1933–1934: The New Reality

During the first year and a half of Nazi rule, the agrarian world was in a state of flux. Surprisingly, there was initially room for dissent, as we will see both in Sering’s publications, as well as in the pages of AFK. In fact, for the first six months of the Nazi regime, the classic inner colonizers had a staunch ally in Hitler’s cabinet, as Hugenberg was the Minister for Agriculture. A man who will be featured prominently in this chapter, Sering’s all-time archenemy Richard Walther Darré, had expected to be given this position but had to instead stew for six months while Hitler appeased Hugenberg’s DNVP. An article appearing in AFK entitled, “What Should Agrarian Settlement Expect from Hugenberg?”Footnote ¹ assured readers that they had nothing to fear from the famous industrialist, as his incredibly long (especially prewar) history with inner colonization was impeccable. Indeed, during his six-month tenure Hugenberg did attempt to place the agrarian sector at the center of the German economy, but he did not share the extreme racist goals of Darré and was constantly at loggerheads with him. When Hugenberg resigned in June, both his career and the DNVP came to an end.Footnote ² Hugenberg’s, and indeed most inner colonizers’, misunderstanding of Nazi settlement thinking was that while they, the moderates, believed that the land was as important as the Volk, Darré simply saw the land as the setting, and in some ways the engine, for the creation of the Bauerntum, the new racially pure peasantry. As opposed to soil and vegetables, Darré thought only in terms of human breeding.Footnote ³ He was, however, still an agrarian romantic. Even though Darré’s purely racial approach would logically produce an egalitarian German population, a “Master Race” (Herrenrasse), he believed in a heroic peasantry ruled over by a Herrenschicht, a class of lords, not so dissimilar to the medieval village that existed in Sering’s mind.

Darré’s thinking was well known via his previous publications,Footnote ⁴ and there were early attempts by agrarian moderates to temper his ideas. A month after Hitler’s ascent, Sering gave a speech at an agrarian conference for the Friedrich List Society in Bad Oeynhausen. He was well aware of Nazi thinking, and that Darré was in the audience, when he walked through three issues. First, he addressed (then quickly moved on from) the “racial political historical viewpoint,” arguing that, despite centuries of movement from the land to the city, Germany still possessed a strong reserve of peasant stock. This was unlike what he, Sering, had witnessed the previous Fall in England where their version of a “Reich Settlement Law” had been a complete failure and the land was still empty.Footnote ⁵ He then moved on to his next theme, “Eastern Border Protection,” an old favourite and an outlook that he enthusiastically shared with the National Socialists. Yet his discussion of it pre-emptively attacked the hereditary, racially based, semi-feudal inheritance law that Darré had been publicly formulating, in which only one member of the family would inherit the farm. Sering insisted that the existing farming situation, where all family members had a stake in the property, led to early marriage and lots of children. Such an inheritance situation should remain at all costs, Sering argued: “It’s about the existence of Germanness in the East, it’s about the survival of the Reich.”Footnote ⁶ Finally, Sering turned to the problem of six to seven million unemployed people and how inner colonization could solve this problem. But to do so, the new regime needed to carry out what had already been agreed to in his 1919 law, the expropriation of a third of the large landed estates. And to counter any claims that this was somehow illegal, Sering made the incredibly bold statement: “in the Middle Ages peasant property was forcibly confiscated or bought by the Junker. In that regard, it is therefore an act of restitution.”Footnote ⁷ Sadly, Sering complained, the Osthilfe program had kept alive many Junker estates, and should surely now be suspended. Here Sering drove home his anti-Junker argument, describing how he had visited giant farms in the American West in 1930, and had seen the results: a vast expanse of land with very few people.

This pre-emptive strike against Darré’s plans continued in the pages of AFK, initially with a contributor who later supported the Nazi position. Max Stolt’s article, “Future Settlement and the Most Appropriate Legal Reforms for its Practitioners,” completed its brief history of inner colonization by pointing out that it had fared worst when the hand of a controlling government was heaviest, a direct reference to Darré’s preparation for massive state intervention. He then mischievously invoked the Führerprinzip, that agrarians knew the will of the leader, and therefore they understood best how to carry out his principles. The journal carried a long quote from Wilhelm Kube’s “Eastern Questions and National Socialism,” that stated that the importance of eastern colonization was not in itself “anti-Junker,” but that there was nevertheless little need for large latifundia.Footnote ⁸ Meanwhile, however, the future historian of inter-war agrarian settlement, Wilhelm Boyens, penned an article that acknowledged the power of a National Socialist agrarian policy, noting that flight from the land was now being caused by heavy indebtedness and this debt quite simply needed to be forgiven.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, this was exactly what Darré was mooting at the time and would implement.

