Collapse and Rebirth: The Creation of the Lex Sering

November 1918 was as momentous in the life of Max Sering as it was in the history of Germany. Over the course of one week, Sering’s only son was killed on the Western Front, revolution swept away the power of the professor’s beloved Kaiser, the war was lost, and Sering was asked to be a key leader in Germany’s postwar rejuvenation. In a 1969 interview, Erich Keup claimed that both Sering and Schwerin knew by “late Summer” that the war was lost and that nothing was secure in the East, from Posen to the Baltics.Footnote ¹ As we saw in Chapter 5, the reversal of German fortunes was swift. As late as September a confident Sering bestrode the steppe in Kiev, but by October a vanquished Sering spoke before students in Berlin about the darkening situation. In an article written immediately after the war, Keup explained that, on October 7, the inner colonial specialists of the GFK had gathered to inform the government that a massive settlement plan was going to be required for the soon-to-be returning soldiers. In a meeting held on October 16 to brainstorm potential solutions, Professor Franz Oppenheimer pushed back on Sering’s traditional inner colonial plans, arguing that something more akin to a “Garden City” approach to soldier settlement should be pursued.Footnote ² Chancellor Max von Baden had set up the Reichsarbeitsamt (Reich Labour Office) in early October, headed by the SPD member and later Weimar chancellor Gustav Bauer, in an attempt to get a handle on the deteriorating situation on the home front. The GFK seems to have gotten its message to the Chancellor and, at the beginning of November, Bauer met with Keup and Sering to discuss the impending return of millions of unemployed German soldiers. They specifically conceived of these potential settlers as useful tools in the threatened East, especially regarding Wilson’s principle of self-determination and the fact that the border with a new Poland would soon be drawn along ethnic lines. Bauer then asked Sering to write a Reich Settlement Law (hereafter RSG), and to in effect shape and oversee a renewed inner colonization in an about-to-be-defeated Germany.Footnote ³ Just as the “opportunity” created by conquest in the East had given Sering free reign over “natives” in order to come up with settler plans to his liking, so the opportunity of the fall of traditional power in Germany itself allowed him at this moment to set an agenda free from the old Conservative obstruction. Amidst so much loss Sering must have smiled at the precipitous loss in power of his “eternal enemy,” the Junker. In fact, on November 10, Sering sent Bauer a copy of a letter he had written on November 17, 1917, explaining that settlement in Ober Ost, occupied Latvia, would be best accomplished by seizing one third of the land of the Baltic Junker. This, he now argued, should be a model for what needed to be done in Germany itself. In other words, the radical freedom of the war, which had allowed settlement specialists in Latvia to force the landed elite to bow to their will, was now the model Sering was asking to employ in the eastern provinces of Germany.Footnote ⁴

Tragically, at this very moment of respect and recognition for Sering the academic, Sering the father experienced the greatest loss of his long life. With a mere seven days of shooting left to go on the Western Front, Max Sering Junior was killed in action. While the official date of death is the fourth, with the German army in full retreat and disarray, some time may have passed before the elder Sering was officially informed. Although by far the most devastating, this was only one of many blows that Sering would take in the weeks to follow. Just as January 18, 1871, the crowning of Kaiser William the First as emperor of a united Germany, was the greatest day of Sering’s life, surely November 9, 1918, with its abdication and flight of William the Second, was one of the worst. The fall of the monarchy was followed by the Armistice on the eleventh and the full realization that Germany had been defeated. Almost immediately, Polish militias in Posen began taking control of that province, strongly indicating to Sering that he was about to lose his coveted settler colonial territory, the Wartheland. Yet, despite his world collapsing all around him, Sering had his eyes firmly on Germany’s immediate future and was hard at work on his new task, creating the RSG. On the ninth, the GFK was holding a meeting in its offices near the Potsdamer Bridge and could hear the ruckus down the street at the Reichstag as the abdication was underway. One member of the group later claimed that the future Settlement Law was largely sketched out at this very gathering.Footnote ⁵

On November 20, Bauer called a meeting at the Reichsarbeitsamt. Sering was the first speaker. He told the audience that he had already outlined a Settlement Law that would address the issue of the surplus of workers in the cities, and ideally bring two million men to rural Germany.Footnote ⁶ As the realization that the British Blockade of Germany was not ceasing with the Armistice and national hunger was only increasing, Sering claimed that Germany should become autarkic. Sering then seized this moment of power and prestige to inform the audience that his new law would involve the confiscation of one third of the land on large Junker estates. After all, Germany had required such a sacrifice from the Baltic barons for settlement in Latvia during the war, so now was the time to expect the same sacrifice from Germany’s own barons. The ensuing discussion involved a lot of pushback, including the usual argument that large estates produced more food than small ones, as well as the fear that such a rash settlement would encompass too many settlers who knew next to nothing about farming. Von Klitzing of Silesia argued that, while such a sudden settlement sounded good, he feared the new arrivals might give up on farming too easily and that they should, therefore, be tied to the land for seven years (an idea similar to what the Nazis would ultimately put into effect). Inevitably, and quite logically, the discussion found its way to the history of inner colonization since 1886. State Commissioner for Housing, Baron von Coels, noted that the Settlement Commission had only set up 25,000 farms at the alarming cost of a billion marks over thirty years. He argued that a defeated Germany simply did not have the money for such an endeavor. Representative for the Agricultural Ministry, Privy Council Krause further emphasized this point, stating that Sering was proposing five times more settlement than the Settlement Commission had managed in thirty years. Keup weighed in to support Sering’s plan, while encouraging “caution.” Sering rejoined that the reason the Settlement Commission had encountered so much trouble in the past was because the land had been so expensive, but his confiscation plan solved that problem. The session was ended by Dr. Tiburtius, the Representative for the Demobilization Office, who claimed that he liked any idea that would please the homecoming troops, an interest they all surely shared.Footnote ⁷

