ABSTRACT
The mobilization of the agrarian interest in the 1890s has found a rightful place in analyses of German political development. The Protestant Junker estate-owners of the east, the Catholic landowning aristocracy of Silesia and western Germany, and small peasant farmers organized and agitated on a scale hitherto unknown against falling agricultural prices and foreign competition. The states and provinces of Germany West were by no means uniform in structure, but they had sufficient in common to allow useful comparisons to be made between their experiences of agrarian politics in the prewar and postwar periods. The Agrarian League brought matters of agrarian protection into the forefront of National Liberal debates, provoking intense internal wrangling and robbing the National Liberals of much of their rural support. The 'second agrarian mobilization' of 1918-24 had a pivotal role in the transition from the agrarian populism of the pre-1914 period to the Nazi progress in rural areas of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
