its appropriate place

there.19 Thus one can explore how the edifice collapses imagery familiar to the monastic mind, for mental

overlapping and integration, itself a process of spiritual or mental building. The image in this chapter will

be considered as a simultaneous reference point, for in finding it we will see many more things disclosed

to us.20

This brings us back to a comparison with the diagram in MS.B.II.35. Unlike its archetype, the

Cambridge image acquires a gloss via its intricate architectural form that gives it exegetical value, placing it

17 P. Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (New Haven; London, 2004), p. 60. 18 E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York, 1957), p. 37. 19 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 39. 20 This comes from Hugh of Saint Victor’s De Archa Noe, IV, pp. ix, 132-140: “..When you find one thing, you will see many more disclosed to you.”

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within the context of scripture. Interestingly, before it was an interpretative method allegory was classified

as stylistic ornament.21 For medieval exegetes Augustine, Bede, and Gregory the Great, scriptures’ figures

and tropes generated new compositions in the mind via meditation, so that every verse of scripture

became a spiritual foundation or gathering place for the assembly of other stories. This method in the

west had its chief formulator in Gregory who wrote that ‘first we put in place the foundations of literal

meaning; then through typological interpretation we build up the fabric of our mind in the walled city of

the faith; and at the end, through the grace of our moral understanding, as though with added colour, we

clothe the building’.22

This of course prepared the method of scriptural interpretation for transferral to the visual, often

in the form of a compressed picture.23 Albertus Magnus advises that for memory one should use, ‘many

similitudes, and unite in figures, that which we wish to retain and remember.’24 Exploited at length at the

Victorine School, this visual method enabled the student to learn more quickly the three or four levels

being presented in the lesson. The architectonic scheme was popular, allowing the scholar to extract

biblical structures and reposition them as the centrepiece of a more systematic moral exposition.25 Often

used were contemporary architectures, such as the one in MS.Ff.I.27. While this references the existing

institution, it is validated or ‘clothed’ in typological allusions to the visionary. In keeping with the

techniques of the period, the imago ecclesiae is thus set in relation to the sacred structures of the Old

Testament: Noah’s Ark and the Temple of Jerusalem, both types for the contemporary ecclesia.

A deliberate textual reference to the former can be found in Gilbert’s text, where he writes that,

‘Noah sits with him [the Pope] at the top of the arch. For just as Noah was in charge of the Ark in the

midst of the waves of the flood, so also the Roman pontiff rules the church in the waves of the ages’.26 A

border inscription around the imago ecclesiae also envisages the Ark of Noah as a three-chambered emblem

for the World, divided into celestial, earthly, and infernal domains. Christopher Norton has argued that by

advertising the twelfth-century church (which he sees very specifically as an image of the church of

Durham) as a refuge from the flood and an image of Jerusalem, one could persuade rulers and princes that

the only sure salvation was to be found in following the path of wisdom as embodied in the institution.27

It is possible that this was contrasted with the image of the labyrinth in the medieval mind. For in

contemporary literature, the clear course provided by the church is often contrasted with the distracting

21 Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory, p. 130. 22 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, prologue 3 (CCSL 143, 4.110-114). 23 See A. C. Esmeijer, Divina Quarternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Exegesis (Gorcum, 1978), p. 2. 24 Albertus Magnus, De memoria et reminiscentia, Opera omnia, IX cited in Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 20. 25 C. Whitehead, Castles of the mind: A study of medieval architectural allegory (Cardiff, 2003), p. 19. 26 Fleming, Gille of Limerick, p. 151. 27 For his argument for the ‘imago ecclesie Dunelmensis’ see Norton, ‘History, Wisdom and Illumination’, p. 98.


temptations of the world outside, conceived of as a maze in which the way is obscured both morally and

physically.28

Gilbert further writes that, “Christ goes before both of these since He is the legislator of both

the Testaments and ‘He made both one’”. 29 This phrase is very useful, for in making ‘both one’ textually

and, in this transmission, visually, Gilbert was able to validate and authorize his contemporary product,

exposing a logical universal order that united the story of Genesis with twelfth-century reform.

Today we may not ‘see’ such correspondences in the image itself (apart perhaps from the

obvious reference to ‘Noe’). But in the medieval mind, these associations were easily inventible, and

visual overlapping would have been just as vivid as those spelled out in the text. Indeed, literature and

pictures, like memories and thoughts, are not unyielding but change their meaning, as they become tools

for different ends. The relatively unfamiliar nature of Gilbert’s diagram to us today suggests that it

represents a contemporary shared educational strategy, which by means of a specific set of images could

guarantee shared resonance and therefore communication. Carruthers uses the term ‘textualism’ to

describe this interpretive process by which a work is socialized, acquiring layers of meaning as it is woven

through the historical and institutional fabric of a society.30 The imago ecclesiae can then be read as one

engaging in a process of mutual valuation; it is not meditatively but politically useful for Old and New

Testament architectures to echo one another.

In this chapter, the image has been read as a statement of inclusion, and as part of an effort to

give an intelligible shape to the whole accumulated tradition of Christian learning.31 For by cueing

associations in the ways that we have seen, the architecture functions rhetorically: in pointing to a

universal order, it serves to elevate the word and give it greater persuasive force. As we will now go on to

see, the visual diagram turned to this contemplation of universal themes empowers its recipient to take

part in God.32 Indeed, by the invention of associations, itself a process of spiritual building, the reader is

allowed to make the diagram his own. The final section will explore this ultimate function of the imago

ecclesiae, as a vehicle for moralization.

III. Moralization: mobility and improvement Having read the edifice as a storage place and as a cue, this chapter will address what would seem

to be its final objective: that which structures, regulates, and protects relationships for the spiritual

28 P. R. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca; London, 1990), pp. 145-191. 29 Fleming, Gille of Limerick, p. 151. 30 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 13. 31 G. Henderson, Gothic (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 49. 32 Whitehead, Castles of the Mind, p. 46.

13

mobility and improvement of the soul. It is via these functions that the use of church architecture can be

revealed as occurring within the context of a larger narrative concerned with every last detail of liturgical

practice. For our imago ecclesiae can be compared with other texts in which the same idea is translated into

socially encyclopedic terms that reveal ecclesiastical thinking upon the divisions and interdependencies of

Christian society.33 It is by moralizing these directions of the edifice that the spiritual ‘way to God and

God’s way to humans’ is revealed.34 It is this that allows the reader to take part in the programme, for it

must work mentally for the societal ideal that it structures, to be accomplished.

Thus the route is a visual phenomenon before it can be internalized, referred to as the ductus by

Consultus Fortunatianus who defined it as a rhetorical concept.35 Carruthers describes it as ‘the conduct

of a thinking mind on its way through a composition’.36 While the labyrinth discussed earlier leads to

confusion, the clear route provided both visually and spiritually by the church will lead the reader via

‘stations’, and to various goals.37 Hence the diagram’s formal characteristics dealt with in the first chapter

can be shown here to take on metaphorical or moral value, and are essential to the conception of the ductus

or the ‘way’ of understanding, for every composition must be experienced as a journey, mobilizing the eye

and then the mind.

It might be helpful at this point to find analogous examples of diagrams in which directions and

elevations have been moralized. Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana, compares meditation as ascending

the steps of a mental ladder, from fear of God, to wisdom (or knowledge of him).38 The Heavenly Ladder

image, or scala virtutis, describes this pictorially; the steps of the ladder are ‘stations’ which mark the route,

each embodying a new level of knowledge of God, from fear to wisdom.

Made popular in the thirteenth century, the heavenly ladder was also incorporated into the

diagram of the Tower of Wisdom (figure 5,6), an elaborate moralised edifice, in which the reader moves from

‘humble’ foundations to the application of virtues in the public sphere. Such images can be seen to draw

on a sort of ‘moral geography’, which decided the medieval mapping of the world, obvious in MS 66’s

Mappa Mundi (figure 7), the earliest in a small family of English illustrated maps. In these, Paradise (the

Far East) is typically placed at the top in order to demonstrate its closeness to heaven; journeys or

pilgrimages could also be traced on these, directly relating the rhetorical ductus to spiritual building. Motifs

33 Ibid., pp. 53-55. 34 Hugh of Saint Victor, De laude caritatis, cited in P. Rorem 2009: Great Medieval Thinkers: Hugh of Saint Victor, (Oxford, 2009), p.122. 35 Fortunatianus was a contemporary of Augustine, and his work reflects the pedagogy of rhetoric that Augustine himself knew. This is taken from Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, p. 77. 36 Ibid. 38 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford, 1995), Book II, Chapter VII.


like these reinforced the message of moral progress, for a love of God, ‘awakens within each level of the

awareness of the soul, a restless longing to search for and find the Beloved himself’.39

Gilbert’s diagram adopts the pyramidal or triangular shape of the Ark to show the difficulty of

such an ascent, an association easily made by the monastic mind. For in Genesis, God advises Noah to,

‘make a roof for the Ark, giving it a fall of one cubit when complete,’ in comparison to its length of ‘three

hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits’.40 Early Christian writers took this to

show how individuals could rise up from the wide base of the many, through steps and decks, to the

narrow peak that is Christ. Hugh of Saint Victor’s Ark is demonstrative of this idea, for while it is, ‘wide at

the bottom… above it narrows to the measurement of one cubit’.41 Similarly, Gilbert writes that his imago

ecclesiae moves from a wide base to the ‘narrow way of the religious and the ordained’.

Thus the image in MS.Ff.I.27 is more socially or organizationally minded than the Tower of

Wisdom. It not only offers the ladder as a vehicle for improvement, but also strictly situates the reader on

his respective step. It engages with the commonplace idea that Christians themselves constitute the

temple of God, as ‘living stones’.42 Using this conception, writers would assemble the taxonomy of

Christian society on the figurative edifice: Origen in his Homiliae in Genesim sorts the population into a

series of neat architectural levels that reflect and validate the order of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.43

Gilbert’s organization is much in this vein. As we know, however, he modernizes the ecclesiastical vision

by including members of the secular world, whose roles are perhaps intended to be something like those

described in Honorius of Autun’s de Gemma animae, where,

The columns that support the house are the bishops, who maintain the machinery of church life

at a level of high rectitude. The beams that hold the hours together are the princes of the world who

defend the church in an unbroken state. The roof tiles, that repel rain from the house, are soldiers, who

protect the church from soldiers and enemies… The floor, that is trodden underfoot, represents the

common people, by whose labour the church is sustained.44

This concern with the operations of the secular world is suggestive of a more practical goal of

regulation. The architecture holds princes and soldiers firmly within the body of the ecclesia to create a

39 Robert Grossesteste ecclesia sancta celebrat, pp. 36-37, cited in J. McEvoy, Roberte Grosseteste, exegete and philosopher (Aldershot, 1994), p. 34. 40 Genesis 6,7. 41 Hugh of Saint Victor, A Little Book About Constructing Noah’s Ark, II, p. 6, trans. Jessica Weiss, Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory, p. 48. 42 I Peter 2: 4-6: ‘Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.’ 43 Whitehead, Castles of the Mind, p. 41. 44 Honorius of Autun, de Gemma animae, 1, pp. 131, 134, trans. Whitehead, Castles of the Mind, p. 41.

15

united Christian defence, and this sort of control could be internalized. Since Plato, the soul and its

functions had been compared to the operations of the state: a soul that could balance appetite and will via

rationalism was used as an analogy for the fully functional and powerful city.45 The conception of the soul

as dwelling led to further allegories of the soul that must be protected, carried out by its wardens,

somewhat like those in Gilbert’s organization. This had its scriptural foundations in Proverbs 4:23:

‘Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.’ If each brother could build in himself such

an equipped soul or spiritual edifice, the brotherhood, or church, would be sufficiently well fortified. The

mind, like the state, ‘God has honoured with tranquillity wishing it to be completely

undisturbed…adding…a desire for sovereignty over the passions’.46

This leads us to the importance of mediation and by what means one could even hope for

movement or improvement when faced with such an inflexible edifice. The principal source for the type

of hierarchy Gilbert describes is found in the work of Pseudo Dionysius who explains the ecclesiastical

hierarchy as a mere image of the celestial world.47 The vertical arrangement is made according to the

members’ level of participation in God, so that the order signifies the graduated manifestation of his

goodness to the universe. Within each grade, the activity of purifying, illuminating and perfecting is the

task, respectively of the lowest, middle and highest order. The hierarchic activity is thus a process of

mediation.48 For example, Gilbert writes that the priest must both, ‘serve [the bishop] wholeheartedly’ and

also, ‘teach’, ‘bless’, ‘anoint’ and carry out many other actions that will serve to perfect those below him,

or ‘further’ from God.49 As Giles of Rome wrote in the fourteenth century, ‘all rightful human relations

of command- whether over other human beings…or over things…depended on their subordination to

the command of the Pope’.50 Giles understood hierarchy as a plurality reduced to God’s unity by the

mediated subjection of the lowest to the highest.

The use of the architectural analogy would therefore seem to engage with many contemporary

conceptions of the church edifice as spiritually reproducible and therefore moralizing. If one could build

and fortify one’s soul so that it carried out its functions in the same way as the ideal state pictured here,

one would be able to mediate effectively, therefore fulfilling one’s liturgical duty, and maintaining the

structure of the whole. For adherence to the rules will allow you to dwell within God’s house, and him to

dwell within your spiritual house. Thus it is this sort of inward mobility that the edifice finally encourages;

a movement described by Philo:

45 See Plato, The Republic, Book IV. 46 Bohn’s ecclesiastical library, Works of Philo Judaeus, III, p. 483, cited in Cornelius, The Figurative Castle, p. 15. 47 See Pseudo Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy. 48 D. E. Luscombe and J. Marenbon, ‘Two Medieval Ideas: Eternity and Hierarchy’, in A.S. McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 60-62. 49 Fleming, Gille of Limerick, p. 157. 50 Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power, in Luscombe and Marenbon, ‘Two Medieval Ideas’, p. 288.


The mind, when walking among and living in the company of these things, as between well

fortified boundaries firmly standing and solidly established, triumphs and rejoices, meeting with no

hindrance on any side to prevent it from exerting its own impulses, but having its road in every direction

easy, and level, and open, and easy to be travelled.51

* * *

Gilbert’s imago ecclesiae was employed to edify, and operates rhetorically as a location, cue, and

vehicle. The formal function of its architecture as explored in the first chapter allows for the information

it holds to be assimilated and stored in the orderly fashion it itself takes. The second explored the appeal

of the architectural form associatively, and how it encourages a reading of the edifice as a reference point

for other architectures invented by the monastic mind, authorizing and validating the product it tried to

‘sell’. Finally and most importantly, the edifice maps a spiritual route for its reader, thereby acting as a

vehicle for internal mobility and salvation. In each instance, the material edifice as seen in the image can

be seen to speak to its reader persuasively, encouraging believers to cultivate their own interior, spiritual

edifice.

Further reading Binski, Paul, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (New Haven; London, 2004) Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008) Carruthers, Mary and Ziolkowski, Jan M. (eds), The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2002) Fleming, John, Gille of Limerick (c.1070-1145): Architect of a Medieval Church (Dublin, 2001) Panofsky, Erwin, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York, 1957) Whitehead, Christiana, Castles of the mind: A study of medieval architectural allegory (Cardiff, 2003) Yates, Frances, The Art of Memory (London, 1966)

51 Bohn’s ecclesiastical library, works of Philo Judaeus, II, p. 5 in Cornelius, The Figurative Castle, p. 20.

17

(Figure 1) Imago ecclesiae, Gilbert of Limerick’s De statu ecclesie, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.I.27, fol. 238,

(Figure 2) Imago ecclesiae, Gilbert of Limerick’s De statu ecclesie, Durham Cathedral Library, MS B.II.35, fol. 36v, (mid twelfth century).statu ecclesie, Durham Cathedral Library, MS B.II.35, fol. 36v, (mid twelfth century).

(Figure 3) Cherub, Corpus Christi College, MS 66, fol. 100 (c.1190).

Limerick’s De statu ecclesie, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.I.27, fol. 238,

(Figure 4) Eusebian canon tables, Library of Trinity College, Dublin,Book of Kells, fol. 5 (c.800).


(Figure 5) Tower of Wisdom, Beinecke MS 416 also known as The Speculum Theologiae, from the Cistercian Abbey of Kamp, West Germany, fol. 135 (late thirteenth or early fourteenth

(Figure 6) World map, Corpus Christi College, MS 66, part I, fol. IV (c.1190).

19

Utopia and the New World: Early Modern Fact or Fiction

Natasha Pesaran Trinity

This article sheds light on the nature of utopian thought in the early modern period through an examination of the tensions between fact and fiction inherent in the utopian project. As well as creating a fictional ideal or ‘other’, early modern utopias also contained an implicit critique and comparison with the social, political and cultural realities. By drawing parallels between utopian thought and writings on the New World, this piece reveals the way in which utopian thought was part of a process of coming to terms with new forms of knowledge and challenging existing boundaries of European self-understanding.

The dream of an ideal society is in many ways as old as humanity itself. Elements of utopian thought

appear in many literary and historical contexts; in biblical accounts of the innocent state of Adam and

Eve, in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and in ethnographic accounts, such as Tacitus’ Germania.

However, it was not until the sixteenth century that these kinds of literary imaginings became known as

‘utopias’, following More’s coining of the term in his seminal work of 1516. Historians have sought to

categorise and create boundaries within genre of early modern utopian writing in their attempt to analyse

the ‘utopia proper’, classifying certain texts as ‘utopias’ and excluding others according to an arbitrary,

imposed set of requirements.1 Certainly any historical analysis of early modern utopian writing must begin

with some form of definition in order to pinpoint the subject under analysis. However, the very nature of

utopian thought complicates any attempt to impose boundaries and definitions; the genre itself represents

a break from reality, rejecting its perceived flaws in favour of a constructed ideal. Nevertheless, the utopia

is also a product of that same reality which it claims to reject, and can only act as reflection of social,

political and cultural realities. This article sees such a tension between reality and utopia as central to our

understanding of the utopian genre. It is hoped that an analysis of the utopian genre within this

framework will shed light on the complex relationship between utopian thought and the cultural and

social bounds of the European imagination.

Such an understanding of the utopian genre demands that texts are analysed not under imposed

conditions, but as complex phenomena that form part of the intellectual milieu of the early modern

period. In particular, utopian texts will be considered as part of the process of expanding European

knowledge about the world. At the beginning of this period, the world was seen as a narrow and ordered

place, which could be described and understood by a complete and accurate body of knowledge.

However, this world view and many of the assumptions it embodied were gradually broken down, giving

way to an age of empiricism and Enlightenment. This was a long and uneven process, which saw the

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �1 See J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (Cambridge, 1981) and M. Eliav-Feldon, Realistic Utopias: The ideal imaginary societies of the Renaissance, 1516-1630 (Oxford, 1982).


creation of new identities and revised understandings about the world and Europe’s place in it. In

particular, new geographical discoveries challenged classical learning and demanded new ways of thinking

about European culture and civilisation. This article will demonstrate the importance of this context of

discovery and possibility to the construction of early modern utopian thought. Indeed, utopian writing

can be seen as part of an intellectual response to the changing boundaries of European knowledge. These

texts often involved a closed society’s opening to a wider world and were concerned with questions of

truth and cultural difference. They were thus a reflection of reality, refracted through the particular

concerns of the author.

This article will draw parallels and connections between utopian thought and the other ways of

coming to terms with the existence of the wider world. The intellectual exercise involved in utopian

thought was similar to that of Europeans considering newly discovered societies; both acts involved the

construction of an imaginative stretch and the ability to extend one’s understanding to an alternative

reality. Both accounts of the New World and utopian texts also represent statements about the world

which imply an element of cultural relativity. In representing something different from European society,

utopian texts inevitably contained an implicit critique of and comparison with European reality. Similarly,

a traveller describing new worlds cannot escape the conceptual apparatus of the old. Thus the encounter

with an ‘other’ society, whether real or imaginary, reveals a gap which reflects back on and marks the

identity of the knowing society. Utopian writing then held up images of other worlds to the real,

European one as distorting mirrors. It was engaged in a complex dialogue between fact and fiction,

Europe and the ‘other’, reality and utopia, and was part of a process of contesting, rather than breaking,

the bounds of European identity and society.

In many ways the new geographical discoveries of the early modern period extended the bounds

of knowledge which set the identity of European society. The encounter between Europe and the

Americas, in particular, challenged the fundamental ways in which Europeans had viewed the world.

Where previously they had relied on the authority of the ancient scriptures and texts, European thinkers

now had to deal with lands and societies whose very existence they had not expected. The New World,

then, presented an ‘other’, something which was outside an immediate European frame of reference and

could not easily be reconciled with contemporary understandings about European history, culture, and

civilisation. Travellers brought back accounts of new societies and the customs they had encountered,

which were disseminated throughout Europe, thanks to the new technology of the printing press. The

way in which the discovery of the New World was conceived by travellers and writers can be seen as an

exercise in utopian thought. It provided a conceptual space in which Europeans sought to break out of

European discourse and translate the imagination of an alternative to the reader. Often, this alternative

took the form of an ideal. Indeed, J. C. Davis has argued that ‘the Americas, and discoveries elsewhere,

21

stimulated…the sense of a tabula rasa on which new forms of ideal society could be both formulated and

built’.2

The sense that the New World presented a clean slate was a particularly attractive concept in light

of the bitter wars of religion that were being fought in Europe at that time. For many Catholics in

particular, the new continent had been sent by God so that they might set up a new kingdom. Indeed,

many missionaries went over to the New World in the hope that they might build a utopian Christian

world. This hope was based on a belief in the innocence of indigenous societies; a people so new and

unspoiled could be elevated to the ideal standards of Christianity. In his study of Indian societies,

Dominican friar Bartolomé Las Casas sought to demonstrate that Indians possessed reason and natural

virtues which made them capable of embracing the Catholic faith.3 This was a view shared by Vasco de

Quiroga, the first bishop of Mexico, who wrote that ‘not in vain, but with much cause and reason is this

called the New World, not because it is newly found, but because in its people and in almost everything it

is like as was the first and golden age’.4 The Indians, like those existing at the time of the Kingdom of

Saturn, were good, obedient, humble, unselfish, care-free, and naked.

