Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History

2 | Bourgeois Culture and Civil Society: The German Case in a European Context

II Bourgeois Culture and Civil Society: The German Case in a European Context The Opportunities of Semantic Ambivalence I t is the aim of this chapter to bring together two lines of argumentation and two bodies of historical research that are separate in most languages, including English: the history of civil society and the history of the bourgeoisie. Such an attempt is in a way natural for German-speaking historians , owing to the ambivalent meaning of the German concept Bürger. With respect to the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, Bürger refers to those who belong to the Bürgertum, a small social formation including businessmen, entrepreneurs, capitalists, managers, and rentiers as well as lawyers, judges, academically trained civil servants, ministers, engineers, and scientists, that is, persons of property and education . At the same time, Bürger means “citizen” and refers to all members of a community regarding their rights and duties. With respect to this second meaning, the corresponding adjective bürgerlich can be translated as “civil” or even “civic,” bürgerliche Gesellschaft as “civil society.”1 The double meaning of Bürger is present in the language of the sources that historians of the modern period study. As a Breslau philosopher and translator, Christian Garve, wrote in 1792: in German, the concept Bürger possesses “more dignity” than the French bourgeois, since it refers to two matters that have two different names in French. On the one hand, Bürger refers to every member of a civil society (bürgerliche Gesell­ schaft), that is, citoyen in French. On the other hand, it means 10 civil society and dictatorship a nonnoble inhabitant of a town (or a city) who lives off a trade, that is, bourgeois.2 The double meaning of Bürger is reflected upon and made use of by a large part of the recent scholarly literature produced by German-speaking historians with respect to the history of the bourgeoisie or the middle class in modern times. Research and writing about this topic have expanded in the last twenty-five years.3 One should take this semantic ambivalence seriously. Does it have structural causes related to a more or less hidden similarity between the bourgeoisie and civil society in German-speaking central Europe? How has the relation between the bourgeoisie and civil society changed over time? Does the combination of these two concepts permit a comparative view on the history of European societies and particularly the German case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? I want to explore these questions, but first the two concepts—and the phenomena they refer to—must be introduced in a slightly more thorough way. Bürgertum: Bourgeoisie Defined by Its Opponents and Its Culture Historians have dealt with the history of the Bürgertum—bourgeoisie or middle class—for a long while. One type of studies concentrated on the Bürgertum as a legally and culturally specific group within European towns and cities, including master artisans, merchants, shopkeepers, and similar categories. This research focused on the early modern period but continued into the nineteenth century. Another type of research dealt with the bourgeoisie as a class vis-à-vis (and in conflict with) other classes, frequently inspired by Marxist categories. In this view, the wealthy merchants and bankers, the rising industrialists , managers, and capitalists (Wirtschaftsbürgertum), their economic interests and political influence took center stage from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the con- Bourgeois Culture and Civil Society 11 text of the history of education (Bildung) and professionalization , other historians dealt with other types of middle-class persons, from the study of the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Enlightenment through the history of academic professions to research on science and its institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this context historians dealt with the educated and academically trained parts of the bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum), and it was in this area that the social history of the bourgeoisie connected, early on, with the history of culture and with the history of gender relations.4 In the 1980s, historians intensified research on the Bürgertum. As far as this work was conducted in German, attempts toward clarifying definitions took place that owed a lot to the rise of cultural history on the one hand, Weberian conceptual influences on the other. On the one hand it became accepted that both merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and other businesspeople as well as professionals...