Veterans Monuments

“On the first of July, 1905, at 6:00 in the morning, Berlin counted a total of 165 individual monuments in stone or iron, 232 in all, representing 716 persons and 128 animals.”Footnote ¹¹ The remark was satirical, of course, lampooning what some called a “monument craze,” others a “monument mania” or “monument plague.”Footnote ¹² The satire points to ubiquitous contemporary obsessions with the sheer number of monuments. How many there were is difficult to discern. In 1904, in a book titled Germany's Fame and Pride, which mainly tracked monuments to Kaiser Wilhelm I and to Otto von Bismarck, as well as to veterans and victory memorials, Fritz Abshoff counted 875 monuments.Footnote ¹³ He focused on monuments that were in some way remarkable and thus overlooked the many unexceptional examples in small cities and towns that had cost less than 10,000 reichsmarks to build—and that surely made up a significant (if not the greatest) number of monuments in Imperial Germany. His numbers can be supplemented by credible inventories of Kaiser Wilhelm I monuments, which counted 322 in 1902 and estimated Bismarck monuments around the same figure.Footnote ¹⁴ But even taken together, these contemporary inventories present an incomplete picture. They do not count monuments to Germany's poets, philosophers, scientists, musicians, and artists; there is no record of monuments to local dignitaries; and no one attempted an inventory of veterans memorials—surely the greatest number, and, to a certain extent, the most significant.Footnote ¹⁵

The local veterans memorials, as Reinhart Koselleck has suggested, signaled a new relationship between citizens, states, and the memorialization of sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁶ In the eighteenth century, soldiers who died in battle were heaped together in piles to be burned or buried in pits, with no monument and no place to register their names. Princes and perhaps prominent generals were commemorated, but never the common soldier. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, a democratization of the commemoration of sacrificial death set in. Monuments lost their caste exclusivity and increasingly assumed this-worldly meaning—defining the community of those who had sacrificed for the state, naming them and connecting the local group (typically a regiment) to the larger country. Mourning became a central motif, and monuments were erected primarily for the community of survivors.Footnote ¹⁷ They proclaimed that the sacrifice of one's own life for the fatherland—whether republic or monarchy, nation or state—had become a constitutive element of a modern social contract, the key to male claims for political participation.

On a more modest level, the veterans memorials also became sites of local sociability—monuments that built associations, as Robert Musil once put it, and that called forth “an uninterrupted sequence,” as another contemporary claimed, of patriotic festivals that “followed one another like frames in a cinematography theater.”Footnote ¹⁸ Much can be said about these festivals—about their organization, their rhythms of inclusion and exclusion, and their servile deference to authority. Suffice it to say that they had become a central preoccupation of the largest nonpolitical organization in Germany, the veterans associations (Kriegervereine), which, by 1913, counted over 2.8 million members. The Kriegervereine—or Kriechervereine (servile associations), as the socialists liked to call them—structured associational life around patriotic holidays, male camaraderie, as well as prodigious amounts of beer drinking and tobacco smoking. Some historians have emphasized the susceptibility of these associations to government manipulation during elections, but recent research has underscored that their memberships were heterogeneous, that their petty bourgeois and even proletarian clientele was usually unmoved by national electoral campaigns, that their culture of patriotic or folkloric nationalism reached deep into the social structure and included the empire's Catholic population.Footnote ¹⁹

Because there is no complete listing, there is no easy way to gauge the dispersion of veterans memorials in Imperial Germany. One method of finding them is to examine turn-of-the-century encyclopedias like Meyers Grosses Konversationslexikon (which had entries for all the towns in Imperial Germany) and to look at old postcards, many of which are now searchable online. While it is impossible for one person to count all these, it is possible to target towns whose size and makeup would ordinarily render them outside the reach of Imperial Germany's patriotic culture and thus to consider them as limit cases.

