In the Spring and Fall of 1896, the völkisch author and publisher Heinrich Sohnrey hiked through Posen and West Prussia visiting each inner colonial settlement, often going door-to-door to interview every settler he could find. He published his reflections the following year in A Hiking Trip through the German Settlement Areas in Posen and West Prussia. To describe the area, he cited a passage from Sering’s 1893 book: “There is no colonial territory on Earth where the prosperity of the settlers was better prepared in such a careful and understanding manner than Posen and West Prussia.”Footnote 1 Sohnrey admitted that he had begun his adventure tainted by the frustration and pessimism that had long surrounded the inner colonial project in the East. But, akin to this passage from Sering, he said he completed his trip an optimist. Among his detailed demographic data and sketches of settler homes, churches, and schools, Sohnrey had a few things to say about the inhabitants. As someone who would grow increasingly interested in race, it is unsurprising to read Sohnrey complaining that the old Frederickian colonies were now largely inhabited by “half-Polaks” (Halbpolaken) upon whom the newly arrived western Germans looked down. The northern European racial bias comes to its absurd limit with Sohnrey’s following reflection: the southern Germans who had arrived to settle here were now healthier, breathing the “harder, stronger air of the East.”Footnote 2 In other words, even Bavaria was too “tropical” and lethargic for the vigorous Sohnrey. In a telling passage that teased what would increasingly become a divide between völkisch elements and Sering, Sohnrey cited a passage from Sering’s 1893 book in which Sering spoke of the Settlement Commission as something the Poles should themselves model, in order to alleviate the absurd situation of the Prussian General Commission sometimes providing land to Poles. Sohnrey disagreed, arguing that the goal must be the end of Polish settlement altogether.Footnote 3 Sohnrey would go on to publish the most significant journal of the inner colonial movement, the Archive of Inner Colonization (Archiv für innere Kolonisation), and his agrarian romantic, völkisch ideology would be praised by proto-, and later actual, National Socialists. For now, though, at the end of the century, agrarian romanticism and the conservatives who benefitted from it would begin a major debate, a significant result of which was to bring Max Sering onto the national stage.
The Question of the Land
At the end of the 1890s, Germany became embroiled in a debate that came to be called “The Question of the Land,” the Bodenfragedebatte. This was in many ways the culmination of a political dispute that had been simmering since the industrialization of the 1840s and the social changes it had wrought. A walk through the debate is a way to highlight many of the tensions and overriding concerns that surrounded Sering and inner colonization at the fin de siècle. As it turns out, this was also a watershed moment in the personal life of Sering, for it brought him national attention.Footnote 4
The argument surrounding tariffs had risen in volume and pitch throughout the 1880s but, as pointed out in Chapter 3, in 1892, as Chancellor Caprivi began lifting these tariffs on several of Germany’s leading trading partners, the Junker, who enjoyed these protections, became heavily politically engaged.Footnote 5 On the intellectual and cultural level, those academics and authors who were against industrialization, and who had the ear of the reading public and right-leaning politicians, gushed forth a wealth of literature, novels, and political tracts, along with economic analyses, that argued: (a) capitalism was egotistical and immoral, (b) a nation incapable of feeding itself was subject to the whim of “food nations” in case of war, and (c) peasants were the true, healthy (and conservative) heart of Germany, providing strong soldiers and maintaining völkisch traditions, unlike the sick, degenerate cities (and their Jews and Socialists). However, there was an additional demand, pushed by a vocal minority often at odds with the Junker, namely the reformation of land in the East, and the halting of the seasonal Slavic influx.
The Junker organized against Caprivi and free trade, first forming a lobby group, the Bund der Landwirte (Agrarian League, hereafter BdL). This group, ostensibly representing both peasant and Junker interests, co-opted many romantic (and definitely anti-modern) arguments and used them to persuade voters and politicians of all stripes to help them regain their tariffs and the perceived economic stability the Junker believed they provided. The clearest indicator that the Junker were rarely if ever interested in the Volkstum of the peasantry, the overall agrarian situation, or the program of Germanisierung in the East, can be most plainly seen in their attempted “gagging” of Sering’s proposal for agrarian land reform or halt to the influx of Polish Wanderarbeiter.Footnote 6
The Liberal response was just that, a constant reaction, for they perceived no great problems.Footnote 7 On the one hand, their rather passive, often muted response fits into the overall Sammlungspolitik argument, that the bourgeoisie were happy not to rock the boat too much in return for power-sharing with the Junker against the “true Left,” that is, Socialists and Communists. On the other hand, the Right arrived too late in this debate, their world had already disappeared, and as the Liberals read every day in the newspapers of both the Right and Left, the evidence demonstrated that the population at large had long since embraced industrialization; Germany’s new “Place in the Sun,” was everywhere and it was unshakable.
The Debate Begins
The early 1890s had seen the beginning of strife in the “Marriage of Rye and Iron,” with the National Liberals coming to the side of the anti-tariff Caprivi. Further, after the death of the head of the Catholic Centre Party, Windthorst, in 1891, Ernst Lieber, a free trader, took over. He especially liked Caprivi’s tolerant attitude toward the Poles, who were, after all, fellow Catholics. The Social Democratic Party sided with free trade over tariffs, because higher-priced bread was bad for the urban poor. Finally, even on the Right, many Conservatives believed that free trade was a necessary patriotic sacrifice. Because of this split among Conservatives, several major free trade treaties began to be passed in 1892.Footnote 8 By 1893 most Conservatives, along with the BdL, were united in favour of raising tariffs, and began a long, vitriolic campaign against Caprivi. This was a major breaking of norms, as the landed elite were attacking the head of state, the Chancellor, and even sometimes the Kaiser.Footnote 9 An argument used again and again by both the academics and the politicians in this debate was that the depopulation of the rural areas was eviscerating the “martial” strength of the nation, for it was the healthy countryside, and not the degenerate cities, that was said to produce the strongest, healthiest lads for the army. Industrialization thus meant weakness by this logic. However, the Kaiser wanted to be a modern emperor with a modern army and did not want to pull out of useful treaties, famously remarking, “I have no desire to go to war with Russia because of a hundred dumb Junkers.”Footnote 10
The Right
There was of course a long tradition of romantic agrarian critique of industrialization, going back to Adam Müller and Fichte.Footnote 11 This high level, intellectual critique of the modern world reached one of its peaks during this period with the (in)famous popularity of Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt as Teacher (Rembrandt als Erzieher), with forty-nine printings between 1890 and 1909.Footnote 12 This work and others were highly critical of the supposedly senseless activity and spiritual emptiness of capitalism. This was a sentiment held across the political spectrum, as both the Right and Left organized youth hikes to escape the city.Footnote 13 Even the radical leftist Karl Liebknecht lamented the “unhealthy concentration of humanity in great deserts of stone.”Footnote 14 The historian Fritz Stern sums up the “conservative revolution” thus:
The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future. They were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because the spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the material remnants of conservative power did not interest them. They wanted a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance.Footnote 15
This aggression born of discontent is what Stern deems “the politics of cultural despair.”Footnote 16 Stern argued that the popularity of Langbehn gave a vocabulary of Volkstum and anti-Semitism to such groups as the Conservatives and the BdL, making their main platform of higher tariffs more appealing to a broader base of voters.Footnote 17
In the 1890s, as conservative academics began to palpably feel change all around them, they reacted. The resulting crisis intertwined two long-running debates: that of industrialization since the 1840s, and that over tariffs since 1879.Footnote 18 The professors Adolph Wagner, Karl Oldenberg, and Sering had set the stage with their writings throughout the early 1890s, but things boiled over in 1897, and over the next five years there appeared a slew of publications.Footnote 19 It was at the “Evangelical-Social Congress” in Leipzig on June 10, 1897, that Oldenberg really set off a brouhaha with a speech in which he placed agrarianism far above industrialism, and included the sentence, “Without industry one can live, but not without food.”Footnote 20 (Weber was in the audience, and a tumultuous question period ensued.)
