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Countryside-versus-City in European Thought: German and British Anti-Urbanism between the Wars

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10848770802503675

1470-1316

Bernhard Dietz,

European history and politics

Abstract The idea that the city is a place of sin and immorality is as old as urban civilization. But what does anti-urban thought mean in societies which are highly urbanized under the conditions of modern industrialism? Furthermore, is anti-urbanism in the interwar period a German völkisch phenomenon––one further stride on Germany's special path? And what does rural revival and the “back-to-the-land” cult mean in Great Britain, the first industrial nation? This article seeks to provide an answer to these questions by exploring anti-urbanist writing between the End of the First World War and 1933 in Germany, and 1939 in Britain. By examining two key themes it aims to show that the clear-cut distinction between German anti-urban radicalisation and the West's coming to terms with urbanisation cannot be maintained. Firstly, attention will be drawn to the ambiguity of perceptions of the city in the writings of “Conservative Revolutionary” authors in the Weimar Republic. In a second step, the British “back-to-the-land” movement, whose advocates developed comprehensive anti-urban third-way theories in the interwar period and were themselves part of a broader popular anti-industrial movement and a rural cult throughout the 1930s, will be examined. Notes NOTES This article is a longer version of a paper presented in the workshop “From Metrosexual to Metropolitan Hybris: Political, Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Anti-Urbanism,” at the 10th International Conference of ISSEI, The University of Malta, Malta, 24–26 July, 2006. 1. The Jew's internationalism has always been a core topos of anti-Semitism from the anti-Semitic literature of the nineteenth century to the propaganda of Jospeh Goebbles. The Jews, it was suggested, could have no Heimat, no place to feel at home in, but in Germany they had Berlin. As Erhard Schütz puts it: “The young metropolis was a synecdoche for the world. Berlin stood for a site of relentless transformation and restlessness, a place of temporal no-placeness.” Erhard Schütz, “Berlin: A Jewish Heimat at the Turn of the Century?” in Heimat, Nation, Fatherland: The German Sense of Belonging, ed. Jost Hermand and James Steakley (New York: Long, 1996), 59. 2. Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 3. Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 13. 4. Harold L. Poor, “City versus Country: Anti-urbanism in the Weimar Republic,” Societas 7 (1976): 177. 5. Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience, 1900–1945: Modernity and Crisis (London: Routledge, 2001). 6. Carl E. Schorske, “The Ideas of the City in European Thought,” in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handling and John Burchard (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1963), 114. Rolf Peter Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (München: Beck, 1984), 203–5. 7. H. J. Massingham, Introduction to The Natural Order–Essays in the Return to Husbandry, ed. H. J. Massingham (London: Denton & Sons, 1945), 3. 8. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 9. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961). 10. Martin Travers, Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1890–1933 (New York: P. Lang, 2001); Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996); Rolf Peter Sieferle, Die Konservative Revolution. Fünf biographische Skizzen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuchverlag, 1995); Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (München: Nymphenburger Verl. Hdlg, 1962); Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932 (Stuttgart: Fr. Vorwerk, 1950). 11. Wilhelm Stapel, “Der Geistige und sein Volk. Eine Parole,” Deutsches Volkstum 12 (1930): 8. 12. Erhard Schütz, “Beyond Glittering Reflections of Asphalt: Changing Images of Berlin in Weimar Literary Journalism,” in Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, ed. Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), 119–26; Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), 78–109. 13. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes–Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, Vol. II. Welthistorische Perspektiven (München: Beck, 1922), 111. 14. For Spengler's anti-urbanism, see Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft (Meisenheim a. Gl: Hain,1970), 179–93. For the influence of Spengler's anti-urbanism on the blood and soil ideology of Walther Darré, see Mathias Eidenbenz, Blut und Boden. Zu Funktion und Genese der Metaphern des Agrarismus und Biologismus in der nationalsozialistischen Bauernpropaganda R. W. Darrés (Bern: Peter Lang, 1993), 197–201. 15. Peter D. Stachura, The German Youth Movement, 1900–1945: An Interpretative and Documentary History (London: Macmillan, 1981); Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). 16. Kurt Sontheimer, “Der Tatkreis,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7 (1959): 229–60; Klaus Fritzsche, Politische Romantik und Gegenrevolution. Fluchtwege in der Krise der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft: Das Beispiel des Tat-Kreises (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976). 17. Giselher Wirsing, “Der Standort des Bauern,” Die Tat 22 (1930): 33. Quotes from the German are my translations. 