In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture by Benjamin Ziemann
  • Jesse Kauffman
Benjamin Ziemann. Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 315 pp. US$99.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-10702-889-0.

As Benjamin Ziemann richly illustrates in this book, the end of the Great War was immediately followed in Germany by a heated battle between competing narratives of the conflict, fought by means of parades and ceremonies, pamphlets and novels, flags and memorials. The stakes were high: the war’s legacy in Germany included two million dead soldiers, defeat, a peace viewed by many Germans as harsh and shameful, and the emergence of a new democratic government [End Page 126] tolerated by many, hated by some, and looked to with impossibly high expectations by all. Eventually a right-wing version of events won out, according to which the German army, undefeated in the field, had been “stabbed in the back” by Jews and radicals on the home front. Ziemann’s central question is why this narrative won, with horrible consequences for Germany and Europe. Ziemann convincingly refutes the claim that the nationalists won the war for the narrative because the republicans (a rather loose term here but one that usually denotes members of the Social Democratic Party [SPD] who supported the Weimar constitution) stood passively by; he shows that the republicans, and republican veterans in particular, were active participants in the battle of ideas and symbols that raged in Weimar Germany.

Ziemann shows how the diffuse elements of a distinctively republican narrative of the war and its aftermath had crystallized by the mid-1920s, around the time the republican veterans’ association, the Reichsbanner, was founded. Several key ideas were at the core of the republican narrative of the war (which was propagated mainly by the SPD and Reichsbanner), including pacifism, a refusal to indulge in hatred of Germany’s wartime enemies, and a belief that the common soldiers had been victims of the inherently unjust imperial system. The republican narrative also held that defeat had actually been victory, because it marked the end of this system. Republicans attempted to popularize this narrative, for example by participating in commemorative events when they could, holding their own events when they could not, and publishing stories by soldiers in republican and socialist periodicals. As Ziemann shows, however, they faced formidable opposition, both institutional (for example in the form of the hostility of municipal governments and the Reichsarchiv) and popular.

Methodologically, Ziemann is interested in the power of symbols, songs, and other cultural products to imbue experience with meaning. But he is keen to embed the production and reception of culture within its particular historical context. In this, he is brilliantly successful, and his book should be read by all those who wish to take up the theme of the cultural history of war experience. The chapter entitled “The Personal Microcosm of Reichsbanner Activism” clearly illustrates Ziemann’s methods as well as his arguments. The chapter focuses on one Fritz Einert, a clerk, war veteran, SPD member, and Reichsbanner man. In response to a historian’s plea for material to help refute the “stab-in-the-back” legend, Einert sent in a narrative of his war experiences, which he based on a rereading of his own wartime letters. The degree to which SPD and Reichsbanner rhetoric found its way into Einert’s account is remarkable: Einert views the end of the war as a liberation from “the yoke of Prussian militarism” (120) and asserts that class conflict made life in the army brutally unbearable. He also depicts the soldiers as passive victims, sent out to die by an exploitative, inhumane system. Through Einert, Ziemann addresses the problem of reception, the key issue in works of cultural history of this sort. In addition, the chapter reveals one of Ziemann’s real strengths as a historian: his ability to empathize with his subjects and put a human face on the cultural upheavals of the Weimar period. [End Page 127]

Ziemann’s claim that the republican cultural struggle over the war narrative reveals a...

pdf

Share