Unsystematic thoughts on the Hohenzollerns and Christopher Clark
One thing I've been meaning to write about lately is the controversy surrounding the attempt of the Hohenzollerns to receive compensation for the confiscation of their property, possibly the most brazen and shameless attempt to personally profit from legal technicalities in recent history. I sincerely hope that the newest Hohenzollern fails in the most expensive and public way possible, so as to finalise the issue for all time. And if you want to see the shameless claim dismissed with the scorn it deserves, then see what Jan Böhmermann has done with it.
But that's not what I want to write about. What I'm interested in is the turns that have been taken in the argument and the blurring of issues that probably don't belong together. In particular, I want to explore my own weirdly disproportionate irritation at the depiction of Christopher Clark's position in this (and in other debates). Most of this irritation, I'm sure, stems from the fact that I'm currently writing a book about Wilhelm II, one that largely verifies Clark's own work on the Kaiser. It is also probably related to how baffled I was by the ways in which good historians in Germany and old guard Sonderweggers shared the same response to his book Sleepwalkers. My irritation at the handling of the Hohenzollern thing is probably an extension of that.
I admit this post is probably superfluous, because it's not like the Cambridge Regius Professor of History Sir Christopher requires any defence by me. And if I could choose to be defended by someone, I'd probably choose a more prominent voice than someone who works (very contentedly) in suburban Adelaide. And as a lefty, I'm not particularly eager to be tarred with the brush of (unwarranted) infamy surrounding Clark (particularly in Germany). But, sadly for me, I think people have got the wrong end of the stick with his work. I think, that is, that Clark is mostly correct.
So what am I talking about?
Let's take the depiction of Clark in David Motadel's otherwise fantastic piece in the New York Review of Books. In this he says that Clark's books have 'made him a hero to the German conservative right.' On the Hohenzoller claim, he goes on to say: 'his report provides a clear endorsement of the Hohenzollern claims.' Motadel is a great historian and his work on the Persian shahs in Germany was fabulous. But presenting Clark's work in this way misses something important, I think.
To take the first point, it is probably true that there are some rusted ur-conservatives who grabbed onto Sleepwalkers to justify their nationalism. It was certainly the cudgel with which John Moses recently tried to beat Clark into submission. John Röhl was similarly scandalised. It's probably not unfair to say that amongst those most dismayed by the book were members of the historiographical cohort who still write within a pre-Blackbourn and Eley world in which the only scoundrel who dared reject the gospel of Fritz Fischer was Gerhard Ritter. For them, Clark had failed to understand that Germany's feudalised bourgeoisie had allowed Prussian Junkers to start a world war in 1914 to maintain the aristocratic, 'quasi-absolutist' status quo. This was the hegemonic narrative in the 60s and 70s in Germany and partially elsewhere. But after that, outside Germany, the Fischer thesis was seen as fatally one sided. Certainly here in Australia, I was taught as an undergraduate in the early 90s that it had to be read as a response to postwar Germany politics, as well as a historiographical contribution.
Whenever I'm in Germany, I'm amazed at how a lot of German left liberals feel they also have to oppose Sleepwalkers as somehow pandering to nationalist fantasies of a blameless Germany (it clearly doesn't). There was also an odd sense that critiquing Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht was a politically iffy stance to take. In Germany, where only German history sometimes matters, the Sonderweg is still in some quarters felt to be the only historiographical remedy to nationalism. Very weirdly, it's also sometimes claimed that it's politically important that Germany be seen as having started both world wars, because debate about one war might spark debate about the other. I'll leave this argument as not worth countering as it is simply not coherent. No credible historian doubts Nazi Germany's role in starting WWII. But it's important to realise that persisting with this kind of atavistic reasoning comes at a cost.
For mine, neo- (often paleo) Fischerite reasoning fails to realise that the intense self flagellation over Germany's excessive nationalism in the early 20th century has been instrumental in letting Russian, Austro-Hungarian, French, Serbian, Turkish and British nationalism off the hook. While this isn't the place for a full review of the causes of WWI, the narrow focus on Germany in Germany has always distorted the historiography, even if it did some medium term political good for post WWII West Germans. Like William Mulligan's excellent book and a bunch of others, Clark's makes clear that those still fixated on the menace of 'Prussian militarism' and refusing to admit that other European players had vital interests they sought to further through war are sadly one-sided in their inability to examine the broader world of nationalist brinkmanship. In short, it's time to consider the possibility that Clark's book functions very well as a left critique of nationalism more broadly. That's certainly how I read it.