The ability of the settler colonizer to see virtually any and all space as empty and ripe for colonization achieved perhaps its most extreme form in the minds of “inner colonizers” immediately after the end of the war. In the first postwar issue of AFK, Erich Keup penned the lead article, “What Now?” Well, “inner colonization now” was his answer, of course, asking if there had ever been a better time. Keup argued that, although the cloud of war had stripped Germany of so much, leaving it very poor, it had also wiped clear a faulty foundation, destroying a nation that had nevertheless been a bit too industrial anyway. Now, the silver lining was that Germany could be born anew as a more properly agrarian nation, and the newly unemployed industrial workers and returning soldiers could move straight onto the land. In a final optimistic comment, made here by Keup before the full extent of the borders of the new Poland had been proclaimed, he rejoiced that the creation of a Polish state would soak up all the usual seasonal Polish labour, solving one of the age-old conflicts with the Junker, that is, their addiction to cheap, non-German farmhands.Footnote ⁸ The journal then reprinted a recent December speech by Hindenburg in which he promised land to the returning veterans for their “fifty months of undefeated work.” Interestingly, Hindenburg suggested that Germany should build garden cities and garden suburbs.Footnote ⁹ The author of the third article in this issue continued in the same heady vein of settlement possibilities in the still amorphous East, and described the land available in Latvia for veterans.Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, the infamous “Freikorps” episode was well under way at this very moment. Just as the dream of settling Germans in Courland was extinguished with the birth of an independent Latvia on November 18, 1918, a radical settlement scheme appeared to take its place in early 1919. The Latvian government, desperate in its war against Russian Bolsheviks, invited German soldiers to help the Latvians in their struggle, in return for a plot of land in the new republic. The men who came, the Freikorps, had little problem with the Latvian request to renounce their German citizenship for, after all, they felt betrayed by the new German government they believed had stabbed the nation in the back. This utopia of Teutonic soldiers settling in Courland was, however, not to be, as the behavior of the Freikorps resulted in the Latvians rejecting them. Most of the men were marching home to defeated Germany by late 1919.Footnote ¹¹

While some inner colonizers, and to a certain extent Hindenburg, still had their sights on Teutonic colonial territory, Keup was speaking of settling in Germany itself, even as the classic lands of inner colonization, Posen and West Prussia, were already slipping away. By the time Keup’s mentor, Max Sering, penned two articles on the subject in 1919, those two provinces were largely gone, and instead land that could be said to be “purely” German was to be the focus of Germany’s latest “colonial fantasies.” In an article in Schmollers Jahrbuch in which Sering described in detail how he wrote the RSG that had come into effect on January 29, 1919, he too mentioned the destruction of industry and how the government, through its support for this new legislation, was very much supporting the idea of getting the now unemployed proletariat out of the cities and onto the land. Crucially, for the man who once saw Prussian Poland as empty, then full when he discovered an empty Courland, Sering now had this to say about the Brandenburg farmland just east of Berlin: it was “emptied,” and “there is enough room available to bring in millions of settlers.”Footnote ¹²

He continued in this vein in an April 1919 AFK article, stating that remaining industry should be decentralized and that: “The German Empire must again become more of an agrarian land.” Sering argued that the only way to keep the unemployed industrialized masses from fleeing to America (and behaving like Italians or Russian Jews) would be to fill the “the wide open spaces in the temperate zone with homesteads.”Footnote ¹³ So many Germans had abandoned their farms for the cities that there was room throughout Germany for “millions of settlers.” Especially, Sering argued, if moors were drained. Sering further explained his rationale for this settlement scheme by pointing out that it was not simply economic flight from the land that had created this vacuum: the war itself had emptied the farms because so many of the fallen soldiers had come from the “healthy” rural districts (as Sering had long predicted they would). Sering argued that this plan would enable Germans to return to the kinds of areas where they naturally belonged. But Sering wanted to make clear that the simple creation of a new Landproletariat would be a disaster. Instead, the only way to truly reverse the demographic trend was to make life better for these new small, landowning farmers, and for that a fundamental “class” levelling had to take place: “It is important to remodel the social constitution of the large farmers and landed elite in the democratic sense, to bridge the class contradictions and to more evenly distribute the land, by setting up many smaller farms alongside larger ones.”Footnote ¹⁴ Here, with more power and prestige than he had ever had, Sering was dialing up his ultimately anti-Junker rhetoric. Embedded into the RSG was a new ability to annex land, but now, instead of being directed against Poles, it was to be used against the Junker themselves.Footnote ¹⁵ Along with this symbolic shift away from Poles and Polish farmland to Germans and German land, Sering ended this article proclaiming that inner colonization should be able to settle 200,000 to 300,000 families, vastly more than the entire Program of Inner Colonization had ever achieved. Quite simply, Sering, as always, moved and refocused his settler colonial vision to the space he had at his disposal.

