Even before 1871, the number of Prussian noblemen willing to spend their active lives in military service could not meet the demand for officers. The expanding army of a united Germany presented an increasing spectrum of opportunities to commoners, or to men whose patents of gentility were only a generation old. William II’s rhetoric about the necessity of preserving the aristocratic spirit in the officer corps fell more and more on the ears of aristocrats by ascription.12 The system of commissioning officers definitely excluded social and political undesirables as defined by the establishment. The key to the process of stratification was the right of each regiment’s officer corps to approve candidates for active and reserve commissions into its ranks—an approval that had to be unanimous. Even the kaiser was reluctant to influence the process, and would rarely approve the commission of a man who did not have his future comrades’ assent. Anyone without the right pieces of paper, the right connections, or the right recommendations, found himself on the outside looking in.
The defects of this selection process have so often been stressed that they hardly require further comment here. The kaiser’s officer corps was, however, neither retrograde nor unique in its approach. Characteristic of secondary institutions in modern societies is their tendency to maintain significant nonprofessional criteria for judging and advancing their members. Board rooms, city rooms, even college faculties, have their own ways of deciding just who qualifies for admission, and just who reaches the inner circle. Subjective qualities valued by the collective—gender, ethnicity, politics, behavior—can count for far more than objective qualifications. A Thatcherite in a British university of the 1980s, a Berkeley professor who voted for Reagan, was likely to know the same kind of loneliness as a closet liberal in the Prussian Guard.
Contemporary critics of the German officer corps tended to regard the principle of exclusivity as more important than any actual career opportunities that might be generated by its removal. To Walter Rathenau, denying him as a Jew the chance to become a reserve lieutenant reflected the empire’s failure to use its elites properly. It did not mean he was unable to pursue an eagerly sought career as a professional officer.13 The German army, moreover, softened the system’s edges by maintaining within general limits a kind of free-market system of application. The very requirement of unanimity tended to make a candidate’s final approval something of a formal process. The real weeding had been done earlier, frequently on the basis of common sense exercised by would-be officers and their families. The makeup and the attitude of a given regiment’s officer corps were hardly secret. A candidate prima facie unsuitable in one regiment might be acceptable, or even welcome, in another. Thus while seven of the army’s line cuirassier regiments had images as aristocratic strongholds, the 8th, stationed in Köln, was hospitable to the sons of bourgeois industrialists. Formations with undesirable garrisons or reputations often were in the embarrassing position of finding it difficult to attract candidates of any kind. The 44th Infantry, in the isolated town of Goldap on the Russian frontier, included 79 active officers in its ranks between 1905 and 1914. Fifty-four were transfers from other regiments. Of the 25 commissioned into the 44th, only 9 joined voluntarily. The other 16 were assigned from various cadet schools.14
The army’s institutional structure paralleled that of society in that its pecking order was determined by such a complex combination of branch prejudices, family connections, traditions, and garrison locations that it is almost impossible to untangle from the perspective of another century. William II complicated the process by a general fondness for bestowing elaborate titles on his regiments. Formations that had for decades contented themselves with a simple number could suddenly sprout references to incidents and generals in Germany’s remote military past. Nor was the gap between guard and line by any means as absolute as in Britain or Russia. Many smaller German counts maintained their own household regiments. Officers of Bavaria’s Leib-Regiment, Württemberg’s Queen Olga Grenadiers, or the Grand Duchy of Hesse’s Bodyguard Infantry were no less proud of their service than the subalterns of “Christianity’s Most Elegant Regiment,” the 1st Foot Guards of Prussia. Within the Prussian Guard itself regiments looked down on some, swore drinking brotherhood with others. Thus in the 1880s the 1st Guard Dragoons considered themselves the finest of the cavalry regiments, and described their sister 2nd Guard Dragoons as representing the barrooms. The Guard Cuirassiers dismissed the 1st Dragoons as carpet-knights and dance floor heroes. The Uhlans, whose barracks were at some distance from the other three regiments, were excluded from this Morris dance of status.15
And so it went. Assignment to a tradition-encrusted formation garrisoned in rural Posen might or might not overbalance the advantages of a commission in a newly created regiment with a “high house number” stationed in or near a large city. The cavalry’s pecking order of lancers, cuirassiers, hussars and dragoons involved such subtle permutations of respective dates of raising and respective feats of arms that everyone was comfortably able to feel superior to everyone else. While the artillery is frequently described as being socially beneath the other combat arms, the exact balance of status and career opportunities between a nonnoble lieutenant of Berlin’s 3rd Brandenburg Artillery and an aristocrat assigned to the 172nd Infantry and stationed in the Alsatian market town of Neubreisach would have been by no means obvious to contemporaries.
For the mass of men in the ranks, the Imperial army played a major role in certifying and affirming male adulthood. The drastic changes in German society since the 1780s had invalidated many traditional male rites of passage. For women, menstruation and marriage remained the keys to adult status. Males had no equivalent generally acceptable ways of defining themselves as men. The peasant youth waiting to inherit a farm, the teenaged unskilled laborer living at home and contributing his paycheck to his parents, the junior clerk in a department store—all faced a similar problem. Their own in-group might have rituals, like the student Mensur, separating the men from the boys. These rituals, however, were likely to be meaningless or irrelevant to anyone else. At the same time, the young German man was part of a society laying significant stress on sex-role stereotypes and divisions. Nicolaus Sombart describes a Männer-gesellschaft, a rigid, militaristic, patriarchal social structure—but one with just enough fundamental doubts about its masculinity to give rise to an efflorescent homosexual movement, and to what Sombart calls Männer-bünder: societies in which the feminine component in men found legitimate expression in male relationships.16 One need not accept this argument entirely to see how in such a context military service could offer a useful psychological testing ground for males uncertain of their sexual identities.