Unkulturen in Bildung und Erziehung (German Edition)

Because Catholic clergy were Polish, the religious aYliation, as with Lithuanians, conditioned overwhelming cultural and linguistic tendencies to assimilate, further confusing ethnic identity. In the cities and towns, soldiers were often surprised to Wnd a group speaking a German dialect, the Eastern Jews. Alone among local peoples, Ostjuden were able to communicate with Germans, either through their cognate Yiddish or polyglot learning.

Jews lived for the most part in towns and cities, making up a larger percentage of their inhabitants, working at small trades and living in diYcult conditions. Before the war, some traveled the countryside as horse traders and peddlers, valued by peasants for the news they brought. Their cherished historical memories recalled the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, and their language, culture, and romantic, messianic nationalism were Polish.

Most Russians in the territory, brought in under tsarist attempts at RussiWcation, were now gone. Only some simple Russian farmers remained. More dangerous were other Russians who went to ground here: Armed and dangerous, they Coming to war land 33 skulked in forests and swamps, forming bandit groups which terrorized the countryside. The largest ethnic German communities were in the old German Baltic provinces of Kurland, Livland, and Estland the last two conquered later, by February Werce tempers, aristocratic appearance, and curiously Xat accents.

Though insisting on their Germanness, Baltic Germans were also deeply embedded in local history. Their identity was above all aristocratic, for they had been loyal servitors of the Romanovs, occupying leading positions in the provinces in spite of their small absolute numbers and Russia.

After emancipation of the serfs, social and economic developments produced growing class and national antagonism with Latvians and Estonians, exploding in the Revolution and ensuing reprisals. Last to be brought under German control were the Estonians, in An aboriginal Finno-Ugric people speaking a language unrelated to Baltic tongues, their history paralleled that of Latvians.

There were also small Tatar and Muslim communities. Tatars were brought here in the Wfteenth century as prisoners, then bodyguards for the Grand Dukes. Compounding confusions of identity, some Tatars belonged to the Karaite sect, professing non-Talmudic Judaism. This entire scene was unsettling for Germans. Terms of ethnic identity here were confusing and explosive. Rather, ethnicity seemed very much determined by choice. Families splintered along many planes of fracture, diVerent branches ending with diVerent permutations of names and allegiances.

Often members of one family count themselves to diVerent nationalities. The low level of education of the population worsens the chaos even further and opens the door to national agitation of every kind. But German observers noted that We discover, with a sense of distress, that all three have distanced themselves far from their national identity. Schmidt, who on top of everything else carries the [German] given name Heinrich, professes himself an incarnate nationalist Pole, Mr.

Kowalski as a thorough Russian and the apparently Muscovite Mr. Kusnjetzow as a genuine German. And the situation is no better with the confessional identity of the three: Kusnjetzow, in spite of his Russian name, belongs to the Evangelical community. Germans found themselves buVeted by competing ethnic claims from all sides. This confusion bothered soldiers because their own national identity was a recent construct, and often in question.

The German Reich, cobbled together only forty years before, was fragmented, despite loud and unconWdent assertions of chauvinists to the contrary. German regionalism and tribalism were persistent realities. Eastern Germany had unassimilated Poles and Slavic minorities. Alsace-Lorraine presented complications in the West, with its German-speaking French patriots.

Bavaria and other principalities resisted Prussian predominance and asserted separate regional characters. Kaiser Wilhelm II declared all divisions transcended: From now on, soldiers with Slavic names occupied an awkward position. They are observed even more keenly than the others, with the exception of the Alsatians.

The sheer variety of peoples could seem astonishing and objectionable to new arrivals used to diVerent certainties. It was disconcerting for them to see how much ethnicity depended on historical circumstance and to them this seemed most obscene on personal choice and commitment.

Whatever feelings came to them at the sight of this variety, one thing was clear to Germans. A complicated and war-wrought history had made this place, giving the region its unique character as a land of syntheses, anachronistic survivals, and local adaptations. German soldiers sensed a living history in the peoples and their ways, from which they were excluded, standing apart. It seemed that once a 36 War Land on the Eastern Front thing happened, it stayed on forever, absorbed and retained, present in visible traces and echoed memories.

Once reaching across northern Russia to Moscow, their territories contracted with the press of other peoples to this last stand, hemmed in on all sides. Yet, in one of the paradoxical historical movements which seemed to play themselves out so often, the Baltic Crusades beginning in the thirteenth century backWred, actually forging anarchic Lithuanian tribes into a state. German settlers were introduced and native Prussians slowly extinguished.

But this pressure from both sides led to the consolidation of independent Lithuanian tribes under Grand Duke Mindaugas in and resurgent paganism in a warlike state, holding oV the Teutonic Knights to the west and raiding Russian lands to its east, expanding at a terriWc rate. In , allied Polish and Lithuanian armies defeated the order at Tannenberg, a blow from which it never recovered. Yet the Grand Duchy eventually waned before the growing power of Muscovy and Sweden. Out of necessity and dynastic politics, Lithuania drew closer to the Kingdom of Poland, culminating in constitutional fusion and the creation of a joint commonwealth.

Decline and then partitions by surrounding powers followed. Instead, this precipitated another paradoxical reversal, as common people, who had little interest in such matters before, became radicalized. Henceforth, national identity was inextricably bound up with the idea of education, a hallmark of the Lithuanian movement.

The history which unfolded before the newcomers recorded a string of failed outside attempts to rule and reshape the place. Neither landscape nor people oVered German soldiers anything to which they could attach their own past. Moreover, the past was here everywhere present, visible and felt, an overlay of legend, tradition, and memory. History seemed not strictly chronological, but present and the land itself adrift in time, so retentive that once a thing happened, it was no longer to be dislodged, but endured in an inWnity of echoes.

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3. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I.

Past traces coexisted out of all context, in archaic, original survivals, uncultivated, absolutely primitive. The sense of history pressing in on the new arrivals came also from the ground underfoot. Among its many disconcerting qualities was how much history it seemed to hold. Dynamiting outside Mitau in to loosen sand could produce a shower of human bones, iron and bronze artifacts. A thin recent layer instantly gave way to dense past. Clamorous prehistory was visible above ground as well: Roadside crosses and chapel poles were everywhere, an insistent pre-Christian tradition, sometimes massed on holy hills.

A key feature was disconcerting simultaneity. Scholars marveled that an ancient hoard dug up near the front contained coins centuries apart, a numismatic museum unto itself. In the countryside, newcomers saw natives farming with nearly prehistoric tools. Buildings of improbable age and condition were not pulled down, but still used.

Yet the whole jumble seemed to cohere. In the same way, the territory held diVerent peoples, in what Germans took to be diVerent stages of historical development, existing side by side. Facing this unfamiliar mess of history, soldiers stationed in Ober Ost looked for their own historical models. Somehow, they had to Wt themselves into this eclectic yet cohering foreign jumble, to give meaning to their presence here. To the present mind, this need may seem strange. Yet in a time when historical memory was denser than in our own age, this was a crucial fundament of identity. Always a man with an eye to his own repute, public opinion, and posterity, here he felt history call on him to justify his presence.

In army newspapers, oYcial publications, and personal documents, Germans recorded their avid search for hints of their own Wt in this area, looking back to parts of their own imagined pasts. The most ancient was that of the great movements of peoples in the Dark Ages, a tribal model hovering before readers of the Song of the Nibelungs. The newcomers tried squinting at the hill fortresses looming before them.

On a diVerent tack, army newspapers took up medievalizing poses, trying to link the region to Germany in a common culture of the Coming to war land 39 Middle Ages. Invaders compared themselves to Teutonic Knights moving eastward and building a state in Prussia, carrying the Drang nach Osten, a sensed continuity asserted in the naming of the Battle of Tannenberg. Their identity was born at the borders, where the word Deutsch Wrst took on its ethnic meaning.

It was not even bound to the area, and thus could not be a perfect match. This model gave expression and some meaning to their rootlessness and brutalization.

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From to , Germany became the stage for an apocalyptic European war. Rough historical estimates Wnd that a quarter of the population was lost, while areas stalked by plague saw more than half swept away. The countryside 40 War Land on the Eastern Front lay abandoned, unpeopled. Helpless, the individual endured, accepted his fate, or went under, in an unending ordeal of suVering and loss.

And the war moved on and on. Moreover, the war seemed even less historical as no one could point to signiWcant outcomes, since the war, lasting a lifetime, ended not with successes, but with the exhaustion of contending powers, called oV without decisive resolutions. Most signiWcantly, the panorama of desolate landscapes made the war a place in popular historical memory. In this war landscape, one German Wgure looms up, one Wgure alone, embodying possibilities of freedom of will and action, less a character than a towering, unyielding shell of black armor, the carapace of an austere moral attitude.

This Wgure is a being named Wallenstein. This popular vision of Wallenstein is actually not unlike the historical Albrecht von Wallenstein, a larger-than-life Bohemian noble, who placed a private army at the disposition of the Kaiser. Encased in such titles, radiating extraordinary powers and dangerous freedom of action, it is easy to see why Wallenstein became a mythological Wgure, sole embodiment of moral possibilities against a background of general helplessness.

