Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 327

This is one of the most ambitious works to have appeared in European agrarian history in recent times, a history of Germany’s rural communities over a period of fifteen centuries. Such a labour is beyond the scope of a single scholar, and the writing is shared between two of Germany’s more active agrarian historians, with Werner Trossbach covering the period up until 1800, and Clemens Zimmermann the last two centuries; a temporal break that also roughly divides the book in half. The book provides an almost exhaustive and impressive synthesis of recent work on the authors’ main themes and provides an essential guide to German agrarian history. It should be a recommended first port of call for anyone wishing to work in this area.

Why a history of the ‘village’, rather than a history of rural society more generally? What the volume really offers is a history of rural farming communities, and the focus of the work is firmly on the quality of interaction among villagers, and between villagers and outsiders. Great weight is placed upon rural social structures, and forms of communication, especially in more recent times the development of ‘new’ media such as the cinema. This social history has strong economic roots as control over, and dissemination of property is presented as the key to the social order and attendant kin relations. This reflects recent trends in German agrarian history that have provided a wealth of detail on property- holding and, especially for the period since the eighteenth century, anthropologically-influenced studies of village life; a literature much richer than that available on the same themes for Britain. This methodological and thematic emphasis means, however, that areas prominent in recent British rural history receive less attention here: the practice and achievements of agriculture itself, lordly culture and practices, manorial organization, and material culture.

The book proposes eight main chronological periods. The establishment of lordly controls over the land and serfdom between 750 and 1150; settlement expansion and the formation of village ‘communes’ (Gemeinden) between 1150 and 1350; a time of settlement ‘stabilization and differentiation’ lasting up until the Thirty Years War (1618–48); the time of the well-studied pre-industrial village ‘on the threshold of modernity’ between 1650 and 1800; developments between 1800 and 1880; an age of increasing penetration of the village by outside influences, and new forms of social organization such as voluntary associations between c.1880 and 1933; the Nazi period; and the age of most rapid change from 1949 on. Of these, it is the late medieval and early modern that receive the greatest weight, for it is argued that much of Germany’s economic geography and forms of communal life were essentially laid down quite early in this period and consolidated as time went on. Indeed, while the authors, in line with recent studies, are keen to stress the continually-evolving lines of tension in village life, change and social polarization occurred at a slow, drawn-out pace. Only after 1880 did the institutional and social lines of village life begin to shift more rapidly.

The authors view the long-term history of village life as characterized by tensions between a hierarchical order, exemplified at an early date by lordship, but later by oligarchies of powerful property-holders increasingly integrated into the functions of the state; and a more egalitarian, corporative principle largely expressed between property-holders and reaching a highpoint in the Peasants’ War of 1525, but that re-merged in various forms, including southern German liberalism, during the revolutions of 1848. This argument of a longue durée of rural politics that continued to exercise strong influence in the twentieth century, along with the longevity of rural institutions, should present British readers with a striking point for comparison. Is the apparent absence of anything equivalent ‘on the island’ the result of different property and institutional structures, or simply the absence of research? The authors are also drawn to the conclusion that the level of rural support achieved by the Nazis in 1933 was not the culmination of long-term developments, but a rather more contingent event responding to the agricultural crisis of the preceding years and to some extent a generational revolution among rural powerbrokers.

However, the deepest shifts in village life belong to the period after 1949, with the consolidation of large-scale, technology-driven farming, and the shrinking of the agricultural workforce to a small minority within the countryside – patterns that have tended to reinforce the importance of the family in farm organization and as a focus of collective life, as ties with other groups have weakened. These trends appear similar in both of the post-war German republics, although deliberate management in favour of rural continuity characterized the east more than the west, with collective farm organizations providing substitutes for the village’s older forms of sociability. The village as settlement, of course, endures, and may even be undergoing a revival. However, it is hard to see how the particular qualities of a community orientated around these settlements, the core matter of this excellent book, will be resuscitated in the new century.