By the summer of 1933, Sering was heavily involved in organizing the hosting of a major international agrarian conference at Bad Eilsen, and in late June reached out to the new Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture Darré, inviting him to attend.Footnote ¹⁰ In an obvious effort to get Darré on his side, Sering followed up with a gushing letter in early July, telling Darré how pleased he was that the Ministry was in the hands of someone who understood how important farmers were. Sering then declared that he would be giving up his scientific life’s work, his leadership of this conference, and his involvement in the GFK, now that he knew agrarian settlement was in such good hands.Footnote ¹¹ Darré responded that, although he would not be able to make it to the conference, Sering should be assured “that it is for him a great pleasure to know that in the future they can work together hand in hand on the question of settlement.”Footnote ¹² This seemingly happy exchange ended with Sering informing Darré that, sadly, due to the economic crisis, it had become impossible for their American colleagues to make it to Germany, so the conference would be postponed for a year.

Sering’s real thoughts about what was happening to his world in Germany can be found in a letter he wrote to the English agronomist Leonard K. Elmhirst, in late November. He noted that, although they had had to suspend the conference this year, it was crucial that it go ahead the next year:

Reichsbauernführer Darré and Extreme Inner Colonization

The law that Darré introduced at the national level in September 1933, the so-called Erbhofrecht, or Law of Inheritance, was nothing short of the firmest answer to central problems that had been in the mind of Sering and all of inner colonization from the start: how do you give land to a peasant family and then stop them from selling it? How do you stop speculation? How can you entail peasants while pretending you are not recreating serfdom? Darré created an inheritance structure that made it virtually impossible for a majority of farmers to sell.Footnote ¹⁴ Further, the law allowed the state to remove a farmer if he was found to be “dishonourable” or “inefficient,” for, as Darré pointed out, the individual’s needs did not outweigh the needs of the race. And, in a move that had no historical precedent (as Sering would point out), in certain circumstances, the inheritor of the farm was to be the youngest son, not the traditional first born.Footnote ¹⁵ Cabinet members spoke up, exclaiming (correctly) that this amounted to something akin to feudalism. At this early stage, Darré had the backing of Hitler, and at this moment the Führer declared that such a law was indeed the only way to stop speculation. Darré thus got his way. Fascinatingly, powerful economic arguments that such small estates would not increase food production were dismissed by Darré, for this plan to maintain the small peasant on the land at all costs was deemed necessary for the future of the race. That nation/race was more important than pure scale economics had long been accepted by the most moderate of inner colonizers. Darré argued that such an approach was neither socialism nor capitalism. Again, at this point, such extreme focus on agrarian human breeding was approved by Hitler and would only become a problem when Darré insisted that there be no expansion of the borders in the East, for there was more than enough racial work to be accomplished within the Altreich. In some ways, this was a new version of the empty/full arguments surrounding space, already seen in the First World War. Whereas Kaiserreich inner colonization required new land to escape the obstacles they encountered within Germany, for Darré, there was no need to “escape” the confines of Germany, as the Nazis could simply remove any obstacles, legal or otherwise.

Of course, Sering and his fellow travellers had always claimed that inner colonization was above any mere definition as socialist or capitalist. While he, and the likes of Max Weber, had insisted that it was instead nationalist, that term was now simply replaced with a more abstract racial notion, yet the sentiment was similar. Darré’s new law stated that any farm large enough to sustain a family was to be included in the strict inheritance system. But whereas “national” had always been squishy among the pre-1933 thinkers, now Darré was able to bring racial selection directly into play regarding who could receive or retain land. Using figures that should have pleased the Junker-hating Sering, Darré’s settlement office projected settling 1.5 million ha with 90,000 new holdings, which was exactly the amount of land made up by farms over 100 ha, that is, large estates. Indeed, Darré and the influential Nazi racial thinker Alfred Rosenberg spoke openly of the “twilight of the Junker,” a class to be replaced with the blood and soil of peasants.Footnote ¹⁶ The Nazis hated that the Junker used foreign labour, and they, along with Junker allies like President Hugenberg and Conservatives in general, were all deemed to be unreliable. Hitler was sympathetic to these anti-Junker sentiments but, ever the political schemer, he knew that his Wehrmacht generals were for the most part raised on these landed estates and he would have to put up with them for a while.