Most at home there was the freebooting mercenary Landsknecht, compounded of severe discipline and rapacious freedom. As the war moved, so moved their homeland: Over time, religion no longer united armies, but only common loyalty to war. They created their own language, a mix of international military jargon and Yiddish, Polish, Gypsy, and romance Coming to war land 41 languages. The armies were a nation of war on the move. Such an invocation of precedent was not unconscious, cultivated by artists and propagandists. These literary tropes took on political signiWcance, as Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was turned into that towering hero, in place of Wallenstein.

A cult of personality was constructed around the Weld marshal. In Berlin, Hindenburg was literally set up as a titanic Wgure. By this common eVort, the huge Wgure became metal-clad, armored, a visible projection of collective will. For soldiers, the land was a collection of unfamiliar scenes and traces of the past, in which the new arrival could not Wnd any reXection of himself.

There was an added special diYculty for German Jews in the administration. Arnold Zweig, a writer in the cultural administration, came away with a commitment to Zionism. German attempts to Wnd historical models for their presence could not overcome this strangeness. Unexpectedly, German identity was thrown into this crucible of war in the East. The sum of powerful Wrst impressions was that the new conquerors were in control, yet in many other respects disoriented. This fact conditioned policies and the ambitions which grew out of them in Ober Ost, against a backdrop of the constant struggle of German soldiers to Wnd a place for themselves, without losing themselves in the process.

The East appeared diseased, lice-ridden, uncannily empty and depopulated. As one recalled, It was a horrifying sight, these villages, deserted, half burned out and haunted by hungry crows, in which only on occasion, out of a stark, barricaded house with blind, covered windows, from a disgusting door crack would lean out a sad Wgure, wasted down to bones, which in terrible greeting would vomit on the doorstep and then immediately crawl back into the darkness of these unhealthy, forbidden houses.

Boundaries of all kinds were obscure and the variety was overwhelming. It came to seem that they were not so much people to whom terrible things had happened as the sort of people to whom disasters always happened, somehow due to their own nature. According to a popular native source, this was conWrmed at the outset of the occupation in a disastrous way, when frightened villagers of a population now made up mostly of women and the old tried to kiss the hands Coming to war land 43 of surprised German oYcers, begging for leniency.

After their Wrst surprise, a popular native account claimed, oYcers eventually held out their hands as a matter of course. Wilna was founded by Grand Duke Gediminas, legend said, at the urging of a prophetic dream of a howling iron wolf. It was used as a cult center for the burning of bodies of the pagan Grand Dukes.

A good part of its strangeness lay in its eclectic character. Scores of diVerent cultures from all cardinal directions ran together. Some Germans found this mixture exotic, others distasteful, as one commented: Over half a thousand years the most diVerent inXuences from Occident and Orient had brought forth a queer cultural mixture which matched the presently still existing mess of nationalities. The guidebooks were less comprehensive guides to the place than guides to correct bearing and etiquette for soldiers.

They warned of spies, usually forward women. Soldiers were instructed that their behavior was watched everywhere: The population of the occupied territory judges the entire German people by your behavior. To pay attention to appearance, salutes, and a worthy bearing is the duty of a German warrior. Afterwards, it directed him to those spots that would seem familiar: At the conXuence of the two rivers rose the castle hill, from whose tower Xuttered the austere and familiar colors, black—white—red, of the Prussian Xag.

But once he stepped down it, it became clear what a diVerent world he had entered. This was the Judengasse, the Jewish quarter. Soldiers were instructed on how to react to sights and sounds of life redolent of foreignness, Oriental mystery. Towns heightened the impression soldiers had of being ungrounded. Footing was uncertain, on streets overlaid with perilous, rickety boardwalks of narrow, slick planks.

Underfoot, multilayered history again announced itself. In another case, cleaning exposed a human skeleton — it was unclear how or when it had ended up there. One stood on a swaying, uncertain base of mud, stamped earth, or rickety boardwalks.

The physical reality and the spiritual combined to produce metaphors for the unfamiliarity of the place. When occupiers considered how they themselves were regarded by subject populations of the rear areas, they worried over their own standing in native eyes. By projecting a resolute image, the occupiers could compensate for their small numbers. Prestige demanded that they keep their distance from native populations. Army publications instructed soldiers in proper bearing: Yet this trouble simultaneously held promise, as a special, urgent case of a larger project, as thinkers at home looked to war as a transformative experience, Wnally oVering a redemptive chance to transcend the Xawed realities of fractured imperial German society, achieving some new, triumphant ideal.

Thus, the army would change the place, giving German form to foreign, alien content. In German Work, Riehl proposed that German craftsmanship oVered a model of unalienated, spiritually meaningful labor. The title alone was of greatest consequence, burrowing into popular imagination. It truly came into its own in the war, as a way of expressing hopes that this conXict was not merely destructive, but a chance for Germans to build a new world.

Germans of the Kaiserreich deWned themselves not without pathos, given the imperfect result as a state-building people. The German, then, was someone who administered and gave order. Through German Work, Germans would Wnd for themselves an identity, justifying their own presence in the East. Success must justify its actions. German Work was neither a bloodless ideological construct nor mere motivational slogan, but rather implied a new way of looking at the eastern territories.

SpeciWc claims about the land followed from it. OYcials asserted that, in spite of all outward appearances, the new land around them was in fact not unlike Germany, merely unworked. Only that here the scale is larger, lines drawn out further, and borders between nature and the work of man seem erased.

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But that is probably due more to lack of exploitation of the land than to its unique character [Eigenart] and does not apply to the areas where human activity could develop itself more briskly. Any land received its face and features from those who worked it, making it over. German Work thus dictated a speciWc prescription for the work to be accomplished, and Ober Ost derived its program and mission from this conception.

German identity in Ober Ost was deWned as a speciWc way of doing things, a working and Coming to war land 47 organizing spirit. Means were deWned as ends. Not content, but method and form were important. It was the ideal chance for the army, which had presented over centuries the image of an unpolitical tool of the state. Now it would reveal itself as a creative power.

Only later would it become clear that turning Kultur into a mere means emptied of content, and deWning German identity as rule over others, would be a disastrous development for both occupiers and occupied. Seizing on the ideology of German Work, the army prepared to build a military utopia which would change the place. The most durable product of the venture, however, would be the transformation which took place within individual soldiers, creating a speciWc way of viewing and treating the lands and peoples of the East.

Meier, , and Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis Berlin: Benning Herald, ; rpt. Marine Corps Association, , On the Second World War: Herausgegeben im Auftrage des Oberbefehlshabers Ost. Bearbeitet von der Presseabteilung Ober Ost Stuttgart: Hirzel, ; Stone, Eastern Front; W.

Bruce Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon: Stein and Day, ; D. Genius of World War I Boston: Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich Munich: William Morrow, , — Lituanistikos Instituto Leidykla, , Israel Cohen, Vilna Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, , Antanas Gintneris, Lietuva caro ir kaizerio naguose. ViVi Printing, , — Wheeler-Bennett, Wooden Titan, Bernhard von der Marwitz, Stirb und Werde.

Korn Verlag, , IX Part 2 Leipzig: Barth, , — Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: Bilder, Briefe, Dokumente, — Frankfurt-on-Main: Verlag Heinrich ScheZer, , Schlichting, Bilder aus Litauen. Kownoer Zeitung, , 9— Pounds, Eastern Europe Chicago: Aldine Publishing, , 11— Victor Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae. Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, , Richard Dehmel, Zwischen Volk und Menschheit.

Fischer Verlag, , Knopf, , 23—; Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Victor Gollancz, , — Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, , 42— Marwitz, Stirb, 17, V, 54; Marwitz, Stirb, Eine Auslese aus der Zeitung der Druck und Verlag Zeitung der Armee, ; Schlichting, Bilder. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: The Outsider as Insider New York: The Intellectuals and Lawrence: Deutscher Taschen- 50 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 War Land on the Eastern Front buch Verlag, Schlichting, Bilder, 11; Das Land, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, , A Short History Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: Oktober bis Droste Verlag, , Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 2nd edn Stanford: Northern Illinois University Press, Istorijos ir Kulturos bruozai Vilnius: Baltos lankos, , — Years of Dependence, —, rev.

University of California Press, , 7. Beilage zur Zeitung der Armee July 18, Armee 89 June 14, All subsequent citations of Zeitung der Bartov, Eastern Front, 93, — Oxford University Press, , Rohwohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, V, ; Klemperer, Curriculum, Verlag Armeezeitung AOK 10, , 9, Cambridge University Press, , 9. The National Debate, — Princeton: Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press, , 40— These ambitions were fused into a utopian vision, which was the moving spirit behind the building of the Ober Ost state and yet also produced within it fatal contradictions.

While the future of these territories was unclear, the army sought to create a durable order before peace came, setting the terms for later disposition of the lands. First there was the obvious necessity of securing areas behind the front, establishing lines of communication and supply, order and quiet among the subject peoples. Next, oYcials would move to a total mobilization and comprehensive economic exploitation of land and people. Successes of rational management by the army were to convince Germans at home and natives here that the regime should be permanent.

Finally, in a utopian climax, came the progressive remaking of the lands and peoples, through intensiWcation of control and administration. LudendorV himself was the war god who called this military utopia into being. From his oYce, scanning maps of the area, he envisioned the state as an extension of his own personality and was awed by his own creation: In fall , LudendorV began to organize the administration in a way that would keep the lands under military control. When the areas had Wrst been conquered, they were administered directly by the armies ranged across them.