On the Hohenzollern Gutachten, I shift onto uncomfortable ground. I don't really want to defend it. Not that they'd ask, I wouldn't take a commission from a royal, not even a pretend one from an extinct house. I don't like commissioned history and I don't like aristocratic pretensions (including knighthoods).
But in all fairness to what's actually in it, Clark didn't offer anything like a ringing endorsement of the Hohenzollern claim. The Crown Prince comes out of it looking not only like a Nazi supporter, but also as politically inept and personally deluded. Leaving to one side that Clark wrote the Gutachten in 2011 - before the current claim even existed - he is pretty clear on why he says what he says, and it maps quite straightforwardly onto his earlier work on Wilhelm II. To paraphrase, the Hohenzollerns always believed they were far more central to political affairs than they were. That's essentially correct and uncontroversial to anyone except perhaps Röhl.
As anyone who has read this blog knows, I think that this understanding is the correct one when it comes to Wilhelm II, and why I simply reject (for example) calls to see the Herero genocide as the 'Kaiser's genocide.' It wasn't, because he did everything he could to ignore the war, and he certainly didn't direct operations there. He appointed Trotha, to be sure, and the genocide was a product of German state power (which is why I'm still in favour of reparations). But just because it would be politically useful to have had the Kaiser order the genocide doesn't make it true. See my chapter here for more details.
So too for Crown Prince Wilhelm and the Nazi Machtegreifung. Clark is essentially correct. The prince thought he was of great importance to the Nazis. The Nazis, however, saw him as a useful idiot, and were happy to accept his help and then discard him once they were in power. The prince might have thought he had found a party that would restore his family to power by the back door, but they were no more serious about that than they were when they told German liberal colonialists that they would help them get their African and Pacific colonies back. This was part of their (reciprocated) co-option of German nationalists of all stripe (whether monarchical or liberal) for tactical purposes, which was mistaken by these nationalists as mutual assistance. That those co-opted believed that they were of central importance is clear. That they often were not is also clear.
I think Clark is right when he says the Crown Prince was too irrelevant to be of any real importance to the Nazi Machtergreifung. I've never read a history of Weimar that mentioned him as more than an oddity. He was maybe good for a small handful of arch royalists votes, but as Clark points out, royalists were more interested in Hindenburg than the Crown Prince by then. And Clark was right to say that, in comparison to his brother, the dyed in the wool, uniformed and marching Nazi August Wilhelm, Wilhelm was a Nazi dilettante.
Where I differ, is with a single sentence in Clark's conclusion, which I think is overdrawn. I think the Crown Prince did everything in his power to offer 'significant assistance' to the Nazis in their rise to power. He certainly believed he was an important figure to them, but the Nazis didn't need him, in the sense that if you subtracted his support, the Nazis still would have come to power.
This is hardly the grounds for returning property to his descendants generations later. In all political events, if you ask whether any particular individual's role was indispensable, the answer would be a clear no, outside of a handful of central protagonists. If Höss had died before arriving at Auschwitz, the Holocaust would have rumbled on there regardless. There was undoubtedly another Eichmann waiting in the wings as well. But both were rightly treated as perpetrators. The Crown Prince, by lending the Hohenzollern name to the Nazis, offered the most significant and public assistance he had to offer. But as Clark points out, the Nazis were too powerful in their own right to rely on it.
Clark is an easy and visible target. And by conflating the German conservative right's misreading of his book Sleepwalkers with a superficial reading of the Hohenzollern Gutachten, it would be easy to misrepresent his project as nationalist apologetics. But historiographically, Clark's work more properly fits into the wave of works that is rewriting the history of the Kaiserreich in exciting ways. He rejects old school portraits of Germany's supposed peculiarity, its ostensibly feudalised bourgeoisie and its putatively dominant East Elbian militarist Junkers. He also rids us of the notion (so dear to an older generation of scholars), that royalty was a prime mover in pre-war and postwar political events.
This sits pretty well with leftwing, post-Blackbourn and Eley work more generally. In demolishing these Sonderweg shibboleths, Clark clears the way for a clearer view of Germany, that shows how its burgeoning liberalism, imperialism, parliamentarisation and determination to assert its national interests militarily was entirely in line with broader trends in European history. This is not a compliment! It's a critique of European modernity.
