Konfliktipelglik ja kõneosav vaikimine: kõrts kui kommunikatsiooniruum Saksa keisririigis
Conflict-shy and eloquent silence: Pub as a communication space in Imperial Germany

Summary/Abstract: The Wilhelmine society was hit by a huge number of social, political, religious, and ethnic conflicts. How did people deal with these conflicts in their everyday life? The article tries to answer this question by describing the different segments of an urban society (especially Hamburg) and their ways of face-to-face communication in pubs. A qualitative and a quantitative analysis of roughly 20,000 reports of investigation written by the Wilhelmine police, who over 22 years visited the pubs of Hamburg, shows that there was nearly no communication between the different segments of society. If they got into conversation, they normally did not talk about politics or anything else concerning their identity or beliefs. There are different reasons for this behaviour: anthropological reasons such as fear of isolation, and political reasons caused by the ‘Obrigkeitsstaat’. One of the most important reasons is the variety of conflicts in Wilhelmine Germany itself. The social, religious, political, and ethnic problems were increasing alarmingly, so that silence seemed to be the most appropriate and reasonable strategy of managing conflicts.For the development of Weimar society the results turn out to be ambivalent. On the one hand, this strategy of managing conflicts helped to stabilize the different ‘milieus’ and, as a result, the Weimar Republic. On the other hand, the same behaviour had serious consequences for the disintegration of German society and was responsible for lack of empathy shown towards the members of other ‘milieus’ and ‘lager’.

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