Behind a twenty-mile strip of operation area at the front lay the rear area Etappe commands of each of the armies. The administration was frequently reorganized, especially in the southern areas, producing constant confusion. LudendorV set about centralizing control, yet he faced the problem of doing this while retaining exclusively military control in the area. The size of the staV grew and grew, by a process that seemed unstoppable. For simple matters of administration, he believed in taking on energetic people without speciWc training: A high oYcial noted that his section attracted young oYcials wanting independence of action and upward mobility in their careers.

To secure the best, LudendorV extracted information about those applying for duty in Germany: One oYcial reported that at its high point the central administration numbered upper-level positions, including military details and economic oYcers. Of that number, oYcials worked in forestry and agriculture, in medicine and veterinary duties, and the remaining at internal administration and justice. One of these, Lithuania, had 2, men in September At this time, Ober Ost had Wve such areas, so an estimate would suggest more than The military utopia 57 16 10, men involved in the administration as a whole.

The chief of Military Administration Lithuania noted that in early he had over 9, subordinates. Throughout the occupation, then, the administration as a whole probably numbered between 10, and 18, men. Besides men in the administration itself, millions of German soldiers served on the Eastern Front and in the rear areas and many came to know Ober Ost. The administration drew in a broad range of men from diVerent walks of life in civilian existence.

In principle, these oYcials were either no longer usable at the front or specialists with important skills, or both. Among higher oYcials, the largest group was involved in government at home. All parts of Germany were represented in the administration, one oYcial reported, though the Prussian element at the top was marked. Another postwar German report cited oYcers and higher military oYcials in Ober Ost, not including those in the economic sector. Of these upper oYcials, The report noted their religious confession: Thus, especially Protestants, and to a lesser extent Jews, were overrepresented.

Education was also emphasized among these upper oYcials: Most of the oYcials were middle-aged. Agricultural oYcials were mostly from Pomerania, East Prussia, and Silesia and were thus able to adapt their skills to similar climatic conditions. In Kurland, Baltic Germans were also included in the administration. A handful of men had served in the colonies, perhaps carrying over some of their administrative experience to this new territory.

Not only experts crowded in to the administration, since oYcials provided places for friends and relatives, and important individuals pressed their wards on the state in the East. Besides being exclusively military, it was also to be exclusively German. Natives could only be drawn in to work as helpers, and then received no pay for their services, could not refuse service or resign from assigned responsibilities. The men heading the administration were, to a great extent, Prussians. Their Prussian character and experience colored their perceptions, assumptions, and methods in the East.

Arnold Zweig, himself a German Jewish oYcial, suggested in his novel that other oYcials resented them, questioning their Germanness. This brought in two groups with an uneasy German identity. Soldiers who spoke Polish were mostly Prussian Poles. Their allegiance could The military utopia 59 prove problematic, when their sympathies and cooperation with local Poles, tacit or overt, created resentment among other natives. DiVerences in religious confession also came into play, creating tension between Protestant Prussian Lithuanians and Catholic natives.

Bavarians, Frisians, Rhinelanders, all in tension with Prussian oYcers. Such as they were, these German military experts approached their tasks with vigor, as energetic and conWdent bearing would have to overcome general lack of knowledge about the place. Trusting to will and organization, their conWdence created a characteristic trait of the state, as immediate needs became springboards to gigantic, monstrous, and impossible ambitions.

LudendorV explained the problem and what he saw as its solution: We worked in conditions that had been for us until then completely unknown, in addition in a land wrecked by war, in which all the bonds of state and economy had been broken. We confronted a population foreign to us, which was made up of diVerent, often mutually feuding tribes, which did not understand our language and for the most part rejected us internally.

The spirit of true and selXess discharge of duty, the inheritance of a hundred-year-old Prussian discipline and German tradition, animated all. Any sort of action or program, if carried through with the rational organization of German Work, was justiWed in these new lands. It was ensconced in Kowno. At the top of the structure was the Supreme Commander in the East and his staV. On the tier below, special administrative sections were established under the quartermaster general, General von Eisenhart-Rothe, on No- The military utopia 33 61 vember 4, Internally, the section steered the entire administrative system, regulations growing out of all the departments, and political problems, especially nationality questions.

Coming from a Prussian military family, before the war von Gayl followed a bureaucratic career, leaving to head the private East Prussian Settlement Society in Section VI Finances , run by Financial Councilor Tiesler, guided economic policy, collected taxes and revenues, and managed state monopolies.

Agriculture exploited the land and directed feeding of the armies and native population, under Count Yorck von Wartenburg. Its sister section VII b. Postal and communications systems were managed by Section X Post. In a duplication of responsibility, Section XI Trade under Major Eilsberger steered economics in industry and monetary policy. Such overlap led to constant inWghting, perversely expressed in steady competitive expansion of sections and their staVs. In the Weld, rear area commanders came into conXict with adminstration oYcials.

LudendorV was the indispensable arbiter in administrative chaos, wielding the Wnal word: Administration chiefs were responsible to both the rear area inspectorates of individual armies and to the central administration. This confusing subordination meant 62 War Land on the Eastern Front that only the supreme commander and his deputy had a clear overview and freedom of action. Progressive centralization of territorial units followed. In November , Bialystok and Grodno were united.

Then this larger unit, too, was subsumed by Military Administration Lithuania in February , with only Military Administration Kurland left alongside. Kurland was led from Mitau by Major Alfred von Gossler, a former Prussian regional governor, conservative Prussian parliamentary deputy, and Reichstag member. He later called this the high point of his life. It was severely depopulated by the war, with entire areas lying empty and half its inhabitants gone. Only about fourteen people remained to a square kilometer. To the south lay Military Administration Lithuania, ruled from Wilna.

The land was inhabited by Lithuanians, with concentrations of Poles to the south, along with Belarusians. Its towns were a mix of peoples, with Jews often in the majority and heavy Polish representation. Jews made up more than a Wfth of the population. Each military administration Chief had under him a staV mirroring the central administration.

This symmetry meant that with every expansion of a central staV section, corresponding exponential growth took place below. Each broke down into regions, subdivided into districts, on the Prussian model, The military utopia 63 though here districts were nearly three times larger. An oYcer was appointed district captain to lead each of these most basic units. District captains wielded unlimited power over local natives, appointing mayors and oYcial heads for communities. They had economic staVs like the supreme commander, with economic oYcers to direct economic exploitation.

Each district was divided into six or seven oYce districts led by oYce heads, whose areas were broken down into estate districts and communities with headmen. InWnite subdivisions placed a grid of control over the wide land. While the administration sought to present the picture of eVective centralization, local oYcials in fact exercised great independence. Remote from central control, many reveled in their power over subject populations.

Isolated in the countryside, lonely oYcials found themselves lost, sinking into the mire of the foreign land. Abuses were rife, as area captains Wlled their own larders and storehouses with requisitioned goods, popular native sources charged. If the army took from the land what it needed, claiming everything as its property, the same lordly treatment was applied to natives. In the streets, natives were required to make way for German oYcials, saluting and bowing. Violence became increasingly routine, with reported public beatings. There were numerous complaints of German soldiers raping and mistreating native girls and women, while men trying to defend them were beaten and threatened with death.

Despite its monolithic image, Ober Ost was wracked by administrative chaos within. The important military Railroad Directorate became a state within a state.

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Whatever was outside the small, narrowly circumscribed area of responsibility of Watch-Master A. Class conXict in the ranks was heightened by diVerent views of the war. While most ordinary soldiers hoped for a quick peace and return home, oYcers and oYcials had more to expect from continued war: Deep divisions and internal conXict wracked Ober Ost, even as it presented itself as a monolithic, total state.

What united the feuding oYces and ambitious staV was a common vision of rule. The occupied territory would be run from its own resources, while providing for armies in the East, placing no demands on the Fatherland. Even better, it actually sent back resources to Germany. The Wrst complete economic plan was drafted for fall Import duties, taxes, state monopolies, and state enterprises yielded considerable sums.

Of necessity, collection systems had to be as simple as possible, even if they placed great burdens on the poor. Its cigarette monopoly was a stunning success. Taxes were also levied on all sorts of regulated activities and property. Financially, the end result was considered a great success, as Ober Ost operated without subsidies from Germany, thus fending oV control from the Reich. Ober Ost based its economic programs on the Hague land-war conventions, which made occupiers responsible for maintaining ordered circumstances, but in fact used them as cover for a severe regime.

In the cities, people were turned out of their homes, businesses, shops, and apartments. From small conWscations, the state as a whole moved to the very largest. Each harvest was conWscated entire and had to be sold to the army at prices which it Wxed 66 War Land on the Eastern Front itself.

All trade was a state monopoly and it was forbidden to sell land. A relentless regime of requisitions formed its foundation. Troops took livestock and food from farmers at gun point, with no pretense of eventual repayment, as no receipts were handed out. To their horror, demands increased, and the system became increasingly brutal and systematic. Economic oYcers strove to rationalize the regime, collecting statistics on the unknown land or ordering local clergy to do so. What followed seemed to natives a statistical psychosis, as soldiers appeared intent on counting all trees in the forests and Wsh in the lakes.

Farmers agonized that counting of cattle would soon be followed by conWscation. Once lists were drawn up, their authority was Wnal, trumping material reality.