This cool and collected academic tone was not so apparent in the public presentation of Sering at this time. In newspaper articles published in early 1919 we find the wartime, immoderate Sering, the one who saw the East through a radical, colonial lens. In “To Arms!,” in the February 17, 1919, Deutsche Tageszeitung, Sering called for the German Army to guard the threatened eastern border, stating that the Reich would lose 18 percent of its territory if the Poles got their way at Versailles. In a three-part article published in March, in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, entitled “The New Eastern and Western Borders,” Sering first reminded his readers of his interpretation of Wilson’s sentiments, “[t]he equal status of all civilized peoples (Kulturvölker) and the just peace of understanding that would result.”Footnote ¹⁶ Shockingly, the normally careful historian stated that long-term history was not so crucial and that, instead, it was the lives of those living today that mattered. He therefore called for a plebiscite in the land of his youth, Alsace-Lorraine, stating that, during the period before 1871, French revolutionary ideas had never really permeated the population and that these people had remained basically German. He then made the classic pivot of the imperial era, where Western or Central Europeans were always treated differently than “others,” stating that the eastern border regions were to be conceived of quite differently from the western. Whereas in the West there were natural borders, and therefore natural divisions between peoples, in the East, the only way to create such order would be the forced relocation/unmixing (Umsiedlung) of mixed ethnicities.

Sering described that, in 1916, as he travelled through Galicia and Russian Poland, the peasants in these areas told him they did not care who ruled over them, Russians, Germans, Austrians, only please not a Pole! (“Wenn’s nur kein Pole ist!”)Footnote ¹⁸ After detailing the various percentages of who was and was not German in the eastern Prussian provinces, he acknowledged that it was ultimately impossible to separate the various “language islands” of Germans from Poles. He then went further down this rather new and realistic vein, stating that, unlike West and East Prussia, Posen was in fact “old Polish” land and that, at best, it was a province that belonged to both nationalities. He mooted the idea of a plebiscite, with separate voting for each municipality (Gemeinde), followed by the proper drawing of an international border as fairly as possible between the western German speakers and eastern Polish speakers. This process was then to be completed by a years-long program of population exchanges, to purify the language border. Sering admitted this would be difficult, especially for cities, but ultimately worth it. If, instead, the region was simply taken from Germany, Sering prophesized in unusually graphic language: “[s]hould Germany be raped, her entire life energy would be used to close this bleeding wound at the first opportunity.”Footnote ¹⁹ Again, such horrendous upheaval was not suggested for the West, as Sering believed one simple plebiscite for all of Alsace-Lorraine should decide the status of the entire region.Footnote ²⁰

Figure 6.1 The creation of Poland, 1919

(Drawn by graphic company – original created for author)

The “Diktat”

On January 17, 1920, Sering swore an oath to uphold the constitution of the Weimar Republic, as was required of all civil servants. Nevertheless, he would devote the rest of his life to attacking and attempting to “right” the Treaty of Versailles that the Republic had signed.Footnote ²¹ He initially crystallized his opinions about the recent war and the Treaty in a booklet he published in 1920, The Peace Diktat of Versailles and Germany’s Economic Situation. He began, unsurprisingly, by detailing war crimes and starvation, claiming that, before 1914, civilians were not supposed to be targets in war and that, therefore, the Allies had been correct in their damning of the German army for its actions in Northern France during the 1918 retreat. But, Sering bitterly pointed out, what of the death of 800,000 German civilians due to the British Blockade and the accompanying calculated destruction of a highly developed national economy? These Allied actions, he decried, were worse than anything since Carthage. Sering claimed that the Allied justification for all of this was of course Germany’s so-called war guilt, but the documents showed that Germany wanted a localized war in Serbia, never had expansionist or annexationist desires, and possessed a Mitteleuropapolitik that was conservative and defensive in nature. Fascinatingly, Sering then conducted a brief overview of imperial history that concluded with his description of what he saw as the new trend by some European powers to not simply limit their colonization to “non-” or “half-civilized” peoples, but instead to now rule over fully European Volk, such as the Boers.Footnote ²² This was a preface to his bitter denunciation of the current colonization of Germans in Posen and West Prussia by their new Polish overlords. He ended his booklet with an optimistic prophecy that a global alliance would arise, untainted by the “mockery” of Versailles, and that a “planetary balancing of the Great Powers” would be restored and include Germany: “This knowledge shall strengthen our faith in a global moral order, and allows tormented humanity to see a shimmer of the morning glow of freedom on the darkened horizons.”Footnote ²³

