Public opinion in Germany,July 1914:the evidence of the crowds

Abstract

Newspapers as a source for studying German public opinion in 1914 How can one study public opinion, defined here as the sum of individual opinions on a specific issue, in an era before public-opinion polls? The greatest difficulty is in finding the sources that allow us to recreate a representative sample, one which recognizes the differences in occupation, class, age, gender, and geography. In their path-breaking works on French public opinion in the First World War Jean-Jacques Becker and P. J. Flood were able to employ a rich variety of unpublished contemporary governmental reports, often written by local schoolteachers. Unfortunately, German government officials were neither as diligent nor as curious as their French counterparts. In August 1914 the Prussian government, perceiving a sufficiently patriotic population, cancelled the customary quarterly reports on the events and mood of the local population (Zeitungsberichte), as well as the reports on the state of the Social Democratic and anarchistic “movement,” asking government officials to concentrate on other, more pressing duties. Those governmental reports on public opinion which do exist either start too late - as with the reports of the Berlin Police Chief, the first of which is dated 22 August 1914, or are little more than one official's readings of the newspapers, as with the “public-opinion” reports prepared by Geheimrat von Berger for the Prussian Interior Ministry, or simply state that there was nothing exceptional to report.