A native source claimed dead chickens had to be brought in as proof before being struck from the sheets. Such schematic requirements disregarded the real conditions of households and countryside society. Norms did not take into account numbers of people dependent on each farmer, kin and hired hands.

Estates whose owners had Xed and holdings judged insuYciently productive were seized and managed by German oYcers. In Lithuania alone, a thousand estates lay abandoned. Deadlines for delivery of the harvest were so abrupt that farmers often did not have time to take in their own share.

Whoever does not complete Weld work in the given time or does it badly, will have his land taken away. Even with the more systematic regime, abuses continued and popular resistance grew. Troops gave farmers requisition receipts to be turned in later for remuneration when was not clear, perhaps after the war; soldiers joked that the English and French would pay. Naturally, brisk smuggling shot up, enraging Ober Ost oYcials, whose own price-Wxing had created this situation. Extraordinary transport diYculties hampered the economy. Farmers were forced to work as wagoners, with their own carts of prehistoric structure.

But rutted roads and miserable travel conditions disrupted military planning. Transport might take days, while requisitioned food rotted. Some forced service pitted ethnic groups against each other, while also oVending religious convictions, as holidays were not respected.

Peasants hid their animals in cellars or drove them to secret forest clearings. Families had their last cow taken away, even if children needed milk. In such desperate cases, natives often resisted, and met crushing violence, shot down or savagely beaten.

Horse requisitions were carried through with exceptionally urgent severity, since the German army for the most part did not manage to mechanize its transport, but relied on horses. Yet these conWscations were crippling to 68 War Land on the Eastern Front farmers, who lost not only a crucial part of their economy, but also what they considered a member of the household. Farmers appeared on time, but when oYcials were several hours late, they allowed their horses to graze nearby. When the oYcials arrived and found the horses absent from the precise spot, punishments began.

Thirty horses were picked out and their owners given one Wfth of the normal price the rest withheld as a Wne for disobedience. The same commission then conWscated a further fourteen horses, because farmers misunderstood orders prescribing a speciWc kind of halter. The conWscated horses were sold on the spot to unknown private persons, not to the farmers, who tearfully begged to be allowed to buy them back.

Farmers soon refused to transport goods, since their horses might be conWscated on the way. With horses conWscated, agricultural productivity sank even further, as requisition quotas increased. Local Jews were recruited to help in collections. Troops came to requisition organ pipes from churches as scrap metal. There were reported incidents of economic troops bursting into churches during mass to seize altar candles.

From Jewish households, soldiers reportedly carried oV sabbath candlesticks and Hanukkah menorahs. Increasingly, hard reality was obscured by alluring economic and agricultural fantasies. In its utopian intensity, the administration looked beyond immediate needs, to grandiose and unrealistic future plans.

On conWscated estates, agriculture could be practiced on a fantastic scale unknown to these lands. Ober Ost imported agricultural machinery of all kinds, introducing gigantic motor plows which amazed natives. The agricultural sections conducted systematic experimentation with seeds, to see which took best to the soil. These plans were celebrated in Germany, to create enthusiasm for keeping this gigantic farming reserve. In November , the administration sponsored an Ober Ost fruit exhibition in Berlin. Throughout the occupation, oYcials looked at the land with a view to changing it.

ConWscated estates under military management were a crucial part of this ambition. OYcers installed as overseers and managers came to feel ever more at home there, treating the property and people as their own. They claimed it seemed a hundred years behind Germany. Even elementary soil drainage was unknown here. Natives accepted the land as it was: One scene in particular astounded soldiers: Such behavior reXected not merely some essential laziness in native character, but their animistic sense that the stones, which had risen to the surface over years, had spirits and a right to be where they were.

The entire country was full of holy stones and boulders, revered since pagan times, here not so very distant. Even local breeds of swine were closer to wild boars, it seemed, than to German varieties. The verdict was clear: A single look out of the window of the rail-car determines, whether one is on the Russian or German side, even though on both sides it is the same soil and the same climate. The way in which agriculture is managed here is an inexhaustible topic of conversation among our soldiers.

The diVerences between Germany and this occupied territory press in on even the most stupid eye. In Germany, regular furrows reach the furthest corner of the usable land, every tree in the forest is trimmed and looked after, planned order rules everywhere. In Ober Ost, except where the German has already created change, the Weld and meadow, tree and bush are left to themselves, and man is not their lord, but their guest, who is satisWed with that which the Welds and gardens generously allow, instead of thinking about improvements with the pencil in hand for calculations.

OYcials speculated that Eastern peoples only lived oV earlier German accomplishments and work, letting them run down. Every piece of land which falls into the hands of the Muscovites, no matter how The military utopia 71 high its Kultur, must sink, with a merciless inevitability, to its natural level of productivity in a short span of time, after the reserves of the earlier, higher Kultur are used up and exhausted.

This was already real, they soberly insisted, and oVered solid prospects for a glorious future and coming wars: Our East-land is neither a utopia-land nor a paradise-land — it will always train a person to hard work, if it is to be richly productive. But if German Work succeeds in opening the land, if the Heimat can count on East-land cattle and meat, wheat and Xax, butter and eggs, in future wars, then the German will know why he kept watch in this.

Perhaps then he will consider the war economy of the army administration which, in the midst of a world in Xames, cultivated the land. When German armies arrived, there was very little industry. Only some larger towns had factories and modest manufacturing centers.

The administration took over what had not been destroyed and built its own factories in Libau, Kowno, and Bialystok, where requisitioned goods were processed for the army or to be sent back to Germany. All sorts of installations grew up. Ober Ost alone supplied a third of the meat eaten by armies in the East. The administration established potato drying centers, stations for processing straw and wood, sawmills, factories for mass production of marmalade, preserves, and drying of mushrooms in huge quantities. By the summer of , military dairies were at work.

Troops required gigantic quantities of lumber at the front for fortiWcations, while railroad structures likewise made great demands. Firewood was essential to survival in the harsh weather. Beginning already in , the army undertook a program of forestry of huge dimensions.

The work was so important that it was made independent of other administrations, creating more bureaucratic conXict. The largest and most important area was the primeval forest of Bialowies, led by Bavarian Forestry Councilor Major Escherich, as administrative chief. Army sawmills supplied their own needs, as well as more wood for the Western Front. Exploitation went beyond purely military needs, as lumber was also sold to private German Wrms. The best wood was sent to the Reich, where cellulose timber supplied production of gunpowder and explosives, such as nitroglycerine, and paper manufacture.

Quantities being cut were so large that eventually military reports went over to merely noting the value of shipments in marks. For kilometers to either side of rivers and roads, forests were cut down. Areas lay waste, a stubble of stumps or dead trees killed by being tapped to drain away their valuable sap. Natives looked with dismay at clear-cut wastes.

According to statistics gathered after the war, during the entire occupation in Lithuania, 90, horses, , cattle, and , pigs were requisitioned. Studies estimate that during this period, the administration removed various resources valued at ,, marks, while importing goods and materials worth 77,, marks. Everywhere, manpower shortages appeared. In mid , the administration ordered that all adult men and women in the territory could be put to work. Forced labor battalions were set up and marched to work at harvests and road building.

Conditions and exertions were terrible, yet each worker was allowed only grams of bread and a liter of soup each day. As a result of poor nourishment, many reportedly died of exhaustion. The wage later rose to one and a half marks. Though additional provision was promised for those with 74 War Land on the Eastern Front families, it was not paid out. Even the old and sick were not exempt from labor. Natives were forced to work in the cold without suitable clothing, under armed guard. When their workday ended at 4 p.

In Schirwintai District, a work battalion supposedly was unable to escape and burned to death when their barracks caught Wre the oYcial bulletin denied this, yet the incident continued to be mentioned after the war in Lithuanian sources. Of workers of Work Battalion A. In December , a popular native source claimed, about a hundred burned to death in their barracks on Stripelkiai estate in Meshkuchai.

Localities were forced to present the ordered numbers of workers it was understood that some of these workers were also to be shipped to Germany. An oYcial in Birsche District commented: Here, assignment to a Civil Worker Battalion is considered a great disaster by the inhabitants.

People are thinking above all about the extraordinarily high mortality number, as well as about those who return, often miserable and sick. One can sympathize with this thought process; on the other hand one must also keep in mind that the Lithuanian is by nature given to whining. Probably almost every family tries to get its members out of the Civil Worker Battalions. After escalating native protests, the army formally dissolved forced labor battalions on September 20, While the regime managed to extract signiWcant quantities of agricultural products and resources from the damaged land, the voraciousness of its immediate demands undercut long-term goals for developing the area.

One result, however, was unambiguous. The condition of natives became unbearable. There, the poor were hardest hit, since they had earlier relied on independent farmers for work and aid in times of trouble. The farmers were now themselves reduced to penury by requisitions. In the crisis, many turned to banditry. The invention of Empfindung is thus a first step towards a risky life because it includes decisions, for example the choice of the one true lover, no longer with reference to rational social criteria. Such decisions can then produce tragic failure.

Because Empfindung represents a whole spectrum of feelings that tend to be out of rational and social control and the ambivalence of grief 32 Gustav Frank undermines moral autonomy, an implicit selection of emotions forbidden to the positive characters in the texts takes place in order to maintain the norms: He is often the most interesting, because the most individualised, character. Where he appears in the typical role of seducer he represents a double transgression. He is shown acting in response to radically egoistic emotion in the form of sexual desire, so making the whole sentimental group a victim of the social world he dominates by seducing the middle-class virgin.