Around the same time Sering penned a piece for AFK which laid out the latest evolution of his “eastern” thinking. Like many in Germany, he had transitioned from the 1917 thinker who saw almost limitless opportunities in the conquered East, to the bitterly conquered and defensive spouter of fear and prejudice. He began with some details of the agrarian mess in Russia caused by Communists, and cited Bertrand Russell on how this new regime was more Asiatic than European, functioning much like Britain’s India. Sering went one step further, buying into a powerful strain of antisemitism: “It is known that foreign elements, the Jews, are playing an overwhelmingly large role in the Soviet regime.”Footnote ²⁴ He continued his rhetorical tour through the conquered East and the many wrongs done to Germany. In Latvia and Estonia land had been stolen from the old German population and now one encountered Baltic barons relegated to the status of beggars. (At this point, Sering did not indicate his joy in 1918 when Hindenburg promised to expropriate a third of the same property!) Lastly, he walked through the humiliations being committed against the very Germans he had helped settle, in Posen and West Prussia, by a Polish regime that was behaving in a barbaric fashion. What is more, he warned, the Polish state, which had descended upon German land like a great fortress, was already thickly settled and this growing population was going to need more land. This should not have been a problem, Sering declared, as “indeed Poland had conquered rich colonial territory in the White Russian and Ukrainian speaking areas.”Footnote ²⁵ In fact, a December 1920 law had promised this land to Polish veterans.Footnote ²⁶ Yet, Sering opined, the Poles clearly had their expansionist eyes on Upper Silesia and East Prussia. He ended this screed against the Slavic Flood with an urgent call for renewed German inner colonization at the eastern border.Footnote ²⁷

Sering continued his diatribe against the Allies and Versailles with the publication two years later of a pamphlet entitled The Crisis of the Global Economy and Foreign Economic Policy.Footnote ²⁸ Here he blamed Germany’s deepening crisis on both the lost war as well as the terrible impositions of Versailles. After decrying how much of the East was lost, he could not believe that the Western Powers continued to drone on about the so-called Red Terror in light of what the Allies had already done and were currently doing to Germany: plunder, expulsions, abuse, and the murder of 800,000 via Blockade. The Allies were no better than the Russians, he concluded.

By 1923 the mood in the now thinner issues of AFK was one of frustration and impotence. There was of course no money available to run the program like the pre-war days and, in fact, the old Settlement Commission was officially terminated in 1922.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, the new expropriation laws, the ones directed against the Junker, were full of legal loopholes and no progress was being made on this front either. In addition to these financial and legal obstacles inner colonizers were under sustained attack from those arguing that thickly settled, small farms were inefficient in terms of food production. Sering argued against this, and the managing editor of AFK, Max Stolt, stated in an article entitled, “On the Question of ‘Food Insecurity’ due to Settlement,” that such anti-inner colonization arguments were poppycock.Footnote ³⁰ In a fascinating and starkly honest article from the previous year, Erich Keup claimed that inner colonization had never been about food production but, instead, had always been about thickly settling the land. A goal that Keup argued should now, especially in the threatened East, be paramount.Footnote ³¹

It is in this period that we get a rare hint of home life in a May 1923 letter in which Sering wrote that, in the midst of his dark mood regarding the French Occupation of the Ruhr, the grandchildren in his house reminded him how to smile.Footnote ³² In a letter of the following year, Sering noted that his mandatory retirement was looming. One can only imagine how hard such a thing would be for someone whose entire identity was being an engaged professor.Footnote ³³ As mentioned in Chapter 5, Dietrich Schäfer published a pamphlet in 1919 attacking Sering for suggesting to the German government that the founding of a Kingdom of Poland would result in hundreds of thousands of Polish troops for the German Army.Footnote ³⁴ In 1924, Schäfer pressed his attack with the publication of Eastern Europe and We Germans. Schäfer described how Bethmann-Hollweg had sent Sering to Warsaw after it was liberated in 1915 and that there Sering was informed that a powerful Poland would be good for Germany. But, seethed Schäfer, the clueless Sering never understood that a strong Poland would threaten German land, and that the promises Sering received from the Polish “temporary politicians” (Augenblickpolitiker) he spoke to in Poland had no guarantee of being kept after the war. Even Schmoller got on board, Schäfer wrote, and joined Sering in the claim that Poles would never pursue German land. Schäfer railed against what he saw as the continual lack of judgement (Urteilslosigkeit) of the best educated men that was on display during the war.Footnote ³⁵