Wrapped up in the Question of the Land, something that was always at the forefront of Sering’s thinking, was the issue of food security.Footnote 21 This argument claims that there is an inherent instability to “industrial nations,” whereas “food nations” are ultimately safe. Certain autarkic nations like Russia and America would always be fine behind huge tariff walls but, unless Germany was to become a “food nation,” it would never be safe in a hostile world. A Germany that had completely industrialized would be hostage to a situation where, for instance, Japan flooded the world with cheap industrial product, and the consequent massive unemployment in Germany would result in starvation, or servitude to some other “food nation.” Then, Germans would “decline” to the level of Japanese or Chinese workers.Footnote 22 In his summation of one of the key works of this debate, Kenneth Barkin clearly enunciates the issues:
In Agrar- und Industriestaat, published in 1901, Wagner took the economic critique of industrialism to its logical culmination. He came to the conclusion that industrialism was a transitory stage that arose in response to rural overpopulation and would disappear with the recognition that the remedy created more problems than it solved. England, a paradigm for economic liberals, already appeared to him to have passed its peak. Faced with competition from continental Europe and America, British production and exports had slumped seriously in the seventies and eighties. Despite the advantages of technological know-how, England’s primacy no longer seemed assured. And Germany did not have Britain’s combination of natural and inherited advantages – a colonial empire, an incomparable fleet, and a coastline virtually impossible to blockade. Situated between France and Russia, and without a significant navy, Germany could not afford the luxury of dependence on foreign grain. Rather than boasting of German industrial progress in the nineties, Wagner asked: “Can one really believe that Germany or North America, even if they make further inroads upon British export trade, will in the long run have a better fate?” The answer was a resounding negative: “For Germany [industrialism] would be an insane, ruinous policy, which no patriot, no statesman, no reasonable man could contemplate in earnest.”Footnote 23
As will be borne out in Chapter 5, what is crucial here is that, in fact, this argument of food security was “proven” to be correct. The British naval blockade of Germany, and the resulting Aushungerung of the army and home front, would be a crucial contributing factor to Germany’s defeat in the First World War. In retrospect, it is shocking to read one of the most spirited defenses of the liberal side, that by Heinrich Dietzel. In 1909 he systematically attacked the autarky argument, claiming that modern transportation made blockade highly unlikely and, besides, all of Europe’s navies would be against England. In any case, he said, modern capitalism was so fundamentally built upon global trade that no country could afford to cut its economy off from Germany for any extended time period.Footnote 24
Another key argument concerned the immorality of capitalism, which began with the assertion that it was egotistical. The moral climate of urban areas could be shown to be terrible, with high levels of alcoholism and prostitution. One could point out so-called degeneration in unhealthy factories, and the rampant greed in the big cities where one could buy anything. Further, it was argued that the working class had abandoned Christianity, while urban families tended to become smaller and smaller.Footnote 25 Oldenberg joined in with his deep concern for falling population numbers brought about by industrialization and he was very worried about the Slavic influence in Germany via seasonal workers. He compared the Poles to the Barbarians who penetrated Rome. Further, a lower birthrate meant a smaller army.Footnote 26 These agrarian romantics railed against the “horror” of department stores and big city life, privileging social harmony over economics, at least in theory. And the elite conservative thinkers, along with their Junker compatriots, really believed that a return to an agrarian world was what the peasants wanted as well. In an extreme version of the kind of food security Sering always wanted, Oldenberg called for a radical autarky in which thirty of Germany’s forty million souls would focus on producing food, allowing for only the remaining ten million to live in cities.Footnote 27
The Liberal Response
Because the pro-industrialists did not perceive a crisis to be afoot, their articles were almost always written in response to the conservatives, and they appeared far less often. Among the heavy hitters in the debate were Lujo Brentano,Footnote 28 Friedrich Naumann, Heinrich Dietzel, and Max Weber. Recall that Weber was not an inner colonizer for agrarian reasons, he was much more the modern bigoted nationalist. Weber began his attack in 1897, arguing that it was in fact autarkic states that were unstable: one drought, with no cash to buy foreign food, would destroy a country.Footnote 29 Further, these economists were able to show that tariffs in the 1880s had prevented the price of land from falling in response to new competition and, as a result, both “Weber and Brentano pointed to the inability of a farmer to invest in machinery, manure, and the like, when all his resources were necessary to pay for his rent or mortgage.”Footnote 30 Liberals also attacked the “strong warriors” type argument, saying that the high price of food leads to weak soldiers, and the “staving off revolution” argument of agrarians was countered by the bread riots which resulted from tariff-induced high prices.
It is important to point out the findings of Mark Hewitson regarding how this debate played out among the reading public. In his review of many newspapers across the political spectrum, he found that, by the early 1900s, the press on both the Left and Right often stated that France’s uneven pattern of industrialization and low birth rate was cause for its decline. Thus, the editorials tended to argue that only an Industriestaat could support a large population and heavy armaments for national defense. Hewitson thus shows us that, at the popular level, the pro-Industriestaat argument had clearly won. Unlike the doom and gloom about industrialization of the authors referenced, German popular opinion, represented in newspapers, was very happy that Germany had overtaken France, and was now the most important country on the Continent.Footnote 31
The major themes of this debate are crucial for our understanding of Sering’s mindset, as a reminder that Germany in the East was always at least as much about the myth of German farming, German farms, and German space, as it was a nationalistic anti-Polish, anti-Slavic “modern” movement. How Germans lived within the Lebensraum of Germany was the crucial question for many of these thinkers. Although it is hard to know exactly what the term means with regard to the German East, it is important to note that, because of his association with the Right in this national debate, Sering was at this time labeled an “archconservative.”Footnote 32 Where exactly he fit in this debate will be explored later in this chapter.
Politics and Economics
Bernhard von Bülow became Chancellor in 1900, and in 1902 began negotiating a series of new tariffs. By 1905, due to these tariffs, as well as an exploding US population that meant that the United States could no longer export grain, and three terrible Russian harvests in a row from 1905 to 1908, the price of grain went into the stratosphere. Yet, Junker indebtedness climbed under the tariffs, and, contrary to the goal of “food security,” Germany imported more grain in 1911 than it had 1901.Footnote 33 It must be noted, however, that Cornelius Torp and others argue that these tariffs were crucial to setting up important trade treaties, and that the overall situation of both peasants and workers were not terribly disrupted, as earlier historians had assumed.Footnote 34
While all this was happening, inner colonization continued. Yet, despite this program to alter the demographic balance in the East, the overall trend was unfavourable for the Germans. Richard Blanke walks through the statistics for inner colonization from 1886 to 1918 (though very little occurred after 1914), and these figures give us a good picture of the mounting frustration inner colonizers must have felt in the years leading up to the war. Overall, 734 million marks were spent to purchase 466,750 ha, which represented 8.5 percent of all land in the two eastern provinces. There were 21,886 established German families and, if we can surmise that the majority of such homes housed larger, rural families, then perhaps 150,000 Germans were settled.Footnote 35 One set of numbers surely pleased the “purist” (read: anti-Junker) inner colonizers: the number of large estates, those over 500 ha, declined by 24 percent, while those measuring 5–100 ha increased by 32 percent. But, a quarter of those Germans settlers had already been living in the eastern provinces, and more than 70 percent of the purchased land had already belonged to Germans. Perhaps the most disheartening statistic for the inner colonizers was this: from 1896 to 1914 Poles increased the amount of land they owned in the eastern provinces by 181,437 ha.Footnote 36
In 1904, in recognition of the success of Polish inner colonization, the National Liberal Miquel attempted to make it illegal for Polish landowners to break up (parcel) their estates, recognizing Sering’s argument that such action increased population. In fact, the Prussian Landtag did pass legislation forbidding new structures to be built on parcelled Polish land. But this failed to slow Polish gains and Bülow began moving in an increasingly extreme direction, mooting the idea of an expropriation law. The lack of any available Polish land, since at least 1898, had resulted in inner colonization becoming a program of simply buying and breaking up Junker estates.Footnote 37 The Pan-Germans and Eastern Marches Society applauded these radical legal moves, but this was unacceptable to the Catholic Centre Party. The Centre Party was, however, no longer needed, for in 1907 the Bülow Bloc was formed, encompassing the Conservatives, the National Liberals, and the Progressives.Footnote 38
In this environment, the Prussian government passed an Expropriation Law in 1908. The main stumbling block had in fact been the Junker, who feared that such a law might be used against them (not an unreasonable fear, knowing what a lot of inner colonizers thought of the East Elbian elite). The problem was similar to that in 1885, that is, how to treat some citizens differently than others, based on ethnicity. Just as expelling only Poles had been the stumbling block before, this time only allowing for the expropriation of Polish-owned properties involved some careful legal maneuvering. The initial law, which allowed for the expropriation of 70,000 ha, soon brought down international opprobrium. This law has received much attention over the years, and rightfully so, for it represented the constitutional stripping of rights and property from ethnically defined members of a state. At the same time, it is equally important to make clear how little the law actually accomplished. It was only ever invoked in 1912, and then for a total of 1,656 ha of Polish property. As Matthew Fitzpatrick has observed, the Kaiserreich flirted with techniques that teased a darker future, but it was nevertheless a Rechtsstaat, a country of laws. The same could be said about the life and beliefs of Max Sering.