Moreover, he also dominates through reason, which enables him to mislead the men and to produce self-delusion in the loving woman. In Sturm-und-Drang drama, however, this structure undergoes fundamental changes. The fundamental role of this underground and its repercussions in pre-revolutionary France are well known see Darnton; Mason. In Empfindsamkeit we can reconstruct the first roots of counterculture, the first basic elements. But there was as yet not really an overtly oppositional counter-culture, for the culture of Empfindsamkeit sought ways to harmonise differences between theory and practice and to overcome the concrete deficiencies of social life.

Therefore it created compensatory models both in theory — above all in the philosophy of history, which was to have such long-term influence — and in literary and social practice — above all in terms of the family and the sentimental code and rites of an elite. But because they needed this contrast, needed to be victims and celebrated tears, they were in fact a constitutive element of the old society which they served to consolidate. Towards Sturm und Drang During the twenty years when the culture of Empfindsamkeit prevailed — , however, the new philosophy of history introduced time and change into the idea of the theodicy see Kondylis , thereby accelerating the production of desirable improvements and strengthening the experience of dissonance between a slowly developing reality and what could be expected of the society to come.

Thus the success of this new philosophy of history forced the next step of development. The compensatory self-perception as an elite was no longer convincing and had to be replaced. Astonishingly enough, the next generation invented a substitute for the deficiencies of social reality by concentrating on sign systems and poetry. They laid claim to individuality by self-exclusion from all existing groups in society 34 Gustav Frank through genius and through the originality of their works.

Thus the sentimental code and rites, with their rhetorical and formal similarity, were negated. For the first time, authors of the younger generation, following the example of Goethe, constituted an opposition. And the fact that it was and could be Goethe, an individual without the protection of a coherent group, is significant for this change.

Goethe reacted against the failings of Empfindsamkeit but based this reaction in the cult of sentiment by unfolding what had been implicit but suppressed. The Sturm und Drang intensified the suffering of the victim, not to show his or her guilt, but to criticise the social and political state. The characteristics of the individual who transcends the group, characteristics which had till then been delegated to negative characters, are partly incorporated into the protagonists. The subject now wants to realise all his potential in a passionate life and therefore lives in explicit contradiction to the given world order.

Resistance to the social rules and transgression of the conventional boundaries become the touchstone of the passionate individual. It is the necessity to prove oneself, in accord with such an understanding of what it is to be an autonomous individual, that makes of this figure the agent of a counter-culture.

"unkulturen" in Bildung Und Erziehung (German, Paperback, 2010 ed.)

Thus this new subject seeks to throw off the emotional bonds that held back the sentimental subject from antisocial action. Towards a New Logic of Passion 35 Prerequisites in Theory At this point, however, it is is necessary to look back for a moment to the emergence of the aesthetic theory of Empfindsamkeit. He argues for an emancipation of the sensually beautiful and vital from mere service in applying the laws of reason, and requires an independent logic for the realm of the sensually beautiful.

The literary revolt of Sturm und Drang, however, based on the new values of the individual, of genius, of originality, and of transgressive passion rooted in divine nature, aims to overthrow this last constraint: Studium and ingenium have not yet changed places, but if passion proves maturity in the individual life, literature could become the proof for progress of society as a whole.

Breaking the rules of conventional poetry, especially the bonds of an obviously rhetorical language, individualises the unique work and constitutes an act of revolt. Here is another prerequisite of the counter-culture of Sturm und Drang. The texts all depict a world with unchanging social structures, where moral values and norms are handed down through the generations. The conflict of the new passionate subject with this invariable world see Duncan subverts the key articles of Enlightenment faith in theodicy and historical progress.

But all the revolts of these exceptional subjects remain illusory. Thus the evolutionary concept of Empfindsamkeit did not turn into a revolutionary programme as it did in some rare cases of later Enlightenment materialism and nihilism. But it turned into the remote revolt of an elitist individual who claims the privileges of deviance. All these rebels fight for their own privileged place in the given society which they find already occupied by legitimate instances and heirs. Though the conflict is unfolded and its epistemological consequences demonstrated, the texts reveal the necessary failure of the revolt.

And in so doing, they imply the necessary failure and end of Sturm und Drang, too. Moreover, Schiller uses a trick to devalue that progressive tendency in the late Enlightenment which questioned the social and moral order in toto on the grounds that this order could no longer be justified by reasonable argument and was sustained by mere sentiment.

While the elder son in the play represents the typical career of the passionate Sturm-und-Drang hero, here the younger son plays the role of the rogue, deploying the weapons of reason not only to destroy the emotional veil covering norms and values but also to seduce and to deceive. By allocating particular qualities to the Moor brothers in this way, Schiller indicates that the new conception of Sturm und Drang is the older and legitimate one, while the radical rehabilitation of sensuality by means of reason is turned into the illegitimate younger and hence immature position.

Counter-Cultural Posing and Success With Sturm und Drang, the phenomenon of the self-exclusion of literary men, semioticians or sign specialists appear for the first time in German intellectual history. The writers and their passionate characters construct a realm of natural otherness, of originality, of intense life and of transgressive love. This public sphere initially comprised the sentimental family and circles of friends. But the media were becoming autonomous to a degree that allowed the authors of Sturm und Drang to build a counter-culture without themselves constituting a group of friends or even a coherent group of any kind.

Sign systems and publicity became an unavoidable companion of all further attempts at constituting a counter-culture. For the elite individual subject was only able successfully to take on a paradoxical exemplary status thanks to the role played by the expanding media, whether printed media or the public institution of the theatre, and the concomitant growth of a wider audience. By publishing or staging individual passion, the authors of Sturm und Drang begin to differ from the characters they put on stage. Rhetoric and theatricality are part of the public sphere of commonly understandable matters.

Publishing or dramatisation then puts on display what by definition allows no witness, the radical and solipsistic emotionality of a singular passion without intersubjective elements. Through this contradiction, the authors at once create and betray this singular subjectivity. But why then this gesture of revolt against the traditional values and norms, this pose of threat against society, this seemingly paradoxical game?

The staging of passion threatens the old authorities with what is brought on stage, but in the very moment of theatricality lie the seeds of betrayal, for the gesture of revolt springs, as the mainstream proponents of Enlightenment claimed, from the hidden and unpredictable nature of passion see Luserke. Kittler overshoots the mark, however, because the middleclass society which became the object of the psychoanalytic gaze at the end of the nineteenth century was only a developing social formation around which was not yet stable.

In those days, sons were not compelled to talk and write, but in fact wanted to in order to compel the powers that be to make a deal with them. The danger and Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion 39 the remedy lie close together in their works: The elitist individual of Sturm und Drang was not to become the source of a conspiracy against existing society. On the contrary, the simultaneous literary production of the passionately transgressive individual together with the remedy of allowing this subjectivity to speak and write, guarantees the authors a place in society.

Most of the other Sturm und Drang authors managed to hide this problem of an internal emotional link to traditional norms and values through their theatralisation of the Kraftgenie. Lenz never solved, either in literature or in practice, the tension between the figure of the Sturm und Drang intellectual who ends in despair and suicide, as depicted in Zerbin oder Die neuere Philosophie , and the utopian harmonising of autonomy and social integration in the Oberlin-like figure of the country parson only one year later in Der Landprediger.

Thus the opposition between an internalized culture and as only theoretically and rationally deduced counter-movement, cuts through the individual psyche. Victims like Lenz clearly demonstrate the price of counter-cultural activity under the post- sentimental condition. Some of those who drew a moral, social or political conclusion from the logic of passion and voted for real social change represent 40 Gustav Frank the active counter-culture of the late Enlightenment, of the French Revolution, and of the first republican experiments on German territory at Mainz.

At the same time, the older customs of pre-literate social groups, which changed only slowly, were also beginning to take on the quality of a resistant counter-culture in response to accelerating rationalisation. But the rapidly changing mainstream culture of the industrialising first half of the nineteenth century would leave behind the alternative counter-cultures which had been inspired by earlier traditions of local riots that sprang up spontaneously in response to unjustifiably high prices for basic necessities up to the late eighteenth century. Sturm und Drang seems, therefore, to be the first main festation of very different counter-cultures.

Finally, what makes Sturm und Drang interesting as a way of reflecting on later countercultures, is its combination of passionate transgression with strategic rationality, of semiotic competence with chaos, of destructiveness of the elite with psychopathic destruction of the self. The Myth of Motherhood: Von der Werther-Krise zur Lucinde-Liebe. Das Andere der Vernunft. Studien zu ihrer dichterischen Erscheinung. Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im Lovers, Parricides, and Highwaymen: Hg Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur.

The Archaeology of Knowledge. London, Tavistock Publications, Empfindsamkeiten Passau, Rothe, Weischedel Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, Geschlechterdifferenz und Affekt in der Sprachpoetik des Studien zu Psychogenese und Literatur im Studien zu einer Geschichte der literarischen Empfindung, Hg. Die Dialektik der Empfindung. Hg Der ganze Mensch. Anthropologie und Literatur im Jahrhundert Stuttgart, Metzler, , — Fiktion und Wirklichkeit Heidelberg, Winter, , — Jahrhunderts Stuttgart, Metzler, Der Strukturwandel in der Lyrik Goethes: This paper focuses on the part played by the ethnic group still called Gypsies and Zigeuner — the Romany nation — in the tradition of German counterculture, and finds several of the above modalities exemplified in the history of their literary representation.

