Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  11

  Dangerous Ideas

  REACTIONARY REGIMES

  In the spring of 1917 the nature of the war changed fundamentally. The outbreak of revolution in Russia and the entry of the United States into hostilities brought a new, ideological edge to the conflict. In President Wilson’s words to Congress on 2 April, ‘democracy’ and ‘the rights and liberties of small nations’ were the causes for which the war was now to be fought.1 He echoed the new revolutionary regime in Russia, which already at the end of March – although nobody had voted – proudly declared itself a ‘Russian democracy’ whose war aim was the ‘establishment of stable peace on the basis of the self-determination of peoples’.2 These were not just powerful slogans intended to please domestic audiences. They had a universal appeal and struck deep at divisions inside Germany and Austria-Hungary. From being the norm in Europe in 1914, monarchical rule suddenly began to look dated. The timing was dangerous, for these ideas of popular governance would resonate with populations increasingly angry and disillusioned with their unelected leaders’ wartime errors, and above all their inability to provide and fairly distribute food. The Russian revolution was particularly frightening for the Central Powers’ governments and inspiring for their dissidents, as it revealed that violent, popular regime change was no chimera but a very real possibility in these extraordinary times.

  The year 1917 was defined in central Europe by deepening division between peoples and their governments. Political reform was one key area of contention. In 1914 large marginalized groups had mobilized hoping for reform as a reward for their service and sacrifices: the Social Democrats (S P D) and Poles in Germany and those nationalities in Austria-Hungary who felt short-changed by the 1867 Compromise, most vocally the Czechs and South Slavs. The calls became louder due both to the extreme hardship at home and to the ideals issuing from abroad; Wilson’s call for ‘government by the consent of the governed’ appealed to democrats and nationalists alike.3 The autocratic governments’ efforts in 1917 to conform to the Zeitgeist and implement change were, however, half-hearted, ill-organized, and frequently met insurmountable opposition from groups that refused to surrender their privileged positions.

  A second cause of the widening division between peoples and rulers was controversy over war aims. The prohibition on public discussion of war aims had been lifted in Germany at Ludendorff’s insistence in November 1916, and both there and in Hungary arguments became increasingly vitriolic in response to the Russian revolution and America’s declaration of war. With deprivation and misery endemic, many Austro-Hungarians and Germans found attractive the call made by the revolutionary Petrograd Soviet at the start of April 1917 for international peace through a democratic settlement ‘without annexations or indemnities’.4 Yet far from the war ending, enemies multiplied, food shortages worsened and the suspicion grew that rulers were deliberately prolonging the war to win vast conquests. While annexationist conservatives and nationalists welcomed this, wider sections of the population came to fear, as the Social Democrats’ newspaper Vorwärts observed in November 1917, ‘that the real and most profound reason making it so enormously difficult to get peace lies in the military successes of Germany’.5 Toxically, both causes of anger and disillusionment were intertwined. The Central Powers’ governments, through their refusal to raise their peoples’ stake in the state and its war effort, failed to underpin their waning legitimacy. They, and the reactionary elites supporting them, staked their existence on the fallacy that popular commitment won by reforms, rather than being a precondition, could be replaced by total victory.

  In Austria-Hungary the year 1917 began with the promise of change. The venerable Emperor Franz Joseph had passed away the previous November and his successor was a very different persona. Emperor Karl was just twenty-nine years old when he ascended the throne, but he and his young family symbolized hope to an Empire in distress, and the press greeted him optimistically as a man of exceptional character: a benevolent and humane war hero who had spent time at (or, more accurately, near) the front and knew the travails of his soldiers. As with all tributes to royalty, the praise was exaggerated. In Vienna the new Emperor’s critics quipped that ‘you hope to meet a 30-year-old there, but you find a man with the appearance of a 20-year-old youth, who thinks, speaks and acts like a 10-year-old boy’.6 Karl unquestionably had faults. He was a man who managed to combine obstinacy with irresolution, insisting on a hard and sometimes courageous course, yet lacking the will or boldness to push it through. His sense of honour and his loyalty to his oaths and allies, qualities that should have been virtues, prevented him from acting decisively for the greater needs of his peoples. He was well educated but insufficiently prepared for the immense responsibilities that he had inherited. What Karl did have was good intentions. He recognized the need for internal reform and was prepared to work in order to set his stamp on government. Moreover, he desired an end to hostilities. The new Emperor’s manifesto on taking the throne greatly raised the hopes of the war-weary, for among the customary platitudes was a promise that Karl himself had insisted should be included: ‘I want to do everything to banish the horrors and sacrifices of the war as soon as possible and to win back for my peoples the sorely missed blessings of peace.’7

