H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (January 2007)

Karl Hampe. _Kriegstagebuch 1914-1919_. Edited by Folker Reichert
und Eike Wolgast.  Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20.
Jahrhunderts. Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004. 1,020
pp. Illustrations, bibliography, family tree, personal index, place-name
index. EUR 118.00 (cloth), ISBN 3-486-56756-X.

Reviewed for H-German by Geoffrey J. Giles, Department of History,
University of Florida

Another Professor's War Diary: A Wonderful, Scholarly Edition of a
Not Remarkably Perceptive Observer

The diaries of Victor Klemperer were so rich and fascinating that one
always hopes to find equally gripping accounts for other periods of
German history. The publication of Professor Karl Hampe's war diary,
in an edition over one thousand pages long, held such promise. But
is Hampe the Victor Klemperer of the First World War? Unfortunately
he is not. For one thing, he was not a victim, but part of the privileged
German elite, one of the highest paid professors at the University of
Heidelberg. His criticisms of the government and military leadership
were somewhat muted; in fact, he willingly accepted a wartime
assignment, justifying and helping to shape German Foreign Office
policy toward Belgium.

Hampe, a noted medieval historian, subsequently became the rector
of the university in 1924.  The volume provides numerous insights into
the life of the university and the attitudes of the faculty during the war
and the following year, as well as extensive comments on his
interactions with government officials in Berlin and Belgium. But one
has to dig for them. Whole chunks of text are just plain dull or trivial
and there seems little justification for publishing the diary so completely,
when a shortened version would have found more willing readers, despite
the fact that the current volume has been edited superbly by Folker
Reichert and Eike Wolgast. The footnotes are extremely thorough. For
example, when Hampe notes with regret in February 1919 that deputies
in the National Assembly are getting away with yelling "Murderer!" at
each other without receiving a reprimand from the Speaker, our editors
have ploughed through the stenographic record to tell us that no such
_Zwischenruf_ was recorded up to February 19, 1919 (p. 833). A
passing reference in November 1918 that Hampe's sister-in-law's brother
had fled, following accusations of the mistreatment of prisoners while he
was commandant of the Traunstein POW camp, brings a twelve-line
footnote, explaining that this was Theodor von der Pfordten, one of the
Nazi "martyrs" killed at the Feldherrnhalle during Hitler's Beer Hall
Putsch (p. 790).

The volume gives the general impression that Hampe knew less about
what was really going on during the First World War than Victor
Klemperer, isolated in his "Jew house" and cut off from newspapers
and radio news, knew about events in the Second World War. As the
editors point out, Hampe, unlike his colleagues Ernst Troeltsch or Max
Weber, rarely had access to insider information and relied for the most
part on German newspapers and the official army bulletins posted all
over town. He chronicled the war in his diary largely from these far from
objective sources, even after his suspicions about their veracity had been
raised. Hampe believed it was simply unpatriotic to question the official
line and rarely indulged in any private reflection, writing on March 21,
1916: "The only thing to do in times like this is to shut up and keep the
faith" (p. 370). He did, however, assiduously collect and commit to his
diary the perceptions and even gossip of his better connected colleagues
and former students, even when he did not agree with them.

What we glimpse from all this endless and rather self-indulgent
scribbling is nonetheless a touching picture of the gradual erosion
of the values of the imperial _Bildungsbürgertum_. Karl Hampe seems
to embody both the arrogance and the vulnerability of the German
professoriate. The sinking of the _Lusitania_ did not bother him unduly,
because he believed the official German explanations that the captain
had it coming to him. On the other hand, an air raid on Karlsruhe a
few weeks later, resulting in only twenty deaths, was "a barbaric way
to wage war" and signaled for him the abandonment of international
law (p. 242).  Viewing the devastation wrought by the German artillery
in Louvain that fall, Hampe did not feel overly concerned. It was a pity
about the total destruction of the university and especially its library,
but it was "architecturally nothing special" (p. 313). He went on to
muse about whether the city hall had really deserved its two stars in
the Baedeker guide, being "a rather ugly building, hedgehog-like"
(p. 313). During his assignment in Belgium to study captured historical
documents, he felt much more comfortable among the military personnel
than with the civilian members of the occupation force. He found the
latter far too skeptical and critical of German propaganda publications
like the White Book on Belgian atrocities, or of the collective
punishment meted out to entire communities for individual instances
of franc-tireur activity. The military men, on the other hand, were, he
thought, a little too casual in speaking of the shooting of 200 civilians,
but such incidents were after all justified by "the necessity of things"
(p. 300). Hampe was quite typical in believing, or at least hoping, that
war was still a sort of gentlemen's game played according to rules that
had changed little since the days of the medieval heroes whom he
studied. The Grand Duke of Weimar did not appear to be such a
gentleman, however, and is criticized for going after the enemy with
all the gusto of a big game hunter, even wanting to gun down a
detachment of POWs (p.371). And admittedly Hampe was quite shocked
by the use of poison gas by the Germans ("a merciless, scientific slaughter
by chemical means"), though he continued in the very next sentence to
note regret that the potential effect of the new weapon had not been
maximized, due to a lack of reserves (p.335).