Other early reports of the New World also sought to demonstrate that recently discovered

societies presented an ideal way of life. Peter Martyr depicted the indigenous peoples as living in an earthly

paradise, filled with plenty and abundance. He observed: ‘Theirs is a Golden Age: they do not hedge their

estates with ditches, walls or hedges, they live with open gardens; without laws, without books, without

judges’.5 ‘They pass their lives content with nature and are not afflicted by the selfishness: nor do “mine

and yours”, the seeds of all evils, fall among them’.6 Similarly, in the texts attributed to the explorer

Vespucci, which provide accounts of his discovery of the New World, he admits he thought he ‘must be

near the Earthly Paradise’. The people have ‘no law or faith, they live as nature dictates’. They have no

need to administer justice since there is no greed: ‘nor have they private property but own everything in

common’.7 Like Martyr and Vespucci, Montaigne in his essay, Of Cannibals (1580), upholds the

indigenous peoples of the New World as living ‘neere their originall naturalitie’, commanded by the laws

of nature. Indeed, he argues that neither Lycurgus nor Plato could have imagined ‘such a pure and simple’

way of life and a ‘happy condition of man’ in their descriptions of the golden age.8

2 J.C. Davis, ‘Utopia and the New World, 1500-1700’ in R. Schaer, G. Claeys and L. Tower (eds.), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York, 2000), p. 116. 3 G. Sanderlin (ed. and trans.), Bartolomé Las Casas; a selection of his writings (New York, 1971). 4 Quoted in S. Zavala, ‘Sir Thomas More in New Spain’ in R.S. Sylvester and G.P. Marc’hadour (eds.), Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More (Hamden, CT, 1977), pp. 302-11. 5 G. Eatough (ed. and trans.), Selections from Peter Martyr, Repertorium Columbianum 5 (Turnhout, 1998), p. 55. 6 Ibid., p. 69. 7 A.Vespucci, Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s discovery of America, ed. and trans. D. Jacobson and L. Formisano (New York, 1992), p. 31. 8 M. de Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals’ in J. Florio and L.C. Harmer (eds.), Montaigne’s Essays, p. 218.


In some ways this idealisation can be seen as an attempt to break out of European discourse and

champion an alternative, ideal way of life. Montaigne tries to remove himself from an established mode of

thinking and asks the reader to appreciate strange and foreign customs on their own terms. He is aware

that ‘we have no other ayme of truth and reason, than the example and Idea of the opinions and customs

of the countrie we live in’, and argues that because of this, we should use the power of reason to break

through conventional stereotypes.9 Indeed, Montaigne provides a detailed account of the customs and

way of life of South American tribes, including descriptions of the construction of the long house,

sleeping arrangements, their dietary regimes, religious assemblies, and beliefs. Writers describing the New

World had to translate the radically different way of life of newly discovered peoples to their European

readers. In doing so, their accounts represented an engagement with a different culture. As, Vespucci

writes, ‘I strove hard to understand their life and customs, since I ate and slept among them for twenty-

seven days’.10 But above all, these writings presented an ‘other’ which in European thought became a

metaphor for the absence of civilisation and the promise of a new beginning.

Slavin has argued that the New World provided More and other ‘revolutionary’ thinkers with ‘a

free space, apparently one with neither history nor any political forms at all’ which inspired them to break

away ‘from the habitual patterning of events’ and create anew.11 In constructing a utopia, writers had to

persuade the reader to extend their imaginations to the realities of the ‘other’. In his Southern Land,

Known, Foigny recognises the challenge this posed and admits that ‘those who measure the divine from

within limits of their own imagination will see the work only as a fiction’. But attempts to extend the

bounds of their imagination, since things that previously had been thought impossible, such as the

existence of the New World, have now been proven to be true; thus ‘because nothing in this story is

impossible, one should at least suspend judgement as to what might be possible or real’.12 Similarly, when

describing the Utopians’ attitudes towards precious metals, More admits that ‘as a general rule, the more

different anything is from what the listeners are used to, the harder it is to believe’. Therefore he appeals

to reason to persuade readers to believe his account: ‘considering that all their other customs are so unlike

ours, a sensible judge will perhaps not be surprised that they treat gold and silver quite differently from

the way we do’.13 Indeed, the treatment of gold and silver is one way in which the society of the Utopians

challenges European perspective and accepted norms. Hythloday, the traveller in More’s work, explains

9 Ibid., p. 219. 10 Vespucci, Letters from a New World, p. 31. 11 A. J. Slavin, ‘The American Principle from More to Locke’, in F. Chiappelli et al., First Images of America, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1976), vol. 1, p. 139. 12 G. de Foigny, The Southern Land, Known, ed. and trans. D. Fausett (Syracuse, 1993), p. 7. 13 T. More, Utopia [1516], ed. and trans. R.M. Adams (Cambridge, 2002), p. 60.

23

that what are considered ‘precious metals’ by Europeans, the Utopians use for their ‘chamber pots and

humblest vessels’ and for the chains and shackles of slaves.14

Foigny’s Southern Land, Known also seeks to extend the imaginative bounds of its readers in

order to persuade them that another culture represents a better way of life. The theme of a voyage to the

austral regions sets up the isolation of the Australian’s world and implies a transition from one cultural

world to another; Sadeur’s voyage, first to the Congo and then onwards to the Southern Land can be seen

as part of his process of breaking from European reality and entering a utopian society, based on abstract

rationality and philosophy. The hermaphrodism of the Australians forms a monoculture; untroubled by

any kind of difference, they cannot even conceptualise a social boundary and are appalled at the sectarian

and national violence of European states. Indeed, they appear to have achieved an ideal harmony to which

all other nations aspire. In his discussion of the Australians and their customs, Foigny uses a dialogue

between an old man and Sadeur to compare the customs and culture of European society with that of the

Australians. By the end of the conversation, Sadeur has been won over by the old man’s reasoning and

admits ‘I was seeing things in a quite different way...and was ashamed to have to admit to myself how far

removed we are from their perfection’.15

However, establishing a society as an ‘other’ representing an ideal way of life also involved an

implicit comparison and criticism of the European life. Sadeur also explains how in reaching his

conclusion about the Australians’ perfection, ‘[he] was forced to make continual comparisons between

what we are and what [he] was seeing here’.16 In order to extend the imaginations of their readers and help

them comprehend difference, writers had to make reference to what the New World, or the utopian

society, was not. In this way, there was an interaction between Europe and ‘other’, reality and utopia.

Thus, the idyllic life of the peoples described by Montaigne is depicted in contrast to Europe, which he

depicts as being full of inventions and artificial devices. Similarly, in Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de

Bougainville the people of Tahiti are presented as being close to the origins of man and nature, unlike

Europeans who cannot live according to what is natural but must follow ‘strange precepts contrary to

nature’ such as marriage and the laws of religion.17 Indeed, the conversation between the visiting chaplain

and native Tahitian Orou reveals the absurdity of European way of following different authorities who

decide what is forbidden, rather than acting on what is natural. Vasco de Quiroga equally upholds the

greed and misery of famine and war in Europe against the fact that property and labour are in common

among Indians, while praising their sexual innocence in contrast to polemics over the celibacy of clergy in

14 Ibid., p. 61. 15 Foigny, The Southern Land, Known, p. 62. 16 Ibid. p. 62. 17 D. Diderot, ‘Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage’, in Political Writings, ed. and trans. J.H. Mason and R. Wokler (Cambridge, 1992), p. 50.


Europe.18 In order to break out of European norms and suggest an alternative as an ideal, writers had to

refer to what they perceived as flawed aspects of European society.

Moreover, the only available tools for describing a world different from Europe were the

categories of European experience and language.19 Travellers’ accounts were therefore never value-free

reports of experience, but were ideologically loaded, implicated in European collective identity and belief

system. Elliott has argued that because of this, the ‘real’ America was slow to impinge on European

consciousness; it was a European dream which had little to do with the American reality.20 Indeed, rather

than describing any reality, the descriptions of Martyr and others were a projection of humanist ideals.

The difficulty of establishing true representation and breaking out of discourse is explored in Montaigne’s

essay Of Cannibals.21 The article begins with a comparison of the immediacy of experience and that of

writing and representation, in which Montaigne argues that the learned are not reliable witnesses since

‘they never represent things truly, but fashion and maske them according to the visage they saw them in’.22

Furthermore, Montaigne also creates a sense of the limitations of communication; in the final section of

the account, where the Indians are questioned, he admits he had to rely on an interpreter who was ‘so

troubled to conceive my imaginations, that I could draw no great matter from him’. Montaigne is also

unable to give an accurate report due to the limits of his memory, commenting that ‘they answered three

things, the last of which I have forgotten’.23 The essay thus invites a suspicion of its own authority and

creates ‘an awareness of the enormous difficulty of translating imaginations from one world to another’.24

Indeed, in translating ideas and norms from the societies they encountered, Europeans made

reference to their own identities. For example, they drew on European concepts of civilised and barbaric

behaviour. Vasco de Quiroga’s praise of the Indians was above all driven by his desire to convert them to

Christianity, civilise them, and introduce them to a European way of life. Such a view was shared by

others, including humanist Niccolò Scillacio who wrote, ‘They are quick witted, naturally intelligent and

clever so that they will be able to be brought to our laws and reasonable way of life without much

trouble’.25 Above all, de Quiroga and Scillacio transplanted Europe’s ideals and morality to the New

World. Indeed, Vasco de Quiroga literally sought to create a ‘Utopia’ in Mexico.26 In a legal brief of 1535,

18 Zavala, ‘Sir Thomas More in New Spain’, pp. 305-6. 19 For further elaboration of this argument see A. Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven CT, 1993). 20 J.H. Elliot, The Old World and the New: 1492-1650 (Cambridge, 1992). 21 D. Norbrook, '"What care these roarers for the name of a king?": language and utopia in The Tempest', in G. McMullan and J. Hope (eds.), The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and after (London, 1992), p. 28. 22Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals,’ p. 218. 23 Ibid., p. 229. 24 Norbrook, '"What care these roarers for the name of a king?"', p. 30. 25 G. Symcox and L. Formisano (eds.), Italian Reports on America, 1493-1522: Accounts by Contemporary Observers, Repertorium Columbianum 12 (Turnhout, 2002), p. 40. 26 Ibid., p. 309.

25

he suggested to the Crown that it should lay down laws inspired by his reading of More’s text. When his

advice was ignored, he took matters into his own hands, bringing More’s Utopia to Mexican soil in his

founding of two hospital villages modelled on the text. His actions must therefore be seen as an attempt

to establish a European ideal on American soil, as they derived from a European mindset. A similar

civilising ideal can indeed be found in More’s work itself: More explains his commonwealth, not as part of

indigenous society, but as the work of a benevolent conqueror who invaded the region and transformed ‘a

pack of ignorant savages into what is now, perhaps the most civilised nation in the world’.27 The ideal

conceptualised in the New World in many ways consisted of the possibilities of civilising its inhabitants,

and was therefore dependent on European identities. But it also rested on the perceived potential of New

World societies to adhere to European norms.

In this way, the New World represented a conceptual space in which American reality met

European ‘dream’ and inherited ideas and norms were employed in the process of coming to terms with

the ‘other.’ As Rubiés has demonstrated, ethnographic accounts were a complex interaction between the

European Christian, humanist tradition, the moral and political concerns of European writers, and the

everyday observation of difference.28 Europeans used a number of different techniques to translate the

unfamiliar to the familiar. Grafton and others have shown that in seeking to describe their discoveries,

writers such as Columbus and Vespucci placed them within an inherited framework.29 By the early

modern period, there were a number of ethnographic common places available to the traveller, such as

Herodotus’s History and the writings of Pliny and Solinus. The novel of Sir John Mandeville also created

a vernacular ethnography which depicted the fantastic and the monstrous. In their response to New

World, Europeans frequently drew on this ethnographical tradition.30 Greenblatt has argued that the

European response of ‘wonder’ was used as a rhetorical device, while Fitzmaurice has shown that

European writers used the humanist art of persuasion to convince the audience to accept something they

did not already hold to be true.31

The New World can be seen not so much as a ‘free space’ where Europeans sought to break

from European identity, but rather an arena in which understandings about European identity and society

interacted with the discovery of difference. Just as images of the New World interacted with European

27 Thomas More, Utopia, p. 42. 28 See J.-P. Rubiés, ‘New worlds and Renaissance ethnology’, History and anthropology 6 (1993), pp. 157-197 and J.-P. Rubiés, ‘Travel writing and humanistic culture: a blunted impact?’ Journal of early modern history 10 (2006), pp. 131-168. 29 A. Grafton, A. Shelford and N. Siraisi (eds), New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The power of tradition and the shock of discovery (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 69-85. 30 For further discussion of ethnographic models used by early modern travellers see M. T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964). 31 S. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1992); A. Fitzmaurice, ‘Classical rhetoric and the promotion of the New World’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), pp. 221-44.


identity and culture, utopian texts were part of an interaction between reality and imagination, fact and

fiction. Both the New World and Utopia represented an ‘other’ that embodied a conceptual space in

which imaginative speculation could be carried out. Indeed, factual events often provided a trigger to

European imaginations. William Strachey’s account of the shipwreck of a group of colonists in 1609 in

Bermuda provides the background to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Shakespeare uses the shipwreck as an

imaginative starting point for his play.32 Prospero’s island itself becomes the ground for a utopian thought

explored in Gonzalo’s utopian fantasy and in the play’s underlying discourses of power.33 Utopian

writings then were an imaginative product of early modern reality.

Indeed, the conceptualisation of utopian texts owed much to the context of European expansion

and exploration. During the sixteenth century, growing European commercial competition drove the need

to find new trade routes and colonies. By 1600 the coasts of America, Asia and Africa had been mapped

with considerable accuracy, as had parts of their interiors. However, only very slowly did fragments of

geographical information which could be fitted into a coherent picture start to emerge. Information about

new lands was vague and confusing and the boundaries with which Europeans thought about their place

in the world became increasingly blurred. Columbus and early commentators on his voyages were unsure

of whether he had discovered Asia or some other unknown continent. They naturally fell back on what

was familiar: traditions derived from the knowledge of ancient authorities. Ptolemy’s Geographia and

Macrobian cosmology presented schematic views of the world which remained influential. Grafton,

Shelford, and Siraisi have shown that ancient learning was adapted by European thinkers to fit modern

needs.34 But in practice, they were often obstacles as much as aids to understanding, distorting the

emerging picture of the world. This new geographical reality was also clouded by inaccurate estimates of

distances travelled, as well as competition between the Spanish and Portuguese, which meant that

overseas activity was veiled in secrecy.

The uncertainty that surrounded new discoveries contributed to the formation of an imaginative

space for early modern utopias. Unlike earlier representations of ideal worlds, which made no claim to

literal or prophetic truth, early modern writers presented their fictional narratives as fact. In doing so,

they played upon the unclear nature of the boundaries of European knowledge about the world and the

possibility of the unknown. Utopian societies were in isolated places that were geographically removed

from Europe in order to give them greater narrative plausibility. Thomas More in 1516 placed the island

of Utopia in the Pacific Ocean, which had been discovered only a few years earlier. In the History of the

Sevarites, Vairasse places his fictional account directly in the context of recent voyages of discovery in

32 W. Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), ed. S. Orgel (Oxford, 2008); More, Utopia, p. 60. 33 For further discussion of utopian aspects of the play, see Norbrook, '"What care these roarers for the name of a king?"'. 34 Grafton, Shelford and Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts.

27

order to make it more credible. In the ‘Notice to the Reader’, the publisher underlines the veracity of the

account by reasoning that since Europeans have recently discovered so many remote places that had been

unknown for thousands of years, it is possible that there remain many more to be discovered.35 Indeed,

Fausett has shown that the unknown nature of the southern region continued to provide fertile ground

for utopian speculation until its exploration in 1772-5.36

In seeking to present utopias as literal truth, writers often contributed to unstable boundaries of

knowledge. Fact and fiction sometimes became so unclear that real reports were viewed with scepticism,

whereas fictional ones were received as real. Vairasse plays upon this uncertainty, implying that his

fictional account ought to be read as truth since ‘the Histories of Peru, Mexico, China etc. were at first

taken as Romances by many, but time has shewed since that they are verities not to be doubted of’.37

Fausett has shown that the secrecy surrounding events such as the wreck of a VOC (East India Company)

ship, the Batavia, in 1629 off the west coast of Australia, also created opportunities for imaginative

speculation and served to further cloud the distinctions between fact and fiction.38 Neville’s The Isle of

Pines and Vairasse’s History can be seen to take their imaginative impetus from the Batavia shipwreck and

mutiny. While the details were not fully disclosed to the public, the accepted historical narrative holds that

the castaway Europeans mutinied and disappeared on the Southland, creating their own society based on

sexism and slavery. Both authors envisage a shipwreck on the Southern continent and imagine how

surviving Europeans might organise themselves into a colony, placing sexual themes at the forefront.

Thus we can see the complex way in which utopian texts inhabited an imaginative space between fact and

fiction, reality and utopia. They were both a product of the changing boundaries of European knowledge,

but could also play an active role in distorting them.

Fausett also points out that speculation about other worlds played an important role in filling

gaps in Europe’s knowledge, acting as an allegory that reflected the writer’s own world and its deepest

concerns.39 Writings about the ‘other’ were part of a process whereby Europeans came to terms with

changing knowledge and understanding about the world. Accordingly, utopian writing did not represent

blueprints for an ideal society, detached from or opposed to reality, any more than traveller’s accounts

were objective observations. Indeed, Louis Marin defines utopia not as opposite to the real world, but as a

reconstruction of the author’s reality which displaces aspects of its own world into the fictional world it

represents.40 In so doing, the texts stretched imaginative bounds, seeking to raise questions in the reader’s

35 D. Vairasse d' Allais, The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi (London, 1675), p. 4. 36 D. Fausett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land (Syracuse, NY, 1993). 37Vairasse d' Allais, The History of the Sevarites, p. 4. 38 Fausett, Writing the New World, pp. 25-27. 39 See Fausett’s introduction to Foigny, The Southern Land, Known. 40 L. Marin, Utopiques: jeux d’espaces (Paris, 1973).


mind. For example, More raises questions of cultural difference in an account of a visit of Anemolian

ambassadors to Utopia. Unaware of the local customs, the ambassadors arrived dressed as ‘elegantly as

Gods’. They were in fact ‘decked out in all the articles which in Utopia are used to punish slaves, shame

wrongdoers or entertain infants’ and the Utopians subsequently considered ‘this splendid pomp a mark of

disgrace’.41 While this is often considered a minor episode in the text, it highlights to readers the great

differences in custom and values that exist between one society and another, as well as demonstrating the

bounded views of closed societies. In this way, More displaces debates from reality about the differences

between European and other cultures into an imaginary setting.

Many utopian texts were concerned with questions of changing social, cultural, and political

boundaries and the relationships between different societies - concerns which reflected contemporary

reality. Indeed, the texts both commented on and contributed to debates surrounding the discovery of

new peoples and places. We can see this in Bacon’s New Atlantis, which in many regards can be seen as a

comment on closed society’s opening to a wider world. The text is often interpreted as a blueprint for an

ideal scientific institution, but the author does not illustrate the benefits of science for his community. We

are in fact given only hints about certain aspects of the society of Bensalem. The text itself is shrouded in

secrecy and incompletion, particularly in its ending (‘The rest was not perfected’).42 The repeated denial of

information leaves the reader with a sense of powerlessness and uncertainty that as Susan Bruce has

pointed out, forces the reader to consider the importance of knowledge to political power.43 Indeed, the

text itself is an imaginative exploration of the implications of the changing boundaries of knowledge about

the world. The society of Bensalem presents the paradox of knowing without being known: while it sends

ambassadors to learn the secrets of other nations, it remains hidden from the rest of the world. Indeed,

the Europeans marvel ‘that they should have knowledge of the languages, books, affairs of those that lie

such a distance from them ... it seemed to us a condition and propriety of divine powers and beings, to be

hidden and unseen to others, and yet to have others open and as in a light to them’.44

Bacon raises issues that are thus of great importance to the contemporary realities of European

empire and global commerce. In this way, we can see Bacon’s utopia not so much as an ideal, which seeks

to create something detached from European reality, but as an imaginative exercise that embodies the

process of European expansion and seeks to question the implications of new knowledge. Similarly,

Foigny’s Southern Land, Known, rather than presenting an ideal form of social organisation, can be seen

as a metaphor for the impossibility of national isolation and unity in an increasingly interconnected world.

41 More, Utopia, p. 62. 42 F. Bacon, ‘New Atlantis’, in S. Bruce (ed.), Three early modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines, (Oxford, 1999), p. 185. 43 Ibid., Introduction. 44 Bacon, ‘New Atlantis’, p.162.