Selective searches online suggest that patriotic culture had significant reach, extending deep into Catholic towns whose population was less than three thousand, such as Markdorf, near Lake Constance, and the town of Simmern (where the film series Heimat takes place) in the Westerwald. Even in particularist Bavaria, Germany's patriotic culture, as manifested in the erection of memorials and the celebrations around them, made significant inroads. Only in genuinely rural communities with populations of less than two thousand does one find places where that culture barely penetrated. The working-class milieu is more difficult to gauge, in this respect, partly because the populations of worker towns were highly mobile and tended to concentrate outside of more established communities. One example is the brown-coal mining area around Bitterfeld. The county seat, with a significant number of officials and a population of 13,290, had already consecrated a large monument in 1881, while neighboring Holzweißig, with a population of less than five thousand, had erected a modest monument to the war of 1870. Yet in smaller communities, like Greppin and Sandersdorf, such monuments did not yet exist. Other working-class areas, like Penzberg in southern Bavaria or the textile and mining towns of Upper Silesia, suggest a pattern of greater, though not complete, resistance. It comes as a surprise that some rural Protestant areas seem to have been less affected—such as the towns around Konitz in West Prussia. Although they were county seats, neither Tuchel nor Schlochow possessed monuments, suggesting that, in remote Protestant areas, the lack of vitality of the public sphere, and perhaps the economic status of the community, put limits on monument building. If one looks farther east to the county of Ortelsburg, likely the poorest in Imperial Germany, this impression is reinforced: its county seat, the town of Ortelsburg, did not possess a memorial either. Finally, the areas of ethnic minorities were closer to Germany's mainstream patriotic culture than one might suspect. Upper Silesian Myslowitz, a town roughly the size of Bitterfeld, just southwest of Katowice and examined by James Bjork in his study of Catholicism and national indifference, possessed such a monument. Bjork cites the lamentations of the Polish press that “thousands of Poles” belonged to the local veterans associations.Footnote ²⁰

It helps to keep the local dimension in mind. In small-town Germany, simple monuments predominated: they cost between 6,000 and 10,000 reichsmarks and can hardly have been said to be sculptural marvels. Towns paid for them with funds in municipal budgets and by raising money—most of it from a few wealthy local donors, a sizable amount from middle-class contributions, and the rest by passing a hat at street corners and at local events. It was precisely in their repetitive ordinariness that these monuments created a sense that something shared across the whole nation was being celebrated. In Markdorf, for example, where about fifty soldiers had participated in the Franco-Prussian War and one was killed, the monument was featured on at least three postcards and served as a backdrop for celebrations of the local veterans association, which, by 1900, had few veterans but many young men as members. The monument swelled civic pride, functioned as a focal point for festivals, and symbolically connected the small town to the larger nation. Perhaps Heinrich Mann, in his novel Der Untertan, was right to pillory these festivals as rehearsals of abject petit bourgeois servility. But in remote Catholic parts of Germany, they also helped bring a once outcast population closer to the nation.

As the modest monuments called forth patriotic festivals, they also generated their own world of objects.Footnote ²¹ The most well known (and still avidly collected) was the regimental stein. As they passed from active duty to the reserve, enlisted men (but not officers) bought the steins from colporteurs. Regimental steins were intended to commemorate the period of active duty, and they typically came ringed with the colors of the regiment's state—e.g., green and white for Saxony, white and blue for Bavaria, black, white, and red for Prussia. They sported a pewter top, often in the shape of an eagle or cannon, or of a soldier standing at attention or offering a prosit. When they first appeared in the 1880s, they were mainly hand painted, but demand was so vigorous that they were soon industrially produced. Some were made of ceramic, others of porcelain.Footnote ²² After 1900, they became more and more ornate and were decorated with scenes from a soldier's apparently harmless life. The steins made for cavalry units typically featured soldiers on horseback riding through agreeable landscapes, whereas those for artillery units displayed canons and those for infantry kind-faced soldiers marching in step. Nicely painted, with the reservist's name, unit, and period of active duty inscribed, the steins likely spent most of the time on display in cupboards or on fireplace mantels. Heirlooms somewhere between folk art and mass-produced art, they portrayed the army, nation, and service as an expression of harmony.