As with all good diaries, we learn a lot about the personal side of its
author. Hampe was every inch the German professor. His wartime
experience was not one of great deprivation; he was concerned that
starch was in such short supply by mid-1917 that gentlemen actually
had to wear soft shirt collars (p. 579). Yet he believed he was making
tremendous sacrifices and crowed triumphantly that he made do with
the same bar of soap for nine and a half months, despite the fact that
he soaped himself down in the bath every morning--he says the secret
is to "bring the brush to the soap" and presumably this surviving bar of
good-quality peacetime soap was off limits to the rest of the family (pp.
599, 658)!

His life was managed by his wife, Lotte, so that he could have as much
time as possible for undisturbed study and quiet contemplation. He also
followed events at the front and in domestic politics very closely. Crises
like the popular unrest in Berlin and the toppling of chancellor Theobald
von Bethmann-Hollweg in July 1917 upset his equilibrium, and the
historian in him started thinking of the start of the revolution in 1848:
"With all these impressions I could not work and went off to the woods
to pick mushrooms and berries" (p. 566). More frequently he sought
refuge in his library amongst the German classics. He boasted of knowing
Goethe's _Faust I_ (1808) by heart (p. 367). When the revolution broke out,
he tried to lift his spirits by reading Fichte's _Speeches to the German
Nation_ (1807) (p. 773). When news of the armistice conditions arrived
on November 10, 1918, he broke down and wept openly with his wife,
but then late that evening read aloud to Lotte, so that they might "fortify"
each other, the section from Otto von Bismarck's memoirs on the 1848
revolution (p. 776).

Hampe often sounds pompous, but we do sometimes learn contemporary
jokes from him, such as the latest proverb in Berlin in the spring of 1917:
"Whoever is hoarding belongs in the penitentiary, but whoever is not
hoarding belongs in the lunatic asylum" (p. 530). My favorite anecdote
concerns the aloof Grand Duchess of Baden, who visited the injured in
a field hospital in the early weeks of the war. Her standard question
about the particular battle in which the soldier had fought, was: "And
where were you injured?" "On the arse, your royal highness," replied
one poor soldier. Thinking this must be a mountain or river somewhere,
the duchess continued obliviously: "And where is that?" (p. 129).

Sometimes it was from his wife, Lotte, that Hampe received reality
checks. She was out among the people far more, and picked up
reflections of true popular sentiment. In the spring of 1917 she
overheard someone in a tram remarking to a soldier returning home
that the men in the trenches were the real traitors, because they were
simply dragging out the war (p. 549). The previous spring, Hampe
heard negative comments about the campaigns to raise war bonds, to
which he himself subscribed massively. Some people were already
viewing the campaigns as devices that simply prolonged the war,
stating "when the munitions run out, we'll be sure to have peace"
(p. 370). These are the kind of remarks for which we cherish Victor
Klemperer's recording hand, but there are too few of them in this diary.

It is clear from the diary that Karl Hampe was a devoted family man,
but also a male chauvinist. When food, not to mention coal, and
indeed money, ran very short in the autumn of 1918, Lotte embarked
on a train journey to friends in nearby Bad Wimpfen, in order to collect
potatoes and apples. Hampe accompanied her to help carry the load.
But while she was struggling to pack all the apples into several large
suitcases, he slipped off to sit in the local cemetery and read (pp.
752-753). More than once he made disparaging remarks about his
female students: profound scholarly interests were in his view alien to
them (p. 548). When he lost his cook in the summer of 1918, which
left the family with the awful prospect of having to cook their own meals,
he reflected that "more girls should be training themselves for domestic
employment rather than studying" (p. 710). Even his neighbor, Countess
Bismarck, the granddaughter of the chancellor, is criticized on the night
when a burglar is noisily apprehended three doors down the street at 3
a.m., for appearing on her balcony and immediately lighting up a
cigarette "as is her habit"--most unladylike! (p. 574).