Bethmann-Hollweg became chancellor in 1909, and early on he found that he would need some Polish support in the Reichstag, and he schemed to find it. He was and would remain annoyed by the more radical anti-Polish elements surrounding him and saw an apparent split between conservative and radical Junker when it came to expropriation, a fissure that could be exploited. He saw a similar split between conservative and radical nationalist Poles as well. It was in this complicated environment that effective use of the new law was largely prevented and, in March 1914, legislation was introduced that greatly appealed to the conservatives Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg was attempting to court, and simultaneously threw a bone to the inner colonizers. Although parcellization was forbidden (the Junker’s greatest fear), the Settlement Commission was given the first opportunity to purchase any property that had been owned for less than ten years and came up for sale.Footnote 39 The Junker breathed a sigh of relief, while inner colonizers finally got the chance to buy bankrupt estates (German or Polish) before the Poles could.Footnote 40
Sering Finds His Voice
At the fin de siècle, Sering found himself involved with the “nationalist pressure groups” Geoff Eley details in his seminal Reshaping the German Right. These entities functioned somewhat like modern day lobbyists, and they often sought the alliance of professors in their campaigns, both as propagandists and to have the ear of those in power. Two important groups, the Pan-German League and the Eastern Marches Society, might have appealed to Sering, especially for their lobbying in favour of Germans in the East, but they were far too radical and unconcerned with the “tactical niceties” of party politics for Sering’s moderate tendencies.Footnote 41 In this atmosphere, from the mid-1890s, Schmoller informally pressed his colleagues and former students to help push for a stronger Navy, and even Brentano was supportive, for a strong fleet was as much to protect international trade as it was to secure overseas colonies. In 1897 Sering was anonymously helping write propaganda for the cause. By 1898, a pressure group specifically for this purpose was formed, the Navy League, and its leadership reached out directly to Schmoller for assistance. The group was, however, too radical in temperament for the “Fleet Professors,” and ultimately Sering was among those who in 1899 managed to apply enough pressure to remove much of the Navy League’s hotheaded leaders and reform it into a body that represented all major supporters of a stronger German Navy. In December he then joined the executive committee.Footnote 42 As Eley points out, until the First World War, many Germans with a colonial mindset were interested in both the landward (Posen, West Prussia) element of settlement, as well as having a seaward “Great Powers” empire. The latter was to be achieved partly through overseas settlement (Southwest Africa) but also importantly via the indirect colonialism of a navy-protected merchant marine that funnelled German goods around the world. The author of the later important work Mitteleuropa (1915), Friedrich Naumann, joined the Navy League in 1899. His push to turn the League’s members into an ad hoc anti-Junker alliance would surely have pleased Sering.Footnote 43 Sering would remain close to the leadership of the League until at least 1908.
While he was becoming involved in the Navy League, Sering rose to national prominence during the Bodenfragedebatte, and many of that debate’s themes would shape the next decade of his thinking. Of all the debating points made by his counterparts, the argument that industry was crucial to a modern military was an important one to Sering. As a member of the League, he obviously agreed that a navy was important, that the ships, cannons, and weapons made possible by an industrial economy were necessary to be a Great Power. At the same time, he constantly argued that a modern military also needed a lot of soldiers, and that a robust, healthy and heavily populated countryside was the best producer of such men. On February 14, 1900, Sering delivered a talk in the Berlin Philharmonic, entitled “The Trade Policy of the Great Powers and the Navy.”Footnote 44 Let us take a moment to remind ourselves of the fundamental contradiction of conservative nationalist rhetoric we find here, one that has a through-line to later fascist politics. At the height of the hankering for a rural state that would solve so many of Germany’s problems, the same people demanded a massive, ultra-modern steel fleet. Sering began by pointing out that, with its expanding population, Germany had been forced to import rye since the 1850s and wheat since the 1870s. Yes, he admitted, Germany had managed to survive just fine so far without a Navy, but one need only recall the Continental Blockade to know that Germany was at the mercy of the British fleet. For all its talk of free trade, in the end, Sering claimed, power is what mattered most to Britain. He then, once again, pointed to America as the example for Germany to follow. Firstly, it was the mix of mid-sized-plot farmers and cities in the North who had defeated the large land-owning elite of the South (this meant that a model of inner colonization had beaten the Junker). And now, that perfect northern mix of rural farms and industrial base had created a railway system that extended throughout the Americas, making both continents an American domain, and a fleet was built that had captured the Philippines and made the Pacific also an American domain. Further, the American empire, like the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, was becoming an enclosed trading system with no need for foreign trade. In an interesting anecdote, Sering told a story about how the British Empire feared losing their territories that ran along the American border. He mentioned meeting a Canadian businessman, in an English officer’s uniform, at a party for the Governor-General of Quebec. The Canadian argued that Canada would be best off in an economic and political union with the United States. Sering drew upon this moment to point out to his audience that it was in response to the huge standing army in the post-bellum United States that resulted in the confederation of Canada in 1867, and a continent-wide railway that was able to get troops from Montreal to Esquimault, on Vancouver Island, in two weeks.Footnote 45
Thus, strategic uses of industry, transport networks, and of course settlement were all necessary in the new geopolitical configuration. Sering quoted Harry Huntington Powers on “the ethics of expansion,” pointing out Powers’ Darwinian ideas about rising and falling races, and how this all helped explain the danger to Germany of both the Anglo-Saxons as well as the Russians. Although there were some, Sering claimed, who argued Germany should lay down the weapons of war and pursue its place in the world peacefully, they were wrong. Instead, Sering argued Germany needed colonies to become stronger, and that perhaps there were still possibilities in the tropics. Although the importance of inner colonization was invoked in this speech, Sering at this moment was obviously speaking about “overseas” colonies.Footnote 46
In an article published the following year, Sering tied some of these themes into the debate around tariffs, and began laying out his linkage between an agrarian economy and the number of soldiers a nation could produce.Footnote 47 Against the argument that tariffs unnecessarily increased the price of food for city dwellers in Germany, Sering asked, what would happen to the farmers of Germany were the tariffs to be dropped? Whereas America was usually Sering’s exemplar nation, England tended to be described as a nightmare that he urged his fellow Germans to avoid. Britain’s dropping of tariffs, and the resulting devastation of agriculture there, Sering argued, had led to cities full of a simple Lumpenproletariat, while Germany’s strong, protected rural order provided a steady stream of healthy young people for the growing cities, and simultaneously produced a great number of excellent soldiers for the Reich. Ever the pragmatist, Sering first buttered up his real target, stating that he understood that the Junker were the drivers of progress in the agrarian East, striving to protect their agrarian realm. But, Sering continued, the Junker’s reliance on seasonal Polish workers undermined this project. Thus, only with the provision of more funding for inner colonization would Sering back the raising of tariffs to protect agriculture. In fact, without simultaneous support for inner colonization, Sering would be against tariffs, as there would be nothing to protect were Germany unable to stop the Slavs from pouring into the vacuum of a thinly settled East. It is fair to say that, at this point, in publications such as this one, Sering was using ethnic chauvinism to further his political project, as he would surely have known that the vast majority of inner colonization at this point involved buying up failed German estates, not Polish ones. Importantly though, he did see the ultimate result of breaking up German estates as bolstering German settlement and, therefore, keeping out the Poles.
