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Chapter 7. Testing Patriotic Alliances, 1913–1916
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CHAPTER 7 Testing Patriotic Alliances, 1913–1916 In the late Kaiserreich, veterans’ and soldiers’ gravesites offered ample opportunity for nationalist musings. The centrality of the dead soldier’s sacri‹ce in the national imagination elevated cemeteries to sites of of‹cial patriotic celebration and mourning. Historians such as George Mosse interested in the distinctive “styles” of German nationalist thought see cemeteries as increasingly important spaces in shaping the “myths” about war in the long nineteenth century.1 But cemeteries also were contested places in the Kaiserreich, a point overlooked in the totalizing myths of nationalism too often reproduced by its historians. Celebrations over soldiers ’ graves were not a monopoly of the nationalist Right. There were the graves of “heroes” singled out for other memory, those who fell in March 1848 defending “democracy,” for example, and honored later by the socialists in the Wilhelmine era. The war dead played into contemporary political struggle over de‹nitions of the German nation that took on added urgency in the crisis years between 1912 and 1914, as war seemed to loom on the horizon. Neither the patriotic Right nor the socialist Left was immune from public taunting. On March 12, 1914, for example, the marble platform on the Kaiser Frederick memorial in Charlottenburg was painted red and inscribed with the words “red week,” eliciting a frantic police search for the culprits. A few days later, against the backdrop of thousands of socialists honoring those buried in Friedrichhain who had died in March 1848, a veteran’s association in a small cemetery laid two bouquets of ›ower decorated with black-and-white ribbons on the graves of soldiers of 1848, appropriating their sacri‹ce for Crown and fatherland.2 251 1. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 44–50. 2. KZ, no. 119, March 12, 1914, and no. 130, March 18, 1914. Cemeteries and Nationalist Doubts Patriotic re›ections around military gravesites revealed deep uncertainties in the nationalist community itself, even as they worked to reproduce legitimate authority. These ambiguities also have been largely ignored in the literature on the cultural forms of national identity. In July 1913, for example, the Kreuz-Zeitung printed the ruminations of Karl Ruhkopf about an “old veteran’s grave” (that of Karl von Reitenkamp, who had died in 1868) in his hometown.3 In the narrative, Ruhkopf describes how as a boy he often walked through the cemetery and noticed a gravestone emblazoned with the patriotic inscription, “Whoever ‹ghts for the right cause will win” (wer recht kämpfet der wird gekrönt). The boy fantasizes that the veteran, a ‹ghter in the Wars of Liberation, came from old aristocratic lineage, as the name implies; his sacri‹ce, indeed, had been crowned in the “glorious years of 1870–71,” which led to one, single, and free fatherland. In Ruhkopf’s words, German unity promised “new and splendid rights for princes and people (Fürsten und Völker), legal guarantees for all the social orders . . . [and] laws tearing down the restrictive custombarriers .” The new state “also did not forget its poor and dejected and sought to protect them from misery and hunger when they became ill, ailing , or old.” This description in many ways reproduced the of‹cial nationalist imagination that drew together elements of a conservative legitimacy, with its links between dynasty and folk, the rule of law, and care for the poor and the downtrodden. But then, Ruhkopf says, “I went from my fantasy to daily life (Alltag ).” An inquiry with his mother revealed that von Reitenkamp was not a nobleman but an ordinary man, indeed a petty Dienstmann, a “poor man of the people” (ein armer kleiner Mann). This “old soldier” had lived a “hard, impoverished, and depressed life,” which did not diminish the author’s admiration, since heroes come in many forms. He had received few accolades in life, however, although he was honored in 1863 at the ‹ftieth-anniversary celebration of the battle of Leipzig. His comrades and friends provided the tombstone because his widow could not afford it. Somewhat bitterly, Ruhkopf notes that “when she was buried next to him . . . perhaps to save money the von was left off her name.” But the point of the story was in the ending. On a recent trip back home, Ruhkopf found that the gravestone had disappeared; according to the church supervisor, it had been sold to make room for other burials and now, presumably, had found a spot in another edi‹ce; it was serving alien functions. Ruhkopf pointedly...