Urban Oucasts of the British City

Chapter 11

Germany’s Special path to Where? elias in the eurozone

Matt Clement

Introduction

Norbert Elias was a witness to the twentieth century. His commitment to tak-ing a long-term view of the process of societal change emerged from a long life (1897–1990), the formative years of which were forged in a nation that agreed underwent rapid spurts of development in both positive and negative directions. Clearly, to have anything meaningful to say about these events, a long-term view was essential

Elias saw how the young Germany in which he grew up was led by a bour-geois class that mythologized the righteousness of its path to state formation— maintaining a militaristic ethos through its student dueling societies (Elias 1996). The First World War was obviously a disaster for all the combatants, but especially for Germany, and Elias’s own horrific experiences in the trenches only reinforced this feeling. Below, I will focus on the years that followed—the Ger-man revolution of 1918–23, the bloody role of the Social Democrat leaders and the officer corps in its suppression, and the rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism that led to the nemesis of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

In choosing exile, Elias achieved his own survival, a path that many millions of his compatriots could not take and that no doubt haunted him from then on. He was a product of German history, albeit not a passive recipient of culture, but one who challenged and interrogated its dominant assumptions in the belief that sociological understanding could positively influence his world. By putting German history back into our analysis of Elias, I believe we can both better understand and appreciate his thinking, and apply it to the twenty-first-century peculiarities of European society currently mired in crisis and austerity.

9781137312136_txt.indd 219 29/04/14 12:24 AM

matt.clement

Cross-Out

220 ● Matt Clement

The Special Path

Germany has often been singled out as a nation for its differences with its West-ern European rivals, France and Britain. The idea of the sonderweg, or “special path,” by which Germany evolved into nationhood and capitalism, has been acclaimed and denounced by various philosophers, sociologists, and state offi-cials, never more than during Elias’s lifetime. He was born into a time of Prussian chauvinism in the afterglow of victory over France and state unification— ironically a triumph of the “Caesarism” (Wyke 2007) of the Prussian military state over France’s “Little Caesar,” Louis-Napoleon. For Bismarck and the kaiser, Germany’s economic and military ascendency over the continent demanded the rewards of empire precluded by their rivals’ own imperial civilizations. Thus there arose the notorious German question: should its state dominate the continent as a “greater Germany”—in line with its economic might and military power—or face regulation and constraint by its neighbors in order to preserve their national autonomy and culture?

Elias titled the second volume of his On the Process of Civilization “State For-mation and Civilization,” indicating that his “macrosociology” operated at the level of nation-states and was a vital accompaniment to his “microsociological” approach in the first volume, which focused on explaining individual human behavior. In his last works, such as Reflections on a Life and The Germans, he returned to the stage of states and politics—and demonstrated that his socio-logical concerns were founded on the great historical questions of the European twentieth century. He lived in Germany, France (briefly), and England and chose to use these three different nations as models to explore comparative social change in the tradition of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—with all of whom he both agreed and disagreed. Recently, sociologists have more explicitly recognized the centrality of Marx’s ideas to those of Elias “on the process of civilization” (Dunning and Hughes. 2013, 114). This chapter explores the historical and bio-graphical context of Elias’s ideas about state formation, in particular of growing up as a German national. It asks whether his thinking about the ways in which Germany’s path to advanced capitalism differed from the lifeworld or habitus of England and France still has relevance when trying to understand Germany’s position in twenty-first-century Europe.

Being born into a certain generation affects the people’s mind-set: regardless of the different subsequent outlooks people adapt, all those born within a decade of one another will share certain social assumptions that impinge upon concepts of nationhood, empire, and self. For example, Churchill and the generation of British political leaders in the Second World War “had all been in their thirties before the first World War had clouded the skies of the Empire on which the sun never set” (Calder 1969, 99). Highlighting the birthdates of both Conserva-tive and Labour figures is a way of illustrating the continuities of mental land-scape and its consequences in wartime policy consensus. This was also true both of postwar Labour leaders, like Clement Atlee, and the handsome “housewives favourite” Tory politician who would later succeed the old warhorse Churchill,

9781137312136_txt.indd 220 29/04/14 12:24 AM

Germany’s Special path to Where? elias in the eurozone ● 221

Anthony Eden. Born in 1897, he “had been old enough to hear the Elgarian strains of national greatness at their loudest before the din of guns had drowned them. While the Conservative Party was emotionally committed to Empire for its own sake, Labour was intellectually committed to its mutation through self-government, into something less brazenly British . . . potentially an immense power for good in the world” (Calder 1969, 99).

In 1956, Eden infamously ordered British troops in to defend “our” Suez Canal in Egypt—against the Egyptians. The social democrat Labour Party opposed this diehard imperial venture—which was to fail so ignominiously—but championed the British “Commonwealth” as an alternative postimperial figuration: they only withdrew from empire slowly, implanting maximum “divide and rule” within the new independent states as they threw off their shackles during Labour’s govern-ment of 1945–51.

Elias was born in the same year as Eden but in a different configuration. He was raised into a liberal German-Jewish petit bourgeois family in what was then Breslau in eastern Germany, now understood to have been Wroclaw, an occupied Polish city. Anyone who has visited the terrifying line of Teutonic fortresses run-ning up Poland’s River Wisla through Touran, Nove, and Grudziadz, climaxing at the magnificent castle at Malbork (Marienbad), will recognize the imperial interests wrapped up in the Prussian/German sense of nationhood ever since medieval times. Prussia in 1897 was, of course, the powerful engine of a newly united German nation whose success had so thoroughly militarized the outlook of its middle class. As a sociologist, the “German question” was unavoidably central to Elias’s generation—as it had been to nineteenth-century German his-torians such as Mommsen, Ranke, and Weber.

Unification and Civilization

Marx had commented extensively upon how Germany’s failure to unify the state through bourgeois leadership in 1848 had bred the realpolitik mentality—“unification by any means necessary”—above liberal notions of a more civilized and democratic path to nationhood. This was epitomized by the case of Theo-dore Mommsen, the renowned German classicist whose History of Rome, written in the 1850s, describes a heroic but defeated political struggle for democracy and freedom in Rome’s late republic that became transformed into to an autocratic dictatorship. Despite his championing of liberalism and lifelong opposition to Prussian militarism, even he, in 1862, embraced Bismarck and approved the use of troops to ensure independence for his region of Schleswig-Holstein.

