It is not too much to talk of a progressive bureaucratization of Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a concomitant growth among the inhabitants of the German states of habits of deference toward authority that seemed excessive to foreign observers. These last may have had ancient roots – it was a medieval pope who called Germany the terra obedientiae – but there is little doubt that they were encouraged by the traumatic effects of the war. The daily presence of death, the constant Angst of which Gryphius speaks in his poems, made the survivors willing to submit to any authority that seemed strong enough to prevent a recurrence of those terrors....
Acceptance of the authority of the prince assumed a willingness to obey the commands of his agents, no matter how petty their position or arrogant their manner. The willingness of Germans to tolerate the most offensive behavior from anyone wearing a uniform or official insignia was something that always surprised Western visitors.26
Craig quotes the Württemberg publisher Karl Frederich Moser, who wrote in 1758: “Every nation has its principal motive. In Germany it is obedience; in England, freedom; in Holland, trade; in France, the honor of the King.”27
One source of this proclivity for obedience, already noted, was the suffering from past wars and people feeling helpless and under siege. Subordination to authorities – the prince, the state – was seen as necessary to deal with external threat or attack. Bureaucratization and militarism also contributed to respect for authority, as they expanded into daily life. In 1781 John Moore described Prussian military life as an early totalitarian system.
The Prussian discipline on a general view is beautiful; in detail it is shocking... .if the young recruit shows neglect or remissness, his attention is roused by the officer’s cane, which is applied with augmenting energy....
. . . As to the common men, the leading idea of the Prussian discipline is to reduce them in many respects, to the nature of machines; that they may have no volition of their own, but be actuated solely by that of their officers; that they may have such a superlative dread of those officers as annihilates all fear of the enemy; and that they may move forwards when ordered, without deeper reasoning or more concern than the firelocks they carry along with them.28
Influential German thinkers stressed the the role of the state not as a servant of the people but as an entity to which citizens owed unquestioning obedience. Martin Luther was one outstanding spokesman for the special status and special rights of the state. He viewed it as an organic entity, superior to any individual. Citizens owed unquestioning obedience to all constituted authorities. A Christian captured and sold into slavery by the Turks would not have the right to escape, becasue that would deprive his master of his property.29 (Alfred Rosenberg’s lawyer at Nuremberg claimed that Christian morality required first and foremost obedience to established authorities.)
Fichte and Hegel also viewed the state as a superior organic entity to which the individual owed complete allegiance. “At the time the Anglo-Americans and French were starting to define the state as the servant of the people, Germans were accepting definition of the people as servants of the state.”30 Democratic values, the rights of the individual, were not evolving in Germany.
Both obedience to authority and giving oneself over to a leader had positive value in German culture. Many Germans were shocked and dismayed by the kaiser’s abdication in 1918. Following and obeying Hitler became a source of honor and joy, expressed in the testimony of many Nazis before and after the collapse of the Third Reich. The French historian Michelet admiringly wrote in 1831:
There is nothing astonishing if it is in Germany that we see, for the first time a man makes himself belong to another, puts his own hands in the hands of others and [they] swear to die for him. This devotion without interest, without conditions... has made the German race great. That is how the old bands of the Conquerors of the Empire, each one grouped around a leader, founded modern monarchies. They gave their lives to him, to the leader of their choice, they gave him their very glory. In the old Germanic songs, all the exploits of the nation are attributed to several heroes. The leader concentrates in himself the honor of the people of which he becomes the colossal archetype.31
Erich Fromm argued that the Germans turned to Hitler to escape personal responsibility for their lives.32 The need to escape personal responsibility and the concomitant desire for submission to authority would have intensified in the difficult times following World War I.
Authoritarian values also pervaded the most basic of institutions, the family. From varied sources, a picture emerges of a widespread tendency of the German father to be an authoritarian ruler of the family. Some of the evidence for this comes from interviews with Germans after the war, but there are also other important sources.33 The psychiatrist Alice Miller reviewed the child-rearing advice that German parents received in many publications from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.34 Children were seen as willful and potentially evil. Their will had to be broken early. Obedience to parents was the highest value and should be sought by any means: manipulation, threats, including the threat of God’s punishment or destruction by ill health and severe physical punishment if necessary.
Two representative quotations are the following:
It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity
