Conclusion

Summary

What does this history of Germany and the East, told through the biography of an agrarian economist, tell us about the larger questions of Modern German History? One of the most central of these questions centres upon the transformation of the German Right, from the Bismarckian 1870s to the Hitlerian 1930s. By following a character who was always amongst key conservative groups, but never wholly belonged to any of them, we see perhaps more clearly how it all transpired. In Sering, we encounter many tensions found in the conservatism of the era. His opinion of farmers combined an intractable contradiction: a desire for them to be free yeomen who were simultaneously restricted by the state in what they could do with their farms. This is an excellent illustration of the vexed relationship between German conservatives and the working, or farming, class. A version of “reactionary modernism” can be seen in (a) the Sering who had a deeply agrarian romantic idea of what small plot farmers breathing in fresh air could make of the Fatherland, and (b) the Sering who simultaneously served as a high-ranking member of the Navy League, demanding more money for steelworkers to weld ships in industrial ports, again, for a better Fatherland. The same man who saw endless work to be done within Germany was also in favour of a global colonial empire.