29

The logic and rationality of the Australians’ culture that was revered as perfect by Sadeur after his

discussion with the old man, has by the end of the narrative been revealed as problematic. The final

chapter on the Australians’ wars demonstrates that they do have real enemies and borders and are not as

isolated as they imagined, while Sadeur’s departure from the Southern Land presents a rejection of both

the homogeneity of Australian culture and its imagined national isolation. Indeed, Sadeur himself becomes

a metaphor for a new interconnected world; his hermaphrodism allows him to embrace cultural duality. In

this way, as Fausett has suggested, Foigny’s text reveals that while all nations imagine themselves to have

boundaries and a fixed identity, they are in practice open to a world of travel, war, and commerce.45 We

therefore can see the way in which utopian texts were concerned with questions of changing boundaries

and were a comment on reality, refracted through the particular concerns of the author.

Utopian writing was part of a process of extending the boundaries of European identity and

society. Utopian texts were deeply implicated in contemporary European debates and concerns. They

reflected the writers’ worlds and thus worked within the boundaries of European thought and identity,

but their symbolic meanings also extended imaginative boundaries, raising questions in readers’ minds.

Utopian writing cannot be understood in terms of the creation of a blueprint for an ideal society,

detached from reality. Rather, the creation of new worlds and ideals, whether real or imaginary, were an

essential way in which European thinkers contested European identities and understandings about the

world in the face of increasingly uncertain and unstable boundaries of knowledge. In particular, utopian

writing as a genre transcended boundaries of fact and fiction in its creation of new worlds, which were

both real and imaginary. This article has sought to highlight this by focusing on the relationship between

utopian thought and new geographical discoveries; America represented perhaps the most obvious

example of a ‘New World’ that was being forged in the European consciousness during the early modern

period. However, many other ‘new worlds’ were being created thereby challenging the boundaries of

European self-understanding: among them were new scientific approaches, religious conflict and renewal,

and processes of state-building. All of these developments exposed deep-seated dilemmas for existing

moral, social, and political orders, thus challenging accepted boundaries and opening up conceptual spaces

for the imagination of alternative worlds.

Further Reading Bruce, Susan (ed.), Three early modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines (Oxford, 1999) Davis, J. C., Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (Cambridge, 1981) Fausett, David, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land (Syracuse, NY, 1993) Grafton, Anthony, April Shelford, and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The power of tradition and the shock of discovery (Cambridge, MA, 1992)

45 See Fausett’s introduction to Foigny, The Southern Land, Known.


Pagden, Antony, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, 1993)

31

�

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The 1848 Revolutions and the German Nation

John Mueller

Fitzwilliam College

The 1848 Revolutions in the German states are regarded as historic failure, and moreover a failure that would inevitably lead to the foundation of an empire under Prussian leadership and eventually the rise of Nazism. However the radicals of 1848 were part of a much older debate rooted in the complicated make-up of the Holy Roman Empire. It was the uncertainty of the empire’s constitution that created the conditions for internal feuding and interference from outside. As the pamphleteers analysed in this article reveal, their aim was to solve these constitutional problems, which had dogged the empire since Samuel von Pufendorf wrote on the state of Germany in the seventeenth century. Introduction In 1510 David de Negker published a print of the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire (see Figure

1). Displayed on the spread wings of the eagle are the arms of the most important principalities. It is a

cumbersome and unpleasing design, but it shows the great diversity of the Empire and the problem of

visualising the whole and the composite parts in one. After Napoleon had simplified the map of Europe

things changed only slightly. The super-structure of the Holy Roman Empire disappeared and tiny

principalities amalgamated to make larger ones. Yet even these were intensely complex. In 1830 the civil

servant Adam Heunisch published a lithograph of the population of the Grand Duchy of Baden (see

Figure 2). Arranged around the Duke in the centre are the statistics of the inhabitants of the

principality, including aristocrats, members of parliament, towns, cities, districts and confessions of the

state. This small principality alone was so intricate and complex that it was difficult to explain its

constitution graphically and in simple terms. These two illustrations show us how intensely intricate

Germany was. What were the dynamics behind this complexity?

The history of Germany as a nation of states is little told. The Prussian School of History, still

very popular believed that Prussia was fulfilling an age-old mission of unifying Germany.1 The drift to

this idea was possibly a result of the failure of the 1848 Revolutions.2 Apparently the belief spread that a

strong government guaranteed peace and prosperity better than the sort of written constitution the

Frankfurt Parliament had tried to instigate.3 Liberal Germans turned towards the Hohenzollern dynasty

to foster a National identity and keep the peace after their Revolution petered out.4 This is also the

beginning of the Sonderweg theory. 1848 failed to bring forth a modern democratic Germany and the

political system remained the most anachronistic in Europe. Germany was on its ‘inevitable’ path to the

Third Reich.5 Fortunately this idea has been slightly deflated since and it has become evident that the

1 G. G. Iggers, Nationalism and Historiography, 1789-1996: The German Example in Historical Perspective, in S. Berger et al (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800 (London, 1999), p. 20. Although officially rejected see A. Green, Fatherlands (Cambridge, 2001), p. 7. 2 E. Breisach, Historiography. Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago, 1983), p. 235. 3 Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, 1983), p. 108. 4 Iggers, ‘Nationalism and Historiography’, p. 18. 5 P. Lambert, ‘Paving the `Peculiar Path´: German Nationalism and Historiography Since Ranke', in G. Cubit (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester, 1998), p. 94.


2

nineteenth century was not just the foundation of Nazism.6 1848 however, remains a crucial point in

Germany’s history. Today the Federal Republic of Germany sees itself as the spiritual child of that

Revolution.7 The idea of Marx and Engels, that 1848 was a bourgeois revolution is possibly true.

However the events seem to be seen too much in the light of social struggle.8

Various sources have been used to re-examine the 1848 Revolutions in the light of Germany’s

complexity. At first pre-Napoleonic Germany will be examined with the aid of Samuel von Pufendorf’s

De Statu Imperii Germanici. Pufendorf might be accused of having a clouded vision, because he was

German, hence his ideas will be contrasted against more detached foreigners. The post-Napoleonic

period will then also be examined in search of constitutional themes and to give sufficient background

to the events of 1848. The leap from seventeenth to the nineteenth century is enormous, but can partly

be justified as the problems discovered by Pufendorf remained largely the same until, and even after,

Napoleon created a news status quo. This relatively extensive time span reveals just how long

contemporaries realised the Constitution of the Empire needed reform and how prone the Empire was

to interference from outside.

After the general survey of the period before the nineteenth century will follow a more detailed

examination of the Grand Duchy of Baden, selected for two reasons. First, because it has been little

examined in the past, and secondly, because it was a hub of revolutionary activity between 1847 and

1849. The motor of the Revolution was the German Bürgertum. It will be referred to by its German

name as the English term ‘middle class’ implies commercial strength. The Bürgertum was, however, a

class largely defined by education. As such it created a public sphere that was served with information

and opinion in the form of newspapers and pamphlets.

Pamphlets or so-called ‘flying pages’ issued between September 1847 and February 1849 will

be discussed extensively in this article in order to establish the nature of the German ‘middle classes’

answer to apparent constitutional problems. The pamphlets are short, usually no longer than a modern

A4 page. Reading aloud and memorising key points must hence have been easier. Also printing was

cheap and distribution fast. Sometimes the same person or organisation would publish two short

pamphlets in one week rather than one long one. The pamphlets were usually either addresses to the

people by individuals and corporations or addresses by the people to the government of Baden and

members of Parliament. There are several recurring themes that appear with different emphasis

according to who is writing and who is being spoken to.

The 1848 Revolutions are often seen as a blip in Germany’s otherwise bombastic, capitalistic or

aristocratic development or as a direct result of Revolutionary rumblings in France. Had 1848 not taken

6 R. J. Evans, Rereading German history: from unification to reunification, 1800-1996 (London, 1997), p. 23. 7 Iggers, ‘Nationalism and Historiography’, p. 16. 8 L. Stein, Geschichte der socialen Bewegung in Frankreich, Volume II (Leipzig, 1850), p. 200; J. Brophy, Popular Culture and Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850 (Cambridge, 2007); J. Cohen et al (eds), Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, 1845-48 (London, 1976), pp. 17, 25.

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place at all, the interpretation of German history might have been a lot easier. These views are over-

simplistic. The Revolutions are not just an anomaly in the history of a nation trudging along some

otherwise straightforward path to the First or Second World War, nor were they the result of Germans

forming their own version of someone else’s Revolution. The sources chosen will hopefully help to

show that 1848 is a seminal point of a long-term development within the German states and part of a

distinctly German problem: the problem of a nation in search of a state. Who or what the nation was

remained unclear; what state the nation is looking for was even more uncertain. These unanswered

questions brought about a certain amount of instability that weakened the Empire. This article hopes to

prove that 1848 was the result of a seemingly endless debate about the nature of the German Empire

caused by its own fragility. In this context, the possible alternatives which prospective reformers faced

are not of immediate interest and will not be examined here closely.

I. A Something without a Name According to Samuel Pufendorf the German Empire was suffering from many problems at the

end of the seventeenth century, they were broadly of a constitutional nature. The quarrelsome states,

the impotence of the Emperor, the lack of a judicature, the irregularity of the executive and the want of

an external policy could all possibly have been solved by a massive reform of the constitution. Eighty to

a hundred years later, this reform had still not taken place. Amongst others, the French editor Louis-

Pierre Antquetil and the Englishman John Bancks observed this.9

There were however more than just constitutional problems: ‘Almost every-where the peasants

are slaves, or tied down in a state of subjection nearly approving to slavery.’ Although all three authors

laud the German peoples for their qualities, in particular their ‘Wit’ and ‘Ingenuity’, no one sees them as

part of the solution to the Empire’s problems.10

Of the multitudinous principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, no two were governed alike.

There were small and large states, temporal and secular, monarchical and popular.11 Each was absolutely

sovereign and ‘they appoint magistrates, make laws, change religion, exercise a power of life and death,

declare war or make peace, all in their own names’.12 The different forms of government led to mistrust

and ‘from hence proceed Envy, Contemt [sic], Mutual Insults (and) Suspicion’ as each wished to be

more powerful than its neighbour.13 This bickering meant the Empire was not one unit. It lacked an

internal cohesion, which manifested itself as weakness towards the outside.

Jealousy as such would not have been such a great problem if each prince were not ‘so far

Soveraign [sic], that he makes War upon his Neighbours’.14 Maintaining an army, which a Prince was

9 L-P. Anquetil, A summary of universal history 8/9 (London, 1800) and J. Bancks, The History of Germany (London, 1768). 10 S. von Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany (London, 1689), p. 155. 11 Ibid., pp. 136, 178. 12 Bancks, History of Germany, p. 28. 13 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, p. 179. Bancks, History of Germany, p. 24. 14 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, p. 151.


4

entitled to do, was a great expense. Equally the keeping of the many courts, which were ‘in such

splendid circumstances’ in Germany, drained the Empire’s assets. 15 The financial situation of the

Empire was not helped by the ‘great variety of Monies (sic)’, which damaged trade.16 Hence the Empire

was further destabilised, arguably unable to sustain itself.

The different states and the different forms of rule brought about a number of questions. Was

the Empire a confederation, a union or a single state? Was it a democracy, an aristocracy or a kingdom?

The exact nature of the Empire’s constitution was unclear, as it was a ‘mis-shapen Monster (…) a

something (without a Name)’!17 The diversity of the Empire meant that it was difficult to decipher

exactly what ‘it’ was. Perhaps it was best described as a ‘republic of foreigners’ bound together by loose

obligations.18

The only time these ‘foreigners’ met to deliberate was at the Imperial Diet. The right of many

states to sit in the Diet was questionable and when they did meet they usually ended up quarrelling over

precedence.19 Even if such matters were resolved, as a legislature this body was useless because ‘the

Diet is not holden as a settled and perpetual Senate, which has Soveraign (sic) Authority’.20 The only

institution that could unite the diversity of Germany was rendered ineffectual.

Matters of precedence and jurisdiction could have been resolved by a high court. This would

also have prevented other states taking advantage of those that were quarrelling, but there was no such

court. No regulated judicial was responsible for the entire Empire.21 Even if there was, the Empire ‘can

never be reformed (…) to the Laws of a Just and regular Kingdom.’22 The Emperor himself was only a

vague guarantor of treaties and customs.23

The Emperor had only a tenuous ability to protect law because of his impotence. His authority

was great, but his power was not.24 The ruler of a large principality ‘looks upon the Reverence he ows

(sic) to the Emperor, as a meer (sic) empty piece of Pageantry.’25 To assert his power the Emperor

would have needed to draw revenue from the Empire itself, which he could not.26 In order for the

Empire to act as a body in foreign politics the Emperor would have had to take on the role of its’

spokesman. The only reason he had some power at all was because the ruling house of ‘Austria’ was

itself potent.27 Although they could not prevent quarrels amongst the states, the Habsburgs were

15 Ibid., p. 155. 16 Ibid., p. 185. 17 Ibid., p. 152. 18 Anquetil, A summary, p. 265. Bancks, History of Germany, p. 20. 19 Anquetil, A summary, p. 20. Bancks, History of Germany, p. 31. 20 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, p. 141. 21 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, p. 141. 22 Ibid., p. 153. 23 Ibid., pp. 150. 24 Bancks, History of Germany, pp. 21. 25 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, p. 151. 26 Ibid., p. 152. 27 Bancks, History of Germany, p. 21.

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sufficiently powerful to ignore the advice of their councils and engineer hereditary succession of an

‘elected’ throne. 28

The Emperor was not responsible for foreign affairs concerning the whole Empire. The

German states lacked a uniting foreign policy and a system of defence. Some states had such little

military power that they could only exist through communal protection29, indeed some were ‘almost

imperceptible’ and needed to ally themselves to larger states in order to exist.30 If the German states

acted as one on the European stage, they could have dominated the continent.31

The solution to Germany’s internal strife and external show of weakness could have been a

reform of the Empire. All foreign affairs should be ‘committed to (a) Council’ and the defence of the

Empire co-ordinated.32 Preventing feuds within the Empire and interference from without would have

provided peace externally. Internally the Emperor should ‘govern those Affairs with him, which every

day happen in the Administration of Publick (sic) Affairs.’ This would have given the Emperor a fixed

role. Whether he should receive remuneration or not is unclear, but the Habsburgs should definitely

give up their hereditary right to the imperial throne.33 All in all the nature of the Empire and the way it

should have been ruled needed to be clarified and simplified. The best thing would have been a written

constitution.34 In it the diet should be empowered and regulated, so it meets frequently and is the only

place a law can be passed.35 Further a constitution would have to establish a judicial system, ‘that all

new Controversies (…), should be referr’d to the Arbitrement (sic).’36 At this time the actual problem of

the Empire was controversies. This continuous arguing amongst the states could be avoided by

guaranteeing each the rights it already enjoyed, including religious and territorial integrity.37 A single

external policy would prevent foreign powers from interfering and attempting to spread discord

within.38

II. A Sense of their Rights By the turn of the nineteenth century the problem of states perpetual quarrelling had been

partly solved by the mighty hand of Napoleon. The Imperial Deputation of 1803 and the formation of

the Rheinbund in 1806 were the last nails in the coffin of the Holy Roman Empire. The mass of tiny

principalities had been amalgamated to form states of medium size. Their monarchs were the only

sovereigns in their territory, answerable to no one. They were free to make and execute policy as they

pleased. They had to submit neither to a council nor to any other authority. This did reduce the number

of quarrelling states. They were, however, faced with new challenges. Firstly they had to consolidate

28 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, p. 194, Bancks, History of Germany, p. 22. 29 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, p. 151. 30 Anquetil, A summary, p. 265. 31 Ibid., p. 265. 32 Pufendorf, The Present State of Germany, pp. 194, 188, 194. 33 Ibid., p. 187. 34 Ibid., p. 194. 35 Ibid., p. 187 and p. 194 respectively. 36 Ibid., p. 193. 37 Ibid., p. 188. 38 Ibid., p. 195.


6

their new states. Secondly a new class of people was emerging clamouring for better governance: The

Bürgertum.39

Possibly people travelling through Germany were best at noticing the challenges that faced the

new states. The enlargement of the Markgrafschaft of Baden into a Grand Duchy has been used as a

typical example of the development of a petty principality into a veritable state and viewed through

travel literature.40

As the ruler of a Markgrafschaft Carl-Friedrich of Baden had ranked as the lowest form of prince

but one, in the order of precedence of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet the House of Baden had ‘availed

themselves, more adroitly, zealously under the banners of Napoleon’.41 This had resulted in the

elevation of Carl-Friedrich, first to the rank of an Elector and later to that of a Grand Duke, to be

addressed as His Royal Highness.42 This change in title had become bitterly necessary, as, in less than

twenty years, the number of people he ruled over had grown from 25,000 to 270,000.43

This had come about when Napoleon, over compensating Carl-Friedrich for his loss of land

west of the Rhine, handed over all the secularised territories east of the river. This is a prime example of

a ‘foreigner’ meddling with Germany’s domestic affairs. Baden now consisted of such diverse places as

the Bishopric of Burchsal the Bavarian Palatine and the Austrian territories Brisgaw and Ortinaw.44

Naturally it would take the Dukes much effort ‘consolidating their dominion and confirming tenure.’45

This was an expensive business and the Duke’s ‘treasury at this moment is by no means

overflowing.’ The Duchy was in bad financial state. ‘The taxes are high and the people generally

discontented’, not least because much of the money was being wasted on art to adorn the royal palace

and on a large standing army’.46 This was not looked upon with great kindness by the emerging

Bürgertum.

Noble and bourgeois students mixed at the tables of the public houses in Heidelberg.47 A new

professional class was emerging which began to develop a self-consciousness and pride. Carl-Friedrich’s

39 The terms “middle class” and “bourgeoisie” carry connotations not applicable to their German cousins. In France and England the bourgeoisie is generally associated with economic success. . In Germany education is the defining element of the German middle class. The lower German middle class is usually referred to as the “Kleinbürgertum”, the well-educated middle class as the “Bildungsbürgertum” and the middle class with economic success as the “Großbürgertum”. See: F. Reuleaux (ed.), „Das Buch der Erfindungen, Gewerbe und Industrie. Rundschau auf allen Gebieten der gewerblichen Arbeit“, quoted in L. Haupts, Das kaiserliche Deutschland (Quellen zur Geschichte und Politik) (Stuttgart, 1999), p. 26. 40 A principality that runs along a border of the Holy Roman Empire was called a “Markgrafschaft”, its ruler is a “Markgraf”, which may be loosely translated as “Marquis” or “Margrave”. 41 C.E. Dodd, An Autumn near the Rhine, or, Sketches of Courts, Society, Scenery etc. in some German States bordering on the Rhine (London, 1818), p. 194. 42 The Universal Magazine (London, 1806), p. 106. 43 F. Engehausen, Kleine Geschichte des Großherzogtums Baden (Leinfeld-Echterdingen, 2005), p. 20. 44 Dodd, An Autumn near the Rhine, pp. 163, 367; The Universal Magazine (London, 1806), p. 106. 45 A. H. Everett, Europe, or, a General Survey of the present situation (London, 1822), p. 171. 46 Dodd, An Autumn near the Rhine, pp. 198, 196. 47 Ibid., p. 334.

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grandson and heir, Carl, had married the bourgeois goddaughter of Napoleon!48 The duchy profited

from an egalitarian schooling system. All Gymnasiums, which prepared pupils for university, admitted on

merit alone. All ranks of society could be found there.49 The spreading of education was the making of

the Bürgertum, but at the same time brought dangers for the (new) established order. The Bürgertum

considered the way they were governed as inadequate and complained about conditions:

The spirit of enquiry, and a sense of their rights, have been too much raised by… the Germans to be silenced by any thing but compliance with their rational requisitions. The most staunch supporters of arbitrary Governments see plainly that concessions are no longer to be evaded.50

The concessions they demanded were a body of representation and a written constitution. It was hoped

this would guarantee order in the principality. The Duke opened the first parliament in 1819.51 A year

before, on 22 March, the ducal government had issued a constitution. It regulated the franchise to

which elections were to be held. All males of mature age had the right to vote and select an elector to

choose a member of parliament.52 Although the constitution was granted solely on the authority of the

sovereign it was considered one of the most liberal in Germany.53 It included all the rights and

privileges of citizens, the ending of serfdom, the right to property, freedom of religion and the rule of

law.54

There was, however a major problem. The members of parliament were far too active and

vocal for the comfort of the Duke and his ministers. So the ducal government ‘offended at the zeal with

which [the deputies] laboured to introduce economy in the administration, closed the session

suddenly’.55 Parliament re-convened and the relationship between government and deputies relaxed

slightly.

In spite of this, the Duchy alone was inadequate at providing the necessary level of order and

liberty: ‘The more shrew well-wishers to despotism see clearly that the rising generation are educating at

the Gymnasium and the University with ideas of independence, ill-suited to the capitals of the little

monarchies.’56

Patriotism was another area where the Bürgertum was zealous. German things and the German

language became ever more popular. There was ‘a violent hostility to everything foreign, and in

particular the French language, both as one of the insignias of aristocracy, and as a memento of their

48 Ibid., p. 185. 49 Approximation, possibly, of a Grammar School. The Name “Gymnasium” stems from the ancient Greek academies. Dodd, An Autumn near the Rhine, p. 172. 50 Dodd, An Autumn near the Rhine, p. 201. 51 Ibid., p. 200 and Everett, Europe, p. 172. 52 Everett, Europe, p. 172. 53 Ibid., p. 173. 54 Engehausen, Geschichte des Großherzogtums Baden, p. 38; The Constitution of the Grand Duchy can be found in The Foreign Office Librarian (ed.), British and Foreign State Papers, 1817-1818 (London, 1837), p. 161. 55 Everett, Europe, p. 173. 56 Dodd, An Autumn near the Rhine, p. 174.