As a powerful companion piece to the “industrial” need for a fleet, Sering simultaneously argued that it was the “agrarian” world that produced the men required for Germany’s land army. At both the 1902 and 1904 plenary meetings of the German Agrarian Council (Deutsche Landwirthschaftsrath), Sering produced a bevy of elaborate colour-coded maps that he argued proved that the higher the concentration of farmers in an area of Germany, the more children (meaning future soldiers) they produced.Footnote 48 In 1902, he directly invoked the threatened “colonial land” of the east, and how many more recruits it produced than the city of Berlin. Not only was Berlin the per capita worst creator of recruits, the men it produced were woeful physical specimens, and Sering ascribed this to the lack of “fresh air” in the capital. The fecundity of women was much worse in the city, Sering claimed, and the death rate among men much higher. Finally, the factory work atmosphere was terrible for the men, and Sering pointed out that there were many examples in England indicating how much worse it could become. In any case, England only had food because of its overseas Empire, while Russia, because of its agrarian base, was producing many more men, much faster.
In 1904 he repeated many of his points, and pressed his degeneration argument even further.Footnote 49 After arguing that the space to play and run free in the countryside resulted in far less of the “nerve problems” witnessed in the city, Sering wanted to see statistics about the origin of the parents of the best soldiers, believing that generations of countryside living were necessary for a strong army. Yes, Sering admitted, industry and technology had made Germany powerful, but they had to compensate for what big cities did to the “life and soul” of Germany. He finished by saying no, Germany did not need to become a “pure agrarian state” but, at the same time, the opposite was also not true.
Overwork, Illness, and Duels
The years at the opening of the century held illness as well as a staggering workload for the increasingly influential professor. In the letters Sering sent to the eminence grise of Germany’s academic system, Althoff, we see traces of this life. Sering struggled with a serious illness during the first half of 1904, undergoing several operations and having to curtail some of his teaching.Footnote 50 From 1905 to 1906, Sering complained constantly of his workload and low pay. He encouraged Adolph Wagner and Schmoller to push the ministry to hire a third Ordinarius for his seminar in Berlin to relieve some of his workload. Sering begged that he only teach in Berlin, and by 1906 he was asking for permission to inform his colleagues in Bonn that that was now the case. To this late date, he had been travelling back to Bonn to carry out some of his teaching duties.Footnote 51 Regarding his pay, Sering claimed that, although professors of astronomy and history were poorly paid, it did not necessarily follow that this should also be the case for him.
The end of the Althoff-system brought about what was surely one of the most personally stressful episodes in Sering’s long life. Sering’s letters detail how, since the 1880s, attaining a professorial position at a German University was absurdly dependent on one’s relationship with Friedrich Althoff. Thus, when Althoff retired in 1907, the government moved quickly to replace the “System Althoff” by asserting ministerial control over the appointment of professors. In one such infamous instance, this led directly to a threat upon Sering’s life. Ludwig Bernhard, a recently appointed professor in Posen, had made a reputation for himself as a firebrand and advocate in favour of Germanization in the Eastern Provinces. He was a sophisticated thinker who spoke and read Polish and praised the organizational quality of the Polish counter-colonial program underway in the same region. He had allies in the Prussian government, and in 1908 Bernhard was appointed to the University of Berlin. The three old “Socialists of the Chair,” Schmoller,Footnote 52 Adolph Wagner, and Sering, were not pleased, and from the outset did not make life easy for the newcomer. Things came to a head in the Fall of 1910 in what can only be regarded as an extreme example of Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake … That is why academic politics are so bitter.” The 1910 Berlin version of this involved the scheduling of lectures. Sering set the timetable, giving the less important “special lecture” to Bernhard. Bernhard was not happy with the timetable, and in response challenged Sering to a pistol duel. Sering’s faculty colleagues were rather relieved when, according to the New York Times, a parley took place under the Christmas Tree in the Ministry of Education, with both sides retracting their more incriminating statements.Footnote 53 Although this was surely a difficult and stressful time in Sering’s life, such challenges were frequently thrown around at the time for even less significant reasons. In the same year, a young Joseph Schumpeter challenged a librarian to a duel in order to speed up access to books for his students.Footnote 54 With regard to Bernhard, however, the government made clear it was now in charge. On 9 January 1911, because of the whole incident, the three older “establishment” professors officially called for Bernhard’s demotion. On 13 March, in the Prussian House, the Conservatives supported the Minister’s keeping Bernhard in place, while the National Liberals backed off. Bernhard had won.Footnote 55
Sering continued to proffer his thoughts on inner and overseas colonization, giving major talks in 1906 and 1907 on these themes, and while his journey of 1883 was always in the back of his mind, often in these speeches, it bubbled up to the front and centre. Speaking on the morning of October 7, 1906 to the German Colonial Congress, Sering began by declaring to his audience that North America was the “showplace of a colonial movement.”Footnote 56 And the space of that colonial movement, a mere hundred years earlier, had been “not much more than a massive hunting territory of nomadic Indian tribes.”Footnote 57 He recounted that when he visited in 1883, settlement was in full motion and the largest group among the foreign born settlers were Germans: “The North American Union was the first among modern colonial powers to understand that unsettled land should be parceled into lots and reserved for middle-sized and small farms.”Footnote 58 But now, he claimed, only the great western deserts were left unsettled, and thus North America no longer belonged to the “colonial areas of the world.” The colonizing work of the “grand variety” (grossen Stils) was over and instead attention was now being paid to “filling up the already settled districts.”Footnote 59 Sering explained that this meant that people now had to purchase land, many becoming mere tenants, resulting in a much slower settlement. Owners of the land sought agricultural workers, like in Germany, and in the eastern regions Poles and Swedes tended to fill these jobs, while in the South, such as in Mississippi, Sering claimed that owners desired “to replace the lazy Negroes on the cotton plantations with Swedish and German workers.”Footnote 60 Sering further explained that, for the most part, immigrants in North America now sought industrial jobs. In other words, the jobs provided by German industry were keeping Germans from leaving to find similar jobs in North America. Sering pointed out that, instead of Germans, American farms ended up attracting cheap labour, like the “Landproletariat” from Italy, Slavs from Austria, and Jews from Austria and Russia. There was one location, however, that Sering believed might still attract good German farmers: the Canadian Prairies. At this point Sering indicated the ways in which Canadian settlement appealed to him. First, there was the obvious way settlement along the forty-ninth parallel combined agriculture with security. The CPR was both facilitating rural settlement and, by being built along the border, also served the function of demarking territory and repelling uncontrolled American immigration. Further, unlike the Americans, Canadians employed immigration agents both in eastern Canada as well as abroad to get the kind of settlers they wanted. Finally, Canadian colonial societies were formed whose sole focus was the organized settlement of people on the Prairies. There had been a development since 1883 that was, however, discouraging to Sering. The Mennonite settlements he visited then had been allowed to function in a virtually “German” manner, maintaining their Germanness. Now, it appeared, communities were no longer sticking together, and Germans in Canada were losing their identity just as quickly as they did in America. This was slowing German migration to the Prairies, as it was coupled with the obvious problem evident to discerning farmers, that of the six-month winter of this area called American Siberia by some. Sering noted that these factors resulted in the arrival of much less attractive settlers, such as Ruthenians (Ukrainians). Many Germans who had originally settled in the Prairies had become disenchanted by the region’s dwindling Germanness and low temperatures, and had decamped for the United States where, Sering claimed, “truer” people of the land were to be found.
