Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism

Marburg, 1880-1935

Rudy J. Koshar

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469617138
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Focusing on Marburg, a contentious university town where voters demonstrated strong electoral support for Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party, this imaginative study discusses the political role of small-town organizational life and painstakingly reconstructs the full range of Nazi sympathizers' cross-affiliations with local voluntary groups.

Part One
Economics, Party Politics, and Social Organizations

One
Economic Structure and Hardship: Bases for Radicalism?

Like a good actor, Marburg wore different faces for different audiences. It was a quiet town of national loyalties and rural beauty for conservatives, the home of a “Fascist university” from the point of view of socialist critics, and either a “citadel of reaction” or a “city of philistines” in the eyes of Nazi activists. But this multiform character was based on a single socioeconomic fact: Marburg was a university and service city. Its population of 28,439 in 1933 was dominated by students, professionals, civil servants, white-collar employees, teachers, storeowners, craftsmen, and pensioners. Working-class people were underrepresented in the local labor force compared with the Reich as a whole and with cities of comparable size. Historians—whether they think of Marburgers as quiet patriots, reactionaries, or yokels—contend that this socioeconomic structure, so skewed by the absence of industry and by dependence on trade and service, made the city more susceptible to economic crisis and political “radicalization” in the form of nazism.¹

I have a contrasting view of the relationship between Marburg’s economic makeup and politics. The decision of local notables to build an administrative city narrowed possibilities for responding to the economic challenges caused by war, inflation, and depression, yet it also made the city less susceptible than more industrial towns to sudden, devastating economic hardship. The structural potential for radicalization of the populace was lower than historians have assumed. Indeed, local economic structure facilitated the social resilience rather than the economic devastation of the Bürgertum, a resilience of great importance for everyday organizational life. The general economic development of Marburg after the late nineteenth century is outlined in the following pages, prior to a discussion of the two most important moments of economic hardship locally, the inflation of 1916–23 and the Depression of 1929.

Rise and Partial Fall of the University City

The foggiest of German cities, Marburg is located in a “cold air sea” formed by the narrow Lahn valley and Amöneburg basin of Oberhessen. Standing in this misty north Hessian valley, the city appeared isolated to contemporaries and later scholars. But Marburg’s history always intersected with regional, national, and international events, as the architectural face of the city in the Weimar Republic suggested. The castle (Schloß), which was built by Thuringian nobles in the thirteenth century, recalled Marburg’s role as a military stronghold and center of religious controversy, having been the site of the Luther-Zwingli debates in 1529. The elegant Gothic Elisabethkirche, architectural counterpoint to the castle, reminded one that more than 86 percent of the town’s population in 1932 was Protestant—well above the Reich average of 64.1 percent. The cult of St. Elisabeth, after whom the church was named, had drawn medieval pilgrims from German lands, France, Austria, and Hungary. Classroom buildings and modern medical clinics traced the growth of the university, founded by the Thuringian Philipp the Great in 1527. The first Protestant institution of higher learning in Germany, the university was mirror and motor in German religious life.²

The market square in front of the city hall and many small shops of the upper city (Oberstadt) recalled the town’s economic ties to the larger society. The city lay 2.5 kilometers east of an older trade route that facilitated north-south connections between Frankfurt/Main and northern Germany and east-west ties between the Rhine and Thuringia. Sources list Marburg markets in which salt, wood, cattle, geese, corn, and leather goods were bought and sold. Although the majority of Marburg’s artisanal trades relied only on the local market, the linen, wool, and leather crafts possessed regional trade links that persisted into the nineteenth century. These trades were important sources of commercial employment in the city until the modern era. The pottery trade, which still employed ninety people in 1843 and produced articles that one anonymous local poet described as “so very fine,” sold wares in the Rhineland, Franconia, Thuringia, and Hamburg.³

Marburg’s regional economic ties eroded before the late nineteenth century, partly because of the policies of Electoral Hessian officials, who feared the social consequences of industrialization and, unlike Prussian bureaucrats, rejected any presumption of being modernizers or reformers. These officials did little to encourage manufacturing or protect small-scale export industries against foreign competition. International competition was especially disastrous for vulnerable north Hessian textile producers. When English and Scottish machine-made textile goods flooded world markets in 1816 and the United States and Spain erected protective tariffs in the same year, Hessian linen production and export collapsed. These problems were exacerbated by a general agricultural crisis in northern Hesse that lasted from 1816 to 1818. Linen producers recouped their losses somewhat in subsequent decades, but the Hessian linen industry would never again achieve the high point it had reached in the earliest years of the nineteenth century. The Marburg linen trade could not escape these economic developments, and the expansion of rail networks in midcentury completed the collapse of weaving in the city. Between 1866 and 1914 the city’s once-lively tanning and pottery trades also declined precipitously. Emigration from Marburg was higher than in surrounding Hesse, and this alleviated some economic hardship. Nonetheless, autocratic government policy and large-scale socioeconomic change had combined to intensify a centuries-long development that weakened Marburg’s ties to nonlocal markets. Meanwhile, most Marburg artisans remained dependent on the home market, as they had been for centuries.⁴