Resistance from the Old Inner Colonizers

Darré’s new law, the Erbhofrecht, was initially put forward at the provincial level, for the state of Prussia, and this version was printed in the AFK in mid-May 1933. After it had become law and the idea of a national Erbhofrecht was being pushed, the issue was actually debated in the pages of the journal by Darré and Hugenberg. Darré put forward his position that this was the best way to control a form of settlement that was not “at any price” (by disallowing speculation), and yet would last. Hugenberg responded that he was happy with traditional Laws of Inheritance (Anerbenrecht) and he was against the state having too much control over the lives of farmers’ families. Another contributor was critical of a law that was supposed to create a true “land of peasants” (Bauernland) yet allowed for the continued survival of the Junker.Footnote ¹⁷ The Nazi-leaning Boeckmann then claimed that the relationship of the state to the peasant was outside any liberal system, that it should largely be outside any money scheme, and that the Reich should pay for peasants to stay on the land.Footnote ¹⁸ Even after the national law had passed in September, critique was sustained in AFK, with Wilhelm von Gayl and others attacking Boeckmann’s ideas. In the last issue of 1933, an article about how to find good settlers was so critical of pre-1933 inner colonization that the editors intervened with explanatory footnotes. The first footnote challenged the assertion that postwar settlement was controlled by Marxists. Sure, the editors admitted, there were some Marxist influences in the government, but such a statement was very unfair, especially as the people being slandered were the editors!Footnote ¹⁹ The same December 1933 issue announced that the journal, currently on volume 25, would be renamed in January. In a highly symbolic move, the title that focused as much on land as people, the Archive of Inner Colonization, would now be changed to directly reference Darré’s prime consideration, Neues Bauerntum, or New Peasantry (hereafter NB). In an editorial, the journal editors stated that the old title was too difficult to say (true) and used foreign words.Footnote ²⁰

Throughout 1934, NB described the new orthodoxy in articles like “Fundamental Questions of National Socialist Farmer Politics,” which stressed “blood” and the Germanic roots of rural settlement in Germany.Footnote ²¹ The international flavour of AFK was maintained, however, with an article on the first 10,000 Japanese reservists sent to settle in Manchuria.Footnote ²² A more sinister “international” flavour appeared in the small notice, “Settlement of Jews from Germany in France?” which remarked on the Jewish Press’s concern over the national revolution, arguing that it was time to go, for now, to southern France. Was this to form a colony there, the editors asked, or merely a stopping point on the way to Palestine or Argentina? They did not know.Footnote ²³ Also, in 1934, there emerged a new and serious interest in “Raumordnung,” the study of the physical space that Germany took up in Central Europe, and the question as to whether or not there was enough of it. In his May article, “The Organization of Space (Settlement Planning) in the Service of the Regeneration of German Farmers,” Carl Lörcher claimed that, although Germany currently did not have “enough” Raum, for the time being it had to focus on thickly settling what it did currently possess, especially in the threatened East.Footnote ²⁴ The 1935 article, “Regarding the Question of Raum in German Settlement,” complained that Germany had lost twenty-seven million souls to overseas emigration, before claiming that there was currently more than enough Raum within Germany for big, healthy new German families.Footnote ²⁵ By 1937, the work of Konrad Meyer, the ultimate Raumforscher (spatial researcher) would regularly appear in NB.Footnote ²⁶ But the newly renamed journal did spend some time reflecting upon and thanking the now dissolved GFK. Since the Reich itself oversaw inner colonization, there was no longer any need for the Society, and the editors thanked the major players for their work, including Sering, but noticeably failed to mention the already persona non grata, Hugenberg. In fact, in the detailed history of the GFK that appeared in the pages of NB in 1934, Sering was heavily praised. But this would be the last moment of such reverence in this journal, as Sering was also about to become an unmentionable.

Figure 7.1 Max Sering in 1932

(Photo by Bundesarchiv)