Not all reservists bought them, of course. One collector's estimate puts the figure at roughly 10 percent and the total number of steins at about half a million. They were more popular in southern than in northern Germany; a few were made in Austria, but otherwise they were specific to Imperial Germany.Footnote ²³ For an average worker in 1900, they would have cost five to seven weeks’ wages; it was not industrial or agricultural laborers but veterans from the lower-middle and middle classes who bought them, if they could.

Related to the beer steins were the reservists’ pipes, which showed essentially the same images. Painted on the ceramic pipe bowl were scenes of soldiers socializing in taverns, or of a soldier standing at attention in front of a guardhouse, trotting on horseback, or leaving his wife and family and coming back to them. Like the regimental steins, the pipes showed when and where active duty had been served and, in some cases, listed the other soldiers in the regiment. There were other objects as well. The most popular, because the least expensive, was the regimental walking stick. In old regimental photos, one often sees all the reservists with their walking sticks, typically wrapped in string and tassels in the regimental colors, perhaps with a Stocknagel (medallion) bearing a trite saying (e.g., “unified and strong to the marrow”) and with a brass engraving on top recording the period of service. There were also framed pictures for soldiers to hang on walls or to give to their mothers—sometimes a printed color lithograph of the soldier surrounded by the attributes of his regimental life (e.g., canons, drums, parade hats, Iron Cross decorations, as well as stock patriotic phrases and benign, watchful monarchs), or a matted photograph replete with images of the activities the soldier had practiced while on active duty, such as marksmanship, fencing, camping, marching, horseback riding, and military maneuvers.

Fig. 1.

The regimental pipe and stein of the author's great-grandfather. (Photo courtesy of the author.)

Kaiser Wilhelm Monuments

The proliferation of Kaiser Wilhelm monuments, for which far more complete documentation exists, likewise suggests a near-ubiquitous monument landscape and a flourishing world of objects. Unlike the veterans memorials, many of which were built in the 1870s and 1880s, the erection of monuments to Kaiser Wilhelm I began in earnest only after his death in 1888, reached a high point with the centenary of his birth in 1897, and declined significantly thereafter. Like the veterans memorials, monuments to Kaiser Wilhelm ranged from modest columns costing 10,000 reichsmarks to elaborate and expensive statutes such as those erected in Essen, Leipzig, and Berlin, which cost as much as 500,000 reichsmarks. Just as obvious as the dynastic nationalist dimension of these monuments was that raising them remained, from the standpoint of their spatial distribution, a Prussian undertaking. Close to 80 percent were built in Prussia—in the Protestant zones of East Elbia as well as in the Catholic Rhineland. Outside of Prussia, there were significant concentrations in Saxony and Thuringia, as well as in some small north German states, but their numbers thinned south of the river Main, constituting less than 10 percent of the total. They were completely absent in Bavaria, including the Palatinate and Franconia, where they would have seemed an affront to the Wittelsbachs. Remarkable too is the density of monuments in the Eifel to the south of Aachen and west of Koblenz, in the German frontier areas of West Prussia and Silesia, and in the working-class districts of Saxony. Conversely, there were only two monuments in Alsace-Lorraine (one in Haguenau, the other in Metz), and only one in Danish-speaking northern Schleswig.

Fig. 2.

Monuments to Kaiser Wilhelm I, 1870–1902.

As with the veterans memorials and the veterans associations that supported them, a world of kitsch buttressed the popularity of Kaiser Wilhelm monuments. Images of Kaiser Wilhelm I were found on silver spoons, ceramic plates, plaques, commemorative medals, and on a range of commercial goods, including letter paper, tobacco boxes, chocolate bars, Christmas hams, and champagne bottles; there were also figurines. Because most of this kitsch was sold by hawkers or in small shops, its production and sale could not easily be controlled. Conversely, government-sponsored initiatives often faltered. Wilhelm II's attempt in a much-heralded speech in 1897 to affix the epithet “Great” to his grandfather foundered not on popular dislike for the old emperor but on the failure of the new image—that of the supposedly true military genius behind unification—to gain traction. Instead, the image of a wise monarch, above the fray, captured the imagination, and it did so mainly through the mass circulation of sentimental images: first in large-format photographs costing roughly twenty reichsmarks, thus within reach of the middle classes; then through smaller, more modest cartes de visite, which became widely available; and finally as dirt-cheap images pirated by taking pictures of the pictures. Images were collected in albums and the albums were then displayed on dining-room tables, with basic albums costing as little as fifty pfennige.Footnote ²⁴