This book led a certain Kurt Haase, four years later, to ask Sering for a memorandum he had written during the war about Poland, and whether there was any truth to Schäfer’s accusations. In the exchange of letters that followed, in what appears to be the only case of which I am aware, Sering openly and knowingly lied. Sering replied that he had never dealt with Bethmann-Hollweg in any way and that he had told Schäfer that he was wrong in his description of the events and Schäfer had simply ignored him.Footnote ³⁶ At the time, in late August 1928, Sering was ill and, thus, the final letter in this exchange was dictated to an assistant. In it, Sering once again correctly pointed out that he did not personally engage with the Chancellor, and that Schäfer was wrong to claim that the Chancellor sent an unprepared Sering to Poland, “the entire episode is made up out of thin air.”Footnote ³⁷ At most, Sering claimed, Bethmann-Hollweg might have seen his memorandum after it had been written. Sering then stated that he had written about Poland only twice. First, in August 1915, he went on a trip “of his own volition,” to research the agricultural situation in the Baltics, and only thereafter informed the Foreign Office of his findings. He stated that he had met Beseler in Warsaw at the end of that trip, and afterward wrote a short report. Second, one year later, in May and June of 1916, he journeyed east under contract with the Ministry of War, of which he was a member as Chair of the Scientific Economic Commission. He was to study the entire Polish economy, such as the Lodz textile industry. Here he noted that, when he spoke to the factory workers, they made it clear they wanted Poland to be economically tied to Germany, not Austria–Hungary. This journey resulted in his report “The Future of Poland.” Such topics as “military potential” were not in the report, as Sering stated he would only have spoken about such things as a “private man.” In any case, Sering claimed that independence discussions were well underway in Poland at the time, and thus in no way could his report be said to be the prime mover for the November 1916 declaration of the Kingdom of Poland. He admitted that he was asked throughout his trip for his opinion, but so was Schäfer. And his opinion was very much along the lines of Adolph Weber’s, or those of Naumann’s Mitteleuropa, published in 1915. To sum up, Sering declared, “Schäfer’s statement in his book ‘Osteuropa und wir Deutschen’ is pure fantasy.” But, as was pointed out several times in Chapter 5, in his confidential advice, to Beseler and anyone who would listen, Sering was in fact a serious and dogged lobbyist for exactly the very mistake Schäfer accused him of pursuing, especially his suggestion that supporting the Kingdom was worth it as the Poles would provide 700,000 soldiers to Germany.

A Shift to Race

Sering had met Gayl in Ober Ost during the war, when the latter was one of the strongest advocates for forced population transfer. In Gayl’s memoir, finished around 1942, he indicated that he was deeply antisemitic while at Ober Ost. He did write that Sering was very helpful to him when he took the reins of the GFK, and that they had a “frictionless relationship” into Sering’s later years. Gayl’s claim in his memoir that Sering was the loudest, most powerful voice for inner colonization, owing to his international fame, is all the more notable as it was written just as Sering’s Jewish background was being decried, as we shall see in Chapter 7.Footnote ⁴³ In any case, even before the GFK was under the control of Gayl, certain biological views were seeping into inner colonization, such as in a 1921 AFK article by Paul Lazarus, “The Health of the Volk via Hygienic Colonization.” After lamenting the loss of two million soldiers at the front and 800,000 civilians due to the Blockade, Lazarus argued that the most “racially weakening” factor was in fact “flight from the land,” as it placed people in “sick” cities with a declining birthrate: “The great biological remedy is hygienic colonization. The Volk must return to a more intimate relationship with Mother Earth.” This had happened in America, he argued, and now the miraculous results could be seen. His seemingly incongruous evidence was this: Sunday was still holy and healthy there, while Germans partied and drank that day away.Footnote ⁴⁴ In any case, soon racial thinking would turn more directly to the Poles.

As the national recovery continued and Germany was increasingly in the position to “act,” the Poles came more clearly into national view as the target of racial vitriol. By 1925 the latest version of an ethno-nationalist wall in the East to stem the Slavic Flood was appearing in the national press. In 1925, the Poles passed a law allowing for the expropriation of German farms in the former Prussian provinces, and, unlike the Prussians from 1908 to 1914, the Poles were much more effective in carrying out such forced removals. The national press reacted with the realization that Germany was on the way to losing those provinces permanently.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such a theme had been simmering in the pages of AFK since 1919, but began to boil at this time with a piece from a member of the editing team, Max Stolt, a man who importantly would later become the editor of the journal when under the control of the Nazis. In “Duties and Goals of Eastern German Settlement,” Stolt opened with what was ostensibly an argument about the economics of settling more Germans and food production. He then pointed out that farmers did not detest harvesting turnips, instead what they hated was doing so alongside culturally backward Slavs. “German Work for German Workers!,” he wrote.Footnote ⁴⁶ He argued that the new border was bleeding, and Slavs were permeating the “still” German land in the East, lowering the overall level of humanity. He then invoked the ancient description of Tacitus, that Germans had spread as far as the Bug and the Njemen, in order to plea that they therefore should again do so, but noted that in the endless struggle with the Slavs, the Germans had never been the aggressors. In an invocation of what would become an increasingly important question among German scientists, he asked if there was in fact enough Lebensraum for the German people and, with such aggressive neighbours, might Germany’s current space ultimately shrink? He then sided with the Sering faction when it came to the Junker, stating that large estates had to be broken up and filled with German settlement. Further, a new version of the wartime Grenzstreife (border strip) idea would not work, Stolt insisted, as Poles would simply infiltrate through it and settle behind the lines, so to speak. Instead, all of Germany had to be inner colonized, to take away all Raum from the enemy. He ended the article by citing Chancellor Luther, who had claimed that settlement was not “a vital issue,” instead it was “the vital issue.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The language of being on the defensive, of Germans as the victims of colonization, was widespread, and even appeared in an AFK piece about South Tirol and the attempt by Italian fascists to “denationalise” the Germans there.Footnote ⁴⁸ But of course the main German victims of aggressive colonization were always to be found in the East. Two AFK articles from 1924 depicted the ruination of the old Teutonic lands. One detailed how the worst moment in the 700 year history of the German Balts was currently underway as Latvians “reformed” the land.Footnote ⁴⁹ The other was a bittersweet story of how an entire village of Germans had created a new settlement in Chludowo in 1914 only to be expelled by the Poles in November 1921, and were now resettled together inside the new German borders.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1929, Max Stolt further pushed his theme of the porous border, arguing that many Poles continued to flow into Germany’s East, working as seasonal labour. He then ramped up his anti-Polish position, stating that the Poles were simultaneously drawing up actual invasion plans.Footnote ⁵¹

