Conservatives and Antisemites in Baden and Saxony

Abstract

‘There are two words that cannot be uttered without causing a Saxon to become greatly agitated: Jesuit and Jew.’ This observation by the arch-reactionary Saxon minister Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust provides an intriguing definition of Saxon identity. It is especially remarkable that Saxons should have become ‘greatly agitated’ on either score, because so few Catholics and Jews actually lived in the kingdom. Did Beust put his finger on the so-called ‘antisemitism-without-Jews’ syndrome and its less well-known corollary, ‘antiultramontanism-without-Catholics’? If so, how did different regional environments condition the search on the German Right for a popular leader, a ‘great agitator’ capable of rousing the masses? Did Conservative antagonism towards the Jews condition the Conservatives’ strategies for political success as they (also) defined themselves in opposition to liberals, democrats, and socialists? These questions provide a starting point for the following reflections on the interpenetration of Conservatism and antisemitism in Germany between the 1860s and 1914. Charges of demagoguery were hurled back and forth between antisemites and Conservatives in almost all German states. Yet ‘authoritarian’ and ‘demagogic’ solutions to the ‘Jewish question’ were not defined the same way everywhere. Certainly much work remains to be done on the microand macro planes before the Alltag of German antisemitism in the countryside or the role of political violence in shaping Imperial Germany’s electoral culture will come into focus. However, these desiderata hint at the usefulness of reconsidering evidence on the meso-level, that is, drawn from the region. We now have some excellent studies of regional antisemitic movements. Building on this body of work, the following analysis attempts to demonstrate that the lines between Conservatism and antisemitism became—for a time—so indistinct as to virtually disappear