It was with the postcard, however, that Kaiser Wilhelm I really got around. First developed in the 1870s, postcards, at three pfennige each, achieved mass circulation in the following decades. According to one estimate, about 250 million postcards were sent in the German Empire in 1900.Footnote ²⁵ What the letter was to the educated middle class, the postcard was to much wider social circles.Footnote ²⁶ Because the mail was picked up numerous times each day, the circulation of images was swift. One sent postcards when away on a railway journey. One sent postcards from weekend places of rest, which were already emerging on the outskirts of cities around 1900. Postcards marked life stages—one sent them, for example, to the attendees at weddings.Footnote ²⁷ And in cities, one sent them across town to make arrangements. Postcards circa 1900 encompassed an enormous range of topics—flowers, erotic material, human curiosities, local scenes, folksongs and sagas, peasant dress, humor, dog races, boxers, bodybuilders, and zoos, to mention only a few. Postcards of the kaiser—Wilhelm I and, even more, Wilhelm II—constituted a significant category in this broad array, and of those images the vast majority, and certainly the most popular (especially with Wilhelm II), were family pictures that brought the powerful Hohenzollerns into the comfortable realm of home and hearth, where ordinary citizens of Imperial Germany could feel a sentimental kinship with them.

Bismarck Monuments

Scholars, most prominently Eric Hobsbawm and Thomas Nipperdey, have divided the monuments of Imperial Germany into two categories: monarchical and democratic nationalist.Footnote ²⁸ Kaiser Wilhelm monuments have stood for the first category, monuments to Otto von Bismarck for the second. But are the differences so significant? And is the vocabulary of “above” and “below” the most felicitous? The conceptual dyad of state manipulation vs. populist impulses is crucial not only for the question of monuments but also for the way we have come to understand nationalism in the late imperial period. After all, the effect of the criticism leveled against Hans-Ulrich Wehler for his excessive emphasis on monarchical and aristocratic manipulation was not so much to undo this duality as to give greater weight to forces from “below.”Footnote ²⁹ But since “below” in this debate referred to the then-neglected bourgeoisie, was this not essentially an argument, in class terms, for the “6 percent,” as against the “less than 1 percent”?

The temporal and geographic patterns of monuments dedicated to Bismarck do not unequivocally suggest that those dedicated to Kaiser Wilhelm were imposed from above, whereas the Bismarck monuments were genuinely popular. The timing, for example, suggests roughly similar chronologies, with a slightly later peak for the Bismarck monuments and a similar if less precipitous decline in the decade between 1903 and 1913. Monuments dedicated to Bismarck also displayed noticeably different geographic patterns from those dedicated to Kaiser Wilhelm. Just over 10 percent of towns with Bismarck monuments had also erected a monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I; Bismarck monuments declined less precipitously in popularity in the decade before World War I, and they were not especially concentrated in Prussia.Footnote ³⁰ Enthusiasm for Bismarck flourished especially in the middle states of Germany—in Thuringia, Hesse, and some parts of Saxony—and in the liberal cities of the Rhineland, which spearheaded an unsuccessful drive to create a national monument to Bismarck near Bingen.Footnote ³¹ In Bavaria, monuments to Bismarck took root in largely Protestant Franconia and in a small number of bi-religious cities. In Baden, centers of liberal Catholicism such as Constance and Freiburg, as well as a number of northern Protestant towns such as Mosbach and Tauberbischofsheim, raised such monuments, while in liberal Württemberg only Stuttgart and Tübingen did so. More surprising is that the craze for Bismarck monuments, fueled by some three hundred Bismarck associations with roughly thirty thousand members, did not extend to all Protestant areas. Much of the Protestant north German plain—Friesland, Oldenburg, and the rural parts of old Hanover—still exemplified the persistent aversion to Prussia in states with long histories of independence. Likewise, there were virtually no monuments in the industrialized Ruhr and very few in Upper Silesia. Bismarck's legacy of the Kulturkampf and the antisocialist laws, one may surmise, still made it difficult for Catholics and workers to see him as a figure of national identification. Finally, there are peculiarities that this map (fig. 3) does not reveal. One is that Bismarck monuments were erected with particular zeal in vacation towns, like Bad Ems, that hoped to attract tourists with conspicuous patriotic displays.

