Discuss @David Flin 's latest article here
Oh, they went much further than that.
"Hey, Tommy. The Prussians will be launching a trench raid tonight at 0100."
From what I've since been able to gather, Bavarians and Prussians didn't get on very well, and the Bavarians, by 1916, basically had come to the conclusion that they would rather be in Bavaria drinking beer and making little Bavarians rather than sitting in muddy trenches with rats, getting shot and gassed and being uncomfortable. The Saxons felt a strong kinship with the English: "We're Saxons, you're Anglo-Saxons," and preferred the English to the Prussians.
And yet in so many after-the-war histories from outside Germany, the Germans are generally portrayed as a unified entity with no internal disputes.
A lot of that is leftover tensions from the Kulturkampf, where the Protestant and freethinker sectors of German society tried to intimate that ultramontane Catholicism was incompatible with "real" Germanness.Bavarians and Prussians didn't get on very well
And yet in so many after-the-war histories from outside Germany, the Germans are generally portrayed as a unified entity with no internal disputes.
Here's the thing that's puzzling me reading this and the wider article - what was the contemporary view inside Germany, and how did what actually happened become the Stabbed in the Back myth? I guess some of it would be not so common knowledge or widely disseminated, and some of it would be sunk cost fallacy ("Remember when half the village literally staved to death no more than a couple of years ago?", "Yes, it was when we were winning the war", "That was winning?", "Well obviously, otherwise we wouldn't have made such sacrifices"). But things like the 100 days, the privations on the front, the mutinies (and the grievances that drove them), the experience of actually losing on the front - that must have left some sort of cultural memory. The Reichstag deputies who pushed for peace must have had constituencies, and been at least as representative of them as the Prussian Junkers were of their estates (pointedly far from the front, as I'm sure would have been prominent in the minds of any Rheinelanders or Bavarians west of the Rhine).
I wonder has there been any demographic study of stabbed-in-the-back sentiment? Was it a thing born into more strongly by those born after 1900 who came of age in the humiliation of the 20s and early 30s, and who only had official stories of the glory that was the 2nd Reich? Or was there a genuine collective national amnesia across the war generation, not least among some of the veterans who became early members of the Nazi and similar parties?
"Lets have another go" feels like it ought to have been the exception rather than the rule of interwar sentiment.
I think a lot of it really must be the shape of the post-war situation. When the country is going to absolute shite then there's a lot of appeal in a mythology of 'we'd have been ok if it weren't for those guys selling out the country. They must have been doing it in the war as well.'
It's probably noteworthy that the NSDAP were never quite able to beat Zentrum to top the polls in the Moselle Valley constituencies to the Reichstag. There's a big demographic reason of course, but considering that they were able to overcome that in Bavaria in 1933, but not the lower Rhineland I think there's something slightly more subtle there as well.
Yeah - I'm conscious that I'm looking for reason in what is a fundamentally irrational scapegoating situation. There's a school of thought that argues that if the Entente offensives of late 1918 had somehow been carried through further into Germany proper - though "all the way to Berlin" is probably hyperbole - then the stabbed-in-the-back myth might not have arisen. Against all this, I'm sceptical, because just how big does a defeat have to be to tip a hypothetical future sentiment from "revenge!" to "never again" - and how can that possibly be known in the mud on the morning of 11/11/1918, or indeed around Christmas tables missing sons, husbands and fathers two months later?
Keep in mind that the Catholic Rhineland and Catholic Bavaria were some of the last regions to voluntarily vote Nazi. Also, Saxony during the 20s was in large part an SPD stronghold.pointedly far from the front, as I'm sure would have been prominent in the minds of any Rheinelanders or Bavarians west of the Rhine