NEWLY COMPLETED AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS of construction, at a cost of six million marks, the pyramidal structure outside Leipzig was the largest war memorial in the world, comprising three hundred thousand tons of concrete and stone. Twelve colossal sentinels balanced their granite shields in a ring around the crown of the monument, as if to repel would-be invaders from any point in the compass.
Inevitably, they dwarfed1 Wilhelm II, more than 250 feet below. He bobbed in Prussian uniform down the steps from the dedication platform, his shrunken left arm clutching his sword. A crowd of sixty thousand cheered while a choir accompanied by six brass bands broke into “Nun danket alle Gott.” The date was 19 October 1913, the centenary of the birth of the modern German state. Here, Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated at the Battle of Leipzig2, or Volkerschlacht, as the Kaiser preferred to call it—“the People’s Battle,” greatest of all European clashes of arms.
Today’s ceremony also marked the twenty-fifth year of Wilhelmine rule. The significance of the occasion to all German-speakers was signaled by the attendance of a special guest, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Lumpen, colorless, and stiff, the heir to the Dual Monarchy was everything that the Kaiser was not. Their helmets bespoke their characters—Wilhelm’s a froth of white plumes, respondent to the slightest breeze, the archduke’s a stolid cylinder. The two men were, however, close friends, vacationing frequently in each other’s hunting lodges, and discussing questions of offense and defense against the Slav. It was a question which of them was the more obsessive on that subject.
Their shared neurosis was nothing compared to that of Franz Ferdinand’s protégé, marching a few steps behind them: General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff. Conrad’s anti-Slavism focused on Serbia, the most restive of the Balkan states crowding the Austrian border. That landlocked nation had already triggered two wars, each nominally against Turkey but strategically threatening its northern neighbor. Its aim was a southern Slav federation, a Yugoslavia strong enough to resist pan-Germanism.
Now, even as Leipzig celebrated the superiority of all things Teutonic, the archduke and general had disturbing news for Wilhelm. A third Balkan war was imminent. Serbia had sent troops into Albania in an attempt to gain access to the Adriatic Sea. The Austrian government was alarmed at t4 his development, which compromised its whole wall of security against two hostile empires—the Ottoman in the south, the Russian in the east. As a result, Vienna had sent a peremptory note to Belgrade: if Serbia did not withdraw from Albania by 26 October, it would be obliterated.
By the time this ultimatum was headlined in tomorrow’s European papers3 (sharing space, no doubt, with the dedication of the Volkerschlacht monument), six days would be left. That was hardly enough time for Serbia to comply, let alone hope that nations dreading a more general war might intervene. As every half-educated burgher living west of the steppes knew, Russia was Serbia’s most reflexive ally, and would not tolerate any further Austrian aggrandizement in the Balkans. The annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 had been provocation enough.
Wilhelm had not welcomed that particular move. But recently he had shown signs of conversion to the Austrian way of thinking. His particular phobia was against the Eastern Slavs: the Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and even Poles who for fourteen centuries had menaced Prussia across its erasable slate of a border—the plattland that any tourist could see from the monument’s observation deck, fading into the enormous distance. A thousand years before, Leipzig had been a Slav settlement. Those sentinels bespoke the granite determination of Teutons that it would never be so again.
“Ichgehe mit Euch,”5 the Kaiser said privately to Conrad. “I am with you. The other powers are not ready; they will attempt nothing against it. In a couple of days you would be at Belgrade.”
Franz Ferdinand jealously6 observed the intimacy developing between Wilhelm and his general, and returned to Vienna that evening in something of a huff.
LEFT ALONE TO STAND against the gray Saxon sky in the days following, after the tents and platforms and bunting had been cleared away, the Leipzig memorial became an iconic shape, inspiring to Germans, Austrians, and Reichslanders, ludicrously overwrought to citizens of other countries. French comments had7 been especially scathing. It was not only the largest such pile since the days of Ancient Egypt, it was something new in its völkisch, ethnic quality, appealing less to memory of a particular battle than to the aspirations of a people who felt that their time for dominance had come.
An eruptive bigness8, as of lava rising, seethed beneath the vineyards and farms and spotless towns of the Fatherland. Since the Franco-Prussian War, the population had burgeoned to sixty-eight million, twenty-nine million more than that of France. Its notable feature was a huge new middle class, thrown up by a fabulously successful program of industrialization. To Germans, all things seemed possible in the arts and sciences. What the monument was to architecture, the symphony was to Richard Strauss. In Vienna on the night of the Leipzig celebration, that master of the modern orchestra had premiered his most gargantuan score yet, a Festive Prelude for 150 instruments, including eight horns, six extra trumpets, and organ. It would seem that music could not get more earth-shaking. Yet Arnold Schönberg was simultaneously opening up a new system of harmony which, like the relativism of Albert Einstein, abolished all sense of stability.
Macht alone, overwhelming political and armored might, could contain all these forces and perpetuate the Reich for who knew how many thousand years. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s son and heir, declared that it was the “holy duty” of his countrymen to hold themselves ready for a “conflagration” which would make the battle of 1813 seem but a first spark. “It is only by9 reliance on our brave sword that we shall be able to maintain that place in the sun which belongs to us, and which the world does not seem very willing to accord us.”
If the prince’s language sounded unduly inflammatory, it was because he sensed a Prussian militarism developing in the very Volk that Germany’s oligarchy of princes and generals depended on to beat back, once and for all, the Eastern hordes. Although there was no denying the impressive depth and breadth of the Kultur that had made Germany the most powerful nation in the world, its society was paradoxically rife with socialism and “progressivism,” not to mention communism and anarchism. In last year’s10 general elections, the Social Democratic Party had won an astonishing third of the vote, and, with Catholic centrists and other anti-Prussian factions, now held the balance of power in the Reichstag.
As a reaction to that victory, the Kaiser and his court of almost exclusively Prussian generals and landowners had forced upon the parliament the greatest troop buildup in German history. The army was now increased to well over three-quarters of a million men, with seventy-two-thousand called up this month alone. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, argued that a record force was needed to prepare for the coming battle of “Slavdom against Germandom.” The Reichstag had reluctantly granted his wish, but was looking for an issue that would transform it at last into a parliament of public opinion, rather than a tame enacter of the imperial will.
SERBIA YIELDED TO THE Austrian ultimatum. Its surly capitulation served only to accelerate Russia’s long-term program of rearmament and (what made the German Chancellor ever more11 apprehensive) raiload building, with most lines pointing west. Across Europe, from Königsberg to Bordeaux and from Naples to Edinburgh and Christiania, fears of a multinational war sharpened into certainty. Georges Clemenceau, France’s former prime minister and its most eloquent Cassandra, had been railing since the spring against thepangermaniste monstrosity in Leipzig, and all it stood for. The German army bill, he wrote, made it “inevitable” that France must fight for her survival again—and soon. She was, after all, the ally of Russia. His warnings used so many words of common meaning on both sides of the Atlantic that they did not need translation. Germany was plotting a “fureur d’hégémonie12 dont l’explosion ébranlera tout le continent européen quelque jour.” Its ultimate aim was nothing less than “une politique d’extermination.”
EARLY IN NOVEMBER13 there was a scuffle between two army recruits on a rifle range outside Zabern, in the Reichsland.
In living French memory, Zabern had been Saverne, and the Reichsland known as Alsace-Lorraine. But the Ninety-ninth Prussian Infantry had been garrisoned in the town for twenty-five years. Restaurants served more beer than wine, and the Kaiser’s portrait hung in the offices of the civil authority.
The fight on the range was broken up by Günter von Forstner, a twenty-year-old lieutenant. With members of his entire squad listening, he lectured the youths on the importance of proper behavior in a region where there was a racial difference between the conquerors and the conquered. It was especially important not to tangle with any “Wackes” downtown.
Wacke, an almost untranslatable word connoting peasant or thickheaded inferiority, had as much force locally as nigger in the United States. Forstner went on to say that German soldiers had, nevertheless, the right to draw arms against this subspecies if shoved or insulted. “Should you kill14 one of them, so be it,” the lieutenant went on. “Behave right, and you’ll get ten marks from me, no one will blame you.”
A sergeant standing at his elbow increased the offered bounty. “And me, I’ll15 give you three marks more.”
They were indulging in what passed among Prussians as humor. But the citizens of Zabern were not amused when reports of Forstner’s words were published in two town newspapers. With repetition, the lieutenant’s language got stronger: “For every one16 of those dirty Wackes you cut down, I’ll pay you ten marks.” The story spread to Paris and Berlin.
On 7 November, a public demonstration broke out in front of Forstner’s house on the main street in Zabern. Stones were thrown. Amid catcalls of “Dirty Prussian!” two toughs broke down the front door before being dispersed by police. Thereafter, Forstner was escorted everywhere by a security detail so preposterously armed that the curses thrown at him became death threats. Within twenty-four hours, officers of the entire regiment were rendered jittery by the gathering hostility. Colonel Adolf von Reuter, the garrison commander, was so provoked by shouts in the street, as he sat at dinner in the Carpe d’Or tavern, that he went out and ordered the crowd to disperse, in the tone of a man who expected to be obeyed. His pallor and flap ears succeeded only in stimulating a competition for creative insults: “ Tête de macchabée!”17 “Espèce de lapin blanchi avant l’âge!”* The fury of the crowd grew till he and his fellow diners had to retreat to the barracks, pursued by hecklers screaming, “We are not Wackes!”
Demonstrations followed almost daily, with cries of “Vive la France.” Colonel Reuter warned the municipal government that if it did not keep order, he would impose martial law. He then left for an undisclosed destination, pleading ill health. Lieutenant Forstner was overheard telling recruits, “As far as I18 am concerned, you can shit on the French flag.” This was too much for his superior officers, who disciplined him with six days’ house arrest. Police contained the situation until 17 November, when Reuter returned and announced that he did so “by order of his Majesty the Emperor and King.”
By now, l’affaire Zabern had attracted the attention of international observers, who saw it as a showdown between German and French nationalism, more fraught with strategic implications than the scare over Serbia. Reporters and photographers from as far away as Bloomington, Indiana, poured into the little town. Demonstrations against the Ninety-ninth Regiment resumed. On 28 November, a huge crowd assembled in the square outside the barracks, as if miming the attack on the Bastille. Reuter finally lost patience. He sent sixty bayoneted troopers into the mob and arrested twenty-seven Alsatians, including three members of the Zabern judiciary. The offenders, judges and all, were thrown into jail overnight, and accounts of the incident telegraphed to Berlin.
The anti-Prussian majority in the Reichstag was sufficiently alarmed to demand an explanation from Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and his war minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn. When Bethmann-Hollweg rose in response on 3 December, the situation in Zabern had deteriorated further. Lieutenant Forstner, freed from house arrest, was accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, and, for good measure, befouling the linen of a local hostelry. Enraged by shouts of19 “Bettscheisser,”* he had slashed one Alsatian across the face.
The Chancellor, sounding20 old and weary, announced that the lieutenant was to be court-martialed. Citizens of the Reichsland would, he promised, no longer be referred to as Wackes. On the other hand, they had no more right to complain about ethnic discrimination “than any other branch of our people.” He hedged his way through a defensive review of the situation, over roars of contempt from socialists and centrists. General Falkenhayn—every bit as bristling as his Austrian counterpart—followed with a speech praising Forstner as a young Prussian of the best military type. The majority needed no further excuse to move that Germany’s entire military government be censured.
During the debate21 that followed, Bethmann-Hollweg tried to forestall what was in effect a vote of no confidence by offering to withdraw the ninety-ninth Regiment from Zabern. But his conciliatory gesture was ignored, and on the evening of 4 December the Reichstag demanded his resignation by a vote of 293 to 54.
TO THE AMAZEMENT of democracies around the world, the Chancellor declined to step down. He stated that he served the Kaiser, and would continue in office, with Falkenhayn at his elbow, as long as His Majesty needed him. Court-martial proceedings against Reuter and Forstner were intitiated, but their ultimate acquittals, given Prussian solidarity, were not in doubt. Socialist demonstrations of rage and shame22 broke out in seventeen German cities, including Leipzig and Berlin. The government’s only reaction was to punish two army recruits for publicly confirming Forstner’s reported insults.
By the end of 1913, l’affaire Zabern was yesterday’s news. But the oracular Georges Clemenceau remained under no illusion as to what tomorrow’s would be. In an editorial addressed to his peace-minded younger countrymen, he bade them hear (if they would not see) “the cannons on the other side of the Vosges,” and warned that the noise would soon be too loud to ignore.
One day, at23 the fairest moment of blossoming hope, you will quit your parents, your wife, your children, everything you cherish, everything that holds your heart and fortifies it, and you will go forth, singing as you always have, yet a different song this time, with brothers (true brothers, they will be) to confront the ugly killer that mows down human lives in a veritable hurricane of steel.
* Corpse-head! You prematurely whitened rabbit!
* Bed-shitter.