Fig. 3.

Monuments to Otto von Bismarck, 1890–1917.

The cult of Bismarck foreshadowed the trappings of modern celebrity. Some 370 German towns and cities offered Bismarck honorary citizenship; countless Bismarck squares and Bismarck streets were designated; there were Bismarck hotels and restaurants; Bismarck's name adorned cakes and a style of pickled herring. And upon his retirement to Friedrichsruh, well-wishers sent a stream of letters and greeting cards. One estimate places the number at half a million.Footnote ³² Patient research into the style and content of these cards would reveal a great deal about the mentality of German nationalism and turn-of-the-century political adulation.

Postcards were also revealing. Some pictured Bismarck and his famous pronouncement, “We Germans fear God but nothing else in this world.”Footnote ³³ But not all had overtly nationalistic messages. Also popular were postcards with Bismarck and his Great Danes, Tyras II and Rebecca, the Reichshunde. There were postcards that attempted to make Bismarck into the wise grandfather of German statecraft. And there was a continual stream of postcards, likely the largest single group, that pictured the Bismarck monument in this or that town or city.Footnote ³⁴ The monuments also left a trail of kitsch in their wake: Bismarck steins, busts, medallions, and bracelet charms, including one that sported the head of Bismarck on one side and a map of Africa on the other (reversing Bismarck's famous adage that his map of Africa was in Europe). But even with Bismarck, whom the radical nationalists attempted to appropriate as their own, the circulation of objects points by no means in a single direction—and certainly not just in the direction that many nationalist ideologues hoped.

Monuments to Heroes of the Spirit (Geistes-Helden)

Moreover, these three main types of national political monuments hardly exhausted Imperial Germany's memorial landscape. Stone statues of poets, philosophers, writers, scholars, intellectuals, musicians, artists, and scientists also populated Germany's towns and cities. Intellectuals had received monuments as early as the 1760s: among the first was a slumping Hercules representing Ewald von Kleist, sanguinary poet of friendship and fatherland.Footnote ³⁵ It took nearly a century before the pace of building accelerated. Fueled by the centenary of Friedrich Schiller's birth, more than four hundred festivals buoyed the first wave of monuments; most celebrated Schiller as a young poet writing in the service of liberal reform and national unity.Footnote ³⁶ Thereafter, building slowed until the 1880s, when throughout Germany civic organizations began raising money to honor celebrities of the spirit—above all Martin Luther, who was celebrated by Protestants with a series of monuments depicting him as the founder of a chosen nation and as a model father and family man.Footnote ³⁷ By the 1900s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had also received a number of monuments.

Monuments to the great intellectual heroes were largely a phenomenon of the second half of the nineteenth century. Centered in the south, not the north (Berlin, which monumentalized for the whole nation, was an exception), the distribution of monuments to Germany's “spirit” was almost the opposite of those to “power.” The relation is not perfect: both types are well represented in the middle states, especially Saxony and Thuringia (in part because of the many Luther monuments built there in the 1880s), and many university towns competed to erect statues of Bismarck as well as of various heroes of the spirit. The relative paucity of monuments to intellectuals in Prussia, apart from Berlin, is nevertheless suggestive.

If regionally inspired, monuments also furthered a nationalization of the literary canon. Authors who were commemorated included Theodor Körner, whose youthful, blood-soaked lyrics still fanned martial fantasies; Max von Schenkendorf, whose poetic voice was subtler but still war-enthused; and Friedrich Rückert, whose oeuvre ranged from heartrending lamentations about the death of his children to inspired translations of oriental literature—but who also wrote aggressive, anti-French poems and songs. Celebrated as well were Hoffmann von Fallersleben, his body of clean-rhymed, plain-language verse already overshadowed by one composition, “The Song of the Germans,” which, as “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” would become the anthem of the Weimar Republic in 1922, and Max Schneckenburger, author of “The Watch on the Rhine,” which became the unofficial German hymn during the Franco-Prussian War.