By this time Sering’s own rhetoric crossed into perhaps the most anti-Polish he had ever been in his life. In a speech in 1929, in which the initial focus was on Soviet redistribution of land, Sering eventually spoke of East Central Europe where he decried how “agrarian laws” were being used as “war materiel” (Kampfmittel) against Germans (or, as Sering deemed them, the “ruling class” [Herrenschicht]), and that Poland was the worst culprit. The audacity of the father of German inner colonization, who had used agrarian laws as methods of war against the Polish minority in Eastern Prussia for decades, crying foul as the Poles now mirrored the Prussians, is truly astounding. The irony was inescapable as Sering complained that the Poles were using the actual Prussian “option to repurchase” (Wiederkaufsrecht) to buy up German estates. He proclaimed “[a]ll in all, injustice and inhumanity in the new or enlarged countries has unleashed a monstrous horror, increased national strife, and enflamed ethnic hatred (Völkerhaß), whereas before the war – in places like Upper Silesia – a peaceful coexistence reigned.”Footnote ⁵² Near the end of the speech he began to move more clearly into the language of the “threatened East” and Raum, pointing out that the new west of Poland was already much more thickly settled than Brandenburg, Pomerania, East Prussia, and the borderlands, and that Poles were having babies at more than twice the rate of Germans. This demographic and spatial time bomb was only exacerbated by the reality that the sapping effect of inflation in Germany had deeply hurt inner colonization’s speed of settlement. Stepping back somewhat from his more inflammatory rhetoric, Sering finished by stating that Germany should do whatever it could through “peaceful politics” to help its brethren inside Poland.Footnote ⁵³ Then, in an article that appeared in AFK the next year, Sering became explicit in his use of “reverse colonialism,” stating that Poland “desired Lebensraum.”Footnote ⁵⁴ I have often referenced Sering’s ability to “see emptiness” when required as a settler colonizer to do so. As it turns out, Sering was even able to project this gaze into the eyes of his enemy. Although Poland as a whole had a population density of seventy-eight PPSKM, western Poland had one hundred PPSKM, while Brandenburg, Pomerania, East Prussia, and the borderlands (Grenzmark), had sixty, sixty-two, sixty-one, and forty-three PPSKM, respectively. To Sering the settler, there could only be one solution to such an imbalance. He once again framed Germans on the eastern frontier as the metaphorical pioneers of the American West. Yes, he admitted, it was difficult and expensive to settle Germans onto the failing Junker estates of the East, but surely America, Western Canada, and southern Brazil had proven that if you gave a German settler his own land, he would succeed. In fact, doing so in the United States had produced “the strongest empire of the European race in North America.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In effect, Sering was arguing that, with a successful inner colonial program the German “cowboys” could hold off the Polish “Indians.”

In fact, already in a GFK speech at the end of 1927 Sering had managed to invoke the American frontier right in the heart of Germany itself. Keup had introduced Sering, and claimed that “inner colonization,” as a movement and an idea, now had virtually no enemies in Germany. Sering agreed, stating that the war had moved agrarian settlement to the most prominent position it had ever enjoyed in Germany. Yes, Germany was an overpopulated land but, even in its current borders, it had more than enough space for the excess, with a mere thirty-seven PPSKM. Indeed, Sering pointed out that the land between Berlin and Hamburg was not much denser than the steppe of the western United States or southern Russia.Footnote ⁵⁶