For my money, Clark's work is not only compatible with a broader left critique of pan-European liberal nationalism and imperialism. It might be a necessary step towards writing such histories, histories that come out from behind the shadow of the Sonderweg thesis.
But that's not what I want to write about. What I'm interested in is the turns that have been taken in the argument and the blurring of issues that probably don't belong together. In particular, I want to explore my own weirdly disproportionate irritation at the depiction of Christopher Clark's position in this (and in other debates). Most of this irritation, I'm sure, stems from the fact that I'm currently writing a book about Wilhelm II, one that largely verifies Clark's own work on the Kaiser. It is also probably related to how baffled I was by the ways in which good historians in Germany and old guard Sonderweggers shared the same response to his book Sleepwalkers. My irritation at the handling of the Hohenzollern thing is probably an extension of that.
I admit this post is probably superfluous, because it's not like the Cambridge Regius Professor of History Sir Christopher requires any defence by me. And if I could choose to be defended by someone, I'd probably choose a more prominent voice than someone who works (very contentedly) in suburban Adelaide. And as a lefty, I'm not particularly eager to be tarred with the brush of (unwarranted) infamy surrounding Clark (particularly in Germany). But, sadly for me, I think people have got the wrong end of the stick with his work. I think, that is, that Clark is mostly correct.
So what am I talking about?
Let's take the depiction of Clark in David Motadel's otherwise fantastic piece in the New York Review of Books. In this he says that Clark's books have 'made him a hero to the German conservative right.' On the Hohenzoller claim, he goes on to say: 'his report provides a clear endorsement of the Hohenzollern claims.' Motadel is a great historian and his work on the Persian shahs in Germany was fabulous. But presenting Clark's work in this way misses something important, I think.
To take the first point, it is probably true that there are some rusted ur-conservatives who grabbed onto Sleepwalkers to justify their nationalism. It was certainly the cudgel with which John Moses recently tried to beat Clark into submission. John Röhl was similarly scandalised. It's probably not unfair to say that amongst those most dismayed by the book were members of the historiographical cohort who still write within a pre-Blackbourn and Eley world in which the only scoundrel who dared reject the gospel of Fritz Fischer was Gerhard Ritter. For them, Clark had failed to understand that Germany's feudalised bourgeoisie had allowed Prussian Junkers to start a world war in 1914 to maintain the aristocratic, 'quasi-absolutist' status quo. This was the hegemonic narrative in the 60s and 70s in Germany and partially elsewhere. But after that, outside Germany, the Fischer thesis was seen as fatally one sided. Certainly here in Australia, I was taught as an undergraduate in the early 90s that it had to be read as a response to postwar Germany politics, as well as a historiographical contribution.
Whenever I'm in Germany, I'm amazed at how a lot of German left liberals feel they also have to oppose Sleepwalkers as somehow pandering to nationalist fantasies of a blameless Germany (it clearly doesn't). There was also an odd sense that critiquing Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht was a politically iffy stance to take. In Germany, where only German history sometimes matters, the Sonderweg is still in some quarters felt to be the only historiographical remedy to nationalism. Very weirdly, it's also sometimes claimed that it's politically important that Germany be seen as having started both world wars, because debate about one war might spark debate about the other. I'll leave this argument as not worth countering as it is simply not coherent. No credible historian doubts Nazi Germany's role in starting WWII. But it's important to realise that persisting with this kind of atavistic reasoning comes at a cost.
For mine, neo- (often paleo) Fischerite reasoning fails to realise that the intense self flagellation over Germany's excessive nationalism in the early 20th century has been instrumental in letting Russian, Austro-Hungarian, French, Serbian, Turkish and British nationalism off the hook. While this isn't the place for a full review of the causes of WWI, the narrow focus on Germany in Germany has always distorted the historiography, even if it did some medium term political good for post WWII West Germans. Like William Mulligan's excellent book and a bunch of others, Clark's makes clear that those still fixated on the menace of 'Prussian militarism' and refusing to admit that other European players had vital interests they sought to further through war are sadly one-sided in their inability to examine the broader world of nationalist brinkmanship. In short, it's time to consider the possibility that Clark's book functions very well as a left critique of nationalism more broadly. That's certainly how I read it.