Sering Breaks with Darré

Sering’s daughter lived with her family a short walk away from her father in Dahlem, and every Sunday she would set out from the von Tirpitz household with her youngest son (Wolfgang, born 1933) to walk to the famous home (and Sering Institut) at Luciusstrasse 9 for dinner. About halfway along the walk, at Am Hirschsprung 44–46, she would stop in front of an imposing, gated mansion, turn to little Wolfgang, and exclaim, “This is the house of the enemy of your father.”Footnote ²⁷ It was the house of Darré. In the initial stages of their relationship, Sering was diplomatic toward Darré, as was clear in the earlier cited letter exchange about the conference. Sering and Darré had still shared the stage as late as June 1933 at the GFK conference, which was held after the Prussian Erbhofrecht was in place. But by early 1934 Sering believed it was time to make his problems with a state-controlled, racially based system of agriculture more widely known. He wrote, but initially did not publish, a fifty-page memorandum entitled “The Right of Inheritance and Debt Relief: Legal, Economic, and Biological Aspects.”Footnote ²⁸ He began by arguing that Law (Recht) was indeed very important and had been a crucial part of the history of the peasantry.Footnote ²⁹ Fundamental to that legal history, and what had now been rejected with the new law was that peasant families had always decided to whom the inheritance would go, and they had decided whether to perform a wholehearted Anerben, or the more equitable Realteilung, ceding the entire farm to one heir, or dividing it among the children. Now, with the new law, it was the legal authorities alone that made these ancient and traditional decisions. Then, in an interesting move to fight the anti-liberal Nazi fire with his own, Sering made the following argument: when the state intervened within what is the most fundamental cell of the state body, the peasant family, it was breaking up that cell into something to be controlled by a bureaucracy, an insidiously “liberal,” “individualizing” move. Sering then undertook to dissect the motive for all of this, which he rightly stated to be Darré’s desire to make the peasantry the blood source of the race. But, argued Sering, while the peasants had been the soldiers (Kampftruppen) of the early National Socialists, these new policies had now sapped them of their energy. The new law created “grotesque” situations, such as the case where the desire to have the farm in the hands of the strongest and longest yet to live farmer resulted in the youngest son inheriting the farm. If he had no cash on hand to pay off his siblings, one could foresee circumstances where the oldest son now served the youngest. Sering finished by again using Nazi racial logic to attack the very same: after citing Hitler and Erwin Bauer on the importance of avoiding “degeneration” at all costs, Sering claimed that the biological impacts of the new law were such that unhappy families were forced to have only one child, for this was the only security in controlling their own family’s inheritance.

In early February 1934, Sering wrote to Darré to inform him that he simply could not agree with Darré’s Erbhofrecht. Sering offered ideas that would bring it more squarely in line with traditional Bauernrecht, peasant law. He enclosed his recently written memorandum with the letter and asked Darré to please have a look.Footnote ³⁰ Sering ended the letter by confirming that the previously delayed international agrarian conference was now definitely going to take place. No invitation was extended. Darré responded back in a letter to the doyen of agrarian settlement with the rather dismissive claim that he rejected Sering’s “purely economic” reasons against Erbhofrecht, and that, due to their “fundamentally different starting points,” it did not make much sense to continue to argue about it.Footnote ³¹ At the same moment, Sering sent Goebbels a notice that he had provided Darré with a memorandum highly critical of entailment and that it was here attached, should he be interested. Walter Funk, Goebbels’ state secretary, responded that the Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had read it with great interest.Footnote ³² Before Darré had even received the memorandum, he had his henchman, Herbert Backe, write to Sering on January 27, informing the professor that his institute would no longer be funded, as this was only causing a “fragmentation” of research, and that Sering’s work was now redundant in the wake of the successful revolution.Footnote ³³ Sering promptly wrote to Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, claiming that the recently deceased Professor Erwin Bauer had promised that Frick would allow good research to continue. Apparently, Frick relented. The institute stayed open for the time being.Footnote ³⁴

In any case, Sering had already let loose the dogs of war. His colleague Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, and soon to be Minister of Economics, had financed the printing of 100 copies of this memorandum, and Sering had distributed them to anyone he thought might be interested. It was not long before some of them slipped out of the country to be read and eventually reported on by the foreign press. Darré was furious. In June 1934, Darré had Der Stürmer print an article “outing” Sering as a “half Jew” who personally disliked the law as it prevented “Mischung,” the mixing of races. Darré then directly asked Hitler in late June to please cancel the big upcoming conference. Hitler responded that for “diplomatic” reasons he simply could not.Footnote ³⁵

