Blackbourn's Peasantry

It is becoming apparent that history is not only as riddled with stigma as society itself, but often is the source. Research can clear up some of the attributes that have discredited certain sectors. Blackbourn exercises that power through the agrarian German peasantry in Peasants and Politics in Germany, 1871-1914. Misunderstandings of their political activism pervade, since it is a convenient way of understanding their eventual support for the Third Reich. Was the stagnant German peasant-farmer of the Second Reich the perfect vehicle for proto-fascism?

German peasants have been simultaneously glorified and derided for their traditionalism. Wilhelm Riehl praised their conservative good sense, while Karl Marx cursed the idiocy of rural life. What needs to be addressed is the actual role of rural politics. Blackbourn begins with the two basic approaches. Haushofer's happy tale of modernization, where social changes correspond to agricultural developments, is "simply one damn improvement after another." The more legitimate argument to consider is Rosenburg's- "the junkers were able to gain a new lease of life by manipulating rural discontent and mobilizing the peasantry and other parts of the rural population behind their own banner." Both theories are exaggerations to Blackbourn, but Rosenburg can at least be considered a starting point for argument and analysis.

The agrarian peasantry came to life in the 1890's, as a result of many varying grievances with a common root: these primary producers were subject to outside market and political forces that lay frustratingly beyond their control. Some fought back with co-operatives- dairy producers, for example, organized to bring about a rise in the cost of milk in 1895. More importantly, a feeling of manipulation and exploitation changed the peasantry. School, military, and communication advances gave agrarian youth the impetus to move to the town, which gave the established farmer a reason to fear and mistrust such "modernization." Dissatsified with the government and otherwise politically inactive, independent movements of the 1890's became the hallmark of peasant discontent. As a result of some fierce politicking, and the winning of supposedly "safe seats," rural grievances were given a platform and would be addressed in years to come. The partisan failure of these fleeting peasant movements is not indicative of their influence, but is a characterisitic of their nature- to flare up, be appeased, and die down until the next aggrivation.

Assesment of Germany's peasant class should be multi-dimensional, as Blackbourn suggests. While Prussian peasants were manipulated to a certain extent by Junker Conservatives through the Agrarian League, there was a different story playing itself out in Bavaria and Wurttemberg. This article closes, as it begins, with a peasant frame for advent of National Socialism in 1933. This advent and the re-casting of rural politics "was itself a process, not a completed event whereby the success of the Agrarian League fixed a pattern of politics down to 1933." These tillers of the land cannot only be viewed as pawns for Junker chessmasters and Nazi mobilization, but must be given credit for taking action for their own causes.