Primary source 3: through the clippings of the Imperial Rural Union

For the past two days I have been looking through the press clippings of the Reichslandbund at the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfeld (the history of the building complex is posted above in German).

The Reichslandbund (Rlb) is translated as the Natural Rural League on the Wikipedia.org site, but that does not make much sense. I would translate it as the Imperial Rural Union, which still does not say much. In 1921, two German agricultural associations united to form the Rlb. Large landowners dominated its politics and it formed a large network of local associations and newspapers to advance the interests of "big" German agriculture alongside those of industry and labor in the Weimar Republic. Benjamin Ziemann suggested I take a look in their press archive, which goes back into the 1890s and reads like a gigantic collection of newspaper articles from newspapers all over Germany that the Rlb organized into a wide range of topics.

Since the collection is so large, I chose to first look at the press collection on Thuringia (Thueringen), the central German region in my study (depicted at left in pink on the map of Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933)). There is so much material that I chose the collection bound in a book for the years 1921-1924. I was interested in these years in particular because of the rise of the Nazi Party in Bavaria to the south and what I knew from earlier research about the rise in political violence and anti-Semitism all around Germany during that time. I wanted to see what fear looked like through this collection and how Germans responded.

Since the collection is primarily newspapers, although other materials occasionally pop up, many of the "voices" among these article clippings are middle class and Protestant, although they collections also include the newspapers of the local agricultural union, the communists and the social democrats. Among the middle class papers, there are conservative, nationalist, racist and democratic voices. It is hard to approach fear this way because I am really looking for descriptions of individual expressions of fear, but I am struck by how much fear does come up in this sampling of German newspapers and the way that Germans were transforming their politics.

In September 1921, Thuringia held its state parliamentary elections and the "Red Block" of Social Democrats (SPD), Independent Social Democrats (USPD) and Communists (KPD) were able to form a ruling coalition with a combined vote of more than 51%. The middle class Democrats were already well on the way to decline from their early successes in the first Weimar elections, but the other, more conservative middle class parties did very well. Much of the press clippings reflects their positions. Their authors very closely followed the decisions of the ruling "Red Block" coalition and the actions of everyday people who supported Social Democracy or Communism in Thuringian communities and they tended to play on the fears that middle class, Protestant Germans associated with the "Reds". Historians such as Helge Matthiesen have pointed out these trends before, but my research brings out some of the dimensions of these political battles even more. For example, conservative middle class authors tended to play the religion card more so than I think we know. So when the "Red Block" announced a new law in October 1921 that eliminated official state status in Thuringia for the holidays celebrating the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther's birthday (on October 31 and November 9 respectively), many papers carried headlines that stylized the decision as the beginning salvo in a new "Cultural War" (Kulturkampf) . The law also made the founding of the Weimar Republic (also on November 9) the new state holiday. Dissenting papers noted how the new law would eliminate religious education and choirs in the schools and reported cases of local ministers and teachers protesting the new law. The Rlb's local papers used the law's promulgation to condemn the entire Weimar Republic. In many cases, the dissenting papers exaggerated the very nature of the law, claiming that the socialists and communists wanted to destroy freedom and moral values and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat and the masses. They portrayed political appointments and hiring practices of the ruling state government as infiltrations, allowing socialists and communists to work in the local police forces, and claiming that the government unfairly granted amnesty to people accused of "political crimes" (in their view, to mostly socialists and marxists), while more aggressively prosecuting rightwing associations and censoring their media like the film Fredericus rex after the rightwing assassination of the German-Jewish industrial and political leader, Walther Rathenau in June 1922. In this context, as Matthiesen has noted, conservative middle class authors railed against the powerlessness of the middle classes and called for a unified middle class voting block of their own made up of Protestants, craftsmen and farmers.

What also struck me about these records was how central Thuringia was to German politics in the early 1920s. My project assumes this approach and the archival materials I saw today focus on the region. So these approaches slants my view a bit, but it was remarkable how many papers from other regions picked up on the developments in Thuringia and even claimed that this region was the cultural battleground and political laboratory of Germany. Thuringia was a newly organized political state that contemporary authors often referred to as "Greater Thuringia". Locals writers initially talked excitedly of the possibilities for the idea of a Middle Germany (Mitteldeutschland), but the fear of a "red" central Germany made national headlines in 1921 and 1922 as something Germans should fear. Papers closely followed the region's events, picking up on the terrorist tactics of local communists who organized paramilitary organizations, conducted house searches, stopped local commercial traffic and attacked right-wing demonstrations. When the socialist and communist leaders of the central German states of Braunschweig, Saxony and Greater Thuringia gathered in Dresden to discuss their regional cooperation, papers across Germany painted the picture of socialist Middle Germany as a grave danger to the nation (the Reich).
I have not yet found much public reaction to the rise in anti-Semitism in this region in 1922 and 1923, but I have found files in this collection that thematized this issue too. I will come back in another week to see those. Meanwhile, I am also struck by the region's connections to events in Bavaria and Berlin. With the possibility of a "red" Central Germany, conservative leaders in southern Thuringia were seriously considering joining their districts to the Federal state of Bavaria. In the fall of 1923, hyperinflation, rising unemployment and the French occupation of the Ruhr industrial valley in western Germany dominated the national headlines. Meanwhile, the national government ordered the military in Thuringia and Saxony to keep order, especially against the threat of communist violence and pending revolution. However, a new group calling themselves the National Socialists were literally reported to be massing paramilitary units on the southern borders of Thuringia and the rumor was they were going to seize power in Munich and march on Berlin.