The Setting Aside of Sering

A few weeks after the conference, Darré wrote to Frick thanking him for the embargo on Sering’s memorandum and went on to point out how dangerous it was for Germany, especially considering the press coverage. Darré later forwarded this letter to Hitler in November and Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers in December. Finally, in late December Darré reprimanded Frick and told him to stop protecting the professor and to please cut off all government funding to the Sering Institut.Footnote ⁵⁰ This last letter is especially intriguing as it indicates that Darré was unaware that Konrad Meyer had in fact already achieved this. Not long after the conference, on October 12, Meyer called for the end of all funding for the Sering Institut by November 1. Sering had been given assurances that he still had time to finish up the institute’s affairs, for he wrote to the Minister of Science, Education and National Culture, Bernhard Rust on November 19 thanking him for a three-month extension in funding. Whatever promises had been made, Rust quickly got back into party line, writing four days later: “due to a scarcity of funds a monthly subsidy from 1 November 1934 can no longer be granted.”Footnote ⁵¹ An indignant Sering responded that they had been promised funding until April 1, that people were employed, there was work to be done, and that they could not accept a sudden suspension of funding. This letter ended with “Heil Hitler.” Another ministry letter, from December 22, stated that as of the twentieth, there was no more funding available and that “[t]herefore I see myself obliged to dissolve the institute with effect from 31 December 1934.”Footnote ⁵² On Christmas Eve, Sering was forced to write to the members of the institute that it would be pointless for him to reiterate the reasons the government was shutting them down, as these motives were already widely known. He reminded his colleagues that since the end of the war they had been the central place for the study of settlement, something they had shown the world at Bad Eilsen, and that they should therefore all be proud. This letter he ended with “mit deutschem Gruss,” (with German greetings) and not “Heil Hitler.”Footnote ⁵³

In her analysis of the shift in power from Sering to Meyer, Irene Stoehr astutely suggests that Meyer likely used Darré’s indignation to help him shut down Sering, though it seems without informing Darré of the fact. The institute had been on its deathbed since early November 1934 when, on December 20, Meyer confirmed that the Institute had to close once and for all, as the Minister had no “trust” (Vertrauen) in either the old professor or any of his trained students.Footnote ⁵⁴ Darré’s letter demanding that Frick cut off funding, mentioned at the start of this section, was written on December 22. Darré may well have also been fooled by the fearless countenance of the seventy-seven-year-old professor. One of the only glimpses we have into the personal life of Max Sering at this time comes from the incredibly rich diary of the American Ambassador William Dodd. The University of Chicago history professor had actually spent time in 1900 studying at Leipzig and had likely already then been made aware of this friend of America. In fact, US Secretary for Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, whom Sering had visited in Iowa in 1930, had told Dodd to allow Sering to use his diplomatic pouch for any correspondence to the United States. On the morning of October 24, 1934, Sering called on Dodd, to speak to him about a letter he was writing to Wallace. Dodd reported that the “very vigorous” Sering told him: “[t]hese people do not know anything about economic and historical problems. They are sacrificing the culture and intellectual life of Germany for their fantastic ideals of perfect unity and complete independence of all the world, which is impossible for a great nation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Dodd then relayed to Sering that, in March, he had strongly reminded Hitler and Rust about the importance of academic freedom for world civilization. Sering was “surprised and most happy” to hear this. The old German, who did not fear the Gestapo, went on, arguing that the present German leadership

Dodd ended his diary entry with this: “Dr. Sering is in danger – serious danger – although I shall keep what he said entirely confidential.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Dodd knew Schacht well, one of Sering’s staunchest defenders, and it is entirely possible that Schacht had brought home to Dodd the full danger of Sering’s situation.

Dodd met Sering again that momentous Fall, on Sunday, November 11. At lunch, Sering “was again most vigorous and outspoken in his opposition to the Hitler philosophy and practice.” And then, interestingly, “[h]is wife was even more venturesome in my presence.” Dodd wrote that the couple were attending Niemoeller’s church in Dahlem, and “rejoice at the Lutheran revolt against the present effort to force all Germans into one church – the Deutsche Christen.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Sitting at that very table was a man wearing “the regular Party badge and to [Dodd’s] surprise, seemed to be preparing a report to the Propaganda Ministry of what he heard.” Sering ignored the man, although Dodd claimed the attentive Nazi was somewhat interested to hear that Sering was related to Admiral Tirpitz.Footnote ⁵⁹

Although Darré had earlier attempted to bring the full force of antisemitism against Sering in the previously mentioned Der Stürmer article, Sering was forced to formally defend himself in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. After Sering filled out a University of Berlin form in September 1935, stating: “I do not belong to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” the University then sent him a letter in October asking whether any of his grandparents were “full Jews,” or “members of the Jewish religious community.” In his handwritten response, in December, Sering referenced the new laws to indicate that, with only one Jewish grandparent, he was just fine. Perhaps his response was not properly recorded, for in late February the following year, the Rector informed Sering that he could no longer be affiliated with the university, as he was “of a foreign race” (fremdrassig).Footnote ⁶⁰ Sering responded again with his racial information, and in early March the Rector wrote that he was indeed sorry, there had been a mix-up in the office.

