The German Empire Read online

  There were various political persuasions within the new Germany after that cold and colorful January day at Versailles, 1871. Enthusiasm for the new turn of events among the liberals was great, almost unlimited, provided that through the Reichstag they could persuade Bismarck to go along with free trade and nation building. They also wished to curb the influence of both major churches and ensure minimal liaison with labor leaders. Unfortunately, the liberals were deeply split. The left wing was composed of 1848ers from Württemberg and the old provinces of Prussia, who had led the charge against royal prerogative. They had tried to squeeze more parliamentary powers out of King William I when he wanted army reform, and they had been the bedrock of opposition against Bismarck ever since 1862 when he assumed office. These liberals saw the constitutional compromise of 1867, when the north German Reichstag had settled scores with Bismarck, merely as a starting point for many more rounds of constitutional wrangling.

  Moving distinctly to the right, the National Liberals were by and large a new party. They enthusiastically endorsed the Prussian annexation of the Kingdom of Hanover and the Electorate of Hesse, of Hesse-Nassau and of the Free City of Frankfurt after 1866. They were happy with the Prussian concept of a free-trade oriented economic area, already embodied in the German customs union, with legislation and jurisdiction about to be united throughout Germany together with one currency and one central bank. For the National Liberal leaders and their flock, 1848 was a closed chapter, best forgotten.

  However, the conservatives were far from triumphant. They had misgivings about Bismarck’s Caesarism, his courting of public opinion, his warmongering against Austria, which was adding oil to the flames of modern nationalism, and his severing of links between throne and altar by taking up the fight for the secular state. To them, the Bismarckian answer to the revolutionary sea change of 1848 had a mephistophelean smell, his alliance with modern nationalism to them was as good as a pact with the Devil. It was only in the course of the 1870s, when the great Prussian agricultural estates east of the Elbe began to suffer under the unforgiving impact of world markets, that the bargain between Prussian conservatives and Bismarck’s regime was put on a new, largely economic footing. Neither could afford to do without the other in the common battle against socialists, liberals, the world market and free trade.

  A key part of the political spectrum in Bismarck’s Germany was the German Center Party, a kind of action committee of political Catholicism. “Il mondo casca” was the cry in the Vatican when, in 1866, the forces of Catholic Austria and their German allies were defeated by the Prussians, who in turn were allied with the Italy of Cavour and Vittorio Emmanuele—arch opponents of the secular power of the Pope. In fact it had been clear ever since 1848 that the clergy, Protestant and Catholic alike, would sooner or later have to be forced to retire into the churches and the universities and lose control of education and charity, except on the margins of society. Throughout German Catholicism, concentrated in the Rhineland, in Silesia and in Bavaria, the battle cry was to unite and set up a political party, to build a bastion against the onslaught of secularism. The Center Party was referred to by its adherents as the Zentrums-Turm, the tower. Because of its organizing principle in the Catholic religion, it was the only political party to unite a cross-section of the population, from laborer to aristocrat, from industrialist to bishop. It did not increase the Center Party’s popularity among national minded liberals that, in the name of Catholicism, the Poles from Prussia’s eastern provinces and the French from the newly acquired Reichslande, Alsace and Lorraine, joined the parliamentary party. The Center Party cut across class barriers and transcended the nation-state. The label “Ultramontane,” soon applied to it, was not meant to flatter. It insinuated that its leaders received their guidelines from beyond the Alps—ultra montes—that is, from the Vatican. In fact, when one of the first parliamentary initiatives of the Center Party in 1871 was to call upon the German Reich to send troops to Italy and protect the Pope against the secular Italian state, Bismarck found his worst suspicions of a Europe-wide Catholic conspiracy corroborated. For the next few years, the Catholics were denounced, just as much as the socialists, as Reichsfeinde, enemies of the empire.