There was an increasing interest in settlement in Germany after 1925. In addition to relative stability beginning that year, high rates of unemployed workers in the cities piqued interest in getting this possibly “dangerous” element onto the land. But the RSG did little to actually alter the situation on the ground.Footnote ⁵⁷ At the end of the decade there were a few other pathetic schemes taking place to repopulate the land in the “threatened East.” One, Osthilfe, or Eastern Aid, was government assistance used to prop up Junker on the verge of bankruptcy. It is difficult to imagine something more grotesque to Sering. In a paper from 1931 in which he requested that more unemployed industrial workers be settled in the East, Sering directly asked that the Osthilfe funding be diverted directly to such a purpose.Footnote ⁵⁸ As it turned out, by late 1932, in what came to be known as the Osthilfeskandal, the Junker beneficiaries of this aid were outed as using it to buy automobiles and go on vacation. The other program, much more in line with Sering’s desires, was the so-called West-Ostsiedlung, West-to-East Settlement. Along the lines of the defunct Settlement Commission, German settlers were found in the “west” and provided parcelled land in the German East. From 1927 to 1931, the program settled a grand total of 2,484 people.Footnote ⁵⁹ Inner colonization had never been successful, but this was abominable.Footnote ⁶⁰

The Professor at the Centre of It All

It is often the case that professors in the Humanities and the Social Sciences are never busier than when they are “retired.” Some combination of a career of publications and achieving status, as well as decades of accumulating knowledge, all significantly alongside the curtailment of a regular teaching load, results in situations like Sering’s in the mid-1920s. The bustling Sering Institut was churning out students, some of whom Sering published in the institute’s own series that he oversaw.Footnote ⁶¹ He was attracting students from around the world and has since become lauded in Women’s History circles for his supervision of some of the first female PhDs.Footnote ⁶² From 1927 to 1930 Sering was a part of the German editorial team overseeing the series “Economic and Social History of the World War.”Footnote ⁶³ He became a member of the editorial board of Otto Hoetzch’s important journal Osteuropa.Footnote ⁶⁴ He appeared at this time to be less involved in the GFK directly, and perhaps this had something to do with the rise of Gayl, though again Gayl later claimed they worked closely together.Footnote ⁶⁵

Interestingly, the famously pro-German Polish politician Wladyslaw Studnicki reached out to Sering in August 1926. He explained that he and others were founding a German Scientific Institute in Warsaw and requested that Sering suggest which teachers in Berlin circles might be willing to come. Sering, always wanting to appear the moderate, responded that he hoped, along with Studnicki, that there would be some economic rapprochement between Poland and Germany: “in place of overheated nationalism we must put in place the feeling of European solidarity.”Footnote ⁶⁶ However, any relationship would have to be on an equal footing and the Allies had made this impossible, with their hypocritical stance on human and minority rights when it came to Germans in Poland. Sering ended the letter informing Studnicki that he would not be able to find a German teacher that would help him in his honourable cause.Footnote ⁶⁷ A few months later Studnicki followed up, reminding Sering of his pre-war position, when he had argued that the only way to save Poland from Russia was a closer relationship with Germany. He expressed the hope that in the future their two countries, along with Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, and Turkey, would form a central European bloc, and that Germany would get Alsace back.Footnote ⁶⁸ Sering forwarded the letter to Erich Zechlin in the Foreign Office, pointing out that Studnicki had not addressed any of his points and thus his position was unchanged.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, this outreach from Studnicki was indicative of the persona that Sering exuded as a relatively safe, seemingly moderate player in this arena. Along those lines, the Breslau-based Law Professor Axel Freiherr von Freytagh-Loringhoven, sent a letter to Sering in February 1930 in which, after laying out his argument that he feared the Poles would soon be receiving reparations through the Young Plan, he appealed to Sering’s reputation as crucial to help support and lend credence to his position, arguing that: “such an authoritative personality, one not wrapped up in day to day politics, would doubtlessly massively increase the impact of my warnings.”Footnote ⁷⁰

The international status of Sering was further recognized when he addressed the World Economic Conference in Geneva, on May 10, 1927.Footnote ⁷¹ Once again, a major focus of Sering’s thinking was the United States and, by extension Canada, as he discussed the global agricultural crisis, and especially its effects upon Germany. During the war, Canada and the United States had increased land cultivation by ten million ha. But with the end of American credit to its allies in 1920, and therefore the latter’s ability to purchase American wheat, the price of wheat had plummeted, and from 1922 to 1925 some 25,000 farms had failed in the United States and three million people left the land for the cities. Thus, global prices were low, but the situation was even worse in Germany, for inflation and tariffs made it very difficult for Germans to export their industrial goods, and there were indeed no finances available for German agriculture to invest in mechanization and the intensification of agriculture.Footnote ⁷² Although there had been a recent stabilization of the economy and some rising prices, for now, Sering argued, Germany needed tariff protection. He hoped, nevertheless, that America would lead the way in freeing up the global economy. What Sering did not articulate at Geneva was his additional hope that the Americans would lead the charge in relieving Germany’s debt burden. This talk was published in an expanded form in 1929.Footnote ⁷³