The commodification of literary figures further fanned the commemorative craze. The reproduction of images of Goethe and Schiller on plates, cups, mugs, silverware, and napkins, and as busts and silhouettes, became prodigious in this period. Commodification also brought an unprecedented and widely circulated visualization of their literary work. Franz Simm's Faust illustrations and Frank Kirchbach's chalk drawings of Goethe poems, already popular as picture books, attained a second life as postcards and prints. Spreading Goethe's fame more effectively than any Ordinarius ever could, postcards reproduced scenes from the plays and motifs from the poems. Six postcards, each with a photograph and sequential lines of text, could be combined to yield “Rose upon the Heath,” for example.Footnote ³⁸ Goethe's lovers and girlfriends were also assembled, pictured, and commented upon in media ranging from penny postcards to an expensive two-volume work.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, images of Goethe's female characters (especially Gretchen from Faust and Mignon from Wilhelm Meister) circulated in prodigious quantities—typically portrayed by actresses photographed in front of painted stage sets.

Fig. 4.

Monuments to Writers, Artists, Musicians, and Scholars, 1820–1914.

Goethe was hardly alone in this regard. Theodor Körner also inspired public oak plantings, memorial stones, a Körner house (where the wounded poet was hidden from the French), plaques, reliefs, and busts. There were also things one could buy: metal, marble, and plaster statues of his handsome countenance; beautiful commemorative volumes of his poetry; black-and-white or color prints to be hung on walls; and, of course, postcards—one reproducing a painting of the young Körner, his deep eyes gazing at the viewer, another showing him bidding adieu to his sweetheart before heading into battle. The cheaper ones simply featured an image of a Körner monument with a line of his poetry.Footnote ⁴⁰

The monuments also reveal the literary, philosophical, and artistic predilections of Imperial Germany, suggesting a selective embrace of the sixteenth century, an openness to Gotthold Lessing's Enlightenment (his critical thoughts about patriotism having been scrubbed away), and hints of a preference for the crystalline, lyrical Romanticism of Joseph von Eichendorff over the dark, mysterious writings of Novalis and E. T. A. Hoffmann. They also indicate that although the Germans of the empire still thought of themselves as comprising a nation of “poets and philosophers,” it was the poets who really captured their imagination. Monuments to the great thinkers—such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. von Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer—were sparse; some, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, achieved cult status among young avant-garde intellectuals but were ignored or derided by the larger public. The sample of monuments is small in the musical realm, but it seems that a “German” musical canon was being formed—J. S. Bach being the clear favorite with four monuments. Ludwig van Beethoven, with two monuments, shared the field with a series of composers and songwriters more famous in the nineteenth century than in the present, while some of the towering figures, including Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann (not, of course, Clara), and Richard Wagner, received only one—while the supposedly “fatherlandless [Giacomo] Meyerbeer,” as Wagner maliciously called him, went without. Finally, there was as yet little consensus about “German art.” Visual artists were celebrated least in monuments, and painters less than sculptors. In fact, only three painters—Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Moritz von Schwind, master of idyllic landscapes—received monuments in the nineteenth century, and artists who are now at the center of the canon, like Caspar David Friedrich, were as yet absent.