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old oppressors.’57 Even the court at Carlsruhe was not immune. Although French was necessary to be

admitted at court, the nobility had begun to speak German in private company.58

Students were especially patriotic. In Heidelberg they started wearing ‘alt Deutsche kleidung

[sic]’ as a mark of national devotion.59 Although many students at the duchies Universities in

Heidelberg and Freiburg were from Baden, most came from other German states.60 It was not just the

students from the small Duchy that were developing this national spirit. Unification was seen as a way

of preserving the German homelands. Students from all over Germany ‘loudly assert that they form but

one body of Germans(!)’.61

III. Honest and Peaceful Men

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth century fundamental constitutional questions

remained unanswered. Even when a part of a problem is solved, another defect emerges. The main

problems seem to be an internal instability and inconsistency. This made the German states look weak

and ineffectual. They were open to attack. This problem was recognised by the Bürgertum and addressed

under the banner of national patriotism and citizen’s rights. The new ideas of the Bürgertum brought

fresh problems to the constitutional crisis. In 1848 the Bürgertum tried to solve Germany’s dilemma in its

own way.

The first popular pamphlets on the subject of constitutional reform appeared long before 1848.

However, after the February Revolution in Paris they became more frequent. Many pamphlets called

for some form of peaceful protest in conjunction with their demands. Really radical (for instance

communist) pamphlets were rare, at least in south-western Germany. Order was praised and demanded

repeatedly by most. The pamphlets were usually addressed to the people or supposedly by the people.

Individuals and political clubs wrote under various pseudonyms, from ‘the people of Baden’ to ‘the

people of Germany’.

The events in Paris of early 1848 were definitely a catalyst for the German states, but the exact

nature of the catalysing moment is a matter of debate. Did the Revolution ignite a love of revolutionary

principles and emulation or did it bring fear of revolutionary turmoil? The ideals of the American and

French Revolutions had reached the provinces of Germany. It had become clear that the people were

entitled to certain rights. They were called ‘unbreachable human rights’.62 If these fundamental human

rights were infringed or non-existence one had the right to fight for them with a ‘strong hand’.63

57 Ibid., p. 185. 58 Ibid., pp. 184. 59 Ibid., p. 330. 60 Ibid., p. 334. 61 Ibid. 62 ‘unveräußerliche Menschenrechte’ State Archives Karlsruhe (hereafter StaatsAK). ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9; K. Obermann, Flugblätter der Revolution 1848/49 (Munich, 1972), p. 40: Vorwärts ist der Ruf der Zeit (Title chosen by Editor), Mannheim, 1848 and Municipal Archive Freiburg (hereafter StadtAF). Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 19. 63 ‘Die Völker mit kräftiger Hand die Rechte sich selbst genommen.’ Municipal Archives Offenburg (hereafter StadtAO). ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27 February 1848.

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‘We demand personal freedom’, the freedom of the individual was no longer seen as a

privilege, but a right.64 Part of personal liberty was the right to voice ones opinions freely. It was ‘the

unimpeachable right of the human spirit to impart his thoughts without dismembering them.’ Hence

the calls for freedom of the press were very loud.65 The pamphlets were an expression of this wish for

freedom. In fairness it should however be pointed out that censorship was lax in Baden and

pamphleteers hardly risked their lives publishing these demands.

Although the Germans had been shown how to fight for their human rights by other nations,

the pamphleteers preferred an orderly and peaceful debate as opposed to full-blown street rioting. The

happy side effect was that pamphlets were generally not banned and their authors not censored. The

municipality of Offenburg, which was arguably one of the hubs of the Revolution in Germany,

exemplified the idea of orderly protest and debate. The town council organised several revolutionary

rallies and made it quite clear that ‘the entire present group do their duty in civilian (or civil) clothes and

without weapons’.66 The council wanted peaceful protest and, as a pamphlet published on a similar

occasion stated, orderliness67. After all the revolutionaries were ‘honest and peaceful men’.68

This was possibly why the unordered French Revolution was perceived as such a threat.

‘Possibly the French army will be standing on our borders within the next days’, one pamphlet noted

with some alarm.69 The threat from outside was still there and would not go. The ducal authorities were

quick to dispel fears by announcing the borders were protected from the French and that ‘the grand

duke’s garrison commanders had, for this purpose, promised the military occupation of the most

important places in the area’.70 Whether the stationing of troops was such a great relief to the people is

questionable. The organisers of rallies were usually quick to point out if they had arranged for no

military to intervene.71

Broadly speaking all pamphlets had constitutional reform or constitutional government as their

subject. Two spheres of interest can be detected. One is concerned with internal affairs, the other with

external affairs. Concerning internal affairs the nature of the state was the most debated question. A

64 ‘Wir verlangen persönliche Freiheit’ StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. On German radical revolutionary thought see: K. Wegert, German radicals confront the common people, Revolutionary politics and popular politics 1789-1849 (Mainz, 1992). 65 ‘das unveräußerliche Recht des menschlichen Geistes, seine Gedanken unverstümmelt mitzuteilen.’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 8.; StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27 February 1848 and StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. 66 ‘die ganze aufgebotene Mannschaft ihren Dienst in bürgerlichem Kleide und ohne Waffen versehe.’ StadtAO. ‘An das badische Volk’, March 1848. 67 Stadt AO. ‘Erklärung der Stadt Offenburg’, 19th April 1848. “Hierin liegt der Ausdruck seines Sinnes für Ordnung” 68 ‘redliche und wohlmeinende Männer’ StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27 February 1848. 69 ‘Vielleicht in wenigen Tagen stehen französische Heere an unseren Gemarkungen’ Ibid. 70 ‘insbesondere (...) zu diesem Zweck die Großherzogliche Garnisons-Commandantschaft die militärische Besetzung der wichtigsten Punkte der Umgebung zugesagt (hat).’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 30. 71 StadtAO. ‘An das badische Volk’, March 1848.


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republic with no monarchical elements was suggested, but was by no means popular.72 It was not that

the idea of a popular republic was disliked per se; the disorder that might come with it was feared.

‘Offenburg belongs to the towns of this country, where there can be found strong sympathies towards

the republican form of state in wide parts of the population.’73 The council publishing this statement

openly admitted to having republican sentiments, but made it quite clear that it would not declare

Germany a republic or let ducal authorities in the town be threatened by anyone.

Order and safety were far too precious to risk endangering them. This meant most

pamphleteers advocated a constitutional monarchy because ‘ order ist not the daughter, but the Mother

of freedom. In practice only inherited power can give order’.74 This simple formula of order providing

freedom and order being guaranteed by hereditary succession was very popular. How the monarch

should rule and, in the context of a united Germany, who the Emperor should be, was hotly debated.

The Grand Duke’s position within the state of Baden was not in great danger, but the way the

state was ruled was criticised. The Civil Service needed to be reformed as did, above all, the judicial arm

of state.75 Oriental Despotism was never an accusation levelled at the Duke and his ministers however

laws should be made ‘worthy’ of all citizens.76 New ideas influenced old on how internal order could be

guaranteed. A reform of the judicature had long since been suggested but now this would have to

involve the introduction of trial by jury, ‘according to England’s example’.77

Recent events had changed the ideas of how a just and stable society should look. In such a

society some people could not enjoy more privileges than others without good reason. For instance

aristocracy had hunting and forestry rights. These would have to be eradicated as a whole.78 They were

seen as a cause of the economic hardship of large parts of the population.79 Bad harvests had created

pauperism and ‘like a dessert animal the hollow eyed fellow, hunger, has set himself upon the German

countries and hunted his prey.’80 Whoever lived in misery was a potential threat to peace. A further

reason for the financial plight of the population was the system of taxation.81 Taxation in itself was fine,

but not under this system, which was indirect and seemed to give the aristocracy tax advantages.82

72 StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 19. “Wir werden unter der bisherigen Fürstenherrschaft also weder frei, noch einig, noch wohlfeil regiert sein.” 73 ‘Offenburg gehört zu den Städten des Landes, wo sich kräftige Sympathien für die republikanische Staatsform im größten Theile (sic) seiner Einwohner finden.’ Stadt AO. ‘Erklärung der Stadt Offenburg’, 19th April 1848. 74 ‘Ordnung (ist) nicht die Tochter, sondern die Mutter der Freiheit. (...) Die Erblichkeit der Gewalt allein stellt in der That (sic.) die Ordnung dar.’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nrs 154f. 75 StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9.“Wir verlangen eine volkstümliche Staatsverwaltung.” 76 Ibid. “Gesetze, welche freier Bürger würdig sind und deren Anwendung durch Geschworenengerichte.” 77 StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27 February 1848. 78 StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9.“Wir verlangen die Abschaffung aller Vorrechte.” 79 StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 8. “dasjenige System der Bevormundung, unter dessen Einfluß unser Wohlstand so schwer gelitten hat.” 80 ‘wie ein Wüstenthier stürzt sich der hohläugige knochige Gesell, der Hunger, über die deutschen Länder und ergreift seine Beute.’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 1. 81 StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 19. “Die last der Abgaben erdrückt das Volk; ein gedrücktes Volk ist nie frei!” 82 In Baden the Constitution was supposed to end all aristocratic privileges, except a seat in the Upper-Chamber. See Chapter II, VIII, III and XXVII in British and Foreign State Papers, 1817-1818.

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Instead an income-based tax system should be introduced: ‘In place of the existing taxation system we

should place a progressive tax on earnings.’83

Although the privileges of the aristocracy were criticised, their role as an elite was not greatly

questioned. They were seen as an element of the monarchical order and as such part of the stability it

guaranteed. That is why the aristocracy should not be a burden on society but lead by example and

‘foster our trade and commerce, which would help us to feed ourselves and bring prosperity’.84

Doubtless doing away with the aristocracy as a whole with its ‘attached princes, the great military… the

expensive ministers… the spies… the great amount of people watching over the indirect system of

taxation’ would be cheaper, but this was only advocated by the most radical pamphlets. 85

One of the new ideals that had come into the equation was education. It was seen as a way of

escaping poverty and improving ones station in life.86 So fostering education was far more important

than questioning the existence of the ordinary aristocracy. Pamphleteers demanded free education for

every person according to their ability.87 To ensure that the people could actually better their situation,

education should be in the hands of the community. This was why they demanded an educational

system free from the interference of church and state.88

These were the demands that concerned internal affairs. Guaranteed by a constitution, ‘justice

and internal freedom’ was to bring internal stability.89 Domestic stability could only be reached fully if

there was security from foreign intervention. Germany was weak in comparison to its neighbours.

There was, at least a perceived, threat from France and not just because of revolutionary disorder. The

general problem of security from outside meddling was probably the oldest of the Empire. Almost all

pamphlets lamented the insecurity of the German states. They were apparently ‘undefended and open

to attack’ and hence easy pray to any foreign power. The answer was to have a common foreign and

defence policy and hence ‘a stronger position abroad’.90

A unified Germany would be stronger and protect its component parts better. Unification was

probably the single greatest wish of the pamphleteers.91 This was also a point of critique levelled at the

83 ‘An die Stelle der bisherigen Besteuerung trete eine progressive Einkommenssteuer.’ StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. 84 ‘unsere Handel und Gewerbe befördern, uns Nahrung und Wohlstand verhelfen’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 1. 85 ‘Apanagen der Prinzen und Prinzessinnen, die ungeheure Militärs, (...), die theuren Minister, (...), die Spione, (...), die Menge von Wächtern über das indirekte Abgabesystem’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 19. 86 StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27th February 1848 and Obermann, Flugblätter, pp. 40: ‘Vorwärts ist der Ruf der Zeit’. 87 StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. and StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27th February 1848. 88 StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. 89 ‘Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit im Inneren’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 8 and StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. 90 ‘eine feste Stellung im Auslande.’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 8. StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. 91 StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 19; StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27th February 1848 and StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9.


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ruling princes ‘you do not form a body of national and political unity in Germany.’92 The wish for

unification might be almost universal but the suggested modalities differed greatly. Was the new

Germany to include Austria (Großdeutsch) or exclude Austria (Kleindeutsch)?93 Closely tied to this question

was the search for the executor. A monarch was the most favoured option in Southern Germany, but as

to who was to become Emperor there was little consensus.

Although Archduke John of Austria was declared Protector of the Reich at the opening of the

Frankfurt Parliament, a Habsburg on the Throne was not inevitable.94 The Protestant and Lutheran

provinces of Baden favoured the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty. When the Austrian Emperor

dissolved the Imperial Diet in Kremsier, thus excluding Austria from a possible unified Germany, a

pamphlet from the former West-Austrian Province of Breisgau lamented: ‘It is painful to see the link

between the German-Austrian country to be regarded as severed from the German land.’95 When the

Imperial Crown was offered to the Prussian King another pamphleteer cautiously voiced his misgivings

‘This step has shocked and hurt us, as much as we wish to express our reverence of the person of the

king’.96 This is a good example of the kind of domestic bickering that was the Achilles’ heel of

Germany.

The unification of Germany would naturally provide the German states with a single voice

towards the outside. This alone however was not a guarantee for security. The military would have to be

reformed. Instead of being responsible to the Duke or an Emperor, soldiers should give their oath of

allegiance to the constitution.97 The army itself should no longer exist in the form it had done, after all

‘the citizen, trained in arms and owning arms can alone protect the state,’ the idea being that the citizen

was to serve as a soldier.98

When exactly the 1848 Revolutions in Germany end is a matter of debate. By the end of 1849

the revolutionary fervour seemed to have petered out. The sentimental pamphlets of this time substitute

the constitutional demands with songs and poems, either lamenting the untimely or celebrating the

timely end of the troubles.

IV. Deutschland über alles

92 ‘Ihr bildet kein Organ der nationalen und politischen Einheit Deutschlands.’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 8. 93 StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nrs 156f. “Wir Deutschen (wollen) Österreich mit Freuden aufnehmen.” 94 Reichsverweser, sometimes translated as Imperial Vicar. 95 ‘So schmerzlich es (...) bewegt, die bisherige Verbindung der deutsch-österreichischen Lande mit Deutschland (...) als gelöst zu betrachten.’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 199. 96 ‘Dieser Schritt hat uns, (…), überrascht und schmerzlich ergriffen, so gerne wir unsere Verehrung für die Person des Königs aussprechen.’ StadtAF. Dvd 7680 RARA, Part 1, Nr 203. 97 StaatsAK. ‘Forderungen des Volkes’, 8/StS 11/17,9. 98 ‘der waffengeübte und bewaffnete Bürger kann allein den Staat schützen’ StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’, 27th February 1848.

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The Germans were split into a myriad of small states with no institution successfully uniting

them; if they had acted as one they could have dominated Europe.99 The Empire could do so much

more than just maintain a fragile status quo if the German states had a functioning deliberating body, a

powerful court and a mechanism to regulate external and internal affairs all guaranteed by a charter of

some sort. However, at best that was all it could manage.100 Internal disagreement over matters of

diversity encouraged foreigners to meddle, which in turn led to further strife. Napoleon’s re-drawing of

the Empire’s borders epitomizes this. He reduced the number of states, thus also depleting the number

of argumentative princes. This did not mean things became easier. The states were left to deal with their

domestic peculiarities on their own.101 Worse still, the question of who or what was to give Germany a

common face was more difficult to answer than ever before. The old institutions of the Holy Roman

Empire had been swept way and were not replaced by new ones. The question of sovereignty had

however been solved. The Empire simply had no sovereign and each prince was henceforth Dei Gratia

in his state. Thus each principality became a different manifestation of God’s will.102

The problems of the German states remained largely the same after Napoleon’s rule. Germany

still lacked a set continuity and space.103 There was no longer even a nominal unifying body. The

problem of unification at home and protection from outside remained largely unsolved. The newly

emerged German middle class, the Bürgertum, was greatly concerned with this problem. The middling

sort in Germany was the result of education. Bildung was its identity. The German universities were not

only the places where the Bürgertum acquired education; these were also the places where the German

spirit of nationhood was planted.104 Hence the ideas of education and patriotism were linked, and the

concept of Bildung was at the heart of the German character.105 Education, widely available to all, could

lead to social advancement.106 It was even possible to ‘jump’ from one class to another.107 Post-feudal

monarchy was based on office not on land and, as such, embraced the Bürgertum.108

What exactly the role of the working class was around 1848 is difficult to say. Shortly after the

end of the Revolution it was quite clear that the working classes had been conspicuous by their

absence.109 Doubtless they had been a consideration to the Bürgertum, but almost only as a sort of

democratic alibi.110 More recently it has been shown that the working class were active and politically

99 Anquetil, A summary, p. 265. 100 C. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials (Berkley, 1990), p. 7. 101 Ibid. Although Russia was also a feared influence. 102 E. Breisach, Historiography. Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago, 1983), p. 234. 103 H. Schulze, The 1987 Annual Lecture – Is there a German History ?’ (London, 1987), p. 8. 104 Lambert, ‘Paving the `Peculiar Path’’, p. 93. For more on the role of education: Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, p. 4. 105 Pointed out, though possibly odd, by H. von Treitschke in G. A. Craig (ed.), History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1975), pp. 63 and 67. 106 Lambert, ‘Paving the `Peculiar Path´’, p. 95. 107 For instance the family of Carl von Rotteck and Gustav (von) Struve, who dropped his title to join the revolutionary forces. See also, R. J. Bazillion, Modernizing Germany: Karl Biedermann’s Career in the Kingdom of Saxony (New York, 1990). 108 M. Sonenscher, Before the Deluge (Princeton, 2007), p. 357. 109 L. Stein, Geschichte der socialen Bewegung in Frankreich, Band II (Leipzig, 1850), Engels, Marx etc. 110 Stein, Geschichte der socialen Bewegung, Band II, p. 122 and Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, p. 350.


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literate during this time, yet possibly had similar agendas to those of the bourgeoisie.111 The role of the

aristocracy is also unclear, unlike in England and France where their tasks and position in society was

more apparent. It is important to separate the mediatised aristocracy, which had a seat in the upper

house and of which there where very few, from the ordinary aristocracy, which were numerous. The

question of whether the state actually needed either of them was raised, but they were often simply seen

as part of the natural order of things.112 The petty aristocrats’ lives and ideals differed little from those

of the Bürgertum.

Education was seen as a way of bettering ones position in life and at the same time a place

where character and patriotism was formed. German patriotism was influenced in at least two ways by

the French. Firstly, the Napoleonic Wars led to the Germans discovering their ‘other’, in the form of

the French.113 The greatest threat to Germany was the sort of oppression and interference that it had

suffered under Napoleon.114 The reason it had been so easy for him to meddle in German affairs was

that the Germans were not united. A unified Germany would have been a force able to resist such

interference. Secondly the French had transported the passion and politics of the ancient world into the

modern ideas of war that was adopted in Germany.115

The Bürgertum’s patriotism was however not wholly dependant on positive and negative

European influences. The influence of education has been mentioned. The German province was also

essential in forming Germany’s and in particular the Bürgertum’s patriotism. The Abbé Sieyès had seen it

as essential to re-organise France into departments, ending all forms of regional loyalty.116 It is not

easier to abolish the province for the sake of the whole.117 In fact, in Germany this was not necessary as

there was always the underlying awareness that the province was part of a larger whole.118 Ethnic and

political units could be used to evoke loyalty.119 In Germany this resulted in a unique combination of

patriotism. The French were regarded as the ‘other’, but at the same time their fervour for a nation was

borrowed. This did not mean that provincialism was sacrificed for the nation, rather, it was

incorporated and utilised. The domestic context could provide moral and cultural stability.120 In

relationship to the locality, a German developed his sense of self by education. The province became

the seat of civil virtue.121

This possibly odd combination presented itself as German patriotism in the 1840s. The idea of

citizenship with fundamental rights was accepted. In Germany human rights included not only freedom

111 J. Brophy, Popular Culture and Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 300. 112 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, p. 356, Iggers, The German Conception of History, p. 106. 113 Schulze, Is there a German History? (Middletown, 1983), p. 13. 114 A. Green, Fatherlands (Cambridge, 2001), p. 5. 115 I. Hont, Jealousy of Trade (Cambridge, 2005), p. 521. 116 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 133. 117 Evans, Rereading German history, p. 215. 118 Green, Fatherlands, p. 21. 119 Ibid., p. 2. 120 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 138. Interesting here is also a study on postcards showing provincial landscapes of Württemberg used during WWI as propaganda, by A. Confino, The Nation as a local Metaphor - Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871-1918 (London, 1997). 121 Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, p. 9.