  The Kulturkampf, nominally Bismarck’s attack on Catholicism, was directed not so much against religion as against the secular power of both major churches and the meddling of priests and pastors in affairs not their own. It had started in the Rhineland, where the Catholic Church was the mainstay of opposition to the Prussian-Protestant predominance. But the government of Bavaria added oil to the flames by demanding that there should be a formal ban on politicizing by priests, that civil matters like marriage and divorce should be taken out of the hands of the churches, and that monastic orders which did not comply should be evicted. Bismarck immediately seized the chance to divide and rule.

  Concomitantly, he was also hostile towards the old-style conservatives in rural Prussia east of Berlin. In their orthodoxy and pietism, they opposed him as well as his nouveau riche Reich and his alliance with liberalism and secularism, so threatening to undermine his sway over King William I. The Kulturkampf, largely through Reich and Land legislation, drew the line between Church and State as in France, and it lasted for the best part of a decade. Thereafter the Center Party was needed in parliament to secure a majority loyal to Bismarck. But neither side could ever be sure of the other. Bismarck wanted, if he could have it, the combined support of conservatives and liberals, and to manage without the Catholic party; the Center Party, in its turn, could ill afford to alienate its working-class wing. Moreover, the party leaders would take as their lodestar the Papal encyclicals, especially Rerum Novarum in 1890, when the Pope gave an answer to the social question that was impossible to reconcile with free-wheeling capitalism. The Center Party was neither democratic nor anti-democratic; it was more conservative than liberal, but it was also more left wing than right wing. In short, it was the party of Catholicism.

  The Social Democratic Party was even more of a misfit in the German political spectrum. After his untimely death in a duel for the honor of Countess Hatzfeld, Ferdinand Lassalle left the socialist field to the small entrepreneur August Bebel, a woodturner who made himself the most redoubtable socialist leader. His followers proudly referred to him as the Arbeiter Bismarck, “the workers’ Bismarck.” Bebel studied Marx’s writings while in prison during the Franco-German war, but he was too practical a man to follow them literally. Bismarck’s summary dismissal of him and his socialist followers as Reichsfeinde— enemies of the empire—somehow missed the point that Bebel and his colleagues, of whom there were a mere handful in the Reichstag of 1871, did not oppose national unification as such. What they wanted was a different kind of Germany, not Bismarck’s authoritarianism, not pure capitalism, but a market economy with a strong state and a lot of social warmth to it.

  Bebel could never be accused of being over-pragmatic: he praised the Paris Commune of 1871, in spite of its bloody excesses, as the vanguard of the European proletariat and the model to which German workers aspired. Fortunately, however, Bebel did not press that point and when two assassination attempts were made on the old Emperor in 1878 and 1879, and in both cases the culprits confessed to some sympathy for the socialist cause, it was Bebel who preached the sermon of evolution and the belief in the metaphorical “wheel of history.” He thus put clear ground between the German socialists and the practices of anarchism and revolutionary terror such as were displayed in Russia and elsewhere. Most German social democrats were in fact petit bourgeois and pragmatic, wearing black suits and bowler hats when demonstrating. They carried with them the legacy of many centuries of guild life: journeymen had always aspired to becoming part of good society and now they were moving closer to that promised land.

  The social democrats were not suppressed, let alone persecuted, by the anti-socialist law of 1879 that was introduced as an answer to the assaults on the Kaiser—and also to help Bismarck form a new, pro-government majority. It pe
rmitted them to function in the Reichstag, but not to engage in public campaigning. Twelve years later the socialists had risen to more than 25 percent of the popular vote in industrial centers, while the liberals had lost support and declined in numbers and influence. This showed the futility of Bismarck’s somewhat half-hearted anti-socialist law and, when he fell, this piece of legislation went too, never to be revived.

  The German political system combined elements of both royal absolutism and parliamentary democracy in an uneasy compromise. In its day it was referred to as “German constitutionalism” and was more often than not justified on the grounds of the exposed geostrategic situation of the country in the middle of Europe. There was no Reichsregierung, as Bismarck once pointedly observed. There was only the Reichskanzler taking political responsibility: the Chancellor with his office of a few higher civil servants. Bismarck had seen to it when the constitution was set up that it remained open from whom this responsibility was derived: from the monarch, most likely; from history, most certainly; from the Reichstag let alone the electorate, most certainly not. There were, of course, a number of state secretaries: one for the treasury, one for foreign affairs, one for naval matters, another one for postal services, one for home affairs, one for questions of jurisdiction. But a state secretary answerable to the Reichstag for the largest chunk of the budget, military expenditure, was conspicuous in his absence. The military budget had to be administered through the Prussian Ministry of War, while all matters concerning the royal—not imperial —Kommandogewalt, the military backbone of the State, rested with the monarch, who, claiming royal prerogative, would handle all matters of military advancement and deployment through the Militärkabinett.