Enthusiasm for overseas colonialism burst onto the German political scene at this time, during the so-called Dernburg era, 1906–1910. As Erik Grimmer-Solem describes, the evolving link between professors and colonialism first seen around the push for a Navy by the likes of Sering, came into full national view during the “colonial crisis” of 1907.Footnote 61 The continuing military situation in German Southwest Africa, involving the genocide of the Herero and Nama, had become quite costly and controversial by 1906, and that year the Centre and Social Democratic parties withheld government funding for the mission. This led to Chancellor Bülow’s calling for a snap election in 1907, the so-called Hottentot Election. In January of that year, Schmoller gathered dozens of professors to lend their moderate, sophisticated, pro-colonial discourse to counteract the often-off-putting language of the Pan Germans, among others. At the Royal Academy for Music, on January 8, after a long speech by the “Colonial Director” Bernhard Dernburg, several others gave talks. Sering opened his speech by laying out the reasons why Germany had so few overseas colonies, pointing out that, like Italy, Germany was late to unify and most of the world had been gobbled up by then. Germany did need colonies he argued, both for raw materials, but also (in a Ratzellian sense) because the German people needed space to grow and have “elbow room.”Footnote 62 It should be noted here, when it came to inner colonization in the German East, Sering believed there was more than enough “elbow room” for Germans, without any kind of border “expansion.” It is thus fascinating that, when speaking of the tropics, Sering suddenly felt that Germany was too small. He argued that Germany ought to get more colonies or the globe would be monopolized by Britain and America. Sering then provided an overview of Germany’s colonial position, and claimed that the current colonies were good, possessing some twelve to thirteen million “coloured” inhabitants, with a great deal of land to cultivate. Sering also pointed out that not all land was ideal for agriculture, citing the example of Canada in which only 10 percent was cultivable (anbaufähig). While conceding that at that time no German colony was excellent for agriculture, Sering pointed to what he had observed in California and proposed that any land could be irrigated. In terms of what was left to colonize, specifically for raw materials, Sering named the tropics of Africa and South America, urging Germany to pursue these opportunities. He ended by admitting that these places were full of races that did not want German colonization, however, he stipulated that, as one of the Kulturvölker, Germans had a duty to colonize. Germany would raise these people up. At the end of all the speeches, a committee was formed to gather funds for a new lobby group; both Sering and Schmoller became part of the small organizing board. Just as Sering always attempted in his professional life to be “above” politics, so this committee and the many professors involved in this Gegenaktion (counter-action, as they termed it) attempted to maintain the fine line between academia and politics, never openly supporting any political party.Footnote 63
As Sering’s interests expanded well beyond the threatened East with the discussion of overseas colonies in the tropics, he was simultaneously shifting his focus in the opposite direction of normal inner colonization, from Germany’s east to the northern and western borderlands. Throughout these years, the Sering family vacationed in Schleswig-Holstein, and it appears that the tireless Sering studied the northern borderlands while supposedly at rest. Although this was arguably an ethnically “threatened” land, for the most part the in-depth study that Sering would produce focused upon another central issue in settler politics in inner colonization: land distribution. In 1908, Sering published Inheritance Law and Agriculture in Schleswig-Holstein from an Historical Basis.Footnote 64 Unsurprisingly, Sering made his usual assessment. In the areas of western Holstein, where there were middle-sized plots of land and very few large landowners, agriculture flourished, and was nicely mixed with ship-building and other industrial endeavours. Eastern Holstein was another story, where, as Sering characteristically viewed it, the problem, it turns out, were, in the end, “Poles” and Junker.
Early in the book Sering discussed the “threatened” borderland, comprised of the three most northern districts (Kreise), where Danish was spoken in the countryside, though German was more often heard in the towns. As Matthew Fitzpatrick illustrates, the Danes of north Schleswig had been viewed as a national threat since their incorporation into the Empire in 1864. In 1898, more than a thousand Danish subjects were expelled for nationalist “agitation.” While Fitzpatrick points out that, especially when compared to the Slavic East, this was more a difference of “nationalities” than “ethnicities,” he does make clear in his analysis of the ex-post-facto Reichstag debate about the expulsions, in 1899, as well as in the language used in the press, that some contemporaries saw both threatened areas as rather similar.Footnote 65 In Sering’s book, after pointing out that added to the linguistic mix were also some Flemish speakers, he had little to say about the most “Danish” part of the “threatened” North, for, as he claimed, they were all “germanisch.” In other words, despite not yet being fully assimilated, these people were not a threat to Deutschtum. Sering claimed that, although the Angles had left long ago, they had been slowly but surely replaced by the Jutes (Germans), adding that the “history of Schleswig can be seen as the gradual replacement of the Danish Empire both politically and nationally.”Footnote 66 In a footnote, however, Sering remarked that there were additionally 4,236 Polish speakers, in his words, “Wanderarbeiter!” (seasonal labour). But, Sering asserted, the Polish problem in eastern Holstein was much, much deeper, for that territory had originally been settled by the Wends, medieval western Slavs. Although conquered by the twelfth century, proper settlement by the Germans only got under way with the end of eastern colonization in 1410. Sering claimed that some long-term racial effects were apparent, in that the slavery practiced among the Wends could be seen physically in the “body composition” of the landless labourers in eastern Holstein. Further, 90 percent of the Junker of Schleswig-Holstein lived in eastern Holstein, possessed the largest estates, and created an attendant class of landless labourers. Despite ostensibly speaking here about Germany’s north, Sering managed to once again make what was really an argument for inner colonization in Posen and West Prussia.