On the Hohenzollern Gutachten, I shift onto uncomfortable ground. I don't really want to defend it. Not that they'd ask, I wouldn't take a commission from a royal, not even a pretend one from an extinct house. I don't like commissioned history and I don't like aristocratic pretensions (including knighthoods).
But in all fairness to what's actually in it, Clark didn't offer anything like a ringing endorsement of the Hohenzollern claim. The Crown Prince comes out of it looking not only like a Nazi supporter, but also as politically inept and personally deluded. Leaving to one side that Clark wrote the Gutachten in 2011 - before the current claim even existed - he is pretty clear on why he says what he says, and it maps quite straightforwardly onto his earlier work on Wilhelm II. To paraphrase, the Hohenzollerns always believed they were far more central to political affairs than they were. That's essentially correct and uncontroversial to anyone except perhaps Röhl.
As anyone who has read this blog knows, I think that this understanding is the correct one when it comes to Wilhelm II, and why I simply reject (for example) calls to see the Herero genocide as the 'Kaiser's genocide.' It wasn't, because he did everything he could to ignore the war, and he certainly didn't direct operations there. He appointed Trotha, to be sure, and the genocide was a product of German state power (which is why I'm still in favour of reparations). But just because it would be politically useful to have had the Kaiser order the genocide doesn't make it true. See my chapter here for more details.
So too for Crown Prince Wilhelm and the Nazi Machtegreifung. Clark is essentially correct. The prince thought he was of great importance to the Nazis. The Nazis, however, saw him as a useful idiot, and were happy to accept his help and then discard him once they were in power. The prince might have thought he had found a party that would restore his family to power by the back door, but they were no more serious about that than they were when they told German liberal colonialists that they would help them get their African and Pacific colonies back. This was part of their (reciprocated) co-option of German nationalists of all stripe (whether monarchical or liberal) for tactical purposes, which was mistaken by these nationalists as mutual assistance. That those co-opted believed that they were of central importance is clear. That they often were not is also clear.
I think Clark is right when he says the Crown Prince was too irrelevant to be of any real importance to the Nazi Machtergreifung. I've never read a history of Weimar that mentioned him as more than an oddity. He was maybe good for a small handful of arch royalists votes, but as Clark points out, royalists were more interested in Hindenburg than the Crown Prince by then. And Clark was right to say that, in comparison to his brother, the dyed in the wool, uniformed and marching Nazi August Wilhelm, Wilhelm was a Nazi dilettante.
Where I differ, is with a single sentence in Clark's conclusion, which I think is overdrawn. I think the Crown Prince did everything in his power to offer 'significant assistance' to the Nazis in their rise to power. He certainly believed he was an important figure to them, but the Nazis didn't need him, in the sense that if you subtracted his support, the Nazis still would have come to power.
This is hardly the grounds for returning property to his descendants generations later. In all political events, if you ask whether any particular individual's role was indispensable, the answer would be a clear no, outside of a handful of central protagonists. If Höss had died before arriving at Auschwitz, the Holocaust would have rumbled on there regardless. There was undoubtedly another Eichmann waiting in the wings as well. But both were rightly treated as perpetrators. The Crown Prince, by lending the Hohenzollern name to the Nazis, offered the most significant and public assistance he had to offer. But as Clark points out, the Nazis were too powerful in their own right to rely on it.
Clark is an easy and visible target. And by conflating the German conservative right's misreading of his book Sleepwalkers with a superficial reading of the Hohenzollern Gutachten, it would be easy to misrepresent his project as nationalist apologetics. But historiographically, Clark's work more properly fits into the wave of works that is rewriting the history of the Kaiserreich in exciting ways. He rejects old school portraits of Germany's supposed peculiarity, its ostensibly feudalised bourgeoisie and its putatively dominant East Elbian militarist Junkers. He also rids us of the notion (so dear to an older generation of scholars), that royalty was a prime mover in pre-war and postwar political events.
This sits pretty well with leftwing, post-Blackbourn and Eley work more generally. In demolishing these Sonderweg shibboleths, Clark clears the way for a clearer view of Germany, that shows how its burgeoning liberalism, imperialism, parliamentarisation and determination to assert its national interests militarily was entirely in line with broader trends in European history. This is not a compliment! It's a critique of European modernity.
For my money, Clark's work is not only compatible with a broader left critique of pan-European liberal nationalism and imperialism. It might be a necessary step towards writing such histories, histories that come out from behind the shadow of the Sonderweg thesis.
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