In late Imperial Germany, monuments, like nationalism generally, reflected and reinforced major fault lines of class, gender, and religion. It is hardly surprising that there were no monuments to champions of the working class—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Liebknecht, or even Ferdinand Lassalle, whose status as a folk hero for the working classes far outstripped the prestige of his more theoretically-minded comrades. Excepting queens and princesses, there were also very few public monuments to women: one was to the writer Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, but it was tucked away in the courtyard of her family's castle; another, a monument in Tübingen “dedicated by German women,” was to Ottilie Wildermuth, unheralded author of short stories about Swabian life. Thereafter the trail goes cold. Hildegard von Bingen—mystic, visionary, and one of the most important religious figures of the Middle Ages—received a plaque in the Walhalla but no secular monument in the imperial period. Anna Louise Karsch, patriotic poetess of the Seven Years’ War, had already been rendered in stone during her lifetime, but her monument began to deteriorate and no one in the separate-spheres nineteenth century thought to repair it.Footnote ⁴¹ Major figures of nineteenth-century Catholicism were also commemorated sparingly. There were at least twenty-six public monuments to Luther (not counting fountains) but none to Desiderius Erasmus (who had, by this time, fallen out of fashion with Catholics as well). Of the popular authors of the Catholic milieu, only the almanac writer Alban Stolz received a monument, though not until 1913; of the politicians, Ludwig Windthorst and a number of minor conservative Catholics were commemorated, but not Klemens von Metternich. The Prussian government also refused to countenance a commemoration of Joseph Goerres, mainly because of his agitation in 1848.

Jewish figures proved especially vexed, and the case of Heinrich Heine offers an especially revealing touchstone for gauging the persistence of antisemitic attitudes.Footnote ⁴² By the centenary of his birth in 1897, there was in all of Imperial Germany only a bronze engraving on a house where he had lived in Hamburg.Footnote ⁴³ Düsseldorf, the city of his birth, contracted the famous carver Ernst Herter to sculpt a major monument, but the project ran into the opposition of antisemites, who considered Heine “through and through a real Jew, not an authentic German.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In a split vote, the city council scotched the plan; similar attempts also failed in Mainz and Frankfurt am Main, and Herter's sculpture (of Heine's Lorelei) ultimately found a home in the Bronx, where “thousands of Germans who gladly called themselves Americans,” as the New York Times put it, attended the unveiling.Footnote ⁴⁵ Not until shortly before the outbreak of World War I were two modest monuments built to Heine in Germany: one by Social Democrats in Halle, the other by the citizens of Frankfurt.Footnote ⁴⁶

Monuments, Kitsch, and Nationalism

How did monuments shape landscapes? How densely suffused were they? It would be possible, of course, to fuse together the maps presented here, with the optical result an impressive picture of the proliferation of monuments. But this will not help us get a sense of whether Imperial Germany's monument culture penetrated deep into the social structure of small-town Germany. Instead, it may be more helpful to look more closely at the local level.

Fig. 5.

Monuments North of Lake Constance.

Consider, again, the rural region north of Lake Constance. It was as far away from Berlin as it possible to go within Germany, and it encompassed four states: Prussia (the Hohenzollern lands), Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria. It was largely Catholic, though of liberal stripe, perhaps making the region more open to German national symbols than were the ultramontane regions.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was mainly made up of small towns within a day's walk of each other, but many of them had been connected by rail since the turn of the century. Looked at one way, the region had five Kaiser Wilhelm monuments, one monument to Maximilian II of Bavaria, and no Bismarck monuments. But when attempting to encompass the whole of the monument landscape and when considering all the towns with a population of more than two thousand, a very different picture emerges. Almost all towns above this threshold participated in the monument craze. The national patriotic monuments were mainly veterans memorials and Kaiser Wilhelm memorials, and, in a number of cases, the two were merged. Towns that built Kaiser Wilhelm monuments tended to be slightly larger, typically in the range of five thousand to twenty thousand inhabitants. What is different from this view is the preponderance of monuments to individuals who were born, lived in, or died in these towns. This finding is in itself not surprising. But it is worth recalling that these monuments were also the products of the imperial period and that they document not only local pride but also a sense of belonging to a wider nation. Meersburg erected monuments to the writer Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and the doctor Franz Mesmer, for example; Friedrichshafen situated a stone dedicated to the travel writer and poet Gustav Schwab along the town's boardwalk on Lake Constance; Meßkirch raised a monument to the composer Conradin Kreutzer, who was born in the town. In 1881, Biberach, the hometown of Martin Wieland, erected a handsome monument to its local enlightener, and the monument's unveiling was accompanied by a civic festival that demonstrated, in the words of a printed handbill, “the joy not just of Biberach's citizens but also those of all Germany.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The celebration of these local monuments became entwined with the store of objects that collectively made up the kitsch of nationhood. As with veterans and Kaiser Wilhelm memorials, monuments to local heroes found their way onto postcards, plates, napkins, and silver spoons. A sense of local pride mixed with a claim on the national, as monuments and objects asserted that the national canon of great men and women ought to include hometown poets, philosophers, composers, and painters. The total number of local monuments to distinguished citizens and sojourners is difficult to document. It may have rivaled the number of national political monuments. Local pride was in this sense an act of tying in, of showing one's hometown to be part of the national landscape. It was not inconsistent for Friedrichshafen to erect monuments to Gustav Schwab and Kaiser Wilhelm, and there is no need to assume that the national could only be understood with eyes conditioned by the local.