The first part of the paper examines the cultural anthropology and literary image of the Romanies in the epoch around as emblematic of the role of art and of the Gypsies in early modern German culture. The thesis is that the representation of the Romanies around consistently followed the agenda of an aesthetic counter1 We define modernity with Silvio Vietta as a cultural macroepoch lasting from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, and characterised by the inner continuity of a small number of basic features across several, superficially distinct stylistic microepochs.

The basic features are exhibited in elemental form in Early Romantic culture: Only in the twentieth century was this ultimately colonialist stance overcome. Romanies in modern and postmodern German literature are still the locus of counter-cultural utopian emancipatory energies. However, the twentieth-century utopia rests for the first time on a hybrid or dialogical notion of authentically intercultural communication: As already indicated, we see the key term counter-culture as implying the notion of utopia.

There is a vast amount of internal variation in the literary utopian genre per se. Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 45 Romantics however modify this representative strategy in two typically modernist ways. Thus Hardenberg presents the theocratic Middle Ages in the context of post-Revolutionary chaos as a lost and future ideal of political constitution. Second, however, these utopian designs are ironically reflected and relativised in the texts themselves, revealed modernistically as merely provisional, experimental and provocative in function something non-specialists perennially overlook when they try to define Romantic politics see Malsch and Kurzke.

Thus despite the attempt to overcome distance, and to embed the utopia in everyday reality, the Romantics in fact also preserve one fundamental characteristic of the utopian tradition in literature, namely the insight that the realisability of a utopia is not in itself an indicator of its value, which lies elsewhere only Karl Mannheim would disagree.

Mannheim argues that only an historically realised utopia qualifies as authentic, the rest qualifying merely as ideologies. Norm, says Pikulik 13—14 , means two negative things for the Romantics: To take Hardenberg again, there are explicit signs of this only towards the end of his career. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen we find the first proper Romantic encounter with utopian Oriental alterity, when the figure of the imperialist Crusader is contrasted with his Muslim prisoner, the Saracen poetess Zulima — with decidedly negative consequences for Germano-Christian selfesteem.

For the Gypsies figure here as the ultimate ideal of human perfection, as ultimate cultural mediators, in short, as the ultimate Bohemian counter-culture of early nineteenth-century philistine Biedermeier. At one level the tale concerns how this inauthentic artist meets his aesthetic Nemesis. The treatment of the border theme is where the interculturality comes in. It is important to note that the company in the tavern is a representative selection of pretty much all the member nations of the Habsburg empire and its neighbours: Austrians, Tiroleans, Savoyards, Italians, Croats, Germans, plus a representative of the former enemy, the Frenchman Devillier not to mention Turks and others in the inset tales.

But the greatest contrast is with two others, in fact the chief characters of the tale. They achieve this by a variety of means, usually aesthetic in nature and involving the creation of order or the discrimination of truth from falsehood. For example Michaly, whom the narrator likens to a second Orpheus Brentano, , quells an outbreak of multicultural chaos in the tavern by playing his violin at a strategic moment and imposing Orphic order.

She also makes peace between the aesthetic entrepreneurs, and even rediscovers her own lost beloved, the sceptical Frenchman Devillier. They create intercultural harmony between the bewildering mix of nations and cultures that is the Habsburg state and there is plenty of evidence that Brentano seriously intended this as a political utopia. They rescue love from oblivion and re-unite divided partners. In short, Michaly and Mitidika transcend any kind of boundary — political, cultural, aesthetic, sexual — in order wherever they act to restore wholeness and harmony, and Brentano does not shrink from promoting messianic associations around their person.

And, to focus more narrowly, the two Gypsies, representatives of Oriental otherness in war-torn and philistine Europe, are the ultimate symbol of late Romantic selfunderstanding, vehicles of one of the last versions of the Romantic poetic utopia, symbol of healing for all the ills of Biedermeier Germany or Austria. But it is precisely the Romantic selection of the Gypsy — among all possible Oriental ethnic groups — which is most remarkable about this tale. For of course the Romantic Gypsy utopia entirely fails to correspond to the reality of Gypsy life around Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 49 degree than even the Jewish nation Jews were at least tolerated absolutely the most despised ethnic group.

Naturally this had to do with their vagrant status and irredeemably low public esteem. In every German state save Austria they were obliged by law on pain of death as vogelfrei to cross the border of wherever they happened to be. With no national territory, they were therefore obliged to make their home everywhere and nowhere, de facto outside of society, in fields and forests — in nature, and to make their scarce living by disreputable trades or theft.

The negativity and marginalisation of the Gypsies rather like that of woman in patriarchal discourse paradoxically only increased their suitability as a poetic symbol of sheer Otherness, and precisely this is what Brentano exploits. Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt 50 lithe physicality as a Naturvolk which Brentano gleefully translates into his particular brand of aestheticised eroticism and their historical trajectory the myth of the return to Egypt, which Brentano translates into Romantic Heilsgeschichte.

But the key point is this: But this criticism is hardly the point. For none of this prevented the Gypsies around from serving as the perfect symbol of everything a Romantic utopian looked for. This is also the case for much of the nineteenth century in Germany, through texts which cannot be explored here,8 at least up to Thomas Mann, whose Gypsies symbolise everything Gustav Aschenbach is not. The Romantic paradigm of the Gypsy, then, which effectively silences the Gypsy voice even as it preaches emancipation and transcendence, exerts a dominating influence over the literary representation of the Gypsy in the nineteenth century.

It thus inaugurated and controlled the discourse on the Gypsy for this period. We shall now consider to what extent this received discourse of the Gypsy retained its power in the twentieth. Counter-Cultures and the Twentieth Century In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the presentation of the Romany universe in normal German culture tended to be restricted to the Orientalist mode. It was an oppositional life-style, a bohemian liberated and liberating space, an escapist aesthetic utopia, which was available to cultivated Germans either in literature or in life.

In the 8 For example: After Adorno signalled the perils of attempting to produce poetry after Auschwitz, and it is equally hard to see how after the extermination of half a million European Romanies the cultural history of the German-speaking world could continue unabashed to present the world of the Gypsies as a utopia. It was not until the s that Romany voices were raised and the dystopian spaces around the Gypsy experience acknowledged. Ethnicity and the Search for Utopia in the Early Twentieth Century Among the Expressionist writers and artists at the start of the twentieth century there was an enthusiasm for other cultures, for other peoples, whether they lived in Europe or beyond.

Otto Mueller — — who reputedly had Gypsy blood and spent several extended periods with Eastern European Gypsies — created images of their proud independent culture. In an exhibition in Bonn in some images of Gypsies bore witness to the ethnicity and individuality of the Romanies, rather than showing them as outsiders. Yet this artistic utopian landscape peopled by bronzed bodies, by angular and often distorted facial features, and scruffy clothing, defiantly staring out at the viewer, this glorification of what appeared more like a primitive tribe, was pronounced unacceptable, likely to inspire only disgust.

Although these works portrayed the reconciliation of man and nature, and opposed urbanised civilisation, they were considered decadent, not in line with Nazi classicist ideals of beauty. The images of Gypsies flowing from the brushes and charcoal of Mueller and Pankok were thus among the many banned by Hitler as degenerate in the infamous Exhibition of Entartete Kunst in Munich in Their works were proscribed, removed from public view, consigned to the storerooms of the galleries. After this cultural cleansing, Pankok comments in on how only one of the many Gypsies he had painted had actually survived the Holocaust.

The others fell, victims of ethnic cleansing. In his speech on Post Acknowledgement of Dystopia After the Romanies were no longer officially persecuted. But does this mean that they ceased to be part of a counter-cultural group? The fact that some forty years after the end of the war many Gypsies had still not received compensation from the German and Austrian governments was proof enough of the continuity of anti-Gypsyism.

In cultural terms Romanies still do not form part of the dominant discourse and are marginalised. At a time when the heyday of socially critical literature in Germany was over, the Austrian writer Erich Hackl began to emerge as the champion of the underdog, the exposer of the iniquities suffered by various minority groups, be they in Europe or South America. Interwoven with the story of the life of the young Gypsy girl Sidonie Adlersburg, who is adopted by an Austrian family, and later deported to a concentration camp, is the reflective discourse around later governmental and public responses to these events.

The key issue is Gadzo non-Romany complicity in the crimes. Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 55 issue of the play, but the bomb explodes before the play begins. For Jelinek it is the cultural representation of the deaths, and the media indifference and insensitivity, the oscillation between images of misery and banality, the failure to see beyond the surface, which intrigues.

The play is not only about the deaths but their memorialisation, the place which they take in history. Yet in both works they emerge as an important part of the literary counter-culture, and illustrate the cultural diversity of the contemporary German-speaking world. How do the minority group themselves react, respond, generate a new genuine counter-culture? Written down some fifty years after the end of the war, these autobiographies highlight the counter-culture, the culture of the Romanies, which was targeted for extermination 12 Cultural history does not only relate to works of literature.