Max Weber took a more consistently reactionary position: aiming to confound the power of Marxism—represented institutionally at the end of the nineteenth century by Germany’s growing Social Democratic Party (SPD)—and above all to justify the necessity of military state making, he christened Germany’s a sonder-weg, or “special path,” to the modern world of figurations of nation-states. His attitude was that of a previous generation to Elias who faced a personal nemesis with the national breakdown of “organized capitalism” in Germany through the

9781137312136_txt.indd 221 29/04/14 12:24 AM


1914–18 war (Allen 2004). Elias strongly disagreed with Weber’s political sup-port for kaiser and country; he was horrified by the experience of the war. This horror was confirmed personally, as a wartime ambulance driver in the midst of this terrifying new episode of barbarism on an industrial scale, and politically, as his country imploded in slow-motion revolution and counterrevolution over the next 20 years. Moreover, Elias fundamentally rejected the idea of the capitalist system as a natural or rational form, recognizing “the fruitfulness of Marx’s thesis that social development, especially the development of the relations of produc-tion, and not just the arbitrary actions of single individuals, are responsible for the rise and fall of social strata fought out with the use of physical-force revolu-tions” (Elias 2012, 195).

In The Germans, written later in life, Elias recalls seeing the corpse of a former Communist schoolmate “found in the Breslau city moat, tied up with barbed wire . . . murdered as politically undesirable by members of the Freikorps” (1996, 186). That winter of 1918–19 was pulling his country apart in all directions: soldiers for and against the revolution of November 1918, the January massacre of the Communists—a tragic reversal of Russia’s triumphant uprising, all politi-cal values seemed to be thrown to the winds—particularly by the transformation of the officially Marxist SPD from being cast as “enemy of the people” to its new role as the government of the new republic, the only hope of rescue for the des-potic brand of “organized capitalism” that teetered on the brink of collapse. Elias, while hailing “the greatness of Marx’s sociological achievement,” highlighted “the damage inflicted on the Marxian system of thought by the fact that its function as the Bible of a great political movement constantly obscure[d] its function as a pioneering work of sociology” (Elias 2012, 200).

He resolved to better understand this social whirlpool of modernity by using sociology’s methods far more rigorously than he felt his so-called radical col-leagues were doing: to steer a path between the Scylla of nationalists (Bismarck and Weber) and the Charybdis of social democrats (such as Ebert and Kautsky). In the next decade, he would observe at close quarters the drift of Heidegger into the first set of rocks and was in no doubt that this fascist danger was the greatest threat to a civilized society. He sought the key to understanding the current crisis by analyzing long-term changes to European societies transforming from feudal-ism into modernity, a process of civilization (Elias 2000).

Throughout the 1920s he was also a witness to the stresses and strains placed upon the whole German constitution through the civilizing process of inter-dependent European governance by a range of state leaders of the “advanced world” that was framed by the Versailles treaty and the formation of the League of Nations. A recent account describes the scene and the attitude of French negotiator Leon Bourgeois: “The French idea was an enlarged defensive alliance against a revived Germany. Bourgeois proposed that only a thoroughly reformed and disarmed Germany could be admitted to the League” (Steiner 2007, 43). This way of thinking was, in Steiner’s opinion, not the stab in the back that so many later apologists for German expansionism were to claim: rather prob-ably the least bad compromise available without even greater political instability.

9781137312136_txt.indd 222 29/04/14 12:24 AM


Nevertheless, it was certainly no lasting solution to this dramatic crisis of war and revolution. International cooperation between the rulers of self-interested state regimes will always favor the most powerful, specifically the “victors,” and “punish” the defeated. The British therefore “institutionalized the system of colo-nialism . . . [and] placed the partition of the German and Turkish empires high on their list of priorities’ (Steiner 2007, 44, 43). This process of regulating other people’s territories—allegedly in the international interest (whatever that may be)—was always going to be seen as a “civilizing offensive” by the “losers,” who would inevitably resent and resist it. Elias claimed the Allies “allowed Germany an army of 100,000 instead of 400,000. This meant a radical reduction of the officer corps . . . Where would they go? The voluntary associations of the Frei-korps were the answer” (Elias 1996, 189). The military remained a post-Versailles menace to German democracy: “Alluding to the Russian Revolution and the danger of its spreading, it had the support of countless middle class and noble supporters” (Elias 1996, 190). The American League of Nations delegate House’s speech on the matter sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom: “If after establishing the League, we were so stupid as to let Germany train and arm a large army and again become a menace to the world, we would deserve the fate which folly would bring us” (Steiner 2007, 48).

Robert Fisk recalls the irony that the British called World War I “The Great War for Civilisation” (2006, xvii), with medals struck to commemorate its uplift-ing mission. To make further cross generational and international comparisons: if Weber’s attitude reflects the bellicose imperialism of a Churchill, then Elias, his opponent, is more like his wartime cabinet colleague and Labour leader Atlee—a reserved advocate of a totally different set of values than his predecessor: a repre-sentative of a more consensual set of international and national relations, which rising complexity and interdependency necessitated in place of empire and war. However, Elias certainly didn’t see himself as a social democrat. He had grown up in an era of economic crisis, revolution, and war, where the party of German social democracy (the SPD) was making policies that were, to his eyes, reprehen-sible. In 1914 they infamously voted for war credits and fell in with the kaiser’s war drive. By 1915 “the ever-lengthening lists of the dead and missing ‘fallen on the field of honour,’ sounded the death-knell of the illusions which the Social Democrats encouraged in 1914” (Broue 2006, 59). In 1917, when a democratic revolution overthrew the czar—surely the very goal social democracy was created for—the SPD newspaper, ironically entitled Forward, warned: “The mad hope of seeing events like those in Russia could cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield” (Broue 2006, 93).

