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Abstract: The article is available for free; instead of an abstract, this is an extract taken from the beginning of the text:
During the year 1914, a torrent of professorial speeches and publications swept across the country. By the beginning of December, 1,400 separate publications with war-related titles had appeared, for an average of twelve books or pamphlets a day.[8] The outbreak of war thus brought about a tremendous upsurge not contributed to this boom, the percentage of professors was notable.
Those who did not stride to the lectern or take up pen were at least willing to place their names on one of the manifestoes with which professors now appeared before the public.[9] This, too, was new in Germany. As early as mid-August 1914, professors such as Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Eucken published a sharply worded statement against the entry of England into the war.[10] They were supported by a joint “Declaration of German University Professors” signed by an additional 29 scholars.[11] Protests and counterprotests by additional professors followed, and on September 1, the historians in Bonn signed yet another manifesto.[12] At the beginning of October 1914, the famous “Appeal to the World of Culture” appeared, signed not just by 37 prominent artists and writers, but also by 56 university professors.[13] In mid-October a “Declaration of the [!] University Professors of the German Reich” appeared, signed by 3, 016 professors.[14] Mobilization on such a grand scale has never occurred since then; it would also have been unthinkable prior to that time.
Declarations of this kind were not a German peculiarity. On October 21, for instance, around 500 professors in England, especially Oxford dons, spoke out against their German colleagues. By the end of the year, fifteen French universities had taken a collective stand against the declaration of the German universities.[15] Contemporaries were already calling this public hue and cry a “War of the Intellectuals,” or “War of the Minds.”[16] By participating, those who stayed behind were making a verbal contribution to the war effort on the home front.
This intellectual mobilization was by no means restricted to the professors. Artists and writers were equally involved in it.[17] While the professors may have been only one group among others in this band of authorial warriors, they were a striking one. The readiness of German professors to contribute their share to the national defense was demonstrated not just by public speeches, writings, and manifestoes. Their own scholarly work, too, was oriented towards the war and its themes. Linguists wrote about “Soldiery in the German Vocabulary,” or “German War and the German Language”;[18] folklorists wrote about “The German Soldiers’ Song on the Field” or “German War Songs and Patriotic Poetry.”[19] Medievalists wrote about “The Bellicose Culture of the Heathen Germanic Barbarians,”[20] literary historians, about “The Present War and Dramatic Literature.”[21] And this political-military event even affected literary periodization. As early as 1915, Oskar Walzel coined the epochal designation “German Prewar Literature.”[22] Entire journal issues were devoted to the war theme; especially in 1915, there was a tremendous upsurge of pertinent articles.[23]
To be sure, most of the journals that focused on the war had already established a close connection between academia and the educated class. Scholarly journals in the narrower sense did not participate in this turn toward war issues. “The” German professorate remained focused on supposedly pure knowledge in its scholarship. But many individuals took the war as an occasion for rethinking their own relationship toward the nation, as well as that of their discipline to national values, and they demonstrated this publicly. Scarcely any German professors voiced pacifistic views during World War I;[24] among the professors of German, I have found not one who, if he made public statements at all, failed to speak out for the war.
I do not want to pursue the development of war writings by German professors in detail. Suffice it to say that the broad, universal war enthusiasm of the first year, which was quickly dubbed the “ideas of 1914,”[25] suffocated in the horrors of trench warfare and the fears and hardships of the following years. Articles and manifestoes came to concentrate on far more special topics: on the discussion of war aims, on the one hand, and on constitutional issues, on the other.[26] These debated were carried on principally by historians, while professors of German were scarcely involved. They tended to feel more responsible for the common good of the nation, but it was only toward the end of the Weimar Republic that they again connected this with the theme of war.
What motivated the German professors to make such a massive and unequivocal contribution to the German entry into war? Since the 1960s, this question has been researched with considerable breadth and great intensity.[27] The most compelling attempt at an explanation of this phenomenon takes as its starting point the fundamentally imperialistic outlook that had shaped the intellectual climate of Wilhelminian Germany.[28] This school argues that the leadership elite in prewar Germany was not only deeply imbued with nationalism and conservatism, but was also largely under the sway of imperialistic thinking, which had tremendous influence on Germany’s entry into World War I. It is only since the publication of “Germany’s Aims in the First World War”, by Fritz Fischer (1961; English trans., 1967), that this perspective has succeeded in overcoming powerful resistance and gained widespread acceptance
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