Sering’s comments in these last two sections, on Africans, Danes, and Poles, warrant some comment on the intersection of race and colonization. While Sering was probably least concerned with Danes because they were culturally and linguistically most like Germans, it is also the case that they were politically and numerically the least threatening. The Poles were more problematic, not only because of their linguistic, cultural, and “racial” differences but because of their considerable power in eastern Germany. Sering described Africans as needing German civilization to raise them up, language that might appear to be more “racial” in tone than he used for Poles. Yet Sering was later comfortable echoing similar language to that of the German occupiers of Eastern Europe in 1915 when speaking of the mostly powerless civilian populations under their control: Germans were a Kulturvolk that would civilize the “dirty,” “backwards,” “lazy” “little peoples” of the East.Footnote 67 From 1905, marriage between Germans and Africans was banned in some German colonies but such rules regarding Jews and Slavs in Germany only came into effect under the Nazis. Ultimately, the racialization and othering of colonized peoples, whether in Latvia or Namibia, relied on many more factors than simply the colour of one’s skin.Footnote 68
The pathbreaking research of Dörte Lerp allows us to further compare and contrast German colonization in Eastern Europe to their “settler” colony of Southwest Africa.Footnote 69 “Germans depended on African and Polish workers,” claims Lerp, detailing how Germans worked to convert each group from independent land owners into landless labourers.Footnote 70 Once again, it was only the legal framework within Prussia that prevented Poles from being treated even more like Africans, for Poles at least had legal status in Prussia and could use the courts and banks to frustrate German goals. In 1903, the Germans formally implemented a government controlled, organized settler colonization modelled on the very structure of the Prussian Program of Inner Colonization, in German Southwest Africa with 300,000 marks allocated to undertake this project. The conflict that erupted there the following year, however, put an end to this scheme. Once the hostilities were over, the settlement plan that was instead put in place was the antithesis of Sering’s inner colonization; a rather Junker-like system of large estates was encouraged (with the resulting vastly lower German population density).Footnote 71 Nevertheless, Lerp powerfully argues for the overall structural and conceptual symmetries between these two “colonial” spaces and for their adherence to an overall global connection between colonization and territoriality:
Legal, administrative and military control no longer sufficed to uphold permanent state sovereignty over a territory, especially not on the edges of empires. The settlement programmes … were all designed to secure imperial frontier spaces by populating them, generally with members of whichever group was considered the ethnic or racial elite. The new concept of territoriality turned the American West, Eastern Europe and Southern Africa as well as Siberia and Manchuria into spaces of struggle for political dominance through spatial means.Footnote 72
The Institutionalization of the Field of Inner Colonization
It was during this heated “colonial” period that some long-term academic projects got underway. The theme of overseas settlement in the tropics interested Sering to the point that he oversaw the production of five volumes for the VfS on the topic, though he did not write any of them himself.Footnote 73 At the same time, the movers and shakers behind inner colonization moved significantly beyond a government program and laid down the foundations of something more akin to an academic field. This occurred in two stages, first, in 1908 with the inaugural issue of the Archive for Inner Colonization (Archiv für innere Kolonisation, hereafter AFK), a journal that brought together specialists and politicians. Then, in 1912, with the opening meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Inner Colonization (Gesellshaft zur Förderung der inneren Kolonisation, hereafter GFK).
The Archive for Inner Colonization
In his 1933 editorial, looking back on twenty-five years of the AFK, Heinrich Sohnrey detailed how the journal got started. Dr. Hugo Thiel, at the Ministry of Agriculture, was the first to suggest a journal devoted to inner colonization. This occurred in his office one day in 1908 and, sitting there beside Sohnrey was Friedrich von Schwerin. Soon thereafter, these two had a meeting with Sering, who, it turned out, was concerned that inner colonization was itself too narrow a theme to support an entire journal, and instead suggested a “Zeitschrift für Agrarpolitik” (Journal of Agrarian Politics). Sohnrey remained convinced, launched the journal, but indeed did have difficulty at first. Luckily, Thiel and the Ministry kicked in financial support to keep the journal afloat in the earliest days, and then, with the founding of the GFK, the AFK became the house journal of that body and was safe thereafter.Footnote 74
In the opening edition of AFK, in 1909, the editors stated that this journal would be a place for academics and non-academics to come together with the shared goal of furthering inner colonization, throughout Germany, but especially in the threatened East.Footnote 75 During this initial period, from 1909 to 1914, although there was no call for a physical expansion of the eastern borders, the envy for spaces of seeming emptiness was apparent throughout the journal. In an intriguing 1912 piece, southern Spain was said to be largely empty and ready for colonization and that this same area had long ago been conquered and initially settled by the Castillians, just as Prussian Poland had once be conquered and settled by the Teutonic Knights.Footnote 76 One of the primary examples of an inner colonizing European power, Russia, was featured throughout AFK. The eastern migration of settlers to Siberia was analyzed, especially in an article that discussed the veterans of the Russo-Japanese War as having received plots there. The author, Charles de Beaulieu’s jealousy for vast, “empty” space was overt.Footnote 77 Beaulieu was based in Frankfurt an der Oder yet did not directly reference the shared struggle of Germans and Russians to settle among Poles in East Central Europe. Although not mentioning Poles, the article “Agrarian Reform and Inner Colonization in Russia” did discuss the Stolypin land reforms that were active in Russia’s Polish space.Footnote 78
“Overfilled” spaces of inner colonization were also analyzed, especially within the greatest of colonial empires, Britain. A collection of articles in 1912 focused on the United Kingdom; B. Skalweit’s two part “Settlement Efforts in England” stands out as an in-depth analysis of the situation in Britain. From his perch working inside the German embassy in London, Skalweit detailed England’s extreme “flight from the land,” underway since 1870. He praised the many governmental efforts, established in the 1880s, to legally protect and distribute smallholdings and direct families out of the cities and onto the land.Footnote 79 Skalweit concluded by arguing that only when in the hands of the government, and not local lords, was settlement successful in England.
Intriguingly, also in the 1912 volume, the journal’s authors made clear that they considered “inner colonization” to be part and parcel of a colonialism that encompassed “overseas colonization.” The previous year, a strange piece by the famous journalist Paul Rohrbach had appeared in the pages of AFK, entitled “Settlement Efforts in Our African Colonies.” Here, Rohrbach emphasized that overseas German settler colonies in East Africa, Cameroon, and Southwest Africa needed to retain their Germanness, but he was honest in his assessment of the land, describing it as desolate, with poor soil and too much rain.Footnote 80 Perhaps as a reaction to this piece, the special “Colonial Issue” of 1912 made the connection to the East very clear, arguing that each form of settler colonialism could learn from the other but that, although the overseas colonies were significant, in the end the “nearby” colonies were more important. In fact, the editor’s introduction stated that 1,000 farmers in the German East were more important than 5,000 in East Africa. And yet, despite this, the editor complained, due to its popularity, overseas colonization received much of the money that would otherwise be directed to inner colonization. In reference to the “natives” of the German East, he did however concede that it was easier to deal with Africans when it came to competition over farmland. He ended the editorial arguing that both strong inner colonization, as well as resilient overseas settlement, would result in the motto that he recommended that the AFK adopt: “A Bigger Germany It Must Be!” (Das grössere Deutschland soll es sein!)Footnote 81
In his economic report in this special 1912 issue, Professor Kurt Weidenfeld noted that Germans were migrating only as far as German cities now, and there was no need for the “safety valve” of overseas migration. By 1912, German emigration had shrunk to 10 percent of what it had been in 1885.Footnote 82 Nevertheless, two other articles discussed overseas colonies in a manner that made them appealing. One dispelled the notion of difficulties with climate, noting that the hill station at Moschi (German East Africa) was rather similar to Central Europe, and further argued that in any case Africans lacked the cultural level to farm properly, being a full thousand years behind Germans, and thus German settlement was necessary.Footnote 83 The other piece referenced Africans as well, noting that their sheer number was the biggest obstacle (a situation rather similar to Prussian Poland, though this was not openly stated).Footnote 84 The relationship of the two forms of settlerism was made clear in the special issue’s select bibliography: “Overview of publications in the area of inner colonization of domestic and overseas areas in 1911.”Footnote 85 Thus, the overall tone of this special issue very much confirms Lerp’s thesis that all spaces of German colonization belonged to an “imperial formation” that connected local factors in a colonial situation to both macro-political German thinking as well as forms of settler colonialism around the globe.Footnote 86
