The German Empire Read online

  Long before those scars could heal or, as the German saying goes, grass could grow over the graves, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars brought more disasters. Since 1793 French armies had swept across the whole of western Europe, redrawing the map of Germany. In 1804 the Holy Roman Empire simply ceased to exist when Francis II in Vienna laid down a crown that had become, over the last hundred years, nothing but a piece of precious metal, with magic no longer radiating from it. In the same year the “Premier Consul” in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned himself “Empereur des Français”: among his “Français” not only many Germans, Italians and Dutch, but also, as obedient and grateful allies in the Confederation of the Rhine, most of the German princes.

  In 1806 the Prussian government, isolated and ill advised, collected what little courage it had, ended its neutrality, declared war on Napoleon and was duly defeated at Jena. However, what was left of Prussia, half its former size, gained new strength through a revolution from above infused with the spirit of German idealism. Reformist civil servants like Baron von Stein, Wilhelm von Humboldt (brother of Alexander the explorer) and Count Harden-berg proclaimed that what the state had lost in material strength it had to replace through intellectual effort and moral energy. At much the same time, military reformers, led by intellectual generals like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, studied French military achievements, incorporated the basic tenets of Carnot’s revolutionary army and created a modern Prussian one, based on patriotism, merit and general conscription. The Jews were emancipated, and a slow and painful assimilation began. The centuries-old guild system was suppressed, following the Enlightenment conception that every man had the right to pursue happiness, even if he never caught it. The feudal system was abolished and peasants, no longer bound to the land, were turned into farmers owning the land. The land-owning nobility still tried to keep up appearances, but they were overtaken materially by untitled rural entrepreneurs, who knew how to reap a golden harvest at a time of expanding population.

  Sebastian Haffner, an émigré journalist from Germany and later a great and influential historian in post-war Germany, summed up the two most decisive conclusions that the Germans had drawn from the French Revolution and Napoleon: “This shall never happen to us again!” and “We can do better!” Throughout Europe the reaction to Napoleon’s conquest was to be the rise of modern nationalism as a means to reconstitute society and to give expression to popular forces. Democracy and the modern nation-state were born together; first in North America, then in France and Germany.

  For the hundred years before Bismarck’s revolution from above, there were two organizing principles at work in the German lands: one steeped in tradition, of the individual states, cities or principalities; the other coming in on the wings of the Enlightenment, seeking equality and with it the great promise of a better life, of a richer future, of self-fulfillment. This latter idea was especially potent to those Germans who were alienated, young and wanted to change, if not the world, then certainly Germany. Both the French Revolution and the “wars of liberation,” as the uprising against Napoleon was called, gave a boost to revolutionary idealism.

  After the eventual defeat of Napoleon’s armies, the Congress of Vienna confirmed the fundamental simplification of the map of central Europe: it restored Prussia, but with disconnected western provinces; created a new equilibrium, with France being admitted as one of the five dominant powers; and installed the “Holy Alliance” of Russia, Austria and Prussia to forestall territorial or political change in central Europe. What came to be called the System Metternich, named after Austria’s powerful Chancellor, Prince Metternich, was meant to be a fortress protecting the status quo.

  “Deutschland Deutschland über alles”—there are few pieces of political poetry as ill understood by Germans and non-Germans alike as the revolutionary lines that a young firebrand by the name of Hoffmann von Fallersleben put on paper, denouncing the suppression exercised by the System Metternich. What young Hoffmann meant was pure German idealism: the idea that Germany, an open and just society lubricated by Riesling, full of song and beautiful German womanhood, should reign supreme over the 38 or so sovereignties loosely united in the German Confederation—the system constructed by the Congress of Vienna to keep the German territories neatly divided so that Europe remained in balance. It was a forward-looking song sung to the melody, ironically, of an Austrian hymn dedicated to the Emperor by Joseph Haydn, and it was incompatible with Germany’s surviving ancien régime.