In 1918, social democracy had appeared to make war upon itself: the Com-munist Party, led by its most famous left-wingers, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, emerged from its left flank, while its right became the embattled government of a country defeated in war—whose soldiers and citizens were emulating neighboring Russia’s revolution of the previous year. In 1919 it crushed the first wave of the German revolution: SPD leaders ordered the Nazi- prototype Freikorps groups of soldiers to assassinate Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

9781137312136_txt.indd 223 29/04/14 12:24 AM


The party’s right-wing leader, President Ebert, had bred this proto-Nazi monster, provocatively proclaiming to defeated troops in a tirade of bellicose denial: “I salute you, who return unvanquished from the field of battle” (Steiner 2007, 11). Elias attributes this to “the high dependency of the Weimar government on the semi-autonomous army . . . These two groups, represented by Ebert and Groener, formed a kind of alliance” (Elias 1996, 219). The center of the party, led by Karl Kautsky, also split away from this reactionary leadership, forming the USPD. The only certainty in German politics, it appeared, was uncertainty—with little hope of the new state surviving the stresses and strains upon its res publica. Elias’s summary, recalling these years in 1984, was ominous:

On the one hand there was a very powerful working class movement, above all in the Social Democrats and the trade unions, with a circle of intellectuals at the universities and elsewhere, and on the other hand the massive block . . . of the middle and upper classes, which were opposed to the Social Democratic Party with a bitterness that is hardly imaginable today . . . The right were only too conscious of their power and one could see the balance of power gradually inclining in their favour. (Elias 1994, 42)

Little wonder then that Elias became fixated on why certain European nations’ development—although at times as bellicose and imperialist as Germany’s—had led to such different state formations with more stable parliamentary forms better able to survive the early twentieth century. Long-term trends incorporat-ing the warlike feudal classes in the diplomatic machinery of the court cluster-ing around the absolute monarch seemed to have been a “civilizing process” in France, as he showed in The Court Society. He described the civilizing process literally, demonstrating the use of reforming social etiquette between members of the dominant classes, which in itself creates the new habitus or lifeworld of values. These courtiers understood that absolute power lay with the king, so they courted it.

According to Elias then, in the long term, humans become more civilized. Society’s increasing complexity breeds a degree of interdependence between dif-ferent elements: “The network of interdependencies among human beings is what binds them together” (Elias 2000, 481–82). This phenomenon has an ancient lineage—being implicit, for example, in Polybius’s The Rise of the Roman Empire, where he acclaims how the republic’s “mixed constitution” successfully met the needs of both patricians and the poorest. In the twentieth century, despite decivilizing wars and what Elias termed “spurts” of reaction—most notably the rise of European fascism—he believed the overall direction of travel was toward further international development of social systems. By the end of the century, ten years after Elias’s death, the process of the globalization of manufacturing was leading to the growth in numbers of the proletariat over the peasantry and rising expectations generated by higher living standards in many parts of India and Asia. In his view, rumors of the end of human progression were snap judgments—hostages to the tyranny of the contemporary over the historical in mainstream sociology.

9781137312136_txt.indd 224 29/04/14 12:24 AM


As a result, even though the postscript to The Civilizing Process was written in the historic year of 1968, in it we find Elias emphasizing the importance of long-term processes rather than focusing only on current events, just as in the shadow of Nazi barbarism he had refused to embrace despair in that “mor-bid age” (Overy 2009). Instead, he explained why “progressive” philosophies of history—or sociologies—had emerged in the nineteenth century alongside the evolution of modernity:

In the industrializing countries of the nineteenth century . . . the voices express-ing the social beliefs, ideals, hopes and long-term goals of the rising industrial classes gradually gained the advantage over those seeking to preserve the existing social order . . . They include men like Marx and Engels who identified them-selves with the industrial working class; and they include bourgeois sociologists like Comte . . . The spokesman for the two rising industrial classes took confidence in the thought of the future improvement of the human condition, even if what they envisaged as improvement and progress varied widely depending on their class. (Elias 2000, 461–62)

To accept this general tendency is often interpreted as a mistaken endorsement of the “benefits” of today’s collection of governments and its economic work-ings, who see the process of civilization advancing with rising complexity and interdependence. Sociologists like Elias, who describe a progressive process of civilization, are not cheerleaders for dominant ideologies. His view was shaped by those Enlightenment thinkers who founded sociology and who have often been misrepresented, as Jonathan Israel explains: “Theories of progress, however, contrary to what many have assumed, were usually tempered by a strong sense of pessimism. The notion, still widespread today that Enlightenment thinkers nur-tured a naïve belief in man’s perfectibility seems to be a complete myth conjured up by early 20th century scholars unsympathetic to its claims” (2010, 3).

Elias famously concluded On the Process of Civilization by quoting Holbach: “la civilization . . . n’est pas encore terminée”1 (2000, 447). Israel’s summary shows how the two agreed on this positive evaluation for humanity in the long term: “Despite the slowness of our steps, urged the baron d’Holbach (1723–1789), one of the most radical of the philosophes, at the close of his ‘Systeme Social’ (1773), the evidence shows, without question, that human reason does progress. We are manifestly less ignorant, barbarous, and ferocious than our fathers” (2010, 4).

Humanity has a “civilizing mission,” as epitomized by the way it has evolved socially over hundreds of years. Both men believed in this enduring human capacity to forge the tools that will set us free. In Holbach’s words: “If error and ignorance have forged the chains which bind people in oppression, if it is preju-dice which perpetuates these chains, science, reason and truth will one day be able to break them” (Israel 2010, 36).

As Mary Fulford argues: “Even if Elias did not operate within a strictly chron-ological teleology, in the sense of the Whig theory of the onward march of his-torical progress, he certainly operated with an evaluative hierarchy . . . writing in a period which witnessed a ‘breakdown of civilization’” (2008, 8).

9781137312136_txt.indd 225 29/04/14 12:24 AM


By citing Holbach in the books closing statement, he shows he shares his “radical enlightenment”2 values—and certainly doesn’t disagree with the view that upholds the French Revolution as the model for progress in modernity. Elias’s terse description of the Enlightenment as when “the structure of thought began to move in a fairly obvious direction during the period when people were starting to treat social problems more as scientific than as theological or philo-sophical ones” (Elias 2012, 50–51). The implication was that a similar process had already pacified and unified the “national interest” in Britain, following par-liament’s neutering of the monarchy via the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688. By drawing Britain into the research field of comparative Western European state making, Elias, like Weber, revisits the “Britain, France, Germany” triangle to analyze the transition from feudalism to capitalism: like Marx, he casts his own nation as the outsider—the exception to the civilizing process, “Germany—itself only recently risen—after 1870—from an often humiliating, low-status position among the established European nation states to a position of relatively great power. Its consciousness of status and identity was therefore particularly insecure and vulnerable compared to that of other long-unified nations” (1994, 124).

