Military, Folklore, Eigensinn: Folkloric Militarism in Germany and France, 1871–1914

In his poem “Our Military!” published in 1919, Kurt Tucholsky describes the great enthusiasm that he, or rather his pseudonym Kaspar Hauser, felt as a boy before World War II for the sis–boom–bah of martial music when the soldiers marched by. Only when he was a soldier himself “in the Russian wind” of the First World War were the young man's eyes opened to the barbarity, desperation, and despair of war and the actual power relations in the army. While the poem's antimilitaristic intentions are readily apparent, Tucholsky nevertheless also managed to capture a view widely held during the interwar years: that before 1914 there still existed in the population an unbroken enthusiasm for the army and its colorful displays, but that the experience during the war of death on such a massive scale put an end to it. Walter Rathenau echoed precisely these sentiments in his 1919 treatise Der Kaiser: Eine Betrachtung, seeing the prewar society of the German Empire as a “militarily-drilled mass” that sought “to display their acquired military arts in grand public spectacles.” The stereotypical image of a bygone prewar era of military glory and pageantry received a more popular, less “critical” treatment in the 1934 film “Frühjahrsparade,” a musical that evoked “the good old days” of the Habsburg Empire and the k. u. k. army, and not least the passion of women for “the man in uniform.”