Sering’s full position on Versailles was made abundantly clear in his 1928 publication, Deutschland unter dem Dawes-Plan, which was translated by S. Milton Hart, and appeared the following year as Germany under the Dawes Plan.Footnote ⁷⁴ Sering regurgitated many of the talking points of the Right in the Weimar Republic, including the idea that the military was not so much defeated as starved by the British Blockade and forced to surrender when so many fresh American troops were provided to the Allied forces. He went so far as to claim a quasi-stab-in-the-back idea: that although Germany had itself decided to disband its army, it had still been so strong that the Allies themselves would never have dared to suggest such a thing. He then delved into some strange conspiracy to rationalize how Germany had lost its long fought-over eastern provinces, claiming that the Polish leader Dmowski had threatened to mobilize American Poles against Wilson if the president did not capitulate to Polish demands. After providing a lot of economic detail about Germany during the last decade, Sering claimed that ultimately Germany’s difficult economic position was closely linked to Germany’s lost land.Footnote ⁷⁵ Invoking no hard division between inner and outer colonization, Sering listed these territorial losses as both the distant overseas colonies, as well as Alsace and the eastern provinces. This lost soil equalled lost wealth: “The only reliable basis of national wealth is the natural wealth of Mother Earth.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Finally, on the agricultural land that remained in Germany, brutal indebtedness was leading to a steady flight from the land to the cities, a situation caused by the radically unfair reparations. Any reasonable analysis, Sering argued, would indicate that the Tribute had already been paid.

The Rise of the Nazis

Unbeknownst to Sering, the very agricultural crisis that he was writing about would set in motion a development that proved crucial to the rise of the political party that would first topple him from his academic heights, then radicalize the entire program of inner colonization and, finally, destroy Germany itself. Although Hitler took a long time to realize it, if ever there was a constituency ready and willing to support the most radically anti-Versailles, anti-Weimar political party, it was the agrarian communities of the heartland of inner colonization, in the North and especially the East. The era of favouritism for the agrarian elite was over. The new reality of government in Germany in the 1920s was a massive and powerful voting urban proletariat coupled with a bourgeois middle class that favoured industry over agriculture. Fear and resentment ran deep among the agrarians and they had had to fight tooth and nail for some form of tariff protections in 1924, 1925, and 1927, protections that they lost completely in 1929 with the German–Polish trade agreement. The political mouthpiece for agricultural interests was represented by the German National People’s Party (DNVP), which found itself in the ruling governmental coalitions of 1925 and 1927, but under the guidance of its new leader Hugenberg, it had largely given up on democracy by 1929. The so-called Green Front, combining agrarian interests across several regions, pushed for the complete ban of all foreign agricultural products and massive subsidization of domestic agriculture. This already quixotic campaign was cut short with the Crash of 1929. At this moment the largely urban-based Nazi movement sensed a real opportunity.Footnote ⁸⁵

In March 1930, the Nazi Party laid out its first proper agricultural program. Over the previous year, elements of a program had appeared in the Nazi Yearbook, ideas that borrowed heavily from the more radical interpretations of a Sering-like style of inner colonization, such as the expropriation and break up of Junker estates for the settlement of small German farms, and a quasi-feudal form of entailment that would prevent many new farmers from selling their land. By the time an official Nazi agrarian program was made available, however, it was declared that “foreign policy” would find the land for new settlers, and thus the Junker could breathe a sigh of relief.Footnote ⁸⁶ Already in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s Ratzellian thinking had convinced him that “inner colonization,” as practiced in the Kaiserreich, that is, within existing German borders, would never suffice. Despite technical advances, Hitler argued that existing German soil alone could never feed the entire, expanding German population.Footnote ⁸⁷ In any case, to settle for old school inner colonization would have weakened Hitler’s expansionist ideas for the eastern border. Further, the agrarian Junker elite were potentially very powerful allies, and that same Junker elite continued to supply a huge proportion of the officer class to Germany’s military. Despite garnering Junker support, the official agrarian program bowed to Nazi racial politics in one significant way, as all foreign workers were to be banned. However radical sounding, such had always been the goal of Sering’s inner colonization.

In 1930, Chancellor Brüning of the Centre Party, a big fan of Sering, was feeling the effects of the agrarian crisis and moved to shut down all food imports but did not have the money for any subsidies. He then instructed his Reich Settlement Commissar Hans Schlange-Schöningen to buy up Junker estates and sell the land.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was at this moment that a fundamental schism among “inner colonizers” emerged. Gayl had long disagreed with Sering when it came to Junker estates and, as an old Ober Ost confidante of the now President Hindenburg, Gayl chose this moment to move in, speak for the aggrieved Junker, and managed to turn Hindenburg against Brüning. Despite having often railed against “agrarian Bolshevism,” Hindenburg’s intervention on behalf of the “red” Junker led to Brüning’s government falling in May 1932.Footnote ⁸⁹ Gayl then became Minister of the Interior in the new von Papen regime. Although in his memoir von Papen would claim that he never cared a fig for Junker interests, in a radio address in September 1932 he claimed the “agrarian sector” was the most important in all of Germany.Footnote ⁹⁰