GHDI logo

Hellmuth von Gerlach Describes a Conservative Election Campaign in Rural Silesia (1880s)

page 2 of 3    print version    return to list previous document      next document


Wohlau is in Central Silesia. We did not have the great latifundia of Upper Silesia. Our estates were for the most part of comparatively moderate size, ranging from two thousand to five thousand acres, and were usually “circulating properties” – that is, they repeatedly changed proprietors. Landlords whose families had been permanently rooted in the soil for many generations, as they were in parts of Pomerania and Brandenburg, were rare in our neighborhood. So when a family had owned and lived upon the same property for fifty years it was usual to confer upon its head the Order of the Red Eagle IV in honor of the event.

[ . . . ]

Much of the property in our vicinity was owned by officers who had been dropped from active service. They knew nothing whatever about farming, but they imagined that although they had failed in a military career they were at least abundantly competent to manage a large estate. Naturally they made one blunder after another, and their bailiffs robbed them right and left. Thereupon they would deliver long harangues on the depression in agriculture and clamor for higher duties upon grain. They were not consciously insincere. They regarded agriculture as a highly respectable calling that required no special preparation but that nevertheless ought to support a gentleman according to the standards of his class.

Those standards were very modest, at least in their own opinion: saddle horses, a couple of spans of coach horses, a dozen carriages, a well-stocked wine cellar, a hunting-preserve, good hunting-dinners, and ability to educate their sons as Corps students or cavalry officers. These things were assumed as a matter of course. Gambling, which was such a curse among the country gentry of Upper Silesia, was kept within bounds. A few frivolous-minded young bloods might play hazard after a hunting-dinner. On such occasions, however, they often had to use matches as chips in default of ready money. But most of the card-playing was confined to humdrum whist and skat.

Our landlords had their own economic code. If a man owned an immense park, he considered the cost of its maintenance a necessary operating-charge of his estate. Instead of sending his children to the public schools, he kept private tutors and governesses and regarded the expense as a perfectly proper cost-item in his farming-operations. He felt the same about his hunting-expenses, which first and last were very considerable – although he might have leased his hunting-rights for a goodly sum. The gentry hardly took the handsome castles and manor houses they occupied into account as revenue. I remember hearing one of our neighbors abuse the Landrat roundly at a neighborhood gathering because that gentleman had assessed his castle, which had twenty windows on the front façade, at a rental of nine hundred marks a year. He had declared it for only three hundred marks. When I asked him how he reduced it to that figure, since the interest on the cost of his residence would have amounted to several thousand marks, he said: “In my village the only other possible tenants would be farm laborers. They earn so little money that taking them altogether they couldn’t pay more than three hundred marks rent.” Yet this man was absolutely convinced that he was right. In fact, the country gentleman had economic theories that were all his own.

first page < previous   |   next > last page