The pattern of the sonderweg—that is, modern Germany’s state-formation processes—has certainly oscillated between low and high status in the league of most powerful European states, as the table of historical periods below illustrates.

Era of rising status “Humiliating, low-status position”

1870–1914 pre-18701919–1941 1919–19291960–1990 (West only) 1945–19601990–present (united) 1960–1989 (East only)

Like all rigid typologies, this table has contradictory elements and contestable phraseology, but it reminds us that this dominant twenty-first-century European power has experienced much social upheaval, much civilization and decivilization in the process. For example, from 1960, the Berlin Wall separated two halves of a nation travelling in different directions in terms of economic status. Obviously, the storm and stress of interwar social change was both desperate and dynamic.

By contrast, in support of Britain’s claim to a less traumatic transition to capi-talism than Germany, Elias hails “the genesis of the naval profession” to explain how the technical advances in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British navy demanded a shift from the dull compulsion of commanders demanding the crew’s obedience to the more advanced mentalities of dynamic cooperation between officers and crew necessary to manage these complex machines, them-selves prototypes of the industrial machine. This in turn bred the type of mercan-tile entrepreneurialism that so effectively exploited overseas colonies and led to subsequent British commercial and imperial success (Elias 1950).

Germany’s dilemma of state instability conferred by much-delayed unification, and subsequent lack of ability to absorb the social pressures of industrialization

9781137312136_txt.indd 226 29/04/14 12:24 AM

matt.clement

Cross-Out

matt.clement

Cross-Out

replace with 'describes'


within long-established institutions along French or British lines, affected other European states also. If sociologists were to avoid backing military forces as the only available glue to hold the nation together, they needed an alternative strategy. Weber had backed the kaiser’s war drive in Germany, and subsequently Croce backed Mussolini in interwar Italy. Elias certainly did not share Weber’s positive evaluation of Germany’s sonderweg. He may not have welcomed Germany’s peril-ous circumstances of December 1918, but he recalled “the feeling of being defeated was balanced by the good fortune that the Kaiser had gone” (Elias 1994, 29).

Gramsci, like Elias, observed and analyzed his country’s extremely uneven development—“too full of feudal remnants”—with its accompanying preserva-tion of premodern social structures across much of the peninsula, a barrier to the leadership of a social movement by the working class, which he felt was neces-sary to defeat reaction and forge the new order he encouraged among the Turin factory workers (Callinicos 2007, 164). He joined the Communists, despite tac-tical differences with the likes of Bordiga, whereas Elias never tied himself to the evolving figurations of either social democracy or communism. When asked whether he had “a special aversion to partisan feeling,” he replied, “I hated the disguise, not the partisanship, I was partisan myself . . . All my friends were of the left, and in this confrontation I sympathised thoroughly with what the left did in the struggle and I did my best to help. But the left’s ideology was unrealistic” (1994, 44).

However, looking at these trends in an international context, the striking point about the German and Italian journey from bourgeois democracy to fascism between the wars is that they shared many features with a number of European countries: The scenario where organized capitalism faces militant opposition from workers and their new social democratic parties, while military rulers threatened and sometimes executed a bloody reaction, emerged in Hungary and Britain in 1918–19, as well as Germany and Russia. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, populist social democratic governments threatened to transform Austria, France, and Spain and were repressed by military invasion and civil war. The interwar decades were an era of unstable states and their international relations: this attempt at the liberal government of Europe collapsed—they were “the lights that failed” (Steiner 2007). Organized capitalism, administered by state lead-ers determined to overhaul domestic economies and international relations—in order to prevent future wars and revolutions—ultimately failed so to do. This view of the period as one of war, revolution, and collapse in international rela-tions due to extremes of economic instability is now sufficiently self-evident as to be in the mainstream of history.

Weimar: Promise and Tragedy

Elias was well aware, growing up in Weimar, that “those who talked before 1945 about a German sonderweg were more often inclined to endow this with a positive value” (Blackbourn and Eley 1984, 3). The autocratic figuration of the industrial magnates—running their factories and “company towns” with brutal

9781137312136_txt.indd 227 29/04/14 12:24 AM


discipline, sacking and evicting workers—appeared to vindicate their approach of maximizing profitability through an authoritarian stance, denying the work-ing class both trade union representation and voting rights for as long as feasible. For the Wilhelmine regime, “Germany’s special superiority was often defined vis-á-vis England. Treitschke was not alone in his dismissive view that the English confused soap and civilization” (Blackbourn and Eley 1984, 3).

Even though the defeat of World War I marked the end of the kaiser’s per-sonal rule, the strong military element within the body politic continued, as Elias describes above. Moreover, even among supporters of the parliament and social democracy, the belief that their country, with its “superior” culture, would carve out a distinctive modernity—more advanced than the Allied powers—carried on into the Weimar years. Eric Weitz describes how “the hyperactive vitality of Wei-mar culture, of its music, theater, film, photography, derived its intensity from the act of revolution, from the psychological sense of engagement, the heady enthusiasm, the notion that all barriers had been broken and all things were pos-sible” (2007, 26). This elation was understandable given the rapidity with which the old order was cast aside and the dynamism of the new expanding economy of the twenties, buoyed up by American loans as their banks sought out profitable investments for the bulging pockets of U.S. corporations. Weimar even survived the first fascist upsurge of the early 1920s, the Kapp putsch: “Heavily armed troops marched on Berlin and declared the Social Democrat government over-thrown. The Social Democrats themselves simply fled. But the militant workers started to arm themselves, the trade unions declared a general strike, and Kapp and his supporters were ousted. Only then did the Social Democrats return, to re-impose ‘law and order’ with rigorous methods” (Dewar 1989, 98).