An important defender of Sering’s was “Hitler’s Banker,” the earlier mentioned President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, Hjalmar Schacht.Footnote ⁶¹ Schacht put together a large edited volume in 1937 and had Sering contribute a chapter, the elderly professor’s first publication since the 1934 imbroglio. Although much of the article, “The Agrarian Foundation of the Social Constitution. Great Britain – Germany – Southern Slavic Countries,” focuses on the United Kingdom, Sering’s growing interest in the Danubian Basin (Donauraum) of the Southeast was on full display. Once again, Sering stubbornly mentioned the importance of traditional laws of inheritance for family and farmer stability, something that would surely be seen as once again criticizing the Darré system.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, more evidence indicates that Sering was as foolhardy as ever. As this volume was coming out, Sering and Schacht made an interesting appearance in Dodd’s diary. On March 30, 1937, Dodd arrived late to what he referred to as Sering’s eighty-fifth birthday (Sering was eighty and, while his birthday was in January, the party that year was in March). Although he missed Sering’s and Schacht’s speeches, he heard that, in front of a hundred guests, both had “criticized the Nazi policy and German military activity. I [Dodd] knew both of them thought this way but was surprised to hear they had felt free enough to talk before a large group of people. Schacht said to me [Dodd]: ‘My position is very critical; I do not know what is to happen’.”Footnote ⁶³

Sering, Inner Colonizer of the East, Becomes an Ostforscher

By 1935, Sering fully realized that he had lost his hallowed perch atop the world of “inner colonization.” Darré and Meyer had taken over his role as the new intellectuals of settling Germans on “empty space,” within the Raum and the borders of the Reich. Sering hated their approach to settlement, but of course in certain key ways it could be seen as simply the most radical version of what he had always wanted.Footnote ⁶⁶ The fact that his protégé, the man who took over his chair at Berlin, Dietze, seemingly endorsed the new Nazi path and yet remained a very close colleague of Sering, indicates that pride was likely at the center of the obstinate Sering’s dismissal of the Erbhofrecht. He could have chosen at this moment to walk quietly into oblivion, or indeed to turn against all Nazi colonial thinking. But he most certainly did not. Instead, just as the radical laboratory that was the Great War had led to him moving further “eastward” in his thinking, beyond Germany itself and all its many frustrations and obstacles, Sering spent the twilight of his career doing, mentally, the very same thing. Sering became an Ostforscher, a researcher of the “East.”

Michael Burleigh’s seminal 1988 book, Germany Turns Eastward, details the transition from Osteuropaforschung, the study of Eastern Europe, to Ostforschung, the study of “the East,” a change in thinking that is helpful in understanding this late and final evolution of Sering. Alongside colleagues like the renowned Russia expert Otto Hoetzsch, Sering had for decades studied the people and land of East Central Europe, and importantly did not see Russia as the Urfeind, eternal enemy, of Germany. Poles were much more of a problem for Sering than Russians. Burleigh tracks a shift in the late 1920s, and increasingly throughout the 1930s, of academic specialists of the East, like Sering, from their “moderate” study of Eastern Europe to a focus on the entire Eastern European space as one to be dominated by Germany. Such a move inevitably became anti-Russian at its core. And such was of course an academic development fully in line with Nazi spatial thinking and ideology. As we shall see, whereas Hoetzsch would not bend the knee and was largely removed from the academic scene by 1935, in that same year, Sering, in the wake of his troubles with Darré, decided to cozy up to the now dominant Ostforscher, specialists of “the East.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Ultimately, this was not exactly a major leap for the old inner colonizer. One of the major areas of Ostforschung was the study of Deutsche Sprachinseln, islands of German speakers found throughout Eastern Europe, and, following from this, how these Germans could be used for geopolitical gain. Indeed, David Thomas Murphy, in his The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933, makes the argument that the intellectual foundation provided by the “inner colonizers” was key to the rise of this academic discipline.Footnote ⁶⁸ He states that those historians who attempt to draw a hard divide between the earlier thinkers and those who thrived under National Socialism, due to the injection of specific race theories, are simply wrong. Willi Oberkrome pushes this argument, claiming that, instead of a 1933 caesura when it comes to German thinking about the East, one must instead recognize the continuum, as he argues in “Consensus and Opposition: Max Sering, Constantin von Dietze and the ‘Right Camp’ 1920–1940.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Here Oberkrome traces the many ways in which the work of these two professors on agrarian settlement were not so very different from what became Nazi agrarian settlement science. Once Sering announced that he would like to be a part of team Ostforscher, he had little trouble, for, after all, in Oberkrome’s words, he was “one of the most imposing figures in the German academic landscape of the early twentieth century.”Footnote ⁷⁰