  State secretaries could not be members of the Reichstag and that meant that this body had no interlocutor except Bismarck. All important administrative work was done by the Prussian administration and overseen by the Staatsministerium of Prussia, the Prussian cabinet. Prussian ministers were also superior in rank to mere state secretaries of the Reich. Within this construction not only the Reichstag had little influence; even the individual states could not exercise any significant measure of control. It also implied that military absolutism remained almost undiluted except for the army budget, and that was voted not annually, but for many years in advance. As long as Bismarck kept his influence over the King of Prussia and German Emperor, the Iron Chancellor was, in all but name, the ruler of Germany.

  However, the German Reichstag, although far from powerless, could not vote a government out of office. Without finding or manufacturing a majority, the government would have found it impossible to function. But, in competition with parliament and political parties, there developed a vast array of organized interests, pressure groups and media claiming a role in that open-ended opera called the German polity. This opera may have been democratic in parts, especially when it came to one-man, one-vote elections. But above all it was functional, translating ever more diverse and indeed controversial interests into a political process as unpredictable as the purest of democracies.

  The Iron Chancellor did everything to overcome the consequences of what he, the white revolutionary, had achieved. His domestic policy was carefully crafted to preserve a social balance in which the landed interest was paramount. But this was a losing battle against the growing strength of industry, vital in any case to provide jobs for the rapidly increasing population. The laws curtailing the rights of the social democrats, passed in 1878, had to be compensated for by the introduction, far ahead of other countries, of state insurance against the effects of old age, sickness and accidents, starting in 1883 and soon turning into a massive system of self-administration overseen by the State. Bismarck’s attack on Catholics had to be broken off in order to win their vote. Colonial propaganda was drummed up, but failed to rouse much public enthusiasm. Domestic politics were overshadowed by the great depression of the 1870s and 1880s and the resulting battles between protectionists and free traders: the former, the landed interest and heavy industry; the latter, the export-oriented manufacturers of machine tools and the like, the socialists and the left wing of the liberals.

  In foreign policy Bismarck preached, time and again, the blessings of peace, equilibrium and the status quo. He had been converted by le cauchemar des coalitions—the nightmare of coalitions—to the lost wisdom of the Congress of Vienna, back in 1815. The Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz-Joseph needed tranquility to keep his multinational empire together. The Tsar needed tranquility to prevent the resurrection of Poland—divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century. Bismarck cultivated alliances with both Russia and Austria, but due to the stirrings of the Balkan Slavs against their Turkish overlords, this became increasingly difficult, and the much trumpeted Three Emperors’ Alliance of the early years threatened to end in war. There was a strong Pan-Slav movement within Russia, which demanded that the Tsar intervene on behalf of their Balkan cousins, more especially the Serbs. But any increase in Balkan nationalism or interference by other states in the region was highly dangerous for the Austrian Empire. Bismarck had given assurances to the Russians, saying that the whole of the Balkans was “not worth the healthy bones of a Pomeranian musketeer.” However, this did not prevent a confrontation between Austria and Russia, caused by the latter’s war with Turkey. Consequently, Bismarck had to call a European congress at Berlin in the summer of 1878. In doing so, he saved the face of Austria for the time being and probably prevented a major war between the British Empire and Russia over who would control the eastern Mediterranean. Bismarck claimed to have acted merely as an “honest broker”—his banker, Gerson von Bleichröder, commented that there is no such thing. At any rate, the Russians were ungrateful and disappointed, the Pan-Slavist press began to agitate against Germany, and the Tsar wrote an angry letter to his uncle, the German Emperor, complaining about Bismarck and his support for Britain and Austria.