It was in the pages of AFK that Sering’s major ally, Friedrich von Schwerin, began to publish. A speech of his appeared in 1911 in which he described the “old Prussian project” of inner colonization, which had begun with none other than Frederick the Great. Schwerin made the vacuum-based argument that, unless Germans were settled onto every square inch of empty land in the East, the same space would surely be filled by the Poles. Indeed, the space was filled every harvest, Schwerin pointed out, with the Slavic Flood of seasonal Polish workers doing the work that settled small-plot German farmers should be doing. How would the nation not avoid starvation, Schwerin argued, should a war prevent the arrival of said Poles?Footnote 87 The language of war appeared in AFK when reference was made to the counter-colonial behaviour of Poles, such as in a 1910 article that referred to Polish inner colonization as a “Feldzug” (military campaign), or a 1911 piece referencing Polish “fanaticism” as being behind the rise in the price of land.Footnote 88
Alongside articles directly about the war over land between Germans and Poles, the more agrarian romantic notion of inner colonization came out in AFK pieces about “social colonization.” The core idea was that getting prisoners and the urban unemployed out of the cities and onto small farming plots would both help basic settler needs but also alleviate overcrowding in the cities and the resulting health problems. Further, as Sering had earlier argued, the thicker the rural population, the more future soldiers that would be produced. One author, Hans Ostwald, went so far as to claim that such progress might result in Germany winning land by tilling the soil (and draining swamps) instead of spilling blood.Footnote 89 Along these same “social” lines, the journal discussed the role of women in inner colonization. An article on the “Exhibition of Women in the Home and at Work,” in Berlin, featured a stand set up by the East Prussian Association which attempted to shame the city visitors by pointing out that, while urban women were “consumers,” women on the land were “producers.” The author used this occasion to call for more research on how women contributed to the “manly” work of inner colonization.Footnote 90
The Society for the Advancement of Inner Colonization
In its opening 1909 edition of AFK, the editorial team had directly stated that this journal was to be an organ where politicians and scientists could come together to further the goals of inner colonization.Footnote 91 And a glance at the list of authors shows the editors at their word, with professors and politicians sharing the bylines. This hybrid model is also apparent when one works through the list of attendees for the opening conference of the newly formed GFK, on December 7, 1912. First, there was the mix represented by the three founding directors, the academic Sering, the politician Friedrich von Schwerin, and the industrialist and publisher Alfred Hugenberg. Beyond them, the academic interest in the Eastern question was represented by the doyen of German–Polish history, Manfred Laubert, as well as Dr Erich Zechlin of Posen, Professor Johann Viktor Bredt of Marburg, Professor Fritz Curschmann of Greifswald, a specialist in the early modern colonization of the East, as well as Professor Heinrich Sohnrey, the publisher of AFK and for many the true guardian of the romantic dream of a better, agrarian Germany. Representing the media were Samuel Breslauer, editor-in-chief of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Heinrich Rippler, the editor of the Tägliche Rundschau, and, of a decidedly more polemical bent, Georg Cleinow, from the Grenzbote, as well as Ernst Hunkel of the Ostmark. Along with the latter two editors, representing the more radically right-wing section of the population were both the business director of the Reich Alliance against Social Democracy and the general secretary of the Eastern Marches Society. Another participant worth noting was General von Beseler, soon to be the commander of occupied Poland.Footnote 92 These various groups and actors may have had many differences, but they all shared a vision of Prussian Poland as a colonial space, a frontier that had, somehow, to be both “cleared” of undesirable elements and simultaneously filled with Germans. The Slavic Flood had to be first dammed, then drained.
The speeches at this inaugural conference dispensed with the niceties such events often proffered, and the participants jumped right into the most contentious debates of inner colonization. Sering obstinately refused to let any Junker in the audience off the hook and returned to one of his oldest arguments: that the slavery and indentured labour found in the American South was the clearest model of how not to conduct inner colonization. Reflecting upon what he had just learned on a recent trip to Russia, discussed in the next section, he remarked that the Stolypin reforms showed anyone who took the time to look at them that free and independent farmers who owned their own land were by far the strongest yeomen to be found.Footnote 93
Sering and Inner Colonization on the Eve of War: 1909–1914
The Junker
A wonderful illustration of Sering’s complicated relationship with the Junker can be found in two speeches he gave at the annual Royal Prussian Agrarian Economic College, as well as in the repartee that occurred during the Q&A immediately afterward. Sering kept his dagger sharp whenever there was an opportunity to attack the Junker, and indeed there was a rather lively exchange in February 1909. Sering began his address complaining that inner colonization was not some program designed to provide a workforce to Junker. Instead, it was fundamentally about changing the distribution of land and simultaneously solving the problem of landless labour. Of course, Sering knew such a radical argument had to be immediately couched in terms of racial and national necessity, and thus claimed that inner colonization of the East would also stop the “colossal flood wave of Slavicness” and would provide a “constant defense.” Numerous German families were the most powerful way to do this, and “neighbouring rows of populous (volkreich) villages” would “defend to their last drop of blood.”Footnote 94 Sering then said that although he was often accused of calling for the dissolution of Junker-dom, this was not true. Yet, if a mere one million of the six million hectares of Junker-controlled land could be colonized, Germany would be in incredible shape.Footnote 95 In the discussion that followed, it must be admitted that some of the Junker participants lived up to the oafish caricatures that history has given them. One claimed that as opposed to what Sering had said about “defending to the last drop of blood,” the peasants he knew were more interested in “money and schnapps.” Further, good, married peasants were staying in the East, and only “day labourers” fled west, because the latter could not stand that their wages were paid to their parents, people who knew to only give out what they thought appropriate. In the West, he asserted, these wasters were their “own lords.” His transcribed comments end with: “Herr Professor Sering appears – at least this is what I feel – to be a little on a war footing with the Junker. (Professor Sering: No! – Laughter.)”Footnote 96
The lively exchange in the room then continued with Sering responding that yes, words like “freedom” were very popular and led many farmers to flee to cities in the hopes that they might find it there. But, argued Sering, they could have freedom right where they already lived in the East, if the Junker would only give them their own farms. And yes, claimed Sering, they would defend their soil (Scholle) to the last drop of blood. Sering said he travelled often among the settlers and stated that they were a hard-working sort who paid off their debts. The Conservative politician Conrad von Wangenheim then countered that speeches like Sering’s today would only increase Junker resistance to inner colonization. Another cited Sering’s words from the Dictionary of National Economy in which he declared that the Junker were necessary to stop the monopoly of power in the cities: “Gentlemen, those words pleased me, much more so than the words I’ve heard him say today. (Laughter).” Sering retorted: “But there is no contradiction!” Sering was then attacked with the charge that the new colonists neither got along with, nor understood, the Junker. “Not true!” yelled Sering, who then stated that he wanted to be very clear: Germany needed “Leaders (Führer) on the Land.”Footnote 97 He noted that, since the defeat of the American South, the farmers there no longer knew what to do, that is, they lacked leadership. Sering, who definitely believed in hierarchy, then claimed that he had never called for the destruction of the Junker and stated that he in fact wanted to restore a form of entailment that would work to maintain truly independent Junker. He finished with, “I ultimately reject being painted as an enemy of the Junker.” Another member spoke up to defend Sering and stated that no one was suggesting a war against the Junker.Footnote 98 Perhaps a cold war is the best way to describe the simmering tension between Sering and the Junker. It is in fact difficult to see any way in which Sering’s denials could be true; although he could never say so directly, he was, without a doubt, an enemy of the Junker.
Sering was clearly not cowed by the reaction he received in 1909 because exactly a year later he was full of vim and vigour again in his assault on the evils of Junker-dom. In his February 11, 1910 talk at the same Royal Prussian Agrarian Economic College, he had three elaborate maps to illustrate the direct link between large Junker estates and the flight from the land of the peasantry. His frustration with Polish counter-colonization was also clearly on display. In the areas of the eastern provinces where there was an ideal mix of small Polish farmer plots and industry, the Polish population was increasing. In regions where the Settlement Commission had achieved such proper land distribution, the same was happening with Germans. Alas, decried Sering, there was no more Polish land to purchase and the only answer was to buy and break up German estates. After lamenting that Poles were not great additions to the German Empire, he again claimed that ultimately Junker were the greatest threat, and that both groups were guilty of degeneration in Germany. Sering lamented that the “supremacy” of the Junker led to depopulation and surmised that, had it not been for Junker estates, there would be three times as many Germans living in the East, Germans who would be strengthening the race. Unusually, Sering admitted that yes, large estates did produce more food, but immediately pointed out that such purely economic considerations were only paramount in a system where food production was all that mattered. Further, Sering argued, “a purposefully directed colonization would result in a steady growth of agricultural production, and supporting this was a legion of objective evidence.”Footnote 99 Sering further claimed that doubling Germany’s agricultural production had become key to its political position in the world, and thus inner colonization was the fundamental answer to all of Germany’s problems. Sering was nothing if not a true believer.