So in 1919 and 1920, the SPD government and the German communists were fighting one another. This was the fruition of the development of “the great schism” within the German working class—“the dissolution of the Erfurt union of revolutionary and reformist forces under the pressure of a changing world” (Schorske 1983, 6).

By 1923, the economy collapsed—the middle class were “proletarianized” in a mindboggling surge of inflation: in March the conversion rate was 240 deutsch-marks to the British pound; by the summer, 265,000; and by December, 15 billion! (Dewar 1989, 105). For the growing Communist Party (KPD) and the mass of social democrat supporters, if not their parliamentary leaders, this crisis beckoned in capitalism’s bankruptcy—literally. Communist International leader Zinoviev claimed, “In Germany events are developing with the inexorability of fate . . . the Proletarian revolution is knocking at Germany’s door” (Broue 2006, xxiv)—leading to Walter Benjamin’s later caustic comment that “nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was mov-ing with the current” (Clement 2009, 418–19), epitomizing a fatalistic opti-mism. Elias’s critique was similar: “the partisanship of the left was . . . prone to untrue idealization and ideologies” (1994, 17). They tragically underestimated the threat of fascism: “The Social Democrats and the unions believed—like my father—in the constitutional state . . . I went to a trade union to speak about my

9781137312136_txt.indd 228 29/04/14 12:24 AM


understanding of the situation . . . ‘Gentlemen, what measures have you taken to defend this fine union building if you are attacked?’ The answer was a deep silence . . . They had never thought of such an event” (Elias 1994, 44).

Elias in Marxburg

This was in Frankfurt in 1932, when Elias, as assistant to Karl Mannheim, taught in the sociology department at Frankfurt University, located in the Marxburg—that is, the ground floor of the famous Institute of Social Research building, which the university rented. The imminence of the Nazi takeover led him to clear the department of any incriminating papers as a precaution: within a few days the SS called at his home and drove him down to the building where, he later discovered, “the Nazis were digging[;] they had the idea—just as in a detective story—that there must be an underground passage between the [SPD] Volksstimme and Horkheimer’s Institute” (Elias 1994, 48–49). These incidents are both a testimony to Elias’s partisan feelings and remind us of his close relations with the Frankfurt School. He was particularly friendly with its cofounder, Adorno. When, in 1938, Elias was casting about for sociologi-cal allies to review The Civilizing Process, many of his contemporary academics seemed to share a benign faith in social democracy or socialism emerging out of the chaos of the day, while for the rest and the right this was all symptomatic of, in Spengler’s phrase, “the decline of the West”—a descent into the maelstrom that called for tyranny and authority to seize the ring of power from bank-rupt democracy. His best hope it appears may have been his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt—who had long been declaring their interest in Elias’s central research question: the interrelationship of micro- and macrosociology—the self and society. Horkheimer wrote, in his programmatic preface to the first volume of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung in 1932: “Among the problems of social research stands foremost the question of the relation-ship between the separate cultural spheres, their dependence on each other, the regularities in their transformation. One of the most important tasks for the resolution of this question is the construction of a social psychology meeting the requirements of history. Its promotion will be one of the journal’s special tasks” (Schottker 1998, 50).

Elias wrote from London to Walter Benjamin, in Paris, in 1938 to solicit a review for his book On the Process of Civilization in the journal. He would have known that Benjamin was a noted founding influence upon both Horkheimer and Adorno, and had probably read his recent work, such as the article on Edward Fuchs published in the journal the previous year, and felt that here was someone prepared to analyze his discussion of civilization.3 By importuning Benjamin, a German-Jewish sociologist in exile like himself, Elias was break-ing with his normal habit of researching independently and not citing the many sociologists and historians who influenced his thinking: he was declar-ing an allegiance. In the course of their brief exchange of letters, at Benjamin’s insistence, he alludes to some of the events, debates, and philosophies within

9781137312136_txt.indd 229 29/04/14 12:24 AM


German society of the previous century: the failed 1848 revolution; the tri-umph of Prussian militarism, empire, and war; defeat; more revolution in 1919 and 1923; and still greater bloody reaction. This storm, alternating between social progress and reaction, was accompanied by the evolution of Marxism and social democracy from banned advocates of revolution to legal boosters for reform. On the SPD right was Edward Bernstein, arguing that “social evolu-tion” inevitably raised up the working class to a better future. On its left was Karl Kautsky: he defended a brand of social democracy that was little better than Bernstein’s—Brown to his Blair. This “pope of Marxism” earned the title of “renegade” from Lenin, who was shocked that he supported the 1914 Ger-man war drive and opposed the 1919 Spartacist uprising; in Kautsky’s hands the creed had become a worthless dogma (Schorske 1983). No wonder many had looked to the Communists, despite their leaders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, having been assassinated in 1919.

Benjamin had joined the Communists in the mid-twenties, but by the mid-thirties he was an open critic of an emerging Stalinism, its current show trials, and the dreaded Nazi-Soviet pact to come. His principled revolutionary opposi-tion to capitalism made him both a “Marxist opponent of progressivism” and a “Romantic advocate of materialism”: Adorno described him as “standing apart from all tendencies” (Lowy 2005, 2). He could see the kernel of fatalistic Social Democratic progressivism within the mind-set of German Communists: con-vinced that Weimar’s capitalist crisis would inevitably usher in its progressive nemesis, many of them believed in the slogan “After Hitler, it will be us.” Marga-ret Dewar recalls how the KPD party cells collapsed in precipitative fashion upon Hitler’s coup in 1933, leaving the bulk of the membership and their supporters demoralized and looking for an explanation for what had gone wrong (Dewar 1989, 151). At their victorious election, the Nazis were still outnumbered by the combined votes of the SPD and the KPD, and yet these parties of the left proved powerless to resist. Elias therefore, despite admiration for Marx, told Benjamin he was disillusioned with “all methodological debates”: he had heard the case for Marxism in various forms for most of his adult life now—an inevi-table byproduct of the habitus for a sociologist living in the cockpit of Western capitalism’s greatest and most long-term crisis in Germany from 1914 to 1933. Elias appealed to Benjamin to rather regard practice as “the test of history”: “It seems to me, that better than all methodological debates—of which, I am sure in this respect you and I have very similar views, we have had more than enough in Germany—is practice, the concrete research which we are all dedicated to” (Schottker 1998, 56).