More disturbing is Hampe's racism. When he saw French and Russian
POWs working closely alongside local women in the countryside, his
first thought was to worry about sexual liaisons and the "danger" of
mixed-race children (p. 407). His overall rejection of the Russians was
fairly mild. He admitted that Russian POWs were "generally appreciated
as good-natured and efficient. A hatred between the German and Russian
people does not really exist" (p. 596). Hampe's antisemitism, on the
other hand, was much more pervasive.  He never missed an opportunity
to identify someone as a Jew.  One of the correspondents of the
_Frankfurter Zeitung_ was "a fat Jew" (p. 452). In the resort town of
Oberstdorf he was irritated by the number of Jewish girls dressed in
Bavarian costume, which spoiled the "harmonious impression" of the
place for him (p. 269). Working in Berlin in the spring of 1917, he was
fortunate enough to tag along with his brother, a museum director, for
a private tour of the home of James Simon, a wealthy German
manufacturer with a stunning collection of paintings by Jan Vermeer,
Rembrandt von Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, and so on. Hampe was quite
enchanted by it all, but could not resist noting that "apart from us the
little tour group consisted entirely of Jews" (p. 537).

Within the ivory tower, negative value judgments were invariably attached
to colleagues or students who happened to be Jewish. He even found it
necessary to label some individuals as "half-Jews," dismissing the
doctoral candidate Max Fischer's conversion to Catholicism as having
occurred, "I suspect, in part for practical considerations" (p. 571). A
fellow historian, Professor Veit Valentin, in a sense a rival because the
German Foreign Office called him in to work on Belgian papers, was
brushed aside as a "half-Jew ... who once again compromise[d] the
university professoriate" (p. 449). Hampe was enchanted by the
Germanness of Antwerp when he arrived there in the fall of 1915: the
Flemish manner of speech, gestures and expressions all reminded him
of Oldenburg or Bremen. So when a German colleague working in
Brussels warned him about tensions between Flemings and Germans,
Hampe saw only the indomitable harmony of racial brothers. His
interlocutor, Dr. Gustav Mayer, because he happened to be Jewish,
"[could] never have this feeling and will therefore always be inclined to
underestimate this characteristic affinity" (p. 294).

At war's end, Hampe's antisemitism flared up even more openly.
Professor Edgar Jaffé was another colleague summoned to work in the
government-general offices in Brussels, with whom Hampe had initially
enjoyed quite friendly relations. On hearing that he had become the
finance minister in the Bavarian republican government, Hampe
spluttered: "What on earth has this scrawny little Jew from Hamburg
got to do with Bavaria, and with what right is he now suddenly assuming
authority?" (p. 774). The following day, when he learned of the kaiser's
abdication and the collapse of the empire, "the most miserable day of
my life," he and his wife encountered the medical professor, Albert
Fraenkel, who greeted them with the words, "I'm already beginning to
console myself."  Hampe was appalled at how unbearable Jews like
Fraenkel were, "with their readiness to adapt" (pp. 775-776). And at
the end of that month he criticized another Jewish colleague for his
"typical" lack of national tactfulness for allowing two French officers to
attend his lectures (p. 789).

Yet Hampe did not allow himself to go completely off the rails. By the
New Year he was already dissociating himself from the views of the far
right: "In the evening read with difficulty an antisemitic pamphlet that
placed the greatest blame for our collapse on the Jews; in spite of its
accurate core one cannot subscribe to this low level of intellect" (p. 818).
One year after the German defeat he noted with distaste the attempt of
German-national students to parade through the town with antisemitic
placards, which were, however, seized from them by the police (p. 913).
Our editors try to place all this in perspective, describing his views as
the typical _Honoratiorenantisemitismus_ of the educated elite in the
mold of Heinrich von Treitschke and Adolf Stöcker. His general remarks
about Jews were dismissive, while at the same time he maintained
entirely uninhibited relations with some of his Jewish colleagues. His
children played with those of a Jewish neighbor. Nonetheless, I myself,
though no stranger to the history of the professoriate during this period,
found the sheer number of offensive comments rather surprising and
shocking.