By the following year’s address, Sering was attempting to soften his direct assault on the Junker and, instead of naming them directly, shifted his argument to simply stating what the positive effects of the inner colonization of the East would be for all Germans. For instance, he sought to show how a return to rural life would produce soldiers. This speech combined his colourful maps from a decade earlier, depicting rural areas and the production of soldiers with his more recent theme of global, land-based great powers and their use of railroads and colonization to settle their rural areas. Because Germany had to make do with the land it had, once again Sering declared Germany must turn to inner colonization as the only way to create “a safe wall against the slavicization of the East,” and simultaneously to create workers and soldiers for the Reich. After all, Sering pointed out, it had been free land that pulled Germans to that space in the first place, long ago.Footnote 100
The very next year he went much broader, with a global comparison of Great Land Empires and their small plot farmers. This 1912 speech, “The Politics of the Distribution of Land in the Great Empires,” opened with a global transnational settler colonial comparison of North and South America, Australia, Siberia, North and South Africa, describing the way each had built railroads that brought settlers into empty prairies where they removed the forests, assimilated or removed the natives, and built homesteads. Sering expressed regret that Germany was late to the game of carving up the globe and therefore would have to settle for less land. He further argued that with less land at stake much more attention would have to be paid to the distribution of land ownership so that it could be administered as efficiently as possible. Comparison to these empires was important to Sering, but the settlement politics of the United States was the archetype for him. After making his usual comparison of the yeoman farmer with his own plot of land in the victorious North, to the slave-owning large land owning elite of the vanquished South, he noted that the expansion into the American Prairie was carried out by “a population that was largely of Germanic descent.”Footnote 101 After pointing out the use of immigration agents in Canada, and his preference for the more organized settlement of that country, he referenced the “climate” problem of Canada, as well as that of Australia. Such “climate” issues were in fact like what Germans had to deal with in Southwest Africa, Sering admitted to laughter from the audience. Sering also made an interesting reference to the success of Ireland in providing farms for settlers, arguing that this had led to social peace.Footnote 102 Then, in reference to the land he would soon be visiting, Sering praised the massive new organization of Russian land undertaken by the recently assassinated Stolypin. Sering called this a massive “inner colonization” at the same time that a massive “outer colonization” to Siberia was taking place.Footnote 103
With these global comparisons completed, Sering claimed that it was high time to indicate where Germany stood. Land was properly divided and in healthy shape in the “old Empire,” but in the colonial area (the eastern provinces), despite the fact that the Junker had a close relationship to the land, much of the lower orders did not own the land, and there were many Slavs (though they were at least somewhat Germanized). Sering claimed that Germany had many colonists but lacked the farms to put them on.Footnote 104
During this period, Sering organized two “Studienreisen,” study trips with several colleagues. The first, in May 1910, was in many ways a trial run of the much bigger journey two years later. The initial excursion saw Sering guiding 150 participants over six days throughout the Moselland, the area that he had explored and studied during his time in nearby Bonn. After moving through the Eifel region of the lower Mosel, they visited the old Roman city of Trier, before moving into the Reichland of Lorraine. In his introductory essay to the accompanying published study,Footnote 105 Sering admitted that this region was a heavily mixed “language frontier,” but that Germanization had been effective over the last forty years. Sering continued, lauding the German civilizing mission, this time in the West, claiming that “Lotharingians” were now doing better than ever, “because we have provided the individual breathing space required to freely develop their powers.”Footnote 106
Two years later Sering departed for a major journey to Russia. Professor Otto Auhagen accompanied Sering on this trip, a massive research journey with some 108 participants. Several would write up their findings, which Sering then edited into a volume that appeared the following year. In his introduction, Sering began by stating that the German people knew far too little about their largest trading partner, the great nation of Russia. Sering explained that, despite westernization, Russia was still 90 percent agrarian, and “in a state of economic and spiritual bondage,” as it was “under the pressure of serfdom and the state poll tax.”Footnote 107 Despite the “emancipation” of 1861, Sering argued that Russian peasants were still in a feudal state and were only emerging from it with the 1906 and 1910 laws, reforms much more akin to “European” understandings of culture and private property. Sering agreed with Auhagen, who had now made two recent trips of his own to Russia, that massive change was underway there because men were being given their own farms, and thus they were achieving independence, an outcome right in line with the developments one could see in “old Europe,” as well as in overseas settler colonies. The travelling group saw Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, as well as industry, schools, infirmaries, and prisons. They travelled out onto the fruitful steppe near Kharkov, the forests near the Volga, and saw villages still in their old configuration, newly parcelled farm plots, and yes, large landed estates. All-in-all, the Russian hosts made everything very easy, and were an example of the greatest hospitality, enthused Sering. What is most fascinating about this volume is that, a mere four years later, Sering would publish another tome on settler colonialism in the Russian lands, only this time from a perspective of the colonizing conqueror.Footnote 108
There was a moment in 1913 that profoundly hurt Sering, and surely served to deepen his anger toward the Junker. I have uncovered only one instance of Sering speaking in front of his great hero, the Kaiser, and on that occasion he was mocked. Let us recall that the greatest moment of Sering’s life was his fourteenth birthday, the day William the Second’s father had been crowned emperor of Germany. February 12, 1913 was to feature Sering giving a major talk on inner colonization at the German Agrarian Council. In the audience sat Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, one of the oldest and loudest Junker and a vocal enemy of inner colonization, as well as Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, and the Kaiser. The proceedings opened with the Kaiser giving an address in which he pointed out the necessity of Germany securing “bread and meat” for a safer future. Such a theme would have pleased Sering, and he then took the stage to provide an impassioned plea for more support for inner colonization. After detailing American and Canadian inner colonization, he described Russia and her ten million hectares ready for settlement, indicating that such programs made these empires strong and ensured social peace. In reference to the Kaiser’s previous comments, Sering declared that unharvested fields in the event of war would be a disaster for Germany and that continued and unabated industrialization would simply turn Germany into England. Unfortunately for Sering, the nasty Oldenburg then immediately took the stage after him, mocked his entire project, made jokes about “free farmers” becoming liberals, suggested that this would lead to a radicalized population, and emphasized that what Germany needed instead were “dependent tenants” (abhängig Pächter). The Junker were good for Germany, he claimed, always managing to keep their farmers happy. Sering surely steamed as this elicited huge laughter from the audience, including the Kaiser.Footnote 109 But the dagger in Sering’s heart would surely have come when he rose to answer this mocking challenge, only to see the Kaiser leave the hall. Although we cannot know exactly how Sering really felt about Poles, we can safely say that he utterly despised certain Junker.Footnote 110
Sering’s frustration in the presence of the Kaiser was a microcosm of his and his colleagues’ impatience with the entire inner colonial project by the Summer of 1914. The intractable forces of an obstinate Junker, coupled with a legally protected and ever-growing population of Prussian Poles, had resulted in the truly Sisyphean settler colonial project in the East: no matter how hard the inner colonizers toiled, the demographic balance was not changing. Sering and his colleagues never imagined that it would be the crucible of war that would seemingly solve their problems. At the same time, war would radicalize their understanding of settler colonialism in the East and expand the German mental horizon regarding Empire and the imperial organization of space and the people living therein.
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