  With the defeat of Napoleon and the end of his continental system of economic warfare against Britain, the nascent industries of Prussia had suddenly been exposed to the cruel impact of superior British producers. While in political terms the Prussian administration wanted to preserve the past and continue on the path of enlightened absolutism, in economic terms the Berlin authorities opened the floodgates of the market economy because they were in need of British goodwill, capital and technology. Population pressure demanded that the State encourage employment, otherwise Prussia’s rulers would follow where France’s ancien régime had led. In 1828 Prussia and Hesse concluded a customs union, built on a common market with low tariffs for the outside world, especially British industries. Six years later this was followed by the Zollverein, comprising all of northern Germany with the sole exception of the Hanseatic cities, such as Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen. Prussia’s liberal bureaucrats, most of them former students of the philosopher Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, had scored a triple victory. They had put the Prussian monarchy on the road to economic liberalism, hoping that one day political liberalism would follow. They had ended the predominance of Austria and saw it as only a matter of time before the south German states joined too. And they had, in economic terms, forged an alliance with Britain.

  This happy state of affairs was cruelly tested in the 1840s. Poor harvests, which drove the price of bread sky high, coincided with a destructive industrial crisis. This was Karl Marx’s defining moment and inspired him and his co-author Friedrich Engels to publish the Communist Manifesto in February 1848. Mass unemployment, soaring interest rates and the collapse of many companies and banks resulted in turmoil and upheaval. Open revolt began on the streets of Paris and was followed by the flight of King Louis Philippe. The exciting news spread immediately via telegraph, unleashing the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 throughout Germany and the Austrian Empire. For some months, the monarchies of central Europe looked as fragile as a house of cards.

  This was Bismarck’s moment, although he would have been an outstanding man at most moments in any age. The prose of his letters was akin to the best German written by Heinrich Heine and Thomas Mann; his parliamentary speeches, although delivered in a high-pitched voice, were as rich in metaphor as in substance; his diplomatic dispatches later had the rare quality of combining an overall picture of often difficult situations with clear directives as to what action to take. He was full of ambition and ambiguity, of energy but also of frustration. He had shortened his military service as best he could, but then found life as a higher civil servant humiliating and boring. After having retired to his family’s run-down estates, he confessed to a cousin, “I want to make music in my own way, or not at all.” His ambition, he continued, was “directed more at avoiding having to obey than to giving orders.” He talked about patriotism and how it had led a few famous statesmen to their destiny. But what would lead him was something else: “ambition, the wish to command, to be admired and celebrated.”

  Politics was not Bismarck’s passion unless, he confessed, he could be Caesar or Cromwell. In 1847 he was sent, as a replacement for a deceased deputy, into Prussia’s United Landtag, whose chief task it was to vote the credits for the railway linking Berlin to the eastern provinces—a strategic more than a commercial proposition. The vast majority of the parliamentarians wanted the railway and were ready to vote the credits, but only on condition that the government honored its age-old promise to grant a constitution. Bismarck rose to the occasion an
d proved himself a staunch supporter of the old regime. “I am a Junker,” the country gentleman farming his own land was heard to say, and he wanted to stay in that God-given position. The French Revolution overshadowed his age, and he was against it. One year later, when the streets of Berlin had seen riots, soldiers shooting, the King expressing his regrets and the troops withdrawing, Bismarck wanted to persuade the generals to stage a coup. But the young hothead was alone. So instead he became co-founder of the Conservative Party and a newspaper, proving that he understood the rules of the political mass market. Moreover, he gained a sinister reputation: “Only to be used when bayonets are fixed,” King Frederick William IV noted of his unruly subject.

  The year 1848 was a defining one for Bismarck, when he learned who was friend and who was foe. His time came when the revolution was over, or almost so. The Prussian government, after dithering throughout the revolutionary months about taking up the cause of German nationalism, finally decided to form a North German Union. But Russia and Austria mobilized armies, and the government in Berlin decided that moderation was the better part of valor. In the Prussian parliament, tempers were hot; the liberals were ready to go to war, while the conservatives were for peace and the status quo with Austria. Bismarck saved the day for His Majesty’s government, talking, with utter contempt, about the “national swindle” and that it was unworthy of a great power, such as Prussia, to go to war over anything but its own manifest interest. This sounded reassuring, and in due course Bismarck became Prussia’s chief diplomat at the Bundestag in Frankfurt, meeting under Austrian presidency. But it was here that the Prussian diehard turned into the man of Realpolitik—a key term of the times. Bismarck understood two important things: that Austria was too old to survive and that it was up to Prussia to try and harness the great national passions of modern times, which otherwise would be left to the protagonists of 1848, the liberals and socialists, who were down but not out.

  Better harvests, the injection of government silver and gold reserves into the general banking system, political frustration and foreign intervention—the Russians sent an army into Hungary, while the British navy staged a show of strength in the Baltic—all helped to overcome the revolutionary furore. The old rulers of Germany escaped catastrophe, but only by the skin of their teeth. And they had learned their lesson. They granted constitutional compromises in order to bring the moneyed classes on to their side. But the chief remedy was economic—a powerful drive towards industrialization and capitalism throughout the German lands allowed private bankers to follow the lead of the French Crédit Mobilier and to set up the joint-stock universal banks, which were to be at the heart of corporate Germany’s rise and rise. Money came out of its hiding places; investors, not least from Britain, hoped for riches in the boom economy now taking off. The gold rushes in North America and Australia stoked up demand. Throughout the 1860s the north German economy registered overall annual growth of between 8 and 10 percent.

  Bismarck observed the rise of Napoleon III from adventurer to prince president in 1848 and to Emperor in 1852 with fascination, and learned a useful lesson. Conservatism, if it kept the masses content with bread and circuses, was a force for the future and could muster popular support. This was a recipe that the Prussian monarchy had yet to try, but in 1862 when King William I and his parliament, dominated by liberal radicals, found themselves in full conflict over army reform and constitutional rights, the moment was ripe. The King was ready to abdicate in favor of the Crown Prince who, married to Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, was full of liberal English ideas. The military leaders sent one telegram after another trying to recall Bismarck, who had just been sent as Prussian ambassador to Paris. But the recipient pretended ignorance. Instead, he was busy persuading his wife that the ambassador’s residence, a palatial building in the rue de Lille overlooking the Seine, was too modest for her, and that he was not ready for her arrival. The truth was that he had developed an infatuation with Countess Katharina Orloff, wife of the Russian ambassador. However, eventually, opting for ambition over love, Bismarck did travel to Potsdam, where he talked the King out of his somber thoughts. He promised not to stage a coup or to alienate the Austrians or surrender to parliament. When made Prime Minister, he did not fully keep any of these promises. He ran the country without a legally approved budget law, he fought a war against Austria, overthrowing the German Confederation, and in the end he even forged an understanding with the liberals in parliament.

  Having been in the Wilhelmstrasse for only a few days, Bismarck fired the opening shot of his grand strategy in the budget committee of the Prussian parliament. “It is not through speeches and majority voting that the great questions of our time are answered—that has been the great illusion of 1848–49—but through iron and blood.” The liberals were duly shocked, but they also wanted national unification, if necessary through a military showdown. Bismarck understood that this was now his best chance of moving forward and starting what soon turned out to be nothing short of a revolution from above.

  The Six Weeks War of 1864 against Denmark— unwisely, the Danish King had tried to incorporate his German provinces, Schleswig and Holstein, situated between the North Sea, the Baltic and Hamburg, into the Danish nation-state—was a military walkover for the combined forces of Prussia and Austria, and finally the elusive Schleswig-Holstein question that had provoked vast nationalistic passion in Germany and Denmark, a short war in 1848 and another sixteen years later, seemed to have been solved. Lord Palmerston, then British Prime Minister, dismissively remarked that there were only three people who understood what he termed the Schleswig-Holstein question: “one was the Prince Consort who is dead, another one a German scholar who has gone mad, and the third one is me, and I have forgotten.”

  The victory over the Danish army was nothing but a primer for much larger diplomatic and military operations. In fact, Bismarck ensured that harmony between Vienna and Berlin, the victors of the war in 1866, was not to last. While keeping the pressure on the liberals in Berlin, he started a sweeping campaign for an all-German parliament. This was impossible for the Austrians to accept, since direct elections throughout the far-flung and diverse possessions of the Habsburg Empire would have been the beginning of the end for that fragile construct held together by nothing but the Emperor, the Catholic Church, the aristocracy and the largely German-speaking civil service. In the spring of 1866, Bismarck concluded a military alliance with Italy, limited to three months, to put more pressure on the Austrians. In addition, he let the Prussian bankers clean out the European capital markets. When war came, Austria had as allies the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse and the entire south, including the Free City of Frankfurt. In retrospect, the war seems to have had more of the formal quality of a duel, with the final exchange of shots at Königgrätz. While the King and his generals wanted to ride triumphantly into Vienna, Bismarck would have nothing of the kind. He foresaw that he would one day need Austria as an ally, and he wanted no cheap triumphs at the expense of a pillar of the ancien régime. He insisted, however, that Hesse and Hanover were taken off the map of Europe and turned into Prussian provinces. Frankfurt and Nassau suffered the same fate.

  Germany after 1866 was in all but name the Germany of 1871. The Prussian parliament accepted defeat, and Bismarck was generous enough to allow the liberals to forgive him his extraconstitutional excursion. The north was united in a confederation, with a common constitution under Prussian presidency. The south—Bavaria, Baden, Hesse, Württemberg—was integrated through the Customs Union, now with a law-making parliament instead of a mere diplomatic assemblage. The military alliances that put the south German troops on the same footing as the Prussians were of equal importance. The result was an extended Prussian army, which as Bismarck could sense might well be needed in the not too distant future against the France of Napoleon III.

  The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was short and swift, at least in its first phase against the imperial armies of Napoleon III, befor
e the French republican authorities conducted their war à l’outrance, to the death, but also ending in defeat. In his opening move, Field Marshal von Moltke had delivered a masterpiece of strategy, using the railways to encircle the French armies at Sedan and, after a few weeks, forcing the French Emperor into an armistice. Meanwhile, the bloody battles in Alsace and Lorraine, where Bavarian and other troops were engaged, made German patriotism surge and gave the Bismarckian construction that magic blessing that only war or revolution, or both, can bestow, fusing the German states into a single entity under the control of Prussia or, more precisely, Bismarck and the Berlin administration.

  Altogether, the political and social revolutions of 1848 and the industrial revolution had challenged the old established order of state and society. The shockwaves of the French Revolution and Napoleon could still be felt throughout the German lands, and they carried with them many promises and many threats. Bismarck’s was a revolution from above to exorcise and paralyze the ghosts of 1789 and 1848. But it was still a revolution albeit in the guise of the old order. Bismarck’s achievement was to have put a stop to the looming social and political changes in Germany. But, by implication, this entailed a transformation of the European system as well. This was what Benjamin Disraeli had in mind when warning Her Majesty’s government in 1871 against the wider implications of what he termed the “German revolution.”

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  THE BISMARCK YEARS

  The industrial revolution in Germany meant that wages rose for the vast majority of the population, beginning in the 1850s. Men and women alike had a chance of living longer and happier lives, and they had a justified expectation that one day their children would fare even better. But what mattered most to the Germans of Bismarck’s day was the hope that the era of angst was a thing of the past. Certainly the prevailing mood was one of confidence and optimism, in spite of the many casualties of industrial progress and capitalist transformation and the ensuing resentment, fear of the future and social upheaval. After the Great War, people would refer to the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine past as the good old days—die gute alte Zeit—and they grieved for the years when peace and progress seemed the norm.