3
The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 by Richard J. Evans Review by: Carla Messman The American Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 5 (Dec., 1977), pp. 1277-1278 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1856445 . Accessed: 25/06/2014 03:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:15:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933by Richard J. Evans

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 by Richard J. EvansReview by: Carla MessmanThe American Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 5 (Dec., 1977), pp. 1277-1278Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1856445 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 03:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:15:37 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Modern Europe 1 277

would dutifully follow their counsel. The kaiser's captivity is presumably the "decadence" in Wilke's pretentiously ominous title; the use of the word, which does not appear in the text, is never explained or defended. To Wilke, the result of William's subjection to this reactionary clique was that imperial Germany failed to develop into a parliamentary monarchy, and this in turn paved the way for 1914 and subsequently for Hitler's ascent to power.

A good case could be made that neither Wilke nor R6hl has written the last word on the 189os, for both labor under the assumption that there was a clearly discernible victor in the battle for influence. In fact, after 1897, as before, the conduct of govern- ment in Wilhelmine Germany was a contest of wills that never proceeded to the resolution which Bismarck had earlier accomplished at the expense of William I and all others who competed with him for power. While initiatives sometimes came from William II's servants in the government, German politics after 1890 was usually an exotic and un- settling farrago of royal caprice and bureaucratic adjustment. No one really led and no one, cer- tainly not the kaiser's luckless subjects, won. With William II, nothing-including the alleged exer- cise of a personliches Regiment-was steady and en- during. Wilke is correct in arguing that the Kaiser was temperamentally unsuited to be an autocrat. The royal will was spasmodic in application and inconsistent in its aims.

Wilke's narrative, which seldom transcends a textual analysis of letters and diary entries written by the major figures, constantly threatens to founder in billows of indigestible detail. He is con- cerned with people, but he almost never pauses to unravel the tangled roots of their connections with one another. The strange and powerful hold which Holstein exerted on Hohenlohe, Eulenburg, and Billow needs to be explained in terms of their relationships while Bismarck was still chancellor. No illumination of the mutual fascination William II and Eulenburg had for one another is to be found here. We are provided little hint that part of Marschall's problems with the kaiser were due to the state secretary's abrasive personality and South German origins. Furthermore, the depiction of Hohenlohe, who drifted between the rival camps surrounding the throne, is unsatisfactory, for Wilke cannot decide whether the aged chancellor was a man of straw to whom politics was little more than temporizing or a selfpossessed states- man who shrewdly realized that ultimately more could be achieved by saying yes rather than no the kaiser. Wilke does better in describing the elusive and devious Eulenburg, but his critical relation- ship with William II is exaggeratedly described as being one in which the courtier "managed affairs"

for his sovereign. In spite of all Eulenburg's unc- tuous and servile protestations of abject devotion to the Kaiser, he would indeed liked to have played such a commanding role. And later Builow would be even more eager to place William II under his thumb. Neither succeeded, and both eventually were deserted by the kaiser, who in the end sur- vived all those who sought to capture him for their own ends.

LAMAR CECIL

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

RICHARD J. EVANS. The Feminist Movement in Ger- many, I894-1933. (Sage Studies in Twentieth Cen- tury History, number 6.) Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications. 1976. Pp. xiv, 310. Cloth $13.50, paper $7.50.

The title of this work is misleading. What Richard J. Evans has undertaken is an analysis of the bourgeois women's movement, as embodied in the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), not an analysis of the feminist movement as such. Though defini- tions might have helped clarify the intended scope of his study, the problem goes beyond one of se- mantics. For to label the BDF a feminist organiza- tion, even in its so-called "radical" period (I896-1908), clearly misrepresents the nature of feminism. Moreover, labeling the I896-1908 period "radical feminist" corresponds in no way to the contemporary understanding of that term. The BDF was a bourgeois organization with middle- class aims, and this was its basic weakness. A minor criticism involves Evans' sexist word choice, including the use of masculine pronouns for unde- fined antecedents and the illogical reference to the Vaterland as "she."

These criticisms having been noted, what re- mains is an extremely ambitious and well-con- ceived study of the complex evolution of the BDF from its foundation in 1894 to its dissolution shortly after the Nazi takeover. On the basis of exhaustive research, Evans investigates the major traumas and turning points in BDF history, high- lighting the 1908 rejection of liberal individualism in favor of a Naumannistic world-view which led the BDF down the road to political conservatism and v-lkisch pretensions. Indeed, the Nazi attitude toward women is foreshadowed in this evolution, providing a continuity in the German women's movement too often overlooked or misunderstood by students of the period.