Prussian intervention in 1866–67 brought about the sharpest break with the past. Prussia annexed a number of Hessian duchies and principalities, including the city of Frankfurt/Main, and combined them into the new province of Hesse-Nassau. The “stagnant, patriarchal government of Electoral Hesse,” one historian wrote, had now given way to the “most efficient, rationally directed administration in Europe, that of the Prussian state.”⁵

Prussia concentrated on the university. The Prussian university budget for Marburg doubled from 1890 to 1910. Between 1870 and 1914 fifteen university buildings, institutes, and clinics were constructed or renovated. The physical plant of the university “achieved a level of quality comparable to that of the great majority of other middle-sized universities” in Germany in the view of a Marburg professor in 1904.⁶

Student enrollment grew from under three hundred in 1861 to one thousand in 1897 and two thousand a dozen years later. Between 1831 and 1914 the number of university students for every thousand inhabitants in the city increased from 52 to 113.9. Not only more students but different kinds of students came to Marburg. In the mid-nineteenth century, a Marburg professor said his mainly Hessian students were “a bit phlegmatic” yet full of “goodwill.” The Marburg student body became more varied and, presumably, more lively once the proportion of students from regions other than the surrounding province increased from one-tenth of all students in 1866 to over two-thirds in 1900 and nearly four-fifths in 1926. The university lost its provincial character as an expanding student population became indispensable to local economic life. At the same time, Marburg began to be a stepping-stone university for upwardly mobile academics, attracting more talented faculty members. Though the university functioned as an economic resource base for the town prior to 1866, Prussian policy isolated this sinew of economic life, abstracted it from its previous relationships, and exaggerated its role in providing for local people’s livelihoods.⁷

Three other factors combined with the expansion of the university and the decline of local export trades to shape Marburg’s economic development. First, large-scale factory production made no inroads in Marburg. Some townspeople hoped that Marburg’s annexation to industrializing Prussia would facilitate the growth of local manufacturing, but their hopes proved vain.⁸ Industrialization was hampered in part because the city started from a very low economic base after 1880. The largest factory in Marburg, which manufactured wallpaper, employed two hundred workers before World War I, and a handful of other plants employed more than one hundred people. Up to the late nineteenth century, the humanistic character of the university hindered technological spinoff activities like the specialized optics industry in Göttingen.⁹ Geographical location and shortage of space also discouraged industry. But by the end of the nineteenth century keeping Marburg nonindustrial became a pronounced goal of city policy. Local officials encouraged light industry, and the founding of the famous Behring chemical laboratories in Marbach, outside the city limits, was a measure of their success. Conversely, in 1885 Ludwig Schuler, the lord mayor, opposed efforts of the city building commissioner Louis Broeg and Karl Benz to establish what reputedly would have been the world’s first automobile factory.¹⁰ In addition, city officials promoted tourism, tried to attract wealthy retirees, and emphasized a “medieval and villagelike impression” the city made on visitors.¹¹ Prussian practice and the interests of local notables thus merged to shape the university city.

Second, although the proportion of individuals employed in local artisanal industries declined, crafts and trade remained important to the city’s economy. Printing and construction expanded in direct response to university growth. Despite fluctuations, more bakers, butchers, tailors, seamstresses, tinsmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, and painters worked in the city in 1914 than in 1867. Industry and crafts still employed nearly one-third of all working townspeople after World War I.¹²

Third, the tertiary sector became the dominant source of employment. Retail trade, heavily dependent on students and tourists, was among the most important pursuits in this area. In 1914 there were 19.8 independent shopkeepers (Krämer) per thousand town dwellers, possibly a higher ratio than at annexation.¹³ These individuals and independent craftsmen made up the majority of the city’s resilient old Mittelstand. Marburg also became an administrative center, with university clinics, state and county government offices, elementary and secondary schools, and vocational training institutes. After World War I, civil servants and white-collar employees made up the largest single occupational group in Marburg. Two-thirds of all employed townspeople earned a living from the tertiary sector. No other local development illustrated more succintly that the medieval balance between production and consumption had been altered in favor of the latter.¹⁴

German urban history is regional history, as J. J. Lee has suggested, and it is important to note how the rise of the university city affected its hinterland. Rural northern Hesse had been transformed in the nineteenth century from an open-field manorial system to one of capitalist exploitation based on small single-family farms. Hessian officials did little to improve agriculture in the region, one of the poorest in the Reich, and Prussianization intensified rather than lessened differences between Marburg and rural Oberhessen, strengthening intraregional disparities in German society.¹⁵

In contrast to the situation in Marburg, population growth in the Kassel administrative district and Oberhessen was well below the national rate between 1867 and 1914. But it was higher than in Württemberg, where unem...