45

15

of expression and freedom of worship, but also the right to live in order and peace. The Monarchy was

seen as bringing order and order was the guarantor for peace. The foundation of an un-monarchical

republic would have been an option if it could have guaranteed similar security, as a monarchy. Similar

to the idea of Abbé Sieyès one could argue the question of monarchical or republican rule was simply

secondary, first of all the good of the people should be considered.122 The question was however

important because constitutional monarchies, as mixed forms of government, are ambiguous towards

the location of sovereignty.123 This brought about even more questions as to the size and constitution

of the state. As the pamphlets show the idea of a monarch as such was little contested. A quasi-mythical

bond between sovereign and subjects made it far more moral than republican democracy.124 ‘The

affection for the ruler comes from the love born of trust,’ so dynastic loyalty had been the forerunner of

patriotism and is an important link to the province.125

Although the monarchical system was accepted, its exact modus of operation and the person

actually on the throne was not. Each state had its ruler by the grace of God, but who had the deity’s

assent to rule all the German states? The answering of this question was hindered by the old allegiances

of the pre-Napoleonic order. If the Protestant King of Prussia had ascended the Imperial throne the

Catholics might have been oppressed. The old Austrian provinces, and Catholics in general, would have

favoured the Emperor of Austria resuming his role as head of the Empire. Germany’s diversity and the

lack of an exactly defined geographic location became an obstacle. When the Austrian Emperor

dispelled his democratic parliament it made the Kleindeutsch solution look inevitable.126 The ideas of

Germanic blood transcending borders might belie this belief.127

The aim was maximum security and order. Whether this could be achieved with or without

Austria seemed to have only been an issue in so far as it might rule out a Catholic head of state. The

French had been established as the German’s single greatest threat to order, but Russian despotism was

also seen as a menace.128 ‘Divided we fall’ was recognised as the greatest problem and the unification of

Germany was seen as the answer. How was such a diverse ‘something’ to be unified? Herder imagines a

nation based on linguistic and cultural common ground.129 It has been suggested that this idea would

be an antipode to the sovereign and commercial state.130 Yet the great diversity of the German peoples,

the many variants of the German tongue they spoke and the differing customs they had were points

against unification. The Heimat or Homeland is what the Nation and the Province have in common.

They stick together against political and economic adversity.131 In establishing borders and a foreign

122 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, p. 132. 123 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, pp. 355-356. 124 Iggers, The German Conception of History, p. 106. 125 Die Sympathie für den Herrscher ist die Liebe aus dem Vertrauen kommt’ Stein, Geschichte der socialen Bewegung, Band II, p. 131. Iggers, ‘Nationalism and Historiography’, p. 17. 126 Evans, Rereading German history, p. 27. 127 Lambert, ‘Paving the `Peculiar Path’’, p. 102 and Green, Fatherlands, p. 15. 128 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, p. 268, although the idea of a mythical bond between monarch and people sounds like the ethos spread by the Romanow dynasty. 129 `Germans and Slavs’ in J.G. von Herder, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart, 1859), p. 103. 130 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 137 and 141. 131 Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, p. 6. In principle this does not exclude Austria or any other Germanic state.


16

policy they reach greater security.132 Borders are a credential of the nation-state.133 The major problem

was that national aspirations were not easily reconcilable with regional reality.134

The 1848 Revolutions were, up to a point, the result of these internal problems. The German

states were diverse and predisposed to argument. This allowed foreign powers to interfere. Alien

intervention in turn caused further factions. Napoleon was a meddler who caused as many problems as

he solved. The princes were also unable to solve them. When the German middle classes emerged, they

were spurned on by the unification of France and their own unique brand of patriotism, which they

adapted to their needs. In this particular part of the development of the 1848 Revolutions the working

classes only played a role in so far as they had to be considered when policy was being made. Policy

itself was intent on solving the age-old problems of Germany by establishing a secure order. Ideally a

federation of German states should have existed, each state having its own peculiar quirks, which were

guaranteed by the federation. This would bind the locality to the super-structure. The exact nature of

the Federation, especially in political terms, remained unclear. Most importantly the federation provided

security externally, which enabled the monarchs of the small states to concentrate on keeping order

internally.

In 1871, under the direction of Bismarck, Germany was finally unified. This was a different

state to the one the pamphleteers of 1848 envisaged. It was distinctly authoritarian. The Obrichkeitsstaat

did guarantee peace and security, but at the cost of personal liberty. Why it was possible for the

Bürgertum to accept this has to now be reassessed in the light of the long-term development leading to

1848. In this context it would be interesting to look at the entire History of Ideas behind the German

constitutional debate. What role, did the History of Thought play? Why did, for instance, Hegel’s

School split in two, one legitimising the Prussian authoritarian Empire and the other becoming the basis

of Marxism? Does this separation have anything to do with constitutional problems and what was the

role of the Bürgertum?

The dynamics forming diverse states also need to be considered further. Germany was not the

only nation with a problematic relationship between domestic and foreign affairs. Italy was also a

Nation formed of diverse states. The Swiss managed to gloss over the internal difficulties that the

rivalry of the Cantons produced. Whig history leads us to believe that England has a linear past and can

be examined as a single location. Some studies concerning the role of the counties during the Civil War

tell a different story.135 Germany probably remains a good example to work from. The dynamics

132 An overseas Empire was not on the agenda, and would remain off it until after Bismarck. See M. Fitzpatrick ‘A Fall from Grace? Unity, the search for Naval Power and Colonial Possession, 1848 - 84’, in German History, vol. 25, 2 (2007), p. 139. 133 Ibid., p. 140. 134 As suggested by Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, p. 13. Although this is not subject of this dissertation, it might be said, that this is the reason for the failure of the 1848 Revolutions. 135 For contrasting views see A. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester, 1966) and A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War: Warwickshire 1620-1660 (Cambridge, 1987).

47

17

between Eastern Prussia and Poland need re-examining in this context, although it would in part mean

going back to a quasi-Prussia School history.136

Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Deutschland über alles was re-adopted as the German

National Anthem after the Second World War when it was renamed Das Lied der Deutschen. Only the last

verse may be sung because of the bitter taste left by the Nazis’ theory of Germany’s superiority. Yet,

when Fallersleben wrote his poem the words Deutschland über alles were expressing the hope for a union

in which the German Nation would be a unit above its petty provinces and protect them.

The 1848 Revolutions are not usually considered the result of a long-term development. They

are mostly seen as a background to what happened after them. However, they are neither just an

anomaly nor the cause of some peculiar path to genocide, nor are they simply part of a social debate.

These aspects are doubtless important, but the 1848 Revolutions need to be examined in the context of

a long-standing problem: the question of what Germany is and how it is constituted. To understand

fully the role of the 1848 Revolutions a much larger time frame has to be considered. Not one reaching

exclusively forward towards the first half of the twentieth century, but one that goes backwards. The

problems addressed in the pamphlets of 1848 are almost the same ones that Germany had had since the

1648 Peace of Westphalia. The treaty that was supposed to re-constitute the Empire was in fact only the

start of a long debate of which the Revolutions of the German Bourgeoisie were a seminal point. The

present attempt to draw clearer lines between the jurisdictions of the German states and the German

federation, under the so-called ‘Föderalismusreform” (see Figure 3), is the third in the past five years or

so. The debate as to the nature of Germany and its constitution rages on.

Further Reading Applegate, C., A Nation of Provincials (Berkley, 1990) Evans, R. J., Rereading German history: from unification to reunification, 1800-1996 (London, 1997) Iggers, G.G., The German Conception of History (Middletown, 1983) Nipperdey, T., Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck (Goldenbridge, 1996) Wegert, K., German radicals confront the common people, Revolutionary politics and popular politics 1789-1849 (Mainz, 1992) Illustrative Materials Figure 1: D. Negker, Quaternionenadler (Augsburg, 1510) coloured print. Figure 2: A.I.V. Heunisch, Bevölkerung des Großherzogthums Baden (...) 1830 (Karlsruhe, 1830) lithography with additional colouring (Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe J-N-B/1). Figure 3: http://www.dbb.de/dbb-beamtenbund-2006/3150_2928.php, Black and White Magazine Publicity of the German Civil Service Union (last accessed on 3 May 2009). Maps 1 and 2: F.W. Putzger, Hisotrischer Weltatlas, 83. Ausgabe (Bielefeld, 1954). Map 3: O. Ischler, Badischer Schulatlas ‘B’ (Karlsruhe, 1923).

136 Other provinces such as Silesia and Bohemia or other formerly German territories in Eastern Europe would also prove interesting: H. Fischer (ed.), Die Ungarische Revolution 1848/49. Vergleichende Aspekte der Revolutionen in Ungarn und Deutschland (Hamburg, 1999).


Figure 1: Coloured print of the so-called ‘Quaternionenadler’ by David de Negker (1510) showing the most important principalities and towns of the Holy Roman Empire.

Figure 2: Lithography of the population of the Grand Duchy of Baden by A.I.V. Heunisch (1830), the Duke at the centre surrounded by the various princes, districts and towns constituting the principality.

‘Bevölkerung des Großherzogthums Baden nach seinen Kreisen - Aemtern - Städten - Standes- und Grund-herrschaften bei dem Regierungs Antritte (sic) Sr. Königl. Hoheit des Grosherzogs (sic) Leopold 1830’

‘The population of the Grand Duchy of Baden according to its Counties - Administrative Districts - Towns - Princes without principalities and noblemen at the time of the beginning of the government of his Royal Highness Grand Duke Leopold 1830’

Figure 3: Black & White publicity from the Union of Civil Servants, as a protest against constitutional uncer-tainty, showing a shattered German eagle.

Appendices

49

Figure 4: Example of pamphlet. StadtAO. ‘Hohe zweite Kammer’.

Map 1: Central Europe before circa 1790.

Map 2: Central Europe after circa 1820.Map 3: Pre-1801/03 territories within the 1819 borders of the


The civil rights movement and the African American in Hollywood

‘You’re going to make a movie, you’re not going to change the world’1

Antonio Weiss Trinity Hall

Using the papers of civil rights organisations and published interviews with filmmakers and actors, this article aims to explain why in spite of the civil rights movement, prejudicial stereotypes remain ubiquitous in Hollywood’s depictions of African Americans. Arguing that though the civil rights movement was relatively successful in breaking down discrimination in the filmmaking industry (with regard to employment), this article notes that it largely failed to change the industry’s on-screen output. Furthermore, the article highlights that many civil rights campaigns against Hollywood were often hindered by the very African Americans these campaigns were trying to help.

‘Until the concern of movies is for the dignity, the manhood, the thinking of the Negro in his world… there can be no true portrait of the Negro, and no true art.’2

Clifford Mason’s condemnation of Sidney Poitier as Hollywood’s ‘showcase nigger’ in 1967’s Guess Who’s

Coming to Dinner was symptomatic of African American attitudes towards the American film industry.3

Here, not only did Poitier’s ‘charming, good-looking, mannerly…candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize’

bear no discernible relation to the African Americans rioting in US cities in the same year, but one of the

black characters – the maid, ‘Tillie’ – seemed so shocked by the prospect of a black man marrying a white

girl (especially her white girl) that on the subject she snorts, ‘civil rights may be one thing, but this here is

another’.4

In truth, Guess Who, despite the film’s clear failings, is one of the few examples of Hollywood

genuinely trying to tackle the issue of racial prejudice. As this article contends, from the birth of

Hollywood up until the present day, the mainstream American film industry (hereafter interchangeable

with Hollywood) has largely failed to escape from using condescending and prejudicial stereotypes for its

depictions of African Americans on-screen – Bogle’s five key characterisations: ‘toms, coons, mulattoes,

mammies and bucks’ being the most obvious.5 This is in spite of the emergence, development, and legacy

1 Quote from Keenan Ivory Wayans in G. Alexander, Why We Make Movies: Black filmmakers talk about the magic of cinema (New York, 2003), pp. 147-8. 2 Clifford Mason, “Why does white America love Sidney Poitier so?”, New York Times, 10 September 1967. 3 Ibid.; This article has tried to use terms such as Negro, coloured, black and African American in their proper historical context. 4 D. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: an interpretive history of blacks in American films, 4th edn (New York, 2001), p. 217; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, Columbia Pictures; US, 1967). 5 See Bogle, Toms, p. 3-18.

51

of the civil rights movement.6 Of course there have been examples of non-stereotypical portrayals of

blacks – films which, as Clifford Mason called for in 1967, depicted black characters in three-dimensional

ways, with an ethnic and cultural past, and as more than merely passive agents in a white world, whilst at

the same time eschewing demeaning stereotypes. But these films more often than not are independent

productions, and when there have been Hollywood productions of this kind they have usually fared

poorly at the box-office.

There is nothing particularly novel, however, in highlighting Hollywood’s use of racially

prejudicial stereotypes in depicting African Americans on-screen. As early as 1940 Peter Noble ‘deplored

the stereotyping of Negroes in American movies’; in 1950 VJ Jerome ‘believed that newly emerging film

stereotypes would perpetuate the oppression of black people’; a generation later Leab noted the

‘condescending and defamatory…stereotypes’ of blacks in films; Bogle claimed that ‘black actors…have

played – at some time or another – stereotyped roles’; Guerrero posited that on-screen, ‘blacks have been

subordinated, marginalized, positioned and devalued in every possible manner’; and, as late as 2004,

Benshoff wrote of ‘stereotyped images of African Americans’.7

Using the papers of civil rights organisations and published interviews with filmmakers and

actors, this article examines why – in spite of the civil rights movement – stereotypical depictions of

African Americans have persisted on-screen up until the present day. In a broader context, this matters

not only because Hollywood has the power to create images which ‘actively contribute to the ways in

which people are understood and experienced’, but also because Hollywood is itself an industry,

employing thousands of workers, yet the role of the civil rights movement in changing this industry (as

opposed to the output of the industry) has yet to be properly documented.8

Three main arguments are outlined in this article. Firstly, that the civil rights movement had a

direct, and largely successful, impact in eroding racial discrimination in Hollywood as an industry.

Secondly, and rather paradoxically, that despite the advances in employment of African Americans in

Hollywood – particularly in areas of film direction and production – racial stereotyping has persisted on-

screen throughout the twentieth century and into the next. And thirdly, that the campaigns of the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) against Hollywood played a key – and

hitherto understated role – in breaking down discrimination in the industry. Yet ironically, it was mainly

African Americans working in Hollywood who proved most resistant to these campaigns in the sense of

persisting to act, write or direct stereotypical roles.

6 Here, the ‘civil rights movement’ refers to the period of 1955-1968, where the movement was a predominantly church-based one, and was largely symbolised by the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. 7 Described in Bogle, Toms, p. xi; Described in E. Mapp, Blacks in American Films: today and yesterday (New Jersey, 1972), p. 9; D. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Picture (Boston, 1975), p. 263; Bogle, Toms, p. xxii; E. Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African Image in Film (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 2; H. Benshoff, America on Film: representing race, class, gender and sexuality at the movies (Oxford, 2004), p. 76. 8 Benshoff, America on Film, p. 1.


I. The civil rights movement and the filmmaking industry The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ‘banned discrimination in employment, federally assisted programs,

public facilities and public accommodations’ marked a watershed moment for African Americans in

Hollywood.9 If prejudiced depictions of African Americans on-screen were to change, there is much

evidence to suggest that it could only occur when blacks actually worked in Hollywood in large numbers

behind the cameras; directing, writing, and producing, for even white-liberal filmmakers who clearly

sympathised with the plight of blacks had problems in moving away from racial stereotypes in their films.

Whilst making Gone with the Wind, producer David O. Selznick made clear that he had ‘no desire to make

an anti-Negro film’.10 Yet despite the excellent performances of Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel

(the latter of whom became the first black to win an Academy Award for her role), McQueen’s Prissy was

essentially an updated variation on the ‘pickaninny/coon’ stereotype first seen in Thomas Edison’s Ten

Pickaninnies (1904), and McDaniel’s Mammy was the archetypal loyal, servile ‘mammy’.11

In terms of the employment of African Americans, late-civil rights movement Hollywood was in

a dire state. The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) Report of 1969 into ‘The

Motion Picture Industry in Los Angeles’ concluded: ‘based on analysis of 1967 data, the industry is a very

poor employer of blacks, falling below the average rates for all industries in the LA metropolitan area, in

almost every occupational category’.12 The Los Angeles average for employment of blacks was 7.4 per

cent, compared to the ‘Motion Picture Producers’’ average of 4.2 per cent. More revealingly, the bulk of

these black workers were at Universal Studios. At Warner Bros., the report found an ‘almost total

exclusion of blacks in upper category jobs’ and at Walt Disney there were no blacks working as either

officials, managers or technicians. Such employment disparities between the studios led the report to

determine that ‘Universal’s figures show that black employment in the motion picture industry is not a

problem of qualification but of effort’. As such, the EEOC unanimously voted to ‘recommend to the

Justice Department that action be taken immediately to institute a suit under Section 707 of the Civil

Rights Act of 1964’.13

More recent EEOC figures show the changes that have occurred in the employment of African

Americans in Hollywood. In 1999, 10.7 per cent of those working in ‘Motion Picture Production and

Services’ were blacks (5.3 per cent in ‘officials and managers’ positions, and 5.4 per cent as

‘professionals’), and in 2006 the total figure stood at 13.3 per cent (5.3 per cent as ‘officials and managers’,

9 A. Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 (London, 2002), p. 282. 10 Quoted in T. Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York, 1993), p. 3. 11 Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, MGM; US, 1939); Bogle, Toms, p. 7. 12 1969 Equal Employment Opportunities Commission Report on ‘The Motion Picture in Los Angeles’, in NAACP Papers, Part 30 Series A, Reel 3, Cambridge University Library (hereafter N30A-RL3). 13 Ibid.

53

and 6.1 per cent as ‘professionals’).14 Comparing these figures to the total number of African Americans

residing in the United States – 13.1 per cent – it becomes clear that not only has Hollywood progressed

dramatically since the late 1960s in terms of employment of African Americans, but that this has been as a

direct result of federal legislation emanating from the civil rights movement.15

In terms of African Americans as film directors, the Directors Guild of America database

suggests that in 2008 some 7.3 per cent of its members self-defined as ‘minority’.16 Whilst proportionately

this is of course still a low figure, it nonetheless represents a marked shift from the pre-civil rights era

when, for instance, in 1952 William Greaves ‘left…for Canada [because] I couldn’t break the racist film

industry here’.17 The biggest change of this period occurred because, as James Snead wrote, ‘as a direct

result of the civil rights movement, black students began entering in university film programs and films

schools in large numbers in the 1960s’.18

The most obvious result of this surge in black filmmakers manifested itself in the form of

independent cinema in the 1970s. This ‘L.A. Rebellion’ group, as it became known, all studied at the

University of California Los Angeles’ Theater Arts Department and featured such directors as Haile

Gerima, Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, John Reir, Bill Woodberry, and Julie Dash, amongst others.19

These directors openly rejected Hollywood, and were seemingly disgusted by its flurry of hugely profitable

‘blaxploitation’ films such as Shaft (1971), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and Cleopatra Jones (1973).20

These Hollywood films either turned the ‘desexed’, ‘Uncle Tom’ Sidney Poitier figure on its head and

returned to the old stereotype of the ‘buck’ (epitomised by the black would-be rapist Gus in D.W.

Griffith’s magisterial yet racist epic The Birth of a Nation), or presented the ‘buck’ female equivalent in the

form of Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier. Instead, independent films such as Charles Burnett’s Killer of

Sheep (1977) focused on a black, emotionally conflicted, slaughterhouse worker.21 Devoid of stereotypes

or traditional Hollywood gloss, the film received poor national distribution despite winning the 1981

Critics Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.22 Ironically then, when black filmmakers have made

non-stereotypical films about African American life, they have often been in the independent sector

14 Equal Employment Opportunities Commission Report on ‘Motion Picture Production and Services’, 1999 and 2006. EEOC website: www.eeoc.gov/stats/jobpat/jobpat.html. 15 US Census Bureau 2006, website: www.census.gov. 16 Directors Guild of America, website: www.dga.org. Here ‘minority’ is taken to include ‘black’ or ‘African American’. 17 Alexander, Why We Make Movies, p. 29. 18 J. Snead, “Images of Blacks in Black Independent Films: A Brief Survey” in M. Martin ed., Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence and Oppositionality (Detroit, 1995), p. 371. 19 Alexander, Why We Make Movies, p. 518; N. Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers” in Martin ed., Cinemas of the Black Diaspora, p. 107. 20 Shaft (Gordon Parks, Sr, MGM; US, 1971); The Legend of Nigger Charley, Paramount Pictures (1972). Director: Martin Goldman. Producer: Larry Spangler; Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, Warner Brothers; US, 1973); The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, Epoch Film Co.; US, 1915). 21 Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, Milestone Films; US, 1977 – reissued 2007). 22 Bogle, Toms, p. 339.


(where blacks have the greatest autonomy over their work – rather like independent radio), yet inevitably

these films reach a smaller audience than Hollywood productions.23

Nevertheless, there are currently many successful African American filmmakers in Hollywood,

almost all of whom went to film schools and were thereby impacted upon by the civil rights movement’s

changes to educational provision. Kathe Sandler, George Tillman, Jr., Malcolm D. Lee, Bill Duke, and

Spike Lee all studied at New York University’s Tisch School; Reginald Hudlin went to Harvard Film

School; and John Singleton was educated at the University of Southern California School of Cinema. Of

these directors, Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) grossed over $127 million domestically and Shaft (2000)

took over $70 million.24 Lee’s Malcolm X grossed nearly $50 million, and Hudlin’s Boomerang (1992)

grossed over $70 million.25 Whilst on-screen stereotypical depictions of African Americans have

continued, there have been many successful black directors in Hollywood.

The civil rights movement also gave opportunities for African Americans to perform as actors in

a newly expanded range of serious acting roles with the development of black independent (though not

necessarily separatist) theatre. As Loften Mitchell wrote in 1967, ‘when Black Power exploded on the

scene in 1966, the federal government willingly supported the concept by funding a number of theatre

groups that offered training to young actors, writers and stage technicians’.26 Roger Furman set up the

‘New Heritage Players’ and Louis Gosset (who would later win an Academy Award for Best Supporting

Actor in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)) founded the ‘Gossett Academy of Dramatic Arts’.27

Most famous of all the black theatres founded in the late civil rights period was the ‘Negro

Ensemble Company’ (NEC) which opened in 1967 with funding from the Ford Foundation. As Samuel

Hay wrote, the NEC ‘developed the talents of thousands of theatre people – a list of their names reads

like a “Who’s Who” in the world of theatre, television, and film’.28 Hay did not overstate the point.