18. Ibid., 36. 19. Hans Zehrer, “Die Revolution der Intelligenz,” Die Tat 21 (1929): 486–507. 20. Leopold Dingräve (= Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann), “Unser Wissen von der Stadt,” Die Tat 22 (1930): 958. 21. Mohler, Konservative Revolution, 92–93. 22. For the assessment of Spengler as crossover author, see Louis Dupeux, “‘Kulturpessimismus’, Konservative Revolution und Modernität,” in Intellektuellendiskurse in der Weimarer Republik: zur politischen Kultur einer Gemengelage, ed. Manfred Gangl and Gérard Raulet (Frankfurt a. M: Campus Verlag, 1994), 293. 23. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Herf's concept was criticized by Thomas Rohkrämer, who demonstrated that a conservative acceptance of technology is not specific to the Weimar Republic, but was already dominant in imperial Germany. Thomas Rohkrämer, “Antimodernism, Reactionary Modernism and National Socialism: Technocratic Tendencies in Germany, 1890–1945,” Contemporary European History 9 (1999): 29–50. For the importance of technology, see also Sieferle, Die Konservative Revolution. 24. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 70. 25. Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 26. Ernst Jünger, “Preface to Luftfahrt ist Not,” in Ernst Jünger. Politische Publizistik. 1919 bis 1933, ed. Sven Olaf Berggötz (Stuttgat: Klett Cotta, 2001), 400. 27. Ernst Jünger, “Großstadt und Land,” Deutsches Volkstum 8 (1926): 580. 28. Oswald Spengler, Preußentum und Sozialismus (München: Beck, 1920), 34. 29. 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Malcolm Chase, “North Sea and Baltic: Historical Conceptions of the Youth Movement and the Transfer of Ideas from Germany to England in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedachtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch, 1750–2000, ed. Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert, and Peter Schumann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 309–30; Michael John Mertens, Early Twentieth Century Youth Movements, Nature and Community in Britain and Germany (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2000); Richard Moore-Colyer, “A Northern Federation? Henry Rolf Gardiner and British and European Youth,” Paedagogica Historica 39 (2003): 306–24; Richard Moore-Colyer, “Rolf Gardiner: English Patriot and the Council for the Church and Countryside,” Agricultural History Review 49 (2001): 187–209. 34. Gardiner, World without End, 31. 35. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–9, (London: Constable, 1980). 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Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (London: Tauris, 2004). 41. Philip Conford, Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris, 2001), 153. 42. See Dan Stone, “The English Mistery, the BUF, and the Dilemmas of British Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 75 (2003): 336–58; Griffiths, Fellow Travellers, 54, 102, 144, 317f. 43. For Ludovici's explicit (and narrowed) social Darwinist interpretation of Nietzsche, see Anthony M. Ludovici, Who is to be Master of the World? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909); idem, Nietzsche: His Life and Works (London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1910); Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 33–61. 44. Anthony M. Ludovici, A Defence of Conservatism: A Further Text-Book for Tories (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927), 234. 45. Anthony M. Ludovici, “The Conservative Programme: A Further Suggestion,” The Fortnightly Review 113 (1923): 611. 46. Wallop wrote in his autobiography: “I Suppose the British government was really tolerant in my case.” Wallop, A Knot of Roots, 197. 47. Richard Moore-Coyler and Philip Conford, “A ‘Secret Society’? The Internal and External Relations of the Kinship in Husbandry, 1941–52,” Rural History 15 (2004): 189–206; Richard Moore-Coyler, “Back to Basics, Rolf Gardiner, H. J. Massingham and ‘A Kinship in Husbandry’,” Rural History 12 (2001): 85–108. 48. Matthew Reed, “Rebels from the Crown Down: The Organic Movement's Revolt against Agricultural Biotechnology,” Science as Culture 11 (2002): 487. 49. Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 2002), 176–87. 50. Jay P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981), 125–71. 51. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals, 182. 52. Conford, Organic Movement, 146–85. 53. Pierse C. Loftus, The Creed of a Tory (London: P. Allan, 1926), 40–41. 54. Loftus, Creed of a Tory, 35. 55. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 88. For the debate on Wiener's thesis, see Richard English and Michael Kenny, eds., Rethinking British Decline (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000). 56. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006): 595–61; Michael Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity: The ‘War Generation’ and Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 343–62. 57. Viscount Lymington, “National Fitness Campaign,” Quarterly Gazette of the English Array 3 (April 1938). 58. Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 59. Stone, “The Far Right and the Back-to-the-Land Movement,” 185. 60. Carl E. Schorske, “The Ideas of the City in European Thought,” in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handling and John Burchard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), 114.