, Sondern Sozialer Natur Essay, Research Paper
“Aber die Grundlage der ersten grossen Ruestungswelle
der achtziger und Anfang der neunziger Jahre war noch nicht
oekonomischer, sondern sozialer Natur” ? Kehr believed that as the middle classes of the 1880s felt the
pressure of the Socialist threat, it allied itself with the
monarchy and aristocracy in a mutually beneficial alliance built
on the common ground of property ownership.? This feudal middle
class’s domestic concern and support for the Crown began to
show itself in the form of the growth of the Reserve
Officers’ Corps.? The 1888 army law’s increase of the
maximum age of national service to 45 and the 23% growth in the
standing army was a reaction not to an economic circumstance, but
the need to ward off the socialist menace.? Increasing the
recruiting quota to 30% and service time to two years risked
diluting the army with democratic ideas, but this was viewed as a
necessary danger in the cause of protecting the middle class.? As
the army grew from 750,000 to 1.2 million men between 1875 and
1888, the praetorian air of the army was gone, and the officer
corps had to be maintained at an artificially low level because
the need to keep democracy out of the army was paramount and only
aristocrats were viewed as having adequate incentive to maintain
the commissioned posts with the required line.? There was a
massive shortage of officers as 56 Prussian regiments in 1902
received no applicants for commissions, and the middle-classed
officers were restricted in number not only by middle classed
liberalism, but also by the snobbery of the selections
procedure. The social issues referred to by Kehr were the fall of the
aristocracy and the rise of socialism.? The 1880s and 1890s were
a time of great trauma for the aristocracy and monarchy.?
Political parties had come into existence as a powerful medium
for middle classed beliefs and the labour movements were rapidly
experiencing great growth.? The agrarian conservative Junker
parties that had been backed in the 1870s by peasants under
duress by their landowners. ?The Kulturkampf isolated the
Catholics from supporting the agrarian conservatives, and the
process of industrialisation led to deruralisation –
population growth and urbanisation both eroded the power of the
agrarian sector at the ballot box.? This social change diminished
the power of the landowners and threatened the middle classes as
the old status quo fell to the socialists, and as the majority of
the population became industrial and urban, the army did so too,
therefore reducing its potency, as the conscripts could have been
seen to have had leftist urban leanings. An agricultural depression in the 1870s and 1880s did have an
effect on the power of the aristocracy, but Kehr sees this
economic factor as no greatly important factor in the growth of
the army.? The German government came to see itself as owing more
to its supporters than to its critics and in Liebknecht’s
words, the state’s policies became “a princely
insurance policy against democracy.”? The failure of the
1890 anti-Socialist laws vindicates not only the view that the
power of the Socialists was becoming prohibitive to their lords,
but also indicates the power of sentiment regarding the threat of
the Left.? Investigations into the legality of force against
insurgent towns under the 1851 ‘State of Siege Act’
by the army indicate a high level of fear at the highest
levels. ?The possibility of an 1866-style war that would empower the
nationalists in any election through jingoism was an avenue being
investigated by the rightist bloc, but the prestige of a large
army, as it happened was all that they would be content to get in
this timeframe.