Hampe certainly did not sympathize with the National Socialist movement.
Rather, he was a solid national-liberal, who moved slightly to the left during
the Weimar Republic, when he joined the German Democratic Party, which
was reviled by some as a "Jew party." He can be counted amongst the
_Vernunftrepublikaner_, but before 1919 he was no great friend of
parliamentary democracy, writing more than once that a dictatorship would
be the most appropriate form of government in wartime (pp. 547 &  571). Yet
as Germany was collapsing, Hampe allowed that a democracy could hardly
be any worse than the "wretched" government of recent decades (p. 756).
The revolution of 1918-19 was offensive to him, and while the murders of
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were "regrettable" and "hardly
desirable in this fashion," they were "in this case understandable" (p. 820).
Similarly, for the murder of Kurt Eisner in Munich he felt "of course no
tears and no regrets" (p. 836). His sympathy lay rather more with the
murderer, Count Arco, who should, he felt, have sought advice beforehand
as to whether this was the right way to get rid
of the Socialist prime minister
(p. 836). All in all, Hampe showed an old-world professorial disdain for
politicians, and was not above delivering cheap shots. At the installation
of the Bauer-Müller-Mayer-Schmidt cabinet in the summer of 1919, he
remarked dismissively: "The vulgarity of the[ir] names is telling. They are
for the most part mediocre dilettantes" (p. 881). Could this be a refusal on
his part to admit that everything he had stood for in the past was wrong,
dreadfully wrong? During the war he had regular conversations with Max
Weber, who benefited from a much clearer view of what was going on than
did Hampe himself. Yet Hampe refused for a long time to surrender his
illusions of German greatness and invincibility and was usually the first
person on his street to hang out the flags at news of some battle victory.
After a lengthy one-on-one discussion with Weber in the fall of 1915, Hampe
wrote: "With his boundless and crippling pessimism, and his absolute
anti-annexationist stance, he is definitely not suitable for any collaboration
[on the Belgian question]" (p. 284).

Reichert and Wolgast have investigated Hampe's role at Heidelberg in
the Weimar Republic beyond the confines of the diary, and find that he
was widely regarded as a moderate. Karl Jaspers wrote to Hampe on
his sixtieth birthday in 1929: "When you are present at a faculty
meeting, one has the reassuring feeling that nothing absolutely terrible
can occur.... Your presence is a shield, and I think we have great need
of that" (p. 93).

There are very few significant points in this book that are not discussed
by the editors in their ninety-page introduction. Determined not to be
influenced by their interpretation, I waded through the 900 pages of the
actual diary first, making over twenty typed pages of notes, before
studying the introduction. It was perhaps not surprising, but rather
gratifying, to discover that many of the points that I had found significant
had been spotted by the editors, too. I bite my tongue as I say this, but
the introduction is so thorough and meticulous that one does not learn
a great deal more from the actual diary entries themselves, which again
suggests the utility of a much shorter version of this book. Apart from
that, I have only a couple of minor criticisms.  There are too many
unnecessary footnotes about every little variation in orthography, such
as when Hampe misspells someone's name, or uses an archaic spelling.
For example, when Hampe writes about "Köln," we have a footnote
revealing that "Hampe writes _Cöln_ here" (p. 286). These minor
corrections are neither surprising nor noteworthy and simply add to
the length of the book. Finally, although the book does not have a
subject index, the excellent introduction is blessed with around thirty
helpful section headings. There are indexes both for places and persons.
The sixty-seven page personal index gives useful biographical information
even if it is arranged in a most irritating fashion. Although entries are
indexed alphabetically by the family name, first names are given first,
which slows down the search for any particular entry. When the eye
runs down the column for the Ts, one sees only Eugen, Mehmed,
Charles-Maurice, Michael, David, and so on. As in other books, the
surname should come first in the alphabetized list.

Costing around $150, this is a book that even some libraries will hesitate
to buy. I am pleased to have it on my bookshelf, and I did find a good
deal of useful material on a variety of topics in it. Parts of it were even
enjoyable to read. But this is not a book that I shall return to again and
again like Klemperer's diaries. Most readers will be content to absorb
the masterly ninety-page introduction by the two editors.


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