Cultural memorials to the past can also be seen as an attempt to acknowledge dystopia. Since the s a substantial number of monuments and plaques have been erected in cities, towns and other sites which mark the events of the Nazi regime in which Gypsies were deprived of their liberty, tortured and murdered. In the debate over the memorial to the Sinti and Roma in Berlin the old concerns about whether the dystopian images should be brought into the foreground are raised again. Driven by the wish to record the traumas which they had experienced, and perhaps themselves exorcise some of the pain, the Romanies use writing as a form of therapy.

Whilst recording the depths of depravation and inhumanity of the Nazi period, they attempt with remarkable lack of bitterness to create a culture of tolerance and understanding, to recapture those idyllic days in which they led a life free of threats of violence and abuse. The heterogeneity of the autobiographies is striking. Here the Romany counter-culture forms part of a further subculture — a regional counter-culture.

Oliver, born in Swabia to Spanish parents, who mixes the Alemannic with the Andalusian. When Alfred Lessing writes of having to play in front of Nazi officials in Buchenwald he is describing the paradoxical attitude to countercultures — the Nazi at once proscribed Romanies and yet were perfectly willing to enjoy their musical talents be it wittingly, or as in the case of Alfred Lessing who played for the SS in Buchenwald concentration camp, unwittingly, since they did not know that he was in fact a Romany.

Oliver also interweaves writing and singing and has made a number of CDs in which he reads or sings his work. Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 57 In the writing of all these Romanies and in the art of Karl and Ceija Stojka, both now internationally acclaimed as artists who depict the horrors of the Holocaust, the dystopian world of the concentration camp is described in all its inhumanity and excesses of barbarism. Although relatively few of their works relate unambiguously to the experience of Romanies — some refer to those of Jews and other persecuted groups — the aim is to create an aesthetic space in which the relatively utopian contours of a nomadic lifestyle prior to the introduction of strict laws preventing movement from one town to another are juxtaposed with the horrors which succeeded it.

Conclusion In the cultural history of the German-speaking world the art and writing about and by the Romanies illustrate the weakness of talking of a major and a minor culture. Although the works of both Mueller and Pankok were condemned as degenerate, they diverge from the officially accepted art culture in different ways.

The Romany may appear as a form of noble savage, a primitive in an utopian landscape, as in the works of Mueller, but for Pankok social inequality is signalled in his inner emigration to a cultural space beyond the Nazi propaganda machinery. After it is impossible to represent the Romanies without the Holocaust casting its shadow. The idea of utopian images of Gypsies seems a contradiction in terms. The continuity of anti-Gypsyism is perpetuated by the journalists, but Jelinek interrogates the melodramatically dystopian media images of the Oberwart bombing and sets against them her own counter-interpretation.

Rather than being seen as forming a minority alternative group within society, the work of the Romanies is no longer to be comprehended exclusively in terms of a counter-culture, in opposition to something which is not, but as a valid culture in its 58 Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt own right. This recognition of dystopia and the reaching to reclaim utopia should not be dismissed summarily as a counter-culture, but should be appreciated as an integral part of the multicultural world of Germany and Austria today.

Works Cited Agnew, V. Materialien zu einem Buch und seiner Geschichte Zurich, Diogenes, Schaub Hg , Clemens Brentano. Ein Zigeunerleben Freiburg, Basle, Herder, Selected Essays London, Fontana 3— Abschied von Sidonie Zurich, Diogenes, Schulz, 6 vols Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, — , I, pp. Mein Leben im Versteck: Poetische Rede des Novalis. Schulte-Bumke, First edition, The Story of Karl Stojka: Hg , Otto Pankok: Kunst im Widerstand Bonn, Bundeskanzleramt, Das Brennglas Frankfurt aM, Eichborn, Western Conceptions of the Orient Harmondsworth, Penguin, Stojka, Ceija, Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-Zigeunerin Vienna, Picus, Stojka, Karl, Auf der ganzen Welt zu Hause: Stojka, Mongo, Papierene Kinder: Politics and Propaganda London, Routledge, The Burschenschaften and the German Counter-Cultural Tradition Throughout their history the Burschenschaften have been associated with strong nationalist tendencies.

Their public image has always gone hand in glove with the political intentions and positioning of German nationalism, which from the later nineteenth century onwards locates them in the right-wing regions of the political spectrum. From at the latest, modern German nationalism, reduced from its original complexity to the simple priority of establishing national unity, was a conservative force that aimed at consolidating an externally powerful and internally obedient nation which could challenge its neighbours for international supremacy.

The left-wing end of the political spectrum had meanwhile been claimed by the new movements of communism and socialism. However, prior to the appearance of these ideas to restructure a fully industrialised society, modern nationalism was the most left-wing element on the political scene because of its links with ideas promoted by the French Revolution, such as constitutional representative government.

The levelling tendencies of nationalism, creating equal citizens of one nation, set it in direct opposition to absolutist dynastic systems. It is in this politically progressive and socially revolutionary context of nationalism that the Burschenschaften originate. On the one hand, 62 Maike Oergel this investigation is a contribution to establishing the origins of modern German nationalism as politically progressive, as a radical opposition aiming at far-reaching social, political, and national reform.

In other words, the essay asks whether there is a German tradition of opposition that is intrinsically flawed. This approach redefines the perennial debate about the political nature of the early Burschenschaften and, in a more general sense, of German nationalism, which still revolves around the assumption that the German political tradition is profoundly antidemocratic and set against the values of Western rationalism and liberalism,2 by asking how and why solidly democratising tendencies promoting civil rights and social justice occur in close proximity to non-democratic activities which tend towards totalitarian dogmatism.

Although as a unique individual act it can only have signal function, the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Burschenschaftler Carl Sand represents these very different tendencies and persuasions: On the other hand, it cannot be overlooked that the readiness to execute such a deed results from a totalitarian dogmatism which decrees that it is legitimate and necessary to eliminate those who hold opposing 1 2 Due to the particular political and social circumstances in the German territories nationalism was an unusually new, politically effective and destabilising force: The grandeur of France, for example, had already sparkled in the fountains at Versailles, before it was claimed by the revolutionary Republic.

The recent study of the Burschenschaften by Dietrich Heither et al. A similar view of the political tendencies of the Burschenschaften was put forward by Walter Grab see Grab, Ein Volk, — Researching German Jacobinism, Grab of course is keen to point out democratic tendencies in other German contexts. It is evident that such violent opposition has proved counter-productive. Militant and radical fringes, committing acts of illegal violence to destabilise a system they find oppressive and exploitative, have repeatedly brought entire opposition movements into disrepute, thus paralysing all progressive powers.

The question arises to what extent there may be a direct line from Carl Ludwig Sand, whose actions precipitated the persecution not only of the Burschenschaften, but also of the entire liberal opposition, to the activities of the RAF and its descendant groups, who caused considerable problems to the self-understanding and efficacy of the Neue Linke. A close analysis of the political and national ideas that informed the early Burschenschaft movement will shed light on the nature of any German peculiarity regarding political tradition and especially political radicalism, and also suggest a number of parallels to radical opposition movements in West Germany in the late s and early s.

Let me begin with a brief look at the political and intellectual background to the nationalism of the Befreiungskriege. Between and the basis for the modern German identity was laid. Political and cultural self- definitions of a modern German nation were in competition, until they eventually combined around the crisis-point of , when after the Prussian military collapse Napoleon controlled much of central Europe.

The Sturm und Drang-movement demanded reform in both the cultural and social fields, but had a mainly cultural impact. The events of gave fresh impetus to political ideas of representative and constitutional government — the enthusiasm of the German intelligensia for the early phases of the French Revolution is quite legendary — but the German situation laid the double obstacle of feudal absolutism combined with territorial division in the path of such ideas.

These circumstances necessarily reinforced a link between political reform or revolution and national unity. But political enthusiasm declined in the wake of the Jacobin Terror and the unprogressive handling of the occupation of conquered German territories by the French. It was replaced with the notion of the Kulturnation, which claimed that culture needed to precede politics and suggested that German culture, unsullied by political involvement and unfettered by an ossified classicism, could prepare the culmination of human culture for the benefit of humanity.

Although Napoleon brought no small degree of constitutionalism to the states of the Rheinbund, he came to be seen by nationalists as a foreign oppressor whose sole aim was territorial conquest. A new political-ideological German nationalism mobilised resistance. So for once the princes and the intellectuals stood on the same side to mobilise the people. This is a unique constellation in the revolutionary phase — And it is responsible for the peculiar mix of revolution- and tradition-based approaches to reform, which has been taken as evidence of the immature backwardness of German political thought.

It was clear that, if Napoleon could be defeated, the situation would be conducive to lasting political, social and national reform. Feudal absolutism had been weakened by the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, and a nationally inspired resistance would pave the way towards national unity on a constitutional basis, in conjunction with the constitutional converts among the princes. The Prussian government in particular saw no reason to dampen the zeal of the nationalists and worked hand in hand with progressive nationalist intellectuals, hoping the situation would lead to a united Germany under Prussian hegemony.

Many of these young volunteers became the next generation of politically active students see Steiger, 42—3. The previously defined cultural superiority is now harnessed to invest the need to fight French occupation with a world-historical dimension. Again, culture, in the shape of education, must precede political action, but political action is now paramount.

In Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Karl Friedrich Friesen put together an Ordnung und Einrichtung des deutschen Burschenwesens, a proposal to organise and mobilise students nationally into a political and military opposition in line with their own political and ideological aims of bourgeois emancipation and national unity.

The Ordnung propagated an active life in the service of Vaterland and the people, based on middle-class efficiency and the Protestant work ethic. They intended to politicise the students in order to facilitate their becoming socially responsible and politically active citizens. Jena, situated in the territory of liberal Grand Duke Carl August of Sachsen-Weimar, became one of the hotbeds of liberation, i. It was no surprise that the Urburschenschaft was founded here. But it was also a class exceedingly dependent on the good will of the aristocratic rulers and their bureaucracies, because in the end they would seek jobs not in the independent areas of trade and commerce, but in those feudal 66 Maike Oergel administrations to secure their material existence.

The great majority of Jena students were preparing for some sort of office in the gift of the state. Since the s Jena University had attracted many young up-and-coming academics, among them Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, Schelling, and Schlegel, all of whom launched their academic careers here. Oken and Fries both lost their posts after and endured lengthy professional bans. In a ceremonial act the Landsmannschaften dissolved themselves and united as one, symbolising the overcoming of the territorial division of the nation.

Notwithstanding this, the new charter endeavours to emphasise democratic structures: The Landsmannschaften also used some democratic structures, but were run along more oligarchic lines, priding themselves on their hierarchical set-up. They had a large underclass of trainees who had no rights. Interestingly much in the Jena Burschenschaft charter is taken verbatim from the constitution of the Vandalia Landsmannschaft.

This has been explained as due to time pressure and to the need to achieve a widely acceptable consensus between old and new practices. It is also clear that members of the Vandalia were the driving force behind the national reformation of student organisations. The Jena foundation ceremony in June occurred at an historically interesting point in time, less than two weeks after the foundation of the Deutscher Bund at the Congress of Vienna and three days before the battle of Waterloo.

Both events mark the political crossroads that had been reached: Waterloo establishes the window of opportunity for change, Vienna symbolises the powerful resistance to it. Although Article 13 of the Bundesakte, signed in Vienna, which promised constitutional rule, might have given the Burschenschaftler some hope, the Deutscher Bund was dedicated to safeguard the 68 Maike Oergel absolutist forms of dynastic and monarchic government, and hardly any constitutions came to be agreed.

One unsurprising exception was Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, which received a liberal constitution in June , even guaranteeing the freedom of the press. However, due to increasing pressure from Austria and Prussia, this freedom was curtailed in and withdrawn in The politically progressive ideas were closely linked with a desire for national unity. The obvious lack of the latter and the widespread view that French models had become increasingly inviable resulted in a search for a distinctive German national tradition of reform.

The reformers were looking for a German tradition that supported change, were looking in fact for a precedent for a German revolution. The new historicist outlook, so prevalent among German intellectuals at the time, suggested that social, political and cultural innovations, in order to succeed, needed to be in keeping with tradition and history. The supporters of representative constitutions were a decided minority, and the notion of the separation of powers was rejected. Traditional solutions based on representations of the estates were just about acceptable. The ideologues of this student movement, such as Arndt and Jahn, were Protestant, too.

Hegel echoed this evaluation fairly precisely in his lectures on the philosophy of history. The link between the Christian and the Germanic, which had established itself as a standard topos in the German self-definition from the Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists? The liberation of the individual consciousness was merely the moral basis for the political and national liberation to come, a notion that fits in well with the German idea that culture needs to precede politics.

So the politically responsible and active Burschenschaftler felt called upon to complete the Reformation. This search for a tradition led to an over- emphasis on what was considered original Germanness, which included Francophobia and anti-semitism. Revolutionary ideas were so closely linked with this Teutomania, that the one indicated the other.

Steiger observes that conservative authorities viewed these clothes as a German variant of the French Sansculottes Steiger, The link between Jacobinism, nationalism and Teutomania, and their shared revolutionary nature, was taken to be an established fact for several decades, as the assessment of the conservative historian K. Menzel of shows. He too establishes parallels between Jacobinism and revolutionary nationalism: The Jena Burschenschaft set about planning the two-day event of the Wartburgfest, a sort of national student congress.

Jahn and Luden were closely involved in the preparations, Fries and Oken attended. It inaugurated the next phase in the development of the Burschenschaften. It seems that this frustration led to the inofficial act for which the Wartburgfest is really in famous, and which signals the beginning radicalisation of some parts of the Burschenschaft movement: All the books burnt were recent publications. It has been pointed out that attendance by universities from the south of Germany was sparse, because of their more predominantly Catholic student intake and the abiding suspicion of southern students that the German unity advocated in Burschenschaft circles was really a unity under Prussian hegemony.

He was a moderate, who despite his commitment to German national unity, held the ideals of the French Revolution and of French legalism in high regard. Its burning has been interpreted as an indication of the political immaturity of the students, who, blinded by their Teutomania, could not see the constitutional foundations embedded in these laws. They also threw into the fire what they regarded as symbols of physical and ideological oppression by superpower militarism and authoritarianism, i. These insubordinate acts of anarchic destruction gave the conservative rulers throughout the Confederation the occasion to act tough.

There can be no doubt that many were worried. Although they demonstrated progressive criticism of the princes, their authors at the same time hoped for acceptance by and assistance from the feudal regents Steiger, —7. Typical, and correct, was the following assessment by one of their own: At this point, the split between a moderate majority, whose political opinions and commitment were vague, and a radical politicised wing became apparent. Internally, the spectrum of the politicised members also stretched from moderate to radical.

Alle Deutschen sind einander an Rechten vollkommen gleich. Unlike Riemann, Karl Follen reckoned that this sovereignty of the people was unlikely to be achieved through an alliance with the princes, or even by peaceful means. It would require politicising the masses, which would in turn lead to uprisings and the eventual breakdown of the current system. The Lied conceives of political revolution as a religious crusade that politically completes the spiritual process initiated by the Reformation. In a grand historical panorama it associates the desired national liberation with an ancient Teutonic drive for independence from the Roman Empire.

Nevertheless, its political and social aims were clear: When unrest broke out among the peasants in the Odenwald region in the autumn of , the Schwarzen hoped that this might be the beginning of the revolution. Level one is more moderate and focuses on ancient German traditions. The Reformation has a crucial status in this countercultural identity. Historicist thinking decreed that only if the revolution were anchored in a German tradition would its realisation be plausible and successful. This connection, however, works on more than one level: The French Revolution and the German Reformation are the constant reference points in the discussion about political change in Germany at this time.

The French Revolution, particularly its violent and regicidal phase, was by many national ist reformers considered to be a failure rather than a model. Riemann wished to make clear that the German Burschenschaftler were no French revolutionaries. And yet the Revolution and Reformation were seen as related. The Reformation was the more promising German version of the French Revolution. Nor did the religious language or the appeal to an ancient German past suggest to the reactionary-conservative authorities that these people were political traditionalists. This equation between spiritual and political freedom was turned into a historical relation — one precedes the other — by constitutionally minded theological thinkers in the early decades of the nineteenth century and became a commonplace in liberal thinking.

It is important to note in this context that this equation is a topos congenial to rationalist interpretations as well as to more Romantic or Pietistic approaches that prioritise a living inner spirit of freedom and justice, as evinced by the post-rationalist generation of Protestant theologians such as Schleiermacher and de Wette.

All these interpretations share a focus on the need to complete the Reformation in the name of spiritual and political progress see Lange, — Do such metaphysical and spiritual concerns invalidate any political democratic principles, as has been argued by those who take modern German political traditions to be intrinsically non-Western?

Does the spiritual always render the political irrational? Does this endeavour to base reform or revolution not only on political, but also on spiritual and historical principles necessarily lead to dogmatic self-aggrandisement? The national ist element, trimmed with spiritual and cultural traditions, is dubious in both interpretations. Its presence has led to a devaluation of the democratic and constitutional trends in German thought in Western assessments, in GDR treatments it has been brushed aside as a lamentable error of immaturity.

Yet it was integral at the time. In a pre-industrial economic situation only the revolutionary national Volk can occupy 15 See Heither et al. Their democratic principles and structures were realised — reasonably successfully compared to early twentieth-century attempts — on German soil in the later twentieth century, while their exclusion of foreigners and Jews, common in Burschenschaft thinking, foreshadows German fascism.

Their theory of resistance also foreshadows arguments put forward by late twentieth-century German terrorists. One of the first publications of the RAF in runs: Apart from leading the masses into revolt, Karl Follen considered the single violent act against an unrepresentative and repressive system not only a legitimate, but also a successful weapon.

Follen made plans to set up a revolutionary organisation that would have revolutionary cells nationwide. After , Follen could not stay in Germany. To escape arrest, he first fled to Switzerland , but in made for the greater safety of the United States. He planned to found a democratic German state as part of the American federation. Once there, he returned to an academic career, introducing the teaching of German language and literature at Harvard.

However, he was removed from his Harvard post after he became active in the cause of liberating another group of oppressed people, the black slaves. He became an American citizen in After a failed suicide attempt Sand was arrested and tried, and finally, on 20 May , executed. This month span is a phenomenally long gap to intervene between arrest and verdict, especially in a case where there is such a self-evident perpetrator to a crime, who never denied his deed.

The drawn-out nature of the case is an indicator of the impact of the deed on the legal and political landscape of the Confederation.