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Junkers

Unbounded reverence for rank was a characteristic of all the Germanic peoples. The ordinary German was docile and submissive to his social superiors. The Middle Ages bestowed all their admiration upon the high-born and high-placed. Common men and common life were despised and oppressed. Its cruelties and its worst faults came from this source.

The German word Junker means the son of a noble House as contrasted with his father, who functions as the Senior or Elder of that House. It was used in this sense in mediaeval German ; still later, in Goethe's 'Goetz von Berlichingen,' in 'The Death of Wallenstein,' and 'William Tell' ; and was current in certain parts of Germany among serving folk in attendance upon the children of country nobles. It was, moreover, the custom to apply this epithet to cadets of patrician families who were sent up to Court to take princely service, and to nobly-born retainers or pages. Further, was usual for young men of this class to devote themselves temporarily or permanently to the military profession.

Under the agrarian system generally prevailing in the country at the commencement of the 19th century, the entire peasant population was tied fast to the soil by innumerable allodial obligations to the larger landowners. All the work on the estate of the junker was performed by the peasant proprietors of the vicinity, who, with their own horses or oxen, ploughed his land, sowed his seed, and reaped and threshed his crops. That they might not escape these labors, they were legally bound to the places of their birth. Until this modified enslavement was done away with, and the rural population was permitted to migrate to the towns, the modern industrial development of Germany was impossible through lack of labor, if for no other reason. Attempts at agrarian reform were made by Stein and Hardenberg from 1807 to 1821, but it was not till the second half of the century that the adscriptus glebae, by which serfs were attached to the farm and could not be sold, was fully and finally abolished.

It was only in the last 100 to 200 years that policing has been effectively monopolized by government, and even that was not uniform across countries. In Europe, for example, France led the way in the systematic nationalization of policing in the 17th century. Nationalization followed fitfully throughout the rest of continental Europe, concentrated largely in towns and often deferring to the private authority of the landowning aristocracy. Prussia permitted the landowning Junker aristocracy to police their large estates up to the unification of Germany in 1871. Russia, too, allowed policing to be shared between government and the landed gentry until the early 20th century.

The worse characteristics of the provincial nobility appear to have been identified with the word Junker at a somewhat early period. He is shown as the petty village-tyrant of foregone centuries, who plundered and ill-treated, his vassals ; as empty, puffed-up, disposed to indulge in mad freaks ; the adversary of reason and justice ; a creature of limited intelligence, and quite in the dark as to his noble extraction ; neither having learnt nor choosing to learn anything. Other authors, however, added exalted passions and a certain brusquerie of manner - taking, rather than offensive - to these unpleasant characteristics of the Junker. Pure and undefiled feudalism was worshipped in the clique to which these gentlemen belonged, and which consisted of advocates of class institutions, enthusiastic partisans of Legitimism, believers in the Holy-Alliance policy, High Churchmen, etc.

The aristocracy had its bright as well as its dark side - in many cases it was the benevolent adviser, support, and protector of its poorer dependants ; it rendered highly noteworthy services to the State; that it prevented the bureaucracy from interfering unduly with public affairs. For centuries past, it wholly and solely provided our armies with officers, and still continued in great measure to do so in the 19th Century, although the pay was anything but a temptation. The German noble regarded fighting as his business. He was content to work hard as an officer for small pay and no one can question his zeal, his competence, his self-sacrificing courage. His virtues were, at least, as conspicuous as his faults.

Even in the offices of the "Landrat," in the governments and in the provincial administrations, Junkers or those who are or would like to be Junkers abound ; even there it teems with brothers of feudal corps, with reserve officers of feudal regiments. The ribbon of membership of a corps and the epaulettes of an officer of reserves - these are the talismans which for the high-born Prussian open all the doors to offices in the State, these are what offer to his feet all the rungs on the ladder of the official hierarchy.

Any one in Prussian Germany is a made man if he simultaneously possesses these three qualifications : that of having been born a Prussian Junker, of having played an active part in an exclusive corps, with the Prussians of Bonn (to which traditionally the Prussian princes belong ; the Emperor William is also a Prussian of Bonn), with the Saxoborussen of Heidelberg or in some other similar union, and, thirdly, that of holding the high rank of an officer of reserve in a feudal, preferably a cavalry, regiment. His qualifications for the highest offices decrease in proportion as he is found to lack these three qualifications; the Junker and corps student counts for less than the Junker, corps student and officer of reserves.

During the centuries when Germany was a collection of medium-and small-sized states, wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of the nobility, landed gentry, and wealthy merchants in the cities. The smaller nobles could not be sacrificed, in the first place, because they had rendered invaluable services in the wars of independence, they had arisen as one man, and they had ruined themselves in sacrifices for the national cause, they had organized the people and led it to victory, finally because they served to restrain the high nobility whose domination was feared. They sustained the throne against the princes, the higher nobility against the democracy, the lesser nobility against the higher, the two forming an intermediary class between the Monarch and the Nation. That was the social conception which prevailed with those who were working to realize the unity of Germany, so that the nobility, lesser or higher, in default of its privileges retained its functions.

This progress of industry and trade indicated the rise of a new class of the population, that of the capitalists. It seemed at first that their arrival would result in a dispossession of the nobility. For example, under the ancien regime the bourgeois could 'not acquire the property of the nobles. But by 1880, for Eastern Prussia only, 7,086 estates of 11,065 belonged to non-nobles. They could have been acquired only with money. Capital was supplanting birth.

A part of the nobility yielded, and took refuge in the great civil, administrative, and military posts. This militarism, which was the support of the aristocracy, has been placed at the service of capitalistic ambition. By the prestige of force, awakening hopes here and inspiring fears there, more than once by the help of maneuvers of intimidation, it has become an instrument of economic conquest.

The combination of the aristocratic and military tendency with the industrial and plutocratic tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat v/ith the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the love of displaying force, the tendency to prove one's own superiority to one's self, play a large part.