A mere two months after Darré and Meyer’s “silencing” of Sering, the old professor sent a letter to the German Academy in what would today be termed a “cold call.” After informing the leadership there of how important his International Agrarian Conference had been, and that both Schacht and important members of the NSDAP had attended in Bad Eilsen, he stated that the Academy had indicated its desire to focus on German settlement in eastern and southeastern Europe. As a specialist on the agrarian history of Germans, he informed them that, since the Middle Ages, German peasants’ ability to sell their own land had been crucial to their development (somewhat ironic from a man who had spent decades complaining about speculation). Thus, immediately after citing his Nazi bona fides (Meyer’s attendance at the conference), Sering could not help himself but directly criticize Darré’s Erbhofrecht. He ended his letter with a request, suggesting to the Academy that he write “the agricultural constitution of German settlements in non-Russian eastern and southeastern Europe.”Footnote ⁷¹ As was the case for the remainder of his life, Sering ended the letter with his “German greeting,” and not “Heil Hitler.” It appears the latter was only used when he still believed he could convince high level Nazis of his point of view or was attempting appease Nazi addressees. A couple of weeks later Sering wrote directly to the godfather of geopolitical-thinking, Karl Haushofer, thanking him for the writings he had sent Sering. He complimented Haushofer, telling him that, for many years, he had been an “eager reader” of his Zeitschrift für Geopolitik. He hoped that Haushofer had seen his recent request to the Academy and informed him that he would be attending the upcoming conference in Munich.Footnote ⁷² Haushofer responded that he was so excited by Sering’s ideas that he would like him to present at the conference.Footnote ⁷³

Sering attended the Munich conference and claimed to have learned a lot from the growing Ostforscher crowd.Footnote ⁷⁴ By May 1935, Sering was in correspondence with many of them, including Albert Brackmann, Director of the Prussian State Archives in Dahlem. In turn, the Ostforscher were keen to tell Sering to be very discrete, as the politics were rather delicate, especially with Poland and Czechoslovakia.Footnote ⁷⁵ In late May, Sering wrote to Dietze informing him that Brackmann had told him that he, Brackmann, led a research foundation that had as its focus the European East and the Germans living in that space. Further, Sering would be giving a talk for them at the Prussian Archive in Dahlem the following Tuesday.Footnote ⁷⁶ Sering then went one step further and used his lifelong accumulated stature as a fair-minded international scholar: he wrote to his co-conspirators that they could use the International Agrarian Conference membership and structure as an umbrella to make the whole project look innocuous and scientific, but to watch out as there were members from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states that had to be kept in the dark.Footnote ⁷⁷ This approach reached its culmination in Sering’s speech at the International Agrarian Conference held in St. Andrews, Scotland, in late Summer 1936. After walking his listeners through Germany’s agrarian history, and how the Diktat had both wreaked havoc on the agricultural sector and barred Germany from global trade, he turned to his new idée fixe; southeastern Europe, if joined in an economic union with Germany, would encompass some 225 million souls and be the size of the United States, always Sering’s standard for a proper land empire. Further, and invoking one of Sering’s favourite colonial measurements, the density of the population living along the Danube was only 57 PPSKM. Finally, while this area would only benefit from free and open trade with Germany, it happened to be in possession of most of the raw materials that the German economy required.Footnote ⁷⁸ This appears to have been Sering’s final moment on the international stage.

By June 1935 Sering was actively bringing together authors for the chapters of his planned edited volume on Eastern Europe, the book that would be his final major project. The people he brought on board, such as Kurt Lück and Walter Kuhn, would later become intimately involved in Meyer’s Generalplan Ost, the genocidal organization of occupied Eastern Europe during the Second World War.Footnote ⁷⁹ By October, Sering was far enough along on the project to ask his new “source of support,” the Academy, for ninety-five marks for an eight-day research trip to Poland. They gave it to him.Footnote ⁸⁰ Sering surely felt (as would decades of historians after 1945), that his new friends, the Ostforscher, were somehow not part and parcel of the Nazi project for the East. On December 6, 1935, Dodd once again encountered Sering and his wife, and Sering’s daughter’s mother-in-law, Countess von Tirpitz. The “frank” talk at the table shocked Dodd, as all present openly criticized the current regime. Nevertheless, Dodd was taken aback when his private conversation with Sering took a very different turn: “Germany’s economic interests must spread over the Balkan zone, where there must be an exchange of industrial for agricultural goods,” stated Sering, who later added, “[o]f course political co-operation must follow.” Dodd, who had clearly met many similar “non-Nazis,” wrote the following in his diary:

Here, Dodd is succinctly summarizing Burleigh’s thesis many decades in advance. Yet, as Dodd would note a month later, Sering was never a Nazi, and was instead “an old-time royalist who prays for Hohenzollern restoration.”Footnote ⁸² Indeed, while warming up to the Nazi-adjacent Ostforscher, Sering made clear his contempt for those who held undisputed power in the Third Reich. At an event on February 20, 1937, with black-uniformed SS in the room, Sering openly and loudly criticized the regime’s treatment of universities. After Dodd signalled to him the enemy in the room, Sering shouted “I say what I think. They can shoot me any time they want to. This system is ruining German intellectual life.”Footnote ⁸³

Of course, Sering’s research was an obvious and direct continuation of the very Naumannesque Mitteleuropa-thinking praised by Sering and others some twenty years earlier during the Great War. To what degree then was Sering now flirting with the newer, darker, racial elements of Ostforschung? A folder in Sering’s papers, containing some research notes for his edited volume then underway, reveal that he was, at the very least, reading the racially leaning material of his peers. Works like Herbert Meyer’s “Folk, Race and Law” are heavily underlined, and there are typed notes to Karl Schöpke’s “Outline for an Overall Plan for Policies to Overcome the Flight from Agriculture.” Although the latter was deeply race-based, Sering surely enjoyed the author’s claim that Sering’s Reich Settlement Law had been successful. Strangely, Schöpke first praised Darré’s 1934 law before pointing out that a lot of farmers had left the land from 1933 to 1938. Sering’s handwritten note at the end of this last sentence screams “NB! Without any connection to the previous point then.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Sering’s activity regarding the volume was intense. In October 1937, he toured the Balkans, visiting professors, and in March 1938 he spent a week in Timisoara, Romania. In May 1938, he exchanged letters with Gustav Fochler-Hauke, a Sudeten German who worked closely with Karl Haushofer. At the time, Sering was editing the volume’s chapter by Andreas Meisner on the Sudetenland, and fascinatingly, at this moment when the circumstances for the Germans living there had quite suddenly changed, Sering did not want the chapter to be “updated.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In another letter to Fochler-Hauke in April 1939, as the edited volume was about to appear, Sering proclaimed that both Lebensraum and Sprachinseln (ethnic enclaves or “language islands”) were themes in the new work and he very much hoped it would find a wide audience. Sering then admitted that, as Fochler-Hauke likely already knew, Darré hated him for something he had written long ago, something that “developments had unfortunately proven [Sering] to be completely correct about.” Regarding the sour relationship, Sering “fear[ed] that because of this,” any review in a journal associated with Darré was bound to be biased against him.Footnote ⁸⁶

When the volume finally did appear, Sering and Dietze’s long forward opened with the happy news of the return of the Sudeten Germans to the Empire.Footnote ⁸⁷ Despite Sering’s readings over the last two years, the tone is not explicitly racist. It instead harkens back to the decades-old language of German high culture, law, and justice, and how these things should spread into the eastern and southeastern spaces that were, and had always been, German. They argued that the “principle of nationality” meant, quite simply, that once land was Germanized, that land should become a part of the nation of Germany, an argument that was in effect a green light to conquer most of eastern and southeastern Europe, for at least “some” Germans could be found almost anywhere. Along these lines, their discussion of the Wartheland is especially illuminating. After stating that Posen and West Prussia had been settled by Poles and Germans, and that Frederick the Great had disparagingly referred to this space as “backwoods Canada” (hinter Kanada), they argued that the 1886 Program of Inner Colonization had only been partially successful, as “the ruling government principles avoided any compulsion and an energetic Polish counter-colonization was allowed.”Footnote ⁸⁸ At the very end of his life, Sering was here regurgitating elements of the Nazi critique of his life-long work, that legal niceties were weak, and that “lesser races” were not to be negotiated with. The authors then spent some time, in line with the “principle of nationality,” arguing for the German nature of this land, especially the so-called Polish Corridor, and thereby providing “scientific” cover for Hitler’s “proper” return of said space to the Reich (something about to take place that fall). With regard to the land of the Corridor, they wrote: “The efforts made during the Bismarck Empire, when it was considered inadmissible to use force, resulted in merely consolidating the existing German population, and thereby the German majority.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, the authors claimed that had Posen and West Prussia been given a vote in 1919, they would have chosen to stay in the German Empire, as many of the Poles had assimilated and the Prussian state had instilled duty and honour among them. Thankfully, rejoiced the authors, Hitler had ripped up the very Diktat that had stolen the land. They finished their foreword claiming that a new “Greater Economic Space” (Grosswirtschaftsraum) in East Central Europe would be good for Germany, and the Sprachinseln would be much safer under such circumstances.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Twilight Years