Alumni of the NEC include Angela Bassett, Adolph Caesar, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson (all

Academy Award nominated), and Denzel Washington (twice Academy Award winner).29

The role of theatre in developing black actors matters precisely because it allowed these actors to

veer away from stereotyped performances in films. Thus it is no surprise that it is these professionally

trained actors who have starred in some of the most racially sensitive Hollywood films: Angela Bassett

and Laurence Fishburne in Boyz N The Hood (1991); Adolph Caesar in A Soldier’s Story (1984); Samuel L.

23 On black radio, see B. Ward, Radio and the struggle for civil rights in the South (Gainesville, 2004). 24 Box Office Mojo figures, www.boxofficemojo.com. All figures for this article are for domestic US box-office revenue; 2 Fast 2 Furious (John Singleton, Universal Studios; US, 2003); Shaft (2000) (John Singleton, Paramount Pictures; US, 2000). 25 Malcolm X (Spike Lee, Warner Bros.; US, 1992); Boomerang (Reginald Hudlin, Paramount Pictures; US, 1992); Torriano S. Berry, Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema (Plymouth, 2007), pp. 381-6. 26 L. Mitchell, Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre (New York, 1967), pp. 220-1. 27 Ibid., p. 221. 28 S. Hay, African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (New York, 1994), p. 162. 29 Negro Ensemble Company, Inc, website: www.negroensemblecompany.org.

55

Jackson in A Time to Kill (1996); and, of course, Denzel Washington in Malcolm X (1992).30 Comparing

these professionally trained actors to the glut of black professional athletes turned actors in the 1970s

(Woody Strode, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson had all made a similar transition in the 1950s), it becomes

apparent that the latter group – primarily because they were already known for being athletic and

powerful – were frequently typecast as ‘buck’ characters. Thus Jim Brown played on ‘white paranoia and

fascination with black male strength and sexuality’ in Fingers (1978) and the former boxer Ken Norton

appeared as a ‘part noble tom/part sexy buck’ in Mandingo (1975) and Drum (1976).31

Of course, theatre and performance have always played a role in the development of African

American actors – the American Negro Theater which ran from 1940 to 1949 counted Sidney Poitier and

Harry Belafonte amongst its alumni – but the difference was that post-civil rights, the federal government

took seriously the claim of forwarding African American theatre and funded it accordingly.

II. The African American on-screen The advent of the civil rights movement effectively ended three genres of film that had hitherto

dealt with African Americans on-screen. Firstly, black-independent ‘race films’ of the late 1910s to 1940s

floundered as liberally conscious post-war Hollywood began to tap into the black-audience market,

thereby removing these black-independent productions’ core audience (as will be shown, it has often

taken the advent of successful independent productions for Hollywood to change its attitude towards

race).32 Such ‘race films’ were produced by black owned production companies such as Noble Johnson’s

Lincoln Motion Picture Company and Oscar Micheaux’s Micheaux Corporation, and made specifically for

black audiences in ghetto theatres.33 Though stylistically poor, some of these films dealt with serious

racial problems such as Micheaux’s Within our Gates (1919) which showed on-screen the horrors of

lynching.34 Such was the uproar that the film caused riots in South Side Chicago, and the Chicago

Methodist Episcopal Ministers’ Alliance campaigned to have the film banned.35

Secondly, Hollywood’s all-black cast musicals were also wiped away by the civil rights movement.

These pictures, such as Hallelujah (1929), Hearts in Dixie (1929) (both commercial failures), The Green

Pastures (1936), Cabin in the Sky (1943), Stormy Weather (1943), Carmen Jones (1954), and Porgy and Bess (1959),

often idealized ‘Negro’ life and portrayed blacks as all-singing, all-dancing, and ever happy. By the civil

30 Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton, Columbia TriStar; US, 1991); A Soldier’s Story (Norman Jewison , Columbia Pictures; US, 1984); A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, Warner Bros.; US, 1996). 31 Bogle, Toms, pp. 243-244. 32 T. Lott, “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema” in Martin, Cinemas of the Black Diaspora, p. 42. 33 D. Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: the story of Black Hollywood (New York, 2005), p. 21; Bogle, Toms, p. 109. 34 Within our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, Oscar Micheaux Corporation; US, 1919). Rediscovered as La Negra in Madrid, 1990. 35 J. Gaines, “Free and Desire: Race Melodrama and Oscar Micheaux” in M. Diawara ed., Black American Cinema (New York, 1993), p. 49.


rights era this would became politically dangerous. Thus, when in Porgy and Bess (the last of these

musicals) Sidney Poitier sang (in a role he was pressurised into playing): ‘I got plenty of nothing, and

nothing’s plenty for me’ just a few months before student sit-ins began in Greensboro, the divorcement

from reality was too much even for Hollywood.36

Thirdly, the civil rights movement swept away the ‘Negro problem pictures’ born out of the

post-war liberal conscience of the late 1940s. Stanley Kramer’s independently produced Home of the Brave

(1949) was hugely successful and, in dealing with the discrimination of a ‘Negro’ soldier during the war,

placed Kramer firmly at the pinnacle of those who wanted to use film (in his own words) ‘as a weapon

against discrimination, hatred, [and] prejudice.’37 Latching on to the popularity of the film, Hollywood

released a further three films that same year which dealt with the issue of discrimination. Lost Boundaries

and Pinky’s ‘tragic mulatto’ heroines and Intruder in the Dust’s defiant black man were undoubtedly

progressive characters for the time (even if Pinky did reinforce segregationist ideals).38 But the advent of

the civil rights movement meant that potentially divisive films such as the ‘Negro problem pictures’ were

deemed too dangerous for Hollywood – an industry which traditionally had seen its role as uniting the

country.39

Thus, the films that Hollywood made concerning race during the civil rights period were deeply

integrationist in their message. Epitomised by the works of Stanley Kramer and Sidney Poitier, audiences

left with the rather simplistic impression that if the two races could only work together, all problems

would be solved. In truth, many films of the period were bold – Tony Curtis’ character in The Defiant Ones

arrestingly (and somewhat comically) pleads: ‘You can’t go lynching me, I’m a white man!’40 This was

particularly impressive given the pressures placed on Hollywood to make financially profitable films. The

studio divorcement decree of 1948 ended the vertical oligopoly the major Hollywood studios had had on

the production, distribution and exhibition of films, and thus as the financial risks mounted in making

films, fewer and fewer were made – just 142 in 1963, compared to 320 in 1951.41

However, the problem with the majority of these films was that they bore no real relation to the

ongoing civil rights movement, and they persisted in using condescending stereotypes when portraying

blacks. Thus, compare the SNCC worker Robert Moses’ claim in 1965 that ‘it’s very hard for some of the

[black] students…who are the victims…of race hatred not to begin to let all that out on the white staff’

with Poitier’s Oscar-winning performance in Lilies of the Field (1963). Here, not only is Poitier the saviour

36 Porgy and Bess (Otto Preminger, Columbia Pictures; US, 1959). 37 S. Kramer, A mad, mad, mad, mad world (London, 1997), p. 233. 38 Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, Stanley Kramer; US, 1949); Lost Boundaries (Alfred L. Werker; US, 1949); Pinky (Elia Kazan, MGM; US, 1949); Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, MGM; US, 1949). 39 For more on this, see N. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood (London, 1989). 40 The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, United Artists; US, 1958). 41 D. Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (London, 1986), p. 1; P. Monaco, History of the American cinema vol. 8: The Sixties, 1960-1969 (New York, 2001), pp. 20-21.

57

of the poor white nuns, but when a construction manager racially patronises him – calling him ‘boy’ –

Poitier’s reaction is to pull up his bootstraps and graft hard to prove his worth.42 If anything, this was a

throwback to DuBois’ ‘talented tenth’ proclamation, and very much out of tune with the ongoing civil

rights movement.

There were, of course, notable exceptions. The ostensibly right-wing director John Ford (who

appeared as an unaccredited Klansman in The Birth of a Nation) produced one of the most racially sensitive

films of the era with Sergeant Rutledge (1960). Here, Woody Strode’s sergeant (who stands wrongly accused

of the rape of a white girl) is portrayed as dignified and noble throughout. Indeed, Ford’s seeming apologia

for his ‘coon-esque’ depictions of Stepin Fetchit in Judge Priest (1934) and Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (1935)

even has Strode crying out: ‘It was all right for Mr. Lincoln to say we was free. But that ain't so! Not yet!

Maybe someday, but not yet!’ But Sergeant Rutledge was poorly received by critics (bar commendation for

Strode’s performance) and failed to mark a notable change in Hollywood’s standard depictions of African

Americans.43

Indeed, the vast majority of characterisations of blacks on-screen in this era retained the same

stereotypical traits of decades before. Poitier consistently represented the archetypal ‘Uncle Tom’:

‘desexed’, loyal, and unthreatening. He gave his freedom up for his white companion in The Defiant Ones,

suffered bedroom problems in A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and even when confronting racial prejudice in In

The Heat of the Night (1967) his character seemed desperate to prove his worth to the erstwhile bigoted

Rod Steiger.44 Given that Poitier was by this point one of the highest grossing actors of all time, the

impact of seeing the one, leading black icon on-screen portrayed in roles so removed from the reality of

the black experience was clearly not lost on African Americans, as Clifford Mason’s aforementioned

diatribe highlights.

It took the success of an independent production for Hollywood to change its attitude towards

African Americans on-screen. Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) – for which,

notably, he gained funding by pretending ‘I was shooting this little porno film’ and had to ‘hire a white

man to pretend he was the boss to release the film’ – signalled a new era of blacks on-screen.45 Not only

did this hugely successful low-budget film about a black hustler, stud, white-cop killer echo many

sentiments expressed in separatist, post-civil rights black attitudes – Huey Newton of the Black Panthers

called it ‘the first revolutionary Black film’ – it prompted a string of Hollywood imitations.46 Shot on a

budget of $500,000 and grossing over $4 million domestically, through the success of the film, Hollywood

42 R.P. Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, 1965), p. 96; Lilies of the Field (Ralph Nelson, MGM; US, 1963). 43 Bogle, Toms, p. 186. 44 The Defiant Ones, see endnote 38; A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, Columbia Pictures; US, 1961); In The Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, United Artists; US, 1967). 45 Alexander, Why We Make Movies, p. 23. 46 Sweet Sweetback’s Baasasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, Cinemation Industries; US, 1971); Benshoff, America on Film, p. 86.


realised the potential of the black-audience market it could tap into at a time when film revenues had hit

an all-time low.47 As such, films like Shaft (1971), The Bus Is Coming (1971), Cool Breeze (1972), and Detroit

9000 (1973) heralded in a new era of ‘blaxploitation’ films.48 However, these films merely presented

updated stereotypes of the ‘buck’ character, and were simply a passing fad for Hollywood. The NAACP

condemned the films as glorifying ‘black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters and super males’, yet

they need not have worried, for as Rosalind Cash remembered of the mid-seventies: ‘my agent [called],

saying, not facetiously, that blacks were out of style’.49 And thus the ‘blaxploitation’ era was over.

Late 1970s and 1980s depictions of African Americans did not always rely on negative

stereotyping. A string of Poitier directed films – Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let’s Do It Again (1975),

and A Piece of the Action (1977) – were successful both amongst black audiences and commercially.50 But

despite the breakthrough of artists like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, the success of “The Cosby

Show” on television, and the attempted presidential candidacy of Jesse Jackson, depictions of African

Americans in Hollywood still continued to eschew three-dimensional representations.51 Thus the cross-

over ‘bi-racial buddy movies’ of the Rocky trilogy (1976-1982), 48 Hrs (1982), and Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

were throw-backs to the black-white ‘buddy movies’ of The Defiant Ones and In The Heat of The Night,

portraying blacks very much in a white world, without any discernible cultural or ethnic heritage.52

Exceptions to this include the Lethal Weapon films (1987-1998) where at least Danny Glover’s family

background is shown, and Coming to America (1988), where Eddie Murphy’s character actually has relations

with a black woman.53 Yet these films were by and large exceptions, and commercially, Coming to America

remains one of Murphy’s least successful films.54 Even so, for all of these movies, Fred Williamson’s

underlying question about Hollywood remained pertinent: ‘how many black stars in this goddamn

business can do movies without a white counterpart?’55

To name just two of the decade’s celebrated films on race – Stephen Spielberg’s The Color Purple

(1985) and Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988) – provides clear examples of the persistent failure of

47 T. S. Berry, 50 Most Influential Black Films: A Celebration of African-American Talent, Determination, and Creativity. (Kensington, 2001), pp. 116-119. 48 Bogle, Toms, p. 242. 49 Ibid., p. 242; G. Null, Black Hollywood: From 1970 to today (New York, 1993), p. 14. 50 Bogle, Toms, p. 251. 51 For more on blacks in television, see H. Gray, Watching Race: television and the struggle for ‘Blackness’ (Minneapolis, 1995), and K. Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television (New York, 1999). 52 Guerrero, Framing Blackness, p. 128; In particular, Rocky II (Sylvester Stallone, United Artists; US, 1979), and Rocky III (Sylvester Stallone, MGM/United Artists; US, 1982); 48 Hrs. (Walter Hill, Paramount Pictures, 1982); Beverly Hills Cop (Martin Brest, Paramount Pictures, 1984). 53 See for instance, Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, Warner Bros.; US, 1987); Coming to America (John Landis, Paramount Pictures; US, 1988). 54 E. Guerrero, “The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eights”, in Diawara, Black American Cinema, p. 239. 55 Alexander, Why We Make Movies, p. 65.

59

Hollywood to veer away from stereotypes of African Americans.56 The former over-simplified its plot

and failed to explain how the root cause of black male brutality on black women was borne out of

enslavement (as implied in the book on which it was based). The latter, though historically quite good in

highlighting the nature of 1950s white-supremacist Mississippi, was effectively a ‘white-buddy’ movie set

in the civil rights era, with blacks merely as passive agents.

However, the biggest disappointment in Hollywood’s depiction of blacks can perhaps be found

in the era when African American filmmakers actually began to make an impact in the industry. Spike

Lee’s (written, directed, and produced) independent cross-over hit Do the Right Thing (1989) and Robert

Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1986) undoubtedly had black sensibilities at their core in a way that white-

made Hollywood films about blacks had never managed before.57 Similarly, John Singleton’s Boyz N the

Hood (1991) and Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City (1991) both captured the essence of a new, post-

Reagan generation of black frustration, without resorting to glorifying violence.58 But Forest Whitaker’s

Waiting to Exhale (1995) seemed merely to reinforce male patriarchy (and grossed nearly $50 million);

Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day (2001) – the fifth-highest grossing film made by an African American –

glorified ghettocentricity; and John Singleton’s Shaft (2000) merely harked back to the ‘buck’ stereotypes

of the ‘blaxploitation’ era.59

Indeed, Tim Story’s NAACP Image Award-nominated Barbershop (2002) – which grossed over

$75 million – was offensive not because it mocked Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, but because

through its comical depiction of the lazy, ignorant, ‘coon-esque’, ‘hip-hop generation’, it reinforced racial

stereotypes, rather than rejected them.60 The film, unlike Boyz N the Hood, placed the failure of the

African American in society squarely on the ‘lazy’ individual, rather than any external socio-economic

pressures. As the ‘hip-hop ex-con’ Ricky says: ‘[We need] some discipline. Don’t go out and buy a Range

Rover when you are living with your mama. Pay your mama some rent. And can we please try to teach

our children something other than the Chronic Album? And please black people be on time for

something other than free before eleven at the club’.61

Of course, it was not only black filmmakers who were falling into the same stereotypical traps as

before. In Frank Darabont’s 1999 film The Green Mile – which grossed over $136 million – the wrongly

convicted black-rapist, ‘John Coffey’, not only has no ethnic or cultural background, such is his innate-

56 The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros./Amblin Entertainment; US, 1985); Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, Orion Pictures; US, 1988). Both films were nominated for several Academy Awards. 57 Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee, Universal Pictures; US, 1989); Hollywood Shuffle (Robert Townsend, The Samuel Goldwyn Company; US, 1986). 58 Boyz N The Hood, see endnote 28; New Jack City (Mario Van Peebles, Warner Bros.; US 1991). 59 Waiting to Exhale (Forest Whitaker, 20th Century Fox; US, 1995); Training Day (Antoine Fuque, Warner Bros.; US, 2001); Shaft (2000), see endnote 22. 60 Box Office Mojo figures. 61 Barbershop (Tim Story, MGM; US, 2002); for more on black press criticisms of Barbershop, see D. Leonard, Screens Fade to Black: contemporary African American cinema (London, 2006), pp. 141-161.


goodness that he bears no ill-will to his white executioners because: ‘I’m tired, boss’. Indeed, even when

his innocence becomes apparent, the noble, sexless, ‘tom-esque’ Coffey is seemingly content to die,

labelled as yet another black rapist.62 Even if he is a ‘black Jesus’, as the film hints, as Janet Maslin wrote

in The New York Times, his ‘capacity for self-sacrifice has its inadvertently racist overtones’.63 Similarly,

Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance (considered a box-office flop in grossing over $30 million –

still more than Lee’s Do The Right Thing) portrayed Will Smith as Matt Damon’s noble, ‘Uncle Tom-esque’

servile caddy; helping him regain his bedroom and golfing prowess, all because he is his ‘Magical African

American Friend’ (as Time called him).64 Referring to Bagger Vance, The New York Times’ A.O. Scott wrote:

‘Hollywood is still, in the year 2000, disinclined to let black actors play human beings’.65

Clearly, the depiction of African Americans had changed from the rapist Gus in The Birth of a

Nation in 1915 to Spike Lee’s three-dimensional characters in the late nineteen-eighties and beyond

(especially in his critique of a racist, reactionary television industry in 2000’s Bamboozled).66 But many

depictions retained the same negative stereotypical portrayals of decades before. This was despite that fact

that blacks began not only writing films but directing them too in the post-1970s era of ‘auteurism’, when

directors truly began to influence the nature of films.67

III. Civil rights campaigns against Hollywood68 One of the unwritten histories of Hollywood’s depictions of African Americans has been the role

of civil rights organisations’ campaigns against the industry in the second half of the twentieth century.69

Seemingly, it was only the least militant of the civil rights organisations (and the one with the greatest

resources), the NAACP, which put any direct pressure on Hollywood during the period.70 During the

civil rights era and beyond, the NAACP campaigned vigorously to improve the perception of blacks on-

screen. However it was confronted by the dual stumbling blocks of condescending white racism, and

African Americans within the industry that refused to support the cause.

62 Box Office Mojo; The Green Mile (Frank Darabont, Warner Bros.; US, 1999); Bogle, Toms, p. 230. 63 New York Times, 10 December 1999. 64 Time, 27 November 2000; The Legend of Bagger Vance (Robert Redford, Dreamworks; US, 2000). 65 Bogle, Toms, pp. 430-431; New York Times, 3 November 2000. 66 The Birth of a Nation, see endnote 19; Bamboozled (Spike Lee, New Line Cinema; US, 2000). 67 Peter Biskind, Easy riders, raging bulls (London, 1998), p. 16. 68 The part of this section which deals with the campaigns of civil rights organisations against Hollywood in the second half of the twentieth century is based on the archival research of the author. As far as the author is aware, these campaigns have been hitherto undocumented (unless mentioned otherwise in the footnotes) in any works dealing with Hollywood and the civil rights movement. 69 Cripps’ Making Movies Black focuses on the first half of the twentieth century. 70 The papers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) reveal no discernible efforts to influence the film industry, although the SNCC was clearly aware of the power of film, recommending group leaders to use clips from films such as MGM’s 1949 Intruder in the Dust to spark debate on civil rights classes. SNCC Papers, “Films on civil rights”, Cambridge University Library, Reel AFL-C10.

61

The NAACP had always been aware of the power of film as a medium for representation of

blacks. It campaigned vociferously against The Birth of a Nation in 1915; in World War II it kept a file of

filmmakers who ‘might help them use film as a weapon’; and in 1942 its then executive secretary Walter

White told the editor of the LA Tribune, Almena Davies, ‘broadening roles for Negroes in the movies

will…help the Negro as a whole’.71 White targeted Hollywood with the genuine belief that the industry

could be changed. In 1940, he, along with Wendell Wilkie (the 1940 failed Republican presidential

candidate), Walter Wanger (a Hollywood film producer), and Darrly Zanuck (producer at Fox) met to

discuss ‘ways and means of presenting to motion picture producers, writers, directors, and actors the

justice of picturing the Negro as a normal human being instead of a monstrosity’.72

After a meeting with Hollywood moguls in 1942, White ‘found a surprising number of writers,

directors, actors…and a small number of producers, who were genuinely disturbed by the situation and

eager to find practical ways of solving it’.73 However, few films that were released bore any of the

hallmarks of these meetings. It was not until 1949’s Pinky, that White, on receiving the script from

Zanuck, replied: ‘it begins to look as though what you and Wendell and I have been working for all these

years is beginning to show results’.74 Yet Pinky did not have the impact White desired. His successor,

Roy Wilkins, denounced its ‘underlying theme that agitation is wrong…[that] good-will will eventually

correct matter, and – most dangerous of all – [that] segregation should be accepted!’75 Nevertheless, the

film, and the work of White, highlighted both how seriously the pre-civil rights era NAACP viewed the

role of Hollywood, and the difficulties it faced in trying to change the industry.