The notion of practice, termed praxis, and the use of the term concrete were common among linguists on the left, often used by Marxists such as Lenin and Lukacs. Unfortunately, Benjamin chose to see Elias’s lack of commitment to “methodology” as a form of idealism. So, even though he described The Civilizing Process as “gripping,” he declared himself unwilling to review the work. This was more of a misunderstanding rather than a real difference of opinion with Elias’s way of thinking. We were deprived of a later response by

9781137312136_txt.indd 230 29/04/14 12:24 AM


Benjamin’s tragic suicide while being pursued by the Nazis in 1940. An idea of his traumatized state of mind at this “midnight of the century”4 is provided by his 1938 writings on Baudelaire and the Paris of the Second Empire: “The resistance that modernity offers to the natural productive élan of an individual is out of all proportion to his strength. It is understandable if a person becomes exhausted and takes refuge in death. Modernity must stand under the sign of suicide, an act which seals a heroic will that makes no concessions to a mental-ity inimical toward this will. Such a suicide is not resignation but heroic pas-sion” (Benjamin 2003, 45).

Elias suffered similar traumas to Benjamin: exile, parents in concentration camps, and his country hollowed out by fascism and Allied bombing, diplomacy, and division. His statement of resistance is more cautious but still stubbornly committed; note when Elias refers below to “the social sciences,” he means not only the academic discipline, the theory, but rather all of human society, all social relations: “It cannot yet be said with certainty that overall social development will necessarily lead to the progressive emancipation of the social sciences as it did for the natural sciences. It is too early to tell; we are still caught up in the process of emancipation” (2012, 50).

The German Question

Elias was drawn back in his late work The Germans (1989) to a long-term analysis of what other writers have called “the peculiarities of German history” (Black-bourn and Eley 1984). Elias believed that long-term trends of rising interde-pendency and state formation would civilize the relations between different figurations. And yet the history of his own country showed otherwise. In Britain and France, the monarch’s “court society” had progressed into parliamentary rule by propertied “representatives of the people” via the process of revolution, giving birth to their bourgeois civilizations. However, this certainly did not mean that German society was somehow “behind” that of its neighbors. Elias begins The Civilizing Process describing the German belief in the superiority of their Kultur over the British and French concept of civilization. This was also the belief of Albert Einstein, who saw early twentieth-century Germany as “a country of doers and innovators, of world-renowned natural scientists still seeped in Germany’s humanistic culture” (Stern 1999, 4–5).

In 1921, Elias was just 24. His country had survived the horrors of war and thrown off the useless shell of Prussian Junkerism. The kaiser’s state had toppled along with all illusions that military dictatorship was to be glorified and justified over democracy. Despite the threats of revolution from left and right, there was also a sense of German society moving forward. Now the republic was bloom-ing, and Elias’s vision was of how humanity could scientifically progress—just as Weimar’s decade radiated with radical innovation in art, media, and com-munity. It was probably the most powerful “cultural revolution” of the twen-tieth century (Weitz 2007). Despite—or perhaps because of—the storm and stress, the Weimar Republic of the 1920s was a beacon of multiculturalism, social

9781137312136_txt.indd 231 29/04/14 12:24 AM


experimentation, and modernism in art and culture (Hughes 1991). Elias antici-pated all this in his writing at the time, which sought to overcome the divide between people and nature; it “points compellingly to the following idea as its culmination: that it is the obligation of everyone to form themselves . . . The only way in which they can become fruitful in passing from the particular to the totality of the world is, therefore, by the process described above” (Elias 2006, 20–21). He certainly believed in the benefits of detachment to produce a ratio-nal, scientific outlook; but changing circumstances change one’s view of events. Regretfully, he found himself agreeing with Mannheim’s devastating demolition of both Max and Alfred Weber’s argument for a “detached” rationalism at the 1928 Sixth German Congress of Sociologists, which concluded: “Understanding of the antithetical character of valuations and ideas rooted in antithetical being-situations was lacking . . . in liberals and democrats” (Elias 1994, 115; Kilminster 2007). Weimar needed radical change beyond liberalism—an echo of Luxem-burg’s analysis a decade earlier, what she called “socialism or barbarism” he called “civilizing processes and decivilizing spurts.” Elias believed in helping people to understand and change their situation. He explains they need to overcome their alienation by becoming conscious of their situation: “The indices of complexity set out here may perhaps help to make everyday matters rather strange. This is necessary if one is to understand why sociology’s field of investigation—the processes and structures of interweaving, the figurations formed by the actions of interdependent people (in short, societies)—is a problem at all” (2012, 98).

These developments represent a refutation of those Elias termed “structural functionalists [who] bear the stamp of this specific mode of thinking, which reduces processes to states” (2000, 456). On the one hand, On the Process of Civilization, published in 1938, was a challenge to some of the Marxists and right-wing thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s who saw decline and crisis as per-manent “states,” heralding humanity’s imminent apocalypse, by emphasizing long-term trends in rising interdependence. On the other hand, his 1968 post-script similarly challenges the zeitgeist of postwar mainstream sociological think-ing, too anxious to pronounce old contradictions reconciled: “In Parsons . . . every society normally exists in a state of unchanging equilibrium . . . Social change refers here to a transitional state between two normal states of changeless-ness, brought about by malfunction” (2000, 456). For Elias, social change was ongoing—embedded in the DNA of figurations. The events of Europe in the spring and summer of 1968 were socially powerful enough to shatter the para-digm of changeless normality, reinserting the power of human agency and praxis in making history (Harman 1988; Clement 2009). Germany’s reunification and rise have all occurred since 1990, the year Elias died, signaling more change than even he imagined. After all, in the 1970s, “Germany’s strategic position in the European power balance” was very different from today. It is striking to recall Somner’s summary: “In the world of the 1970s, the German role in European power politics has undergone a dramatic change. Germany is no longer the cock-pit of specific conflict, causing unrest either by tempting the twelve neighbouring countries with its weakness or overpowering them with its strength” (1972, 152).