The evidence presented in this article also raises questions about interpretations from the national perspective. Here a prevalent tendency has been to focus on those who controlled nationalist organizations and to argue that, for example, Sammlungspolitik came undone when radical nationalists challenged the precarious coalitions of the government and unleashed a series of crises in major nationalist organizations, foremost the Navy League, with some scholars insisting on the importance of the formal victory of moderate nationalists and others on the significance of cumulative radicalization after 1908.Footnote ⁴⁹ But can we assume that debates within the presidium of nationalist organizations reflected the national imaginary at the base in the hundreds of towns and cities throughout Germany? The pattern of objects, while not a substitute for in-depth local studies, can at least suggest alternate possibilities.

The proliferation of monuments in Imperial Germany suggests that the national imaginary brought together in bric-a-brac fashion elements from the local and the national; that the mediation of the national worked as much through monuments, festivals, and objects as through ideology; and that the aggressiveness of expressions at the national level may not always have found clear echoes at the local level. We still know too little about everyday patriotic culture in remote parts of Catholic Germany, in wide swaths of rural Protestant Germany, and in the industrial districts of Upper Silesia, the Ruhr, and Saxony. The same may be said of industrial workers and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It is true, for example, that Franz Mehring and Rosa Luxembourg took critical aim at the huge and highly organized festivities of the Monument to the Battle of Peoples of 1913. But in the same year, a leader of the SPD also complained that “that the mass of workers are not such antimilitarists as we would like.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Was there a tension between the party's undeniably engaged antimilitarist rhetoric and the reality of worker participation in the empire's patriotic culture? Thomas Rohrkrämer's statistics for the social makeup of veterans organizations in Konstanz and Bochum must, in any case, give us pause: workers participated in considerable numbers, making up a third of the membership in the former and a majority in the latter.Footnote ⁵¹ The corresponding figures for more policy-oriented associations, such as the Colonial Society and the Navy League, were much less impressive. Moreover, the gains in Catholic areas were significant and suggest that patriotic culture in the Catholic milieu cannot be dismissed so easily, even where local patriotism did not possess the degree of social layering that one sees in the two largely Catholic cities of Konstanz and Bochum.Footnote ⁵²

How, then, do we understand the “below” of pre–World War I nationalism? The harmonizing tendencies of nationalist kitsch help us understand a “below” that rested less on articulated ideological positions than on an activity of the imagination that tapped familiar, serialized, repetitive emotions, that combined local engagement, activity, and ritual with a wider network of objects and images, and that created a sense of likeness and perhaps even solidarity—in short, a sense of nation. This is because the harmony that kitsch propagates works regardless of ideological positions. Whatever the image—the kaiser with children, a monument to a hometown hero in a flowering landscape, cross-class conviviality in a tavern, a soldier kissing his fiancée good-bye: the emotional appeal to the sentimental, the good, the romantic worn at the edges, the clichés of home and garden—all of this exerted a power difficult to measure but wide in its reach and its grasp. That power stretched not only into Catholic Germany but also into some sectors of working-class Germany, into the tavern and inside the house, where images were collected and sorted, exchanged and written upon. In the imperial period, German nationalism offered very little in the way of new ideas—and the ideas that were new, in the sense of conceptual departures, concerned race and empire, not national sentiment per se. What was new, and revolutionary in its dimensions—an explosion, really—was the ability of objects and images to circulate and make the nation seem a part of one's hometown world.