  In 1879 the German Reichstag retaliated against a doubling of Russian import duties—the Russians suddenly insisted on payment in gold instead of half-price paper rubles—by introducing protective tariffs for German agriculture, and this economic pressure enhanced the alienation. Only one year after his diplomatic triumph at the Congress of Berlin, Bismarck again tried to mend diplomatic fences, concluding a dual alliance with Austria and then, for balance, a new alliance with Russia. But the latter had to remain a secret because public opinion in both countries would have been opposed to it. In 1887, in the face of much warlike talk, a secret “Reinsurance Treaty” was added, amid growing hostility between Austria and Russia over the Balkans. The treaty, to last for three years, specified that in case of war both Russia and Germany were to observe neutrality: Germany in the case of a war between Russia and Austria, Russia in the case of war with France. Nobody thought that the Reinsurance Treaty was worth very much. But it was to give Germany breathing space if war broke out, and it was also meant to have a sobering effect on Vienna and St. Petersburg, as neither could count on automatic German support.

  Bismarck insisted that Germany was, by now, solely interested in maintaining the status quo, saying, “We are what old Prince Metternich called a saturated power.” In reality, Bismarck found himself in the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice, who had lost the words of the spell to get the genie back in the bottle. There had been too much upheaval, too much social change, and there had been the industrial revolution.

  Germany’s industrial revolution had begun on the Lower Rhine and in the Ruhr area during the final decades of the eighteenth century, then in Berlin and Silesia, while the centuries-old industrial centers south of the Main river lagged behind for want of capital, technology, access to markets and, not least, coal to fire the furnaces. In the long run, this would prove to be a blessing in disguise, as southerners had to cultivate their ancient metallurgical skills and apply them to modern machinery. Such was the case of Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz in Stuttgart and Mannheim respectively, working on the motor car, or
of Robert Bosch who, after a long apprenticeship on the east coast of the United States, supplied the electrical equipment required by the car. But nineteenth-century industrial Germany was built on coal and steel and textiles, on railways and canals, and most of these were to be found in the crescent of prosperity stretching from Aachen in the west via Cologne and Essen to Berlin, and from Berlin to the coal mines and mills of Upper Silesia.

  Bismarck’s revolution from above had coincided with the building of a powerhouse at the heart of the continent. Once most of the main lines were completed, machine tools took over from railways as the leading sector, getting a second wind when, even before the turn of the century, electricity was harnessed to production. A vast building boom gave employment to small-scale manufacturers of household appliances and encouraged many old-style artisans to try their hand in larger undertakings. The textile industry of Krefeld expanded, as did that of northern Bavaria and around Plauen in Saxony. The chemical industry, in the past concentrating almost entirely on raw materials, now found vast markets for fertilizers, pharmaceuticals and artificial dyes. In the 1860s almost overnight Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (BASF) turned the fishing village of Ludwigshafen, at the confluence of the Neckar and the Rhine, into an industrial landscape of giant proportions. The same was true of Meister Lucius & Brüning in Hoechst on the Main, and of the Bayer works, best known for aspirin, in Leverkusen on the Rhine.

  Germany’s industrial revolution had started on the principle of free trade and this remained the keynote well into the 1870s. But then the business climate changed throughout the Atlantic world. In May 1873 the Vienna stock exchange collapsed, then Berlin’s and Frankfurt’s followed suit. For the past fifteen years or so, stocks had been rising with new companies springing up left and right, bringing fortunes to investors, banks and speculators — Gründungsfieber, “founding mania,” as the conservative Cassandras called it, had become a contagious disease. But now the tide turned inexorably, and no longer could the liberals hope that it would carry them to power. Conservative fundamentalism came into its own, seeing the old Prussia, with its Protestant value system and its rigid social hierarchy, going to ruin. Frustration with the capitalist wealth machine that had suddenly come to a halt gave rise to anti-Semitism, the losers finding the root of all evil in the lust for money and the stock exchange; seeing the new Reich as some giant, godless casino.