9781137312136_txt.indd 232 29/04/14 12:24 AM


Twenty-First-Century Questions

The German question has revived over the last couple of years in particular, as the early twenty-first-century ideal of a European federation of equals, reflected in a powerful stable currency, has given way to the Eurozone crisis. The focus has shifted to the power differentials between states: Germany’s centrality and economic dominance across the continent is a sign of the combined and uneven development affecting “peripheral” nations whose relative industrial underdevel-opment is generating a vicious cycle of austerity and social breakdown. This has bred varying political reactions: Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, in Decem-ber 2011 bluntly stated, “I fear German power less than German inactivity. The choice for the EU now is between deeper integration and collapse” (Runci-man 2012). This willingness, from representatives of countries it has previously repressed, for Germany’s rulers to take power and wield it for the benefit of all is an indication of how intractable the crisis is becoming. Some European leaders embrace Merkel’s doctrine of “ordoliberalism”—defined as “rigid rules and legal frameworks beyond the reach of democratic decision-making . . . they alone had learnt from the failures of laissez-faire in the 1920s” (Muller 2012, 18–19). Once again it appears Germany’s destiny to take the European helm.

This is certainly the view of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who recently argued, “The European discussion over the Euro has almost become domestic politics” (Merkel 2012). From this viewpoint, what Germany’s rulers believe is necessary becomes the truth for all its “partners.” She went on: “We will be clear with Greece. We will say, if you want to be part of a common currency, you have to do your homework. But we will always support you.”

The tone is more that of a parent than tyrant, but the determination to pre-serve market hierarchy over political freedom is evident, as is the assumption of political authority (Clement 2013). In March 2013, German finance minis-ter Wolfgang Schauble referred back to German hyperinflation in the 1920s to remind his international audience that “Austeritet in the sense of fiscal discipline has a complete positive vibration in our German ears of course.”5 The German ruling class are locked into austerity to avoid the situation that bred Nazism, while the likes of the Greek economy is suffering from the effects of austerity that allow their Golden Dawn fascist party to grow. Many neoliberal politicians and their economic partners in “the business world” are unapologetic about jet-tisoning democracy—replaced by technocracy for several months in both Greece and Italy in 2011/12.

Meanwhile, when democracy occurs, the neoliberal mantra of “necessary aus-terity” (Radice 2011) is increasingly challenged by votes for rejecting this brand of market logic. Paradoxically, the deeper the crisis becomes, the more political solutions will polarize either side of this divide. Although Elias was always warn-ing of the dangers of “the retreat of sociology into the present,” he would be aware that these current developments pose a challenge to his argument that as the system becomes increasingly complex and interdependent it breeds a “func-tional democratization.” One prominent Eliasian scholar has recently argued

9781137312136_txt.indd 233 29/04/14 12:24 AM


that the Eurozone crisis is evidently a process of “functional de-democratization” (Mennell 2012). He locates this within the triumph of a market fundamentalism that ignored any need to consider the public interest or exercise foresight as to the consequences of such an antisocial polity. Elias’s autobiographical experience and later reflections can still inform our understanding of the sociogenesis of the “German question” today.

Conclusion

This chapter has aimed to situate our understanding of Elias within the cockpit of history that was post-Wilhelmine Weimar Germany. Real events (war, revo-lution, bourgeois republic, and counterrevolutionary putsch) and real political forces (social democracy, communism,6 liberalism, and fascism) civilized and decivilized various constellations of classes or figurations. These short-term events were related to how states were formed, divided, and reformed over longer periods under their specific national conditions. This idea underpinned his mag-num opus On the Process of Civilization in 1938 and was still being reinforced in his later work, where he once again returned to the antinomies of his homeland in The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1989). “Every future sociological theory,” he wrote, “will contain at its core a theory of long-term social processes” (1994, 119).

As Marx predicted in 1845, in The German Ideology, Germany’s opportunity to forge a united nation through bourgeois revolution in 1848 failed. This class lacked the will to defeat the nobility; leaving it to the military forces of reaction to achieve this in 1871, thus illuminating Germany’s special path. The milita-rized landowning class instituted the nation-state, and the modernization and advance of capitalism that followed in its wake was legislated by diktat rather than through the parliamentary methods of Britain’s “Gladstonian coalition.” This distortion of the “norms” of state-formation processes was, in Elias’s analy-sis, doomed through its inbuilt instability. Like a doctor diagnosing the patient, Elias pronounced Germany’s development damaging to its health, liable to violent eruptions at the extremes of its body politic—ultimately leading to the “decivilising spurt” of the Third Reich.

Germany today is hailed as one of the most stable European states, with its powerful industrial economy being the engine room of European growth, sur-rounded by its sickly neighbors, prone to recession and austerity. Once again there is a mismatch—its economic power dwarfs its political influence in a con-tinent of nation-states. Again a long-term view of uneven development is illu-minating—less than 20 years ago, things looked very different: “Pre-unification West Germany had been one of the most wealthy and homogeneous states in the European Community. East Germany, by contrast, immediately became the Community’s largest depressed region, poorer in economic output than southern Italy and most parts of Greece” (Marsh 1996, 14).

Germany’s leaders point to their high-tech manufacturing power as a model for its ailing neighboring economies, but it is one they cannot replicate

9781137312136_txt.indd 234 29/04/14 12:24 AM


(Lapavistas 2012). This is not the fault of these other states alone: powerful financial interests, such as U.S. and British banks, have often imposed a model that they subsequently penalize as unsustainable. When the European Union levied funds from Cypriot bank accounts to bail out the banks, The Irish Times commented: “Reckless, greed-fuelled lending by German banks is the other side of the reckless borrowing by the ‘bad’ countries . . . What, in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus, is the most important political institution? The answer is obvious: the troika . . . an ad hoc institution with great power and no accountability . . . In the handling of the euro zone debacle, democracy has been suspended” (O’Toole 2013).

At the same time, the postwar German constitution was drawn up by the Allies to ensure that Germany’s political leaders would govern collectively, shar-ing responsibilities split up between posts—often in coalitions—rather than allowing the chancellor to dominate. Institutions such as the Bundesbank consider themselves constitutionally bound to prevent pan-European institu-tions such as the European Central Bank (ECB) gaining too much power in the process of dealing with the Eurozone financial crisis, a scheme denounced by Jens Weidemann, the head of the Bundesbank as very dangerous, “since it would give politicians access to the ECB’s currency printing press—normally only allowed to central bankers.” This specter of the Weimar Republic, where the politicians ordered the continual printing of money to pay war reparations, causing the Reichsbank to usher in hyperinflation (Fergusson 2010), is not only threatening to the bankers but to democracy itself, as “a nascent Eurozone treasury . . . would quickly be tapped to deal with crises without relying on national parliaments, which cannot act at the speed demanded by markets” (Spiegel 2011, 8).

Thus we return to where we started: Spiegel’s prediction of 2011 has already been borne out over the next two years in Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Cyprus—and there is every reason to believe this contemporary phenomenon will develop further. These contradictions are part of the “lifeworld” of a people encouraged to feel economically powerful but politically constrained by others: a common currency among uncommon conditions may result in a return of the “German question” in future years.

Notes

1. “The process of civilization . . . is not yet complete” (my translation).2. The thesis of a “Radical Enlightenment,” which both gave birth to and fought with

its reactionary partner as well as the old order, is explored in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment (2003) and ‘Enlightenment Contested (2008).

3. The other name Elias tells Benjamin he would consider for reviewing his book is Erich Fromm, the pioneering Marxist psychoanalyst who worked with the Frankfurt School in its U.S. exile.

4. The phrase was coined by Victor Serge to describe the twin political triumphs of fas-cism and Stalinism.

5. Interviewed on BBC Newsnight, March 7, 2013.

9781137312136_txt.indd 235 29/04/14 12:24 AM


6. Elias saw Marx as a “colossal figure” and stated emphatically “the central role played in German sociology in the 1920s in the argument over the work of Marx and the materialist conception of history.” He criticized the “actually existing Marxism” of the Soviet Union, where he recognized that the ending of bourgeois private prop-erty (industry) had not in itself made the state less authoritarian or empowered the people—“a massive increase in the power of state rulers, as compared to their widely dispersed subjects” (1994, 119, 146). This concurs with Trotsky’s account of the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in The Revolution Betrayed, and even more with Cliff’s pathbreaking State Capitalism in Russia (1948).

References

Allen, K. 2004. Weber: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto.Benjamin, W. 2003. Selected Writings Volume Four 1938–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.Blackbourn, R., and G. Eley. 1984. The Peculiarities of German History. Oxford: OUP.Broue, P. 2006. The German Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket.Calder, A. 1969. The People’s War. London: Jonathan Cape.Callinicos, A. 2007. “The Dream of Revolution and Reaction: Marxist History in the

20th Century.” In C. Wickham (ed.), Marxist History Writing in the 21st Century, 158–180. Oxford: OUP/British Academy.

Clement, M. 2009. “Praxical Sociology and the Algebra of Revolution.” Critique 37 (3): 415–24.

Clement, M. 2013. “Manufacturing Austerity in the Eurozone.” Human Figurations 2 (1).Cliff, T. 1978. State Capitalism in Russia. London: Pluto.Dewar, M. 1989. The Quiet Revolutionary. London: Bookmarks.Dunning, E., and J. Hughes. 2013. Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology. London:

Bloomsbury.Elias, N. 1950. “Studies in the Genesis of the Naval Profession.” British Journal of Sociol-

ogy 1 (4): 291–309.Elias, N. 1994. Reflections on a Life. Cambridge: Polity.Elias, N. 1996. The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the 19th

and 20th Centuries. Cambridge: Polity.Elias, N. 2000. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.Elias, N. 2006. Early Writings. Dublin: UCD Press.Elias, N. 2012. What Is Sociology? Dublin: UCD Press.Fergusson, A. 2010. When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-Inflation.

London: Old Street.Fisk, R. 2006. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. London:

Harper Perennial.Fulford, M. 2008. “The Character and Limits of the Civilizing Process.” German Monitor

(66): 1–16.Harman, C. 1988. The Fire last Time: 1968 and After. London: Bookmarks.Israel, J. 2003. Radical Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Israel, J. 2008. Enlightenment Contested. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Israel, J. 2010. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins

of Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Kilminster, R. 2007. Norbert Elias: Post-Philosophical Sociology. London: Routledge.Lapavistas, C. (ed.). 2012. Crisis in the Eurozone. London: Verso.Lowy, M. 2005. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin. London: Verso.

9781137312136_txt.indd 236 29/04/14 12:24 AM


Marsh, D. 1996. Germany and Europe: The Crisis of Unity. London: Mandarin.Mennell, S. 2012. “What Economists Have Forgotten: A Figurational Perspective on the

Crisis in Economics.” Paper presented at the Norbert Elias and Processual Sociology Conference, Copenhagen, April 2012.

Merkel, A. 2012. BBC Newsnight Interview, March 26.Muller, J. 2012. “What Do Germans Think about When They Think about Europe?”

London Review of Books, September 2.O’Toole, F. 2013. “Opinion.” The Irish Times, March 26.Overy, R. 2009. The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars. London: Allen Lane.Radice, H. 2011. “Cutting Government Deficits: Economic Science or Class War?”

Capital & Class 35 (1): 125–37.Runciman, D. 2012. “Will We Be All Right in the End?” London Review of Books, January 5.Spufford, P. 2006. Power & Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe. London: Thames

& Hudson.Schorske, C. 1983. German Social Democracy 1905–1917. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.Schottker, D. 1998. “Norbert Elias and Walter Benjamin: An Exchange of Letters and Its

Context.” History of the Human Sciences 11 (2): 45–59.Somner, T. 1973. “Germany’s Strategic Position in the European Power Balance.” In

E. Feuchtwanger (ed.), Upheaval and Continuity: A Century of German History, 152–166. London: Oswald Wolff.

Spiegel, P. 2011. “Debate Rages over Rescue System Funds.” Financial Times (London), September 21.

Steiner, Z. 2007. The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919–33. Oxford: OUP.

Stern, F. 1999. Einstein’s German World. London: Allen Lane.Weitz, E. 2007. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton.Wyke, M. 2007. Caesar. London: Granta.

9781137312136_txt.indd 237 29/04/14 12:24 AM

9781137312136_txt.indd 238 29/04/14 12:24 AM

Urban Oucasts of the British City

Documents

Transcript of Urban Oucasts of the British City