Evans addresses two issues in particular which make this work of vital importance. Both concern the close relationship between the BDF and Ger- man liberalism and give this work wider impact.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:15:37 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1278 Reviews of Books

Fluctuations of BDF policy closely paralleled changes in the overall political climate. Like the liberals, the bourgeois women's movement leaders lacked a coherent ideology to give them direction and hence took a pragmatic position at every turn. While it may have ensured temporary success, in the long run this policy was as disastrous for Ger- man women as it was for German liberals. The dilemma each faced was the classic problem of representation versus leadership in the critical area of social legislation. Both the liberals and the BDF chose to represent rather than lead and found themselves in the position of being co-opted by both ends of the political spectrum.

In the larger context, Evans explores the funda- mental weakness of the Weimar Republic. From the start, German liberalism proved incapable of accommodating change; in 1918 and again in 1933 a deus ex machina resolved conflict. Parliamentary action was a sham in imperial as well as in republi- can Germany. The women's movement reflects an important feature of the failure of liberalism in Germany and offers further insight into the nature of the Nazi triumph.

CARLA MESSMAN

Hamline University

GUSTAV STRESEMANN. Schriften. Edited by ARNOLD

HARTTUNG. Introduction by WILLY BRANDT.

(Schriften grosser Berliner.) Berlin: Berlin Verlag. 1976. Pp. xvi, 438. DM 38.

The number of monographs dealing with aspects of Stresemann's policies has increased rapidly since the war; the Bibliographie Gustav Stresemann com- piled by Martin Walsdorff (1972) is 207 pages long! His own writings, while available to histo- rians on microfilm, have long gone out of print. The most important selection of his papers, Ver- machtnis, edited by his secretary Henry Bernhard in three volumes (1932-33), appeared at a most inauspicious time, just when Hitler came to power. He saw to it that the whole set was destroyed after only a modest number of copies had been sold; they are now rarely found on the antiquarian book market.

Arnold Harttung's compilation, therefore, fills a gap in more ways than one. Stresemann's Reden und Schriften (1926) stop after Germany's entrance into the League of Nations; the Vermachtnis starts, far too late, in 1923. The new selection, brief though it is, aims to cover Stresemann's whole life. Harttung avoids the error of overemphasizing his role in foreign affairs. Instead he d9es justice to his total personality, including his accomplishments in business organizations, social reform, and party politics. His smart selection is followed by a few

testimonials written by people who knew Strese- mann intimately such as Lord D'Abernon, The- odor Eschenburg, and Antonina Vallentin. The volume begins with an address by Willy Brandt and concludes with an impressive essay by Carl von Ossietzky, the pacifist martyr of the Hitler days; both, like Stresemann, were honored by the Nobel Peace Prize.

Any selection from such a wealth of material is bound to omit significant items. I regret, for ex- ample, the fact that Stresemann's moving tribute to Friedrich Naumann was not included, for Stresemann had learned more from him than from any other German political thinker. A table of historical events and a brief biographical diction- ary at the end of the volume will be useful for younger readers in particular.

Harttung's volume should be especially valuable for American graduate students beginning re- search on Stresemann and the Weimar Republic. They will learn from it that serious study of him should not be limited to the period after I918 or 1923, but ought to encompass his whole life and the many facets of his unique career.

FELIX E. HIRSCH

Trenton State College

JOHN HOWARD MORROW, JR. Building German Air- power, I909-I9I4. Knoxville: University of Ten- nessee Press. 1976. Pp. ix, 150. $12.95.

The relationship between the military and indus- try has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, but detailed investigations of the ori- gins and development of particular branches of the armament industry have not been examined as carefully as they should be. John Morrow has written one of the first accounts in English of the development of the air industry in Central Europe before World War I. Based largely on archival research, Morrow compares the growth of the air industries in Prussia, Bavaria, and Austria-Hun- gary while noting the differences in the style and success these three states had in nurturing their infant industries.

In all three lands, important segments of the professional military quickly recognized the poten- tial of the airplane and warmly encouraged its development, but the bureaucratic responses of their respective ministries were far different. Mor- row argues that the Prussian policy of controlling aviation development through enforced industrial competition was superior to the Bavarian and Aus- trian policies of attempting to overdirect and guide their own selected, native factories. The Prussian War Ministry, although cautious, followed a sup- portive but sensible and pragmatic approach to-

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:15:37 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions