Agrarian League
AGRARIAN LEAGUE
AGRARIAN LEAGUE (in German "Bund der Landwirte "), extreme conservative German organization for the defense of agrarian interests, formed in 1893. Its membership included most of the Protestant farmers and farm laborers in the period of the German Kaiserreich. Ideologically, the League constituted a bridge between the tenets of Christian German nationalism ("Das Christliche Deutschtum") and romantic and racialist tendencies. It was outspokenly antisemitic, although in a religious rather than a racialist sense. This did not prevent it from cooperating with the racialist antisemites of the Berlin Movement (Berliner Bewegung, see *Antisemitism). Non-Christians were explicitly excluded from the League by its program. The League waged a campaign against what it considered the three enemies of the "true Germany: the Liberals, the Social Democrats, and the Jews." In 1921, the Agrarian League was united with other agrarian associations in the Reichslandbund, which took part in the "national opposition" against the Weimar Republic. From 1931 on, the Reichslandbund supported Hitler's National Socialist Party.
bibliography:
H.-P. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (19882); H.-P. Mueller, in: Zeitschrift fuer wuerttembergische Landesgeschichte, 53 (1994), 263–300; H.-U. Wehler, in: Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 4 (2003), 91–93, 382–84.
[Marcus Pyka (2nd ed.)]