Nevertheless, during the civil rights period the NAACP campaigned in earnest to change

Hollywood. In 1957 Roy Wilkins told a conference of Hollywood film producers and actors:

[There] are three Negroes in Congress, many [Negro] state legislators and city councilmen, yet with all this, we find that films seldom picture Negroes as part of an American crowd scene…it is unrealistic for the movies and television not to keep pace with the Negro’s own progress. It is not fair to the race or to the Negro actor…to be handicapped by misrepresentation in a medium which speaks powerfully to people everywhere.76

Similarly, in 1961 the NAACP Los Angeles Branch met with the Directors of the Screen Extras Guild and

the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) to discuss ‘hiring policies of the studio’, eventually leading to the SAG

adopting an ‘anti-segregationist policy’.77 In 1962 the NAACP setup its Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch

71 Benshoff, America on Film, p. 78; Cripps, Making Movies Black, p. 15; NAACP Papers, N18B-RL20, 28 April 1942. 72 W. White, A man called White: the autobiography of Walter White (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949), p. 200. 73 Ibid., p. 202. 74 Ibid., p. 234. 75 Cripps, Making Movies Black, p. 234. 76 N24A-RL28, 24 October 1957. 77 N24A-RL28, 3 March 1961; ibid., p. 14 August 1961.


with the specific aim of improving depictions of blacks on-screen.78 And, in the mid-1960s, the

NAACP’s labor secretary Herbert Hill ‘threatened to...“disfranchise” studio guilds that had been denying

blacks employment…and the studios began to grudgingly admit black apprentices to the guilds’.79

Throughout the NAACP’s campaigns they faced unwillingness on the part of Hollywood studios

to change their practices. Nevertheless, it would seem that it was less an explicit racism that caused this,

and more, as Melvin Van Peebles described it, a ‘benign, unconscious racism’.80 In reality, this would

perhaps be harder to change. As Stanley Kramer reminisced on selling the idea of Guess Who’s Coming to

Dinner to Columbia, ‘I made a careful, studied sell…I didn’t say that it would be a marriage between a

black man and a white woman’.81 Similarly, when John L. Doles of the SAG wrote to Roy Wilkins in

1961 that, ‘certain producers still take the stand that certain prohibitions or policies promulgated by the

NAACP impede full employment opportunities for negroes. For instance, we have heard that Negroes

may not be cast as villains or in scenes of brutality’.82 The implicit assumption here was that these

producers simply did not believe that there was much of a market for ‘Negroes’ being cast in much other

than these stereotyped roles.

Nevertheless, the campaigns of the NAACP did make gains. In 1966, the head of the

Association of Motion Picture, Television and Film Producers, Charles Boren, thanked the NAACP for

‘making us aware’ of the discrimination of ‘Negroes’ in the industry, and announced that ‘training

programs are being started in co-operation with the unions to bring in Negro workers behind the cameras

in addition to portraying them on the screen’.83

Perhaps most revealingly, the greatest hurdle these campaigns against Hollywood faced came in

the form of the people they were trying to help – African Americans in the film industry. As early as

1942, the LA Tribune noted that its campaign against demeaning stereotypes of ‘Negroes’ in Hollywood

was ‘not well received by the majority of Negro actors in Hollywood, who complained that we were trying

to take the bread out of their mouths’.84 A similar situation arose in 1955 when the presiding officer of

the Co-ordinating Council of Negro Performers urged members to picket discriminatory television

studios, only to be met with the response: ‘Let’s not antagonise anyone. It may lose us our jobs.’85 And

in 1959, Stepin Fetchit – who made famous the lazy ‘coon’ stereotype in the 1930s – attacked the NAACP

78 N24A-RL28, 1 June 1962. 79 Cripps, Making Movies Black, pp. 292. 80 Alexander, Why We Make Movies, p. 23. 81 Kramer, Mad World, p. 220. 82 N24A-RL28, 13 October 1961. 83 N28A-RL8, 13 March 1966. 84 N28B-RL20, 14 September 1942. 85 N24A-RL24, 29 November 1961.

63

for having ‘Communist influence’ and defended his career, denying ‘that his characterization of the Negro

ever belittled his race’.86

Later on in the period the NAACP still faced black hostility towards its actions. The early 1970s

Committee Against Blaxploitation, formed in conjunction with the Urban League, had to be disbanded

after pressure from African American filmmakers and actors who felt that the group – which complained

that the ‘blaxploitation’ genre glorified pimps, drugs and violence – was hindering their employment

opportunities.87 Even in the early twenty-first century there appeared tensions between African American

filmmakers who felt that criticism from blacks was holding back their progress in the industry. As

Keenan Ivory Wayans, whose Scary Movie films (2000, 2001) and White Chicks (2004) made him the

second-highest grossing African American film director ever, said of the black press in 2003: ‘they don’t

understand the damage that’s being done by them taking negative spins of everything we do. They naively

have expectations of people…you’re going to make a movie… you’re not going to change the world’.88

Of course, there is another side to the story. Ostensibly John Singleton used the prestige gained

from his Shaft sequel to write, produce and direct 2001’s Baby Boy about the hardships of an immature,

young, black father of two children – harking back to some of his social and familial concerns in Boyz N

The Hood.89 But it would seem that it in order to makes films that have ‘something to say’ (as Singleton

opined), black directors first have to prove their worth in Hollywood, by making successful – yet racially

stereotypical – films such as Shaft (2000), in the process rejecting campaigns by black pressure groups to

change stereotypical depictions of African Americans on-screen.90

IV. Conclusion In 2003, Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, when discussing the possibility of a romantic film

with Denzel Washington and Halle Berry (both Oscar winners), said: ‘white people aren’t interested in

watching black people fall in love and make love’.91 This statement goes some way to explaining the

ongoing stereotypical depictions of African Americans on-screen in Hollywood. The use of stereotypes in

films is commonplace because they reflect the prejudices and perceptions of the target demographic

viewer (indeed a similar history of stereotypical depictions could be traced with regard to Native

Americans, Latin Americans, and other ethnic minorities). Given that in 2007, 909 million movie

admissions were sold to Caucasians, and only 150 million to African Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising

86 N24C-RL22, 23 May 1959. 87 Benshoff, America on Film, p. 87. 88 Alexander, Why We Make Movies, pp. 147-8; Scary Movie (Keenan Ivory Wayans, Dimension Films; US 2000); Scary Movie 2 (Keenan Ivory Wayans, Dimension Films; US, 2001); White Chicks (Keenan Ivory Wayans, Columbia Pictures; US, 2004). 89 Baby Boy (John Singleton, Columbia Pictures; US, 2001); Boyz N The Hood, see endnote 28. 90 Alexander, Why We Make Movies, p. 473. 91 Skip Gates interview with Arnold Milchan in ‘America behind the color line’, BBC/PBS (2004).


that only a handful of Hollywood films eschew stereotypical depictions of blacks that speak directly to

white audiences and instead target African American viewers.92

Nevertheless, what is perhaps surprising is that these stereotypes so often have retained the same

prejudicial qualities that were first aired around the birth of Hollywood. This is especially surprising,

given that civil rights movement clearly had a direct impact on the American film industry, both in

eroding discriminatory employment practices, and in opening doors for a new generation of post-civil

rights African American directors and actors. Many of this new generation have done much to change

these negative portrayals on-screen. Spike Lee, Reginald Hudlin, Mario Van Peebles, Morgan Freeman,

and others have not only succeeded in Hollywood (as well as countless independent African American

filmmakers), but have done so without resorting to negative portrayals of blacks.93 But there are also

others who have seemingly perpetuated many of the stereotypical characterisations of blacks that the civil

rights movement (especially the NAACP) fought hard to destroy. Perhaps one should sympathise

because the pressures of a white-dominated film industry have often made it near-impossible to break free

of these prejudicial visual representations. But perhaps it is also the case that many of these directors and

actors are of a generation who did not really understand what the civil rights movement meant, and what

it had fought for. As Eddie Murphy told Newsweek in 1983: ‘I’m not angry… If somebody white called me

“nigger” on the street, I just laughed’.94

Further reading Alexander, George, Why We Make Movies: Black filmmakers talk about the magic of cinema (New York, 2003) Benshoff, Harry M., America on Film: representing race, class, gender and sexuality at the movies (Oxford, 2004) Bogle, Donald, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: the story of Black Hollywood (New York, 2005) Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: an interpretive history of blacks in American films, 4th edn (New York, 2001) Cripps, Thomas, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York, 1993)

92 MPAA Movie Attendance Survey 2007, website: www.mpaa.org, p. 11. 93 However Spike Lee has been criticised by some members of the black community, notably Amiri Baraka. See “Spike Lee at the Movies” in Diawara, Black American Cinema, pp. 145-153. 94 Quoted in Bogle, Toms, p. 281.

65

Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: The unexpected toast of the German public sphere Joel Winton

Sidney Sussex

For those interested in understanding Germany's Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the Goldhagen controversy offers a platform from which to explore some of the most pertinent issues relating to the politics of memory in contemporary Germany. The bifurcated German reception of *Hitler's Willing Executioners*, viewed by many contemporaries as a litmus test for Germany's democratic rehabilitation, highlighted competing conceptualisations of the role of history among historians and the German public. This article asks why Goldhagen was in such high demand and often so well received by a German public when historians were so critical. In doing so we are confronted with a German public striving to fully come to terms with the Nazi past, and in the process hoping to no longer be fettered by it. On the 20th of March 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the

Holocaust1(from here on referred to as HWE) was released in the USA on a wave of media hyperbole

about fully ‘explaining’ the Holocaust. It was unequivocally condemned by Holocaust experts.2 During

what should be seen as the first of three distinct stages in the Goldhagen controversy, the doyens of

German history responded with increasing vitriol. Early German reviewers (historians and editors alike)

argued that the book contained ‘nothing new’ and was ‘simply bad’.3 It was a ‘provocation’, a ‘collective

guilt thesis’ festooned with accusatory language that pinned Germany to an eternal ‘sonderweg’.4

Yet only six months later (as stage two drew to a close), Josef Joffe and Volker Ullrich would write

respectively about Goldhagen’s ‘conquering of Germany’on his ‘Triumphal Procession’ through the country.5

More favourable reviews now permeated the press (often attacking the dismissive earlier critics) whilst the

public propelled HWE to the top of the best sellers’ lists. 6 Meanwhile would-be audience members

scuffled for tickets outside the podium discussions.7 What had changed? Why was Goldhagen, so

despised by his early critics, now seemingly in such high demand? Why almost one year after the release of

1 Daniel. J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). 2 Raul Hilberg, ‘The Goldhagen Phenomenon’, Critical Inquiry, 23 (1997), pp. 721-728, at p. 725. Hilberg describes early reactions of Historians at the Washington Holocaust Symposium. 3 Michael Wolffsohn, ‘A People of Willing Jew Murderers?’, Berliner Morgenpost, (24 April 1996); and Eberhard Jackel, ‘Simply a Bad Book’, Die Zeit, (May 17 1996). 4 Volker Ullrich, ‘A Provocation to a New Historikerstreit’, Die Zeit (12 April 1996); and Frank Schirrmacher, ‘Hitler’s Code’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (15 April 1996); and Norbert Frei, ‘A People of “Final Solutionsts?”, Suddeutsche Zeitung (April 13 1996). 5 Josef Joffe, ‘The Killers Were Ordinary Germans’, The New York Review of Books (28 November 1996); and Volker Ullrich, ‘A Triumphal Procession’, Die Zeit (13 September 1996). 6 Representative examples include, Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, ‘The Mentality of the Perpetrators’, Die Zeit (7 June 1996); Ulrich Herbert, ‘The Right Question’, Die Zeit (14 June 1996); Andrei Markovits, ‘Discomposure in History’s Final Resting Place’, Blatter fur deutsche und international Politik (June 1996). 7 Bernhard Rieger, ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den?’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), pp. 226-233, at p. 228.


HWE (during the third and final stage of quiet reflection), was Goldhagen the toast of the liberal left and

German democracy, as Jurgen Habermas delivered a laudatory speech to the young American now back

in Germany to accept his ‘Democracy Prize’?8 Unpacking these questions that cut to the very core of the

Goldhagen controversy shall be the primary focus of this article.

For those interested in understanding Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the Goldhagen

controversy offers a platform from which to explore some of the most pertinent issues relating to the

politics of memory in post Nazi Germany. Part of Goldhagen’s success lies in the way in which his book

highlighted themes and questions that have, since 1945, both captivated the German public sphere and

been avoided by it. As Habermas noted, ‘Goldhagen’s investigations are tailored to address precisely those

questions that have polarized our public and private discussions for the past half century.’9 Goldhagen’s

study poked at long established issues of: collective guilt, resistance, victim hood and normalisation. He

further highlighted and thrust into the centre of public discourse oft-neglected questions of morality and

individual responsibility. German historians had never concerned themselves with such subjective

questions, and much of their criticism is explained by discrepancies between what they and Goldhagen

believed to be the role of history. Where Goldhagen saw an opportunity to recreate a moralising bloody

narrative, German historiography identified a need to explain the structural processes that had led to the

event. The ensuing controversy emphasised exactly which model the public preferred.

Goldhagen was concerned with the perpetrators’ thought process at the moment they pulled the

trigger. Objectivity in this matter was deemed impossible and so it was neglected by the German guild. In

highlighting the ordinary perpetrators, establishing them as Germans motivated by anti-Semitism,

Goldhagen broke the sacrosanct taboos that had been conscientiously avoided by German historiography

and political culture. The content in Goldhagen’s book, though perhaps familiar to historians, came as a

shocking discovery to the German public and goes some way to explaining HWE’s success. However,

content alone does not sufficiently explain the bifurcated reception of Goldhagen. Further evinced in the

controversy are: issues of generational conflict, political concerns, questions of censorship and historical

aesthetics, which add to our understanding of the public reception. The context of ‘events’ preceding,

and indeed occurring during the controversy, heightened public sensitivity to some of Goldhagen’s key

themes and taboos. In coming to understand why the public received Goldhagen as they did, it is of the

utmost importance that we recognise what Goldhagen was offering them. His message was two-fold, and

the second part, emphasising how Germany had changed completely since 1945, was what they responded

to best. Goldhagen ultimately offered a version of normalisation and redemption previously unpalatable

to the ‘public’.

8 Robert. R. Shandley, Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (Minnesota, 2001), at p. 1. 9 Jurgen Habermas, ‘Goldhagen and the Public Use of History: Why a Democracy Prize for Daniel Goldhagen?’, Blatter fur deutsche und internationalePolitik (April 1997).

67

To truly understand the reaction of the ‘German public’, we must first recognise that it was a

specific public sphere that ‘received’ Goldhagen on behalf of the nation. Seemingly unacknowledged at

the time was the absence of East German voices from the debate (Kurt Patzoldexcepting).10 Similarly

Goldhagen’s tour of ‘Germany’ never ventured East of Berlin. Thus we are dealing with a predominantly

West German ‘public’. Moreover, reviews of the book, often invoking complex methodological and

historiographical arguments, were clearly aimed at an intellectually active ‘public’. The locations chosen to

host the podium discussions are equally important. Goldhagen filled the venerable sites of German

bourgeois culture like the Hambruger Kammerspiel, and the Mozart Saal of the Alte Oper in Frankfurt.11

Such venues would play host to an audience already familiar with them.

Reporting on the podium discussions, commentators noted how the enthusiastic audiences were

predominantly made up of those belonging to the ‘third generation’ (those whose grandparents may have

experienced National Socialism).12 Discourse concerning Goldhagen before, during, and after his tour

was driven overwhelmingly by the centre-left. It was the left historians and editors who first came out so

vociferously against Goldhagen.13 The ‘right’ was largely absent from a debate that (unlike its

predecessors Bitburg and the Historikerstreit, the two most explicit examples) saw very little political

delineation. Ultimately when speaking of the ‘public’ in the Goldhagen controversy, we are dealing with a

predominantly West German, left/liberal, intellectually active ‘middle-class’ drawn from the third

generation. It is imperative that we recognise this debate as one conducted in a specific public sphere that

was not representative of a ‘German’ whole. Only then can we understand the public reception.

At a loss to explain the rapid polarisation between historians and the public, numerous observers sought

an explanation in Goldhagen’s perceived stylistic novelty. Reviews in Germany often alluded to

Goldhagen’s ‘thick’ descriptions of genocide.14 All previous German historiography had developed a

detached ‘bloodless’ style when portraying these events, and as Norbert Frei noted, ‘[Goldhagen] has us

confront the dreadful details of the killing actions… with an urgency and clarity only rarely to be found in

the previous scholarly literature’.15 There can be no denial that Goldhagen’s descriptions were explicit:

‘Blood, bone, and brains were flying about, often landing on the killers, smirching their faces and staining

10 Kurt Patzold, ‘On the Broad Trial of the German Perpetrators’, Neues Deutschland (17 August 1996). 11 Atina Grossman ‘Memory, Repetition, and Responsibility in the New Germany’, in Geoffrey Eley (ed.), The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism – Facing the German Past, (Minnesota: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 89-129, at p. 113. 12 Both Joffe’s ‘Killers’ and Ullrich’s ‘A Triumphal Procession’ highlight this peculiarity. 13 Frei, ‘A People of “Final Solutionsts”?’; Schirrmacher, ‘Hitler’s Code’; Jackel, ‘Simply a Bad Book’; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Like a Thorn in the Flesh’, Die Zeit (24 May 1996); Rudolf Augstein, ‘The Sociologist as Hanging Judge’, Der Spiegel (15 April 1996). 14 Jackel, ‘Simply a Bad Book’; Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, ‘The Mentality of the Perpetrators’, Die Zeit (7 June 1996); Herbert, ‘The Right Question’; Markovits, ‘Discomposure in History’s Final Resting Place’. These provide characteristic samples. 15 Frei, ‘A People of “Final Solutionsts”?’


their clothes.’16 Kocka and Mommsen respectively argued that the ‘books aesthetics were key in

establishing its popularity’ and that in its portrayal of sadistic and gruesome violence it realised a ‘certain

voyeuristic moment’. 17 Such claims that reduce the non-academic readership to ‘voyeurs’, discount the

book’s themes, content and message as a factor in its popularity. If so, all that a German public wanted to

read was a gore-filled narrative. This explanation falls woefully short. Descriptions of atrocities were not

difficult to find in 1996.18 The Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition offered audiences an even more

‘voyeuristic’ experience with its collection of macabre photos and soldiers’ letters narrating the genocide.19

Likewise, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, which achieved none of the public attention

accorded to Goldhagen, renders stylistic novelty a tenuous explanation. 20 Browning, using perpetrators’

testimony, explains the same events as Goldhagen in exactly the same language: ‘Through the point-blank

shot that was thus required, the bullet struck the head of the victim at such trajectory that often the entire

skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed

everywhere and besmirched the shooters.”21 If the German public, as Kocka suggested, were simply

lapping up descriptions of horror that approximated ‘the aesthetics of mass media’, then why did they not

appropriate Browning’s book with similar gusto? 22 Indeed this is a point that shall be considered again

later, but for the moment it serves to emphasise that Kocka and Mommsen’s stylistic explanations do not

stand. It was not simply the descriptions that readers were responding to but something more nuanced

within the book’s content.

To the ire of historians, Goldhagen claimed that all previous Holocaust literature had failed to

‘explain why’ the Holocaust happened, and so was in need of ‘radical revision’.23 Goldhagen called for a

‘reconceiving’ of three key and neglected areas in Holocaust historiography, namely: the specific role

played by German anti-Semitism; the role of the perpetrators (in particular who they were and what

motivated them); and a ‘thicker’ description of the realities of genocide (a self-proclaimed stylistic shift).

Each of these three ‘taboos’ had been avoided by German historians, and in breaking them Goldhagen

was said to have had a ‘liberating’ effect on the German public.24 Whilst German historiography had dealt

superbly with processes explaining how (the structural processes) the Holocaust had happened, it had

failed to consider the moral questions of why (motivating factors) the Holocaust had occurred. Moreover,

16 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 22. 17 Cited in Joffe, ‘Killers’; Hans Mommsen, ‘The Thin Patina of Civilization’, Die Zeit (31 August 1996). 18 Geoffrey Eley, ‘Ordinary Germans, Nazism, and Judeocide’, in Eley (ed.) The “Goldhagen Effect”, pp. 1-31, at p. 7. 19 Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London, 2002) at p. 151. 20 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London, 2001). 21 Ibid., at p. 65. 22 Cited in Joffe, ‘Killers’. 23 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 9. 24 Istvan Deak, ‘Holocaust Views: The Goldhagen Controversy in Retrospect’, Central European History 30 (1997), pp. 295-307, at p. 306.

69

the answers that historians had proposed were so complex and convoluted as to have made them

practically incomprehensible to the non-specialist. Goldhagen’s most basic argument, that the Germans

killed Jews because of their anti-Semitic beliefs, jarred with the complexity of the ‘functionalist’

interpretative model which had been the orthodoxy since the 1980s.

