Talk:Sammlungspolitik

I'm no expert in this area, but I thought that Sammlungspolitik referred to the pursuit of nationalistic goals (especially the acquisition of colonies) to distract workers from internal German problems. Sir1 (talk) 00:28, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
 * This name is accurate and the notice should be removed. Sammlungspolitik does not have an English equivalent that is commonly used. Maybe that's where the misconception lies. I am currently a German History student and this is the term that all texts and professors use without exception. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rsg70007 (talk • contribs) 01:13, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree with Rsg70007 and I'm going to remove the notice.Seanwal111111 (talk) 22:21, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Your thinking of social imperialism, which is a different thing, through related. Sammlungspolitik refers to the policy of trying to rally certain elements of the German people in support of the government, usually by creating some sort of alleged "enemy" who was said to be threatening the Reich. It was a very negative style of politics. Sad, but true fact. It is always easier to create a sense of unity by getting everybody to hate somebody else than it is to rally people together by a positive goal. It is noteworthy that in wartime that there one usually sees a very strong sense of national unity. Sammlungspolitik was basically trying to create a wartime mentality in peacetime, which explains much about the peculiar way politics operated in the Second Reich. Social imperialism is a policy of imperialism meant to distract people from problems at home; sammlungspolitik is trying to rally people together against any sort of alleged "danger" such as Social Democrats, Catholics, Jews, and Poles to name just four of the various internal "enemies of the Reich" put forward at differing points in time. Likewise, sammlungspolitik can mean imperialism, but not necessarily. The supposed bogey of a revanchist France was constantly brought up as a reason for Germans to rally around their government; the fact that much of this talk was just propaganda to scare people has apparently escaped many of the people around here. This idea that France was committed to revanchisme and that all of the problems in Franco-German relations between 1871-1914 were entirely the work of the French is repeated in far too many articles around here, despite the manifest lack of evidence for this thesis. That is another matter, but the bogey of a revanchist France was a very big part of sammlungspolitik. Likewise, the picture of the Russian empire driven by a supposed Pan-Slav ideology into a policy of expansionism at the expense of Germany and of Britain, said to be full of envy at German economic success and intent upon ruining the German economy, were also very big parts of sammlungspolitik. This article should talk more about this. --A.S. Brown (talk) 19:23, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Just as a further suggestion, I would argue that one should look at the world of cartoons. This seem off-topic, but the world of cartoons reveal much. Eric Hobsbawm was a British Marxist historian, and many people don't like him for that reason, but I think he does fall within the guidelines of a RS. Hobsbawm's essay "Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914" from the 1983 book The Invention of Tradition is a difficult read, but has much interesting information. Hobsbawm compares the cartoon images of Marianne in France vs. Deutscher Michel in Germany. In this regard, Hobsawm noted: "The point about Deutscher Michel is that his image stressed both the innocence and simple-mindedness so readily exploited by cunning foreigners, and the physical strength he could mobilize to frustrate their knavish tricks and conquests when finally roused. 'Michel' seems to have been essentially an anti-foreign image". In other words, Germany is a nation always threatened by foreigners who were out to do the Reich harm, which of course required a state with a very strong military to keep those dastardly foreigners at bay. And naturally, Germans should not question their government, which was looking out for them and keeping them safe, and instead rally around it. In this telling, those Germans who did criticize the government such as Social Democrats were essentially guilty of treason by doing so. The legacy of Sammlungspolitik in the Weimar republic was that a very considerable segment of middle-class opinion regarded the SPD as a treasonous party, and the Weimar republic as illegitimate because it was born of a revolution in 1918 associated in the popular mind with the SPD. --A.S. Brown (talk) 22:54, 30 May 2021 (UTC)