Whilst historians chastised him for ‘simplification’ and mono-causality, for the public such

concerns were irrelevant. Playing down the role of anti-Semitism, Mommsen’s typical argument was that,

‘the structure of the regime… fuelled a process of cumulative radicalization whose inevitable endpoint

was the liquidation of the Jews.’25 In Goldhagen’s descriptions the perpetrators had free agency: in

Mommsen’s they appeared as victims of a process. Thus Goldhagen’s account tapped into a public

demand for exploring issues of autonomy, responsibility and resistance. It tackled exactly the subjective

moral issues that German historiography had eschewed in its quest for absolute objectivity. Goldhagen’s

simple moral explanation was far more understandable and thus more comforting. For German historians

Goldhagen’s approach lacked Rankean objectivity: for the public this was one of its most appealing

factors. A report on the Berlin podium discussion demonstrates this point unequivocally. As Mommsen

argued that ‘many perpetrators were themselves unclear about their motives’ the audience erupted into

loud protest. Goldhagen countered, ‘Is there anyone here in this auditorium, who agrees with Professor

Mommsen that people who were murdering Jews did not know what they were doing?’ Mommsen,

described as turning a shade of ‘beet red’, could not provide a simple answer to this fundamental moral

question. He did not believe such an answer existed. Consequently the audience sided with Goldhagen’s

one-size-fits-all explanation.26

Goldhagen made the crimes of ordinary Germans far more relevant, accessible, and

understandable to the public than ever before. Whilst historians had long recognised the complicity of

ordinary individuals in the killing apparatus, for much of the public this discovery was genuinely new.

Readers’ letters in Die Zeit emphasise this point well. Dietrich Giffhorn wrote, ‘Goldhagen is right: the

perpetrators were quite normal people....people like you and I’. 27 Similarly Stefaine Weidemann wrote,

‘The awareness that it was not “beasts”, but people who committed these atrocities for explainable

reasons means that we lose the distance to them that we build up by denying their humanity.’28 Like

never before, Goldhagen had presented the holocaust in a black and white manner. He told the public,

‘who did it’ and then explained ‘why’. German historiography and political culture had developed a

penchant for referring to the war crimes of Hitler, the Nazis or the SS. Goldhagen shifted the ascription

of who was a ‘perpetrator’ from ‘Nazi’ to ‘German’ whilst simultaneously inflating the numbers of those

25 Mommsen, ‘Thin Patina’. 26 Ullrich, ‘A Triumphal Procession’. 27 Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 132. 28 Ibid., p. 151.


implicated in genocidal activities. The Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition (as we shall see below) was doing

exactly the same on an even grander scale, and the centrality of this theme in a national exhibition only

serves to emphasise that in exploring the role of ‘ordinary German perpetrators’, Goldhagen had hit on an

issue that the public was keen to explore.

It should of course be noted that ‘demand’ is a relative concept, and as such should be

contextualised. The German edition of Hitler’s Willing Executioners certainly sold well.29 The first printing

of 40,000 copies was exhausted in five days and during Goldhagen’s tour in September 3,000 books a day

were flying off the shelves.30 By the time Goldhagen returned to Germany in 1997, over two hundred

thousand copies had been sold.31 For an academic work its commercial sales figures were without

precedent.32 However sales should not be blown out of proportion. When compared with the commercial

popularity of events that preceded the Goldhagen controversy, HWE’s success begins to look less

surprising. The release of Schindler’s List in Germany in 1994 attracted 371,482 viewers in its first week and

after 15 weeks over 5,000,000 people had seen the film.33 The German translation of Thomas Keneally’s

book on which the film was based, sold one million paperback copies in March and April 1994 alone.

Schindler’s List did more to throw the questions of individual resistance and personal responsibility into the

centre of public discourse than any other previous event. Schindler had shown that resistance was far

easier than previously assumed. Goldhagen in his insistence on free agency broached a similar topic

eliciting a similar response.

Likewise, the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition launched in 1995 had by 1999 attracted nearly one

million visitors across Germany.34 Whilst one could argue whether Goldhagen’s police battalions

represented a reflective sample evincing a ‘national will’, the conduct of the Wehrmacht (as a twenty million

strong conscription army) gave an altogether clearer picture.35 The two ‘events’ seemed to corroborate

each other. Both explored the roles of ordinary Germans, informing the public that the number of

ordinary killers was higher than previously believed. The exhibition destroyed the mythical image of a

‘clean’ Wehrmacht pushing the question, ‘who was a perpetrator?’ into the national limelight. Considering

the commercial success of Goldhagen’s work against a Hollywood blockbuster or national exhibition may

not seem like a fair comparison. However, each should serve to demonstrate that by 1996 the German

29 Daniel. J. Goldhagen, Hitlers willige Vollstrecker. Ganz gewohnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (Berlin: Sideler 1996). 30 Eley, ‘Ordinary Germans’, p. 4. 31 Ulrich Herbert, ‘Academic and Public Discourses on the Holocaust: The Goldhagen Debate in Germany’, German Politics and Society, 4 (1999). 32 Ullrich, ‘A Triumphal Procession’. 33 Bill Niven, ‘The Reception of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ in the German Media’, Journal of European Studies 25 (1995), pp. 165-195, at p. 166. 34 Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 143. 35 Grossman ‘Memory’, p. 124.

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public sphere was a proven consumer of Goldhagen’s chosen topic. Had Goldhagen’s work not been an

academic thesis, its sales figures would certainly have been less surprising.

An even more revealing comparison is with Victor Klemperer’s diaries released in 1995.36 Both

Klemperer and Goldhagen acknowledged the centrality of anti-Semitism in the lives of ‘ordinary

Germans’, Klemperer on the ‘home front’ and Goldhagen on the ‘killing front’.37 As persuasively as

Goldhagen demonstrated that ‘ordinary Germans’ had autonomy in deciding whether they would become

‘ordinary murderers’, Klemperer showed how even under dictatorship ordinary Germans retained free

agency when choosing between brutal anti-Semitism and expressions of sympathy. In this way Klemperer

had also by 1996 thrust the issues of individual responsibility and anti-Semitism, so key in Goldhagen’s

text, into the centre of public discourse. Unsurprisingly, the public thanked Klemperer, as they did

Goldhagen, by buying over one hundred and forty thousand copies of his diary.38 Thus ‘high demand’

appears as an obfuscating term, implying a level above the ordinary. With demand for Goldhagen better

contextualised, the public reception seems in keeping with precedent and certainly less extraordinary. This

is not to downplay the importance of the new and neglected issues that Goldhagen highlighted in his

‘reconceiving’ of the Holocaust. What it should emphasise though is the way in which Goldhagen’s

success fed off its context. Schindler’s List, Klemperer’s Diaries and the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition, all

ensured that the public would be much more willing to listen to stories of Willing Executioners.

The secondary literature overwhelmingly views Goldhagen’s success as occurring in spite of the

historians’ rebuttals. For many this was the defining characteristic of the Goldhagen controversy, that is, a

bifurcated reaction to a book that highlighted the gap between public and academic sensitivities. Whilst

this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Goldhagen controversy, in understanding it, we should

shift the emphasis and recognise Goldhagen’s cordial reception as a result of, or rather because of, the

historians. Simplistic as it sounds, the public received Goldhagen so enthusiastically because historians,

editors, and other opinion makers rejected him so vehemently. Rather than engage in an active discussion

of Goldhagen’s thesis, during the first stage of the controversy, they rejected it out of hand as unworthy

of debate. As Josef Joffe noted, ‘“Don’t read” was the basic point, and this set a key pattern; pre-emptive

censorship’.39 As such, the public began to question why this book, not even available in German yet, was

the recipient of such a concerted effort of rejection. Surely there must have been something in it? Even

when the historians did engage in close textual analysis, they often returned pedantic criticisms. The book

was ‘riddled with errors’, names had been misspelled, or photographs wrongly labelled.40 This early

36 Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 138. 37 Ibid. 38 Grossman ‘Memory’, p. 109. 39 Joffe, ‘Killers’. 40 Jackel, ‘Simply a Bad Book’; and Mommsen, ‘Thin Patina’.


reluctance of critics to tackle any of the key questions and themes that Goldhagen had raised, can in part

explain why when the book was released so many Germans bought it.

Critic Rainer Lingernthal noted how ‘the premature demontage of the Goldhagen book…

deprived the German public of the right of decision’.41 As the second stage of the Goldhagen controversy

took hold and criticism of the critics began to appear, it is discernable from reviews that these concerns

had pushed many into the ‘Goldhagen camp’.42 The message was clear: the critics could not be trusted,

and as Goldhagen himself put it to the German public, ‘before people judge, they should read the book’.43

The reading public further corroborates this explanation for the popular reception. A reader of Die Zeit,

Maria Mischowsky, noted how, “The self confident rebuttal of the American book by the critics is

frightening”. Briefe an Goldhagen, a collection of letters from readers released by Goldhagen after his tour,

revealed similar concerns. 44 Ultimately, the more the critics acted to quash debate, the more the public

seemed determined to stage it. The diatribes, the ad hominem attacks and reluctance to engage with any of

HWE’s merits and themes during the first stage of the controversy, led to an air of censorship which

paradoxically undermined attempts to limit discussion.

That the first stage of this ‘discussion’ unfolded even before the German publication was

available suggests a sense of German uneasiness and self-awareness of how much the Nazi past, or rather

contemporary efforts at vergangenheitsbewältigung, are still observed overseas. Ever since the early post-war

period, when Konrad Adenauer sought Germany’s readmission into the community of ‘civilised’ nations,

sensitivity to the German image abroad has been a prevalent feature of German national identity.45 With

the re-unification of Germany, the supergedenkjahr in 1995 and the proposed shift of government from the

Bonn Republic to the new Berlin Republic, debates regarding the ‘normalisation’ of German political and

cultural life pervaded the public sphere with an urgency and relevance as never before. As Joste Nolte

concluded in an early review of Goldhagen’s book, “More than half a century after Hitler’s death and after

the Wende of 1989-1990… it finally looked as though Germans would be released… Goldhagen has tried

his best to push them back into damnation”.46 Commenting on the early reception of Goldhagen in the

USA, Ulrich Herbert noted that, ‘an important element of these articles [reviews and opinion pieces] was

an underlying tone implying that the German reaction to the book would be the decisive test for its dealing

with the Holocaust’.47 It is no coincidence then that Volker Ullrich, initiating the German debate in Die

41 Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 132. 42 Markovits, ‘Discomposure in History’s Final Resting Place’; Volker Ullirch, ‘Familiar Tones’, Die Zeit (14 June 1996). 43 Daniel. J. Goldhagen, ‘The Failure of the Critics’, Die Zeit (2 August 1996). 44 Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 132. 45 Gavriel Rosenfeld, ‘The Controversy That Isn’t: The Debate over Daniel J. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners in Comparative Perspective’ Contemporary European History, 8 (1999), pp. 249-273, at p. 265. 46 Joste Nolte, ‘Sisyphus Is a German’, Die Welt (16 April 1996). 47 Herbert, ‘Academic and Public Discourses on the Holocaust’.

73

Zeit, drew on, “the fierce commotion that the book’s appearance has unleashed in the US”, before

concluding, “How we receive this book… much can be registered about the historical consciousness of

this republic”.48

In highlighting the German ‘reception’ of the book, Ullrich tacitly recognised that German

reactions are under surveillance. Hostile retorts to Goldhagen could be interpreted in the USA as

reluctance to face the past. Frank Schirrmacher summed up the feeling of many early reviewers when he

put it bluntly that, ‘If one believes the book’s theses, the German’s pathway into the twenty-first century

can only be regarded with scepticism’.49 But as the liberal public had proven again and again in opposition

to the right (at Bitburg, during the Historikerstreit and in their clamour for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin),

it would certainly not be accused of seeking ‘normalisation’ with all its ‘relativising’ connotations. For a

newly unified, newly confident Germany, whose democratic principles were cast in Hitler’s shadow,

grounded and constantly reaffirmed in opposition to the Nazi past, would not a positive reception of

Goldhagen’s message prove that German democracy (now in the hands of the third post-war generation)

had truly come of age?

Numerous commentators have come to see the role of generational conflict as a key factor in the

controversy.50 Overwhelmingly, the historians and critics that so vehemently rejected HWE during the

first stage of the debate (and against whom the ‘public’ ultimately defined themselves during the second

stage), had either experienced the war or were members of a post-war generation with far less distance to

it than the public that received Goldhagen. Increasingly young German historians performed a ‘demi-

defection’ to the side of the public. Prefacing any praise for Goldhagen with methodological and historical

objections, they none the less welcomed the moral implications of his work and the way in which it had

captivated the public imagination.51 That Goldhagen received such a warm reception amongst this third

generation (some of whom were even historians) is because it was precisely only this generation that could

have welcomed Goldhagen’s arguments. Assertions that the prevalence of anti-Semitism in a majority of

ordinary Germans meant that the Holocaust could be construed as a national project, was no indictment

of the contemporary Germans who now considered such a mindset abhorrent.

For the preceding generations however, such arguments came too close to collective guilt. Josef

Joffe pointed eloquently to the moral and emotional distance which meant that, ‘the stigma no longer

48 Ullrich, ‘Provocation to a New Historikerstreit’. 49 Schirrmacher, ‘Hitler’s Code’. Similar concerns were expressed by Nolte, ‘Sisyphus Is a German’; Wehler, ‘Like a Thorn in the Flesh’; Augstein, ‘The Sociologist as Hanging Judge’. 50 Axel Korner, ‘“The Arrogance of Youth”: A Metaphor for Social Change? The Goldhagen-Debate in Germany as Generational Conflict’ New German Critique, 80 (2000), pp. 59-79. Korner’s exploration of this topic is the most detailed. 51 Herbert, ‘Academic and Public Discourses on the Holocaust; Gotz Aly, ‘The Universe of Death and Torment’. These two were the most prominent ‘defectors’.


oozes blood; the unbearable horror was perpetrated almost two generations ago… and so latter-day

Germans need not fear what awaits them if the fog is pierced… The ordinary monsters that younger

Germans may find in Goldhagen’s mirror did their killing ‘in another country’.52 For the elder historical

and cultural gatekeepers, the perceived implications of Godlhagen’s thesis were clear. It was they, their

friends, their siblings, their colleagues, their parents, their cousins, and their spouses who shared some

responsibility for the Holocaust. Even if not involved directly as perpetrators, their lack of resistance and

purported indifference to the fate of the Jews rendered them culpable. These caveats that precluded them

from accepting Goldhagen, and did so much to define their defensive and at times nationalistic rejection

of HWE, were simply not relevant to the third generation, who were thus free to embrace the redemptive

part of Goldhagen’s message.

Claims that Goldhagen was peddling collective guilt also served as a device allowing elder critics

to side-step one of the key implications of HWE: the question of individual resistance. As Klaus

Theweleit noted, Goldhagen had touched a ‘sore spot’ and ‘among German historians and some

journalists like Augstein who had grown used to repeating, “But it was not all Germans”… it doesn’t

change the fact that there were lots of them, and not just SS men’.53 As Spielberg, Klemperer and

Goldhagen had demonstrated, individual resistance was an option. It did not have to take the form of a

Stauffenberg plot, it could mean refusing to murder Jewish children, a choice that Goldhagen highlighted

as being as readily available as it was rarely exercised. As Gotz Aly noted, ‘Goldhagen rightly insists upon

the complete freedom of each individual to decide and refuse. Not a single German who refused to kill a

Jew was demoted… [Goldhagen] brings a new and different intensity to the question of responsibility

shared by many Germans’.54 No longer would Augstein’s self-exculpatory claims (representative of

others) that resistance, ‘could only be done by an institution, not by an individual’, carry much weight with

the younger Generation.55 As Goldhagen replied to Augstein, ‘You – as almost everyone has until now –

are assuming that there was a will, but not a way, to resistance… I show that there wasn’t even a

widespread will to protest’.56 In accepting Goldhagen, the public were rejecting assertions that

totalitarianism ruled out resistance as a possibility. Through recognition of the possibility of resistance,

they were reaffirming their own morality when concluding that, now as good democrats, they would

certainly not have exercised such moral ambivalence. Taking in Goldhagen’s descriptions of murders

carried out by members of their grandparents’ generation with a feeling of moral indignation, was all part

52 Joffe, ‘Killers’. 53 Klaus Theweleit, ‘Killing for Desire’, an interview in Badische Zeitung (15 October 1996). 54 Ibid. 55 Rudolf Augstein, ‘What were the Murderers Thinking? An interview with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’, Der Spiegel (12 August 1996). Making similar arguments were, Marion Grafin Donhoff, ‘Why Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Book is Misleading’, Die Zeit (6 September 1996), and Schirrmacher, ‘Hitler’s Code’. 56 Goldhagen quoted by Augstein, in ‘What were the Murderers Thinking?’

75

of the appeal. It ‘proved’ to the public that they were morally different to their forbearers, utterly changed

in their cultural and political values.

On this reading, much of Goldhagen’s appeal exists in his redemptive message, and in the way in

which he made palatable to the youthful left a version of that notion so synonymous with the

contemporary German right: ‘normalisation’. Previous calls for normalisation from the right were viewed

negatively as nationalistic attempts to relativise the past and so absolve the German nation. Goldhagen’s

version of normalisation required, rather than relativisation, a complete acceptance of the Holocaust’s

singularity along with recognition of the most uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi past. It was therefore a

much more appealing pill for the left to swallow. Goldhagen proclaimed that young Germans could be

confident, indeed proud of their democratic achievements and European role, so long as they had fully

grappled and come to terms with their national past. Whilst Goldhagen’s book was a stinging indictment

of Germany and ‘Germans’ until 1945, it was also a eulogy to the exorcising of evil and democratisation

that had occurred post 1945. As Goldhagen explained while accepting his Democracy Prize,

‘Acknowledging the past does not shame today’s Germany but emphasizes to the whole world that the

Federal Republic is different and that it abhors such deeds and the beliefs that led to them.’57 This

message, non-existent in the main body of the American edition, was highlighted in the preface to the

German edition and constantly repeated by Goldhagen whilst in Germany.58 Along with a greater more

personal understanding of the holocaust, this was the main message that the public took from the

controversy.

In concluding, it will be enlightening to return to a question posed earlier. Why were Browning’s

‘ordinary’ Germans ignored by a public so desperate to know Goldhagen’s? After all, Browning’s book

tackled similar taboos and themes to Goldhagen’s. It explored perpetrators’ motivations, expanded their

numbers and showed them to have been ordinary. It highlighted free agency and the possibility of

resistance, using the same ‘thick’ descriptions and presented to the same third generation. Goldhagen’s

book must have had something further then. The discrepancy in reception (and thus Goldhagen’s

popularity) is best explained by the two books’ differing conclusions. Unlike Goldhagen’s prose, which

challenged all previous interpretations of the Holocaust, Browning’s conclusions reaffirmed the

functionalist orthodoxy. Like that of German historiography, Browning’s work lacked the moral lesson

that the public responded to so positively in Goldhagen’s book. It confirmed a consensus that universal

and situational factors such as discipline, authority and peer group pressure had played an equally

important if not greater role in the genocide than anti-Semitism.59 As such it mitigated individual

57 Daniel J. Goldhagen, ‘Modell Bundesrepublik’, Suddeutsche Zeitung (April 1997). 58 Grossman ‘Memory’, p. 110. 59 Omar Bartov ‘Reception and Perception: Goldhagen’s Holocaust and the World’, in Eley (ed.), The “Goldhagen Effect”, pp. 33-87, at p. 53.


responsibility by portraying the perpetrators as victims of circumstance. Goldhagen through his moral

message offered the public a sense of closure denied by previous historians. ‘This is the evil that was

done, this is who did it; here is why they did it and how they felt.’60 The Holocaust was unique and anti-

Semitism caused it. Such a simple message had never been relayed so emphatically to the public. The

importance of the Holocaust in the public sphere is that it serves as a moral lesson of good versus evil; an

example and a warning emphasising the depths of barbarism into which humankind can sink. Yet

historical literature had never approached the simplest moral questions. History was not supposed to fulfil

such a purpose. It was meant to refrain from subjective judgements and explain things objectively. When

Goldhagen breached this gap by offering, in an academic work, a moral explanation like never before, the

public responded with gratitude.

Context is equally important and Goldhagen ‘arrive[d] here at the right time’.61 Goldhagen’s

conclusions were simply more relevant to the public sphere as they debated issues of normalisation.

Browning’s answers could not help explain the resurgence of the radical right, attacks on asylum seekers

or whether the Bundeswher should be deployed in Bosnia. In essence they bore no real relevance to

Germany’s present. Goldhagen’s redemptive message, repeated to audiences time and time again, was as

much about the future as it was about the past. Goldhagen came in the wake of Schindler’s List, Klemperer’s

Diaries, and the Crimes of the Wehmracht exhibition. Each of these events increased demand for the taboos

that Goldhagen broke. His style made these topics more accessible, but is not sufficient in explaining his

reception. What highlighted these taboos, making more acute the sense of controversy, were the critics’

vehement rejections. Had the historians ‘let it be’, it is feasible to consider that the public may not have

developed such an interest. But they could not – Goldhagen’s work was an affront to their years of careful

and objective archival research. It jarred completely with what they believed was the true purpose of

history. Regardless, Goldhagen’s message for young Germans was irresistible: remember the past, but no

longer be fettered by it. He exclaimed to the public: the more you strive to recognise and abhor your Nazi

past, the more you ground democracy and legitimise your national future. Above all else the public

embraced this message, and the promise of normalised redemption that Goldhagen represented.

Further Reading Eley, G. The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism – Facing the German Past, (Michigan, 2000) Goldhagen, D. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York, 1996) Kautz, F. The German Historians: Hitler’s Willing Executioners and Daniel Goldhagen, (Montreal, 2003) Niven, B., Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich, (London, 2002) Rieger, B., ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den?’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), pp. 226-233 Shandley, R. Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, (Minnesota, 2001)

60 Joffe, ‘Killers’. 61 Kurt Patzold, ‘On the Broad Trial of the German Perpetrators’, Neues Deutschland (17 August 1996).

77

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The Rhetorical Function of Architecture in Gilbert of Limerick’s imago ecclesiae

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