  The new Emperor’s first task, however, was to take control of his realm. The first six months of his reign saw the wholesale replacement of Franz Joseph’s advisers with a younger team. A new Austrian Minister President, Count Heinrich Clam-Martinic, and a Common Foreign Minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, were appointed on 20 and 23 December 1916 respectively. These choices signalled that far-reaching reform was intended, for both men had belonged before the war to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s Belvedere Circle, and had contributed to planning the heir to the throne’s intended restructuring of the Habsburg Empire. Reform was now more urgent than ever, for the Dualist system’s unwieldiness had inhibited the Monarchy’s war effort, not least in the effective and equitable distribution of food supplies; change was in any case almost inevitable, as any gain or exchange of territories would upset the delicate balance between the two halves of the Empire. Most significantly, Karl reined in the military’s independence and malign influence on Austrian politics. He personally took over the Supreme Command in early December, relieving Franz Joseph’s appointee, Archduke Friedrich. A month later, he annulled powers sanctioning military rule and encroachment in areas well behind the battlefront. Conrad von Hötzendorff, the Chief of the General Staff whose battlefield failures and interventions in the interior of the Monarchy had so damaged its legitimacy, was dismissed at the end of February 1917. The overhaul of personnel was completed in April when the War Minister, Baron Alexander von Krobatin, was sent instead to the Italian Front. General Arthur Arz von Straussenburg, the new Chief of the General Staff, and the replacement War Minister, General Rudolf Stöger-Steiner, were soldiers without political ambition.8

  Karl’s endeavour to reform the Dualist system was nonetheless hamstrung from the beginning by a lack of planning and poor decision-making. He made his biggest mistake on his first day as Emperor, when he agreed on an early coronation as King of Hungary, instead of waiting the six months that was legally permitted. Count Tisza, Minister President of Hungary, had acted with speed, visiting Karl on the morning after Franz Joseph’s death and impressing on him that the best way to peace was through coronation. In fact, the Machiavellian Minister President’s real concern was to secure Hungary’s territorial integrity and privileged position. By 1917 pressure was building for fundamental reform of the Empire, to turn it from a land based on historic territories to one with a new legitimacy derived from organization into national and possibly federal territories. In particular, South Slav (and above all Croatian) nationalists wished for the unification of the Kingdom of Croatia, one of the historic lands of St Stephen that constituted Habsburg Hungary, with Austrian Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Earlier in the war this might have been achieved within Dualist Hungary. However, the onl
y circumstance that could have made this politically feasible, the compensation and expansion of Austria through the addition of formerly Russian-ruled Congress Poland, had by 1917 been all but ruled out by Germany’s ambitions and the Central Powers’ proclamation of an independent Polish state. Similarly threatening to Magyar elites in 1917 was a new fad among Czech nationalists to demand unification with Hungarian-ruled Slovaks, whose realization would also force a drastic revision of Dualism and historic borders. Persuading Karl quickly to take the Hungarian coronation oath was Tisza’s means of quashing these schemes, for it obliged the new king to pledge to maintain the integrity of the lands of the Crown of St Stephen. The scheduling of the ceremony for 30 December 1916 left no time to force a reorganization of the Dualist system before this oath was given. Afterwards, reform became all but impossible, for the reactionary Hungarian government’s opposition could not be overridden without reneging on this promise.9

  With imperial reorganization blocked, Karl could only try to restructure Austria. However, his government’s initial plan was ill-considered. His key ministers were all Austrian Germans (only one Czech was appointed, as the unimportant Minister of Public Works) and their programme corresponded to their nationalist compatriots’ vision for Austria’s future. German was to be the sole language of administration and the historic Czech lands were to be divided for the benefit of their German minority along ethnic lines into self-governing districts. German domination in the Reichsrat was to be assured by removing Polish deputies, a measure justified by increasing Galicia’s autonomy, and by the introduction of new rules banning obstruction. The Czechs were to be a powerless minority. These measures, which would have been anathema to most Austrian Slav representatives, were to be imposed through imperial decree, the Oktroi. It was predictable that measures so partial, forced on a land already resentful after three years of oppressive, unrepresentative government, would incite considerable discontent and further undermine the Monarchy’s standing among its Slav subjects.10

  The Russian revolution halted Karl’s move along this disastrous course. The new Emperor was very frightened by the upheaval in the east. As he wrote to his ally, Kaiser Wilhelm, on 14 April, ‘We are fighting against a new enemy, more dangerous than the Entente: against the international revolution.’11 Fearing revolt among his own hungry and increasingly turbulent people, Karl attempted to give them a greater stake in the war effort, a move that led to significant change in both halves of the Empire. In Hungary he pressed Tisza at the end of April to use his party majority to pass social measures and extend the suffrage. Opposition politicians had recognized the seething mood in the country and already in February had reintroduced to the parliament ‘the heroes’ right to vote’ bill that had been quashed two years earlier. The urgency of extending the franchise was underlined by a wave of strikes, which started among miners, metalworkers and railway staff that month and continued through the spring. On May Day 1917 widespread worker demonstrations and demands by union leaders for universal suffrage made manifest that Hungary’s war effort would not last much longer without some concession to the will of the people. With Tisza refusing to countenance any significant dilution of the Magyar gentry’s power through real democracy, the King-Emperor decided that the desperately unpopular Minister President, who for nearly a decade and a half had dominated Magyar politics, would have to go. On 23 May, at Karl’s request, Tisza submitted his resignation.12 Austria’s political system underwent an even more fundamental transformation one week later. In April, impressed by Russia’s revolution and food riots in Bohemia, Karl had abandoned the plan to restructure the western half of the Empire by decree. Instead, he broke dramatically with the autocratic past and tried to restore waning Habsburg legitimacy by convening Austria’s parliamentary representatives. On 30 May 1917, for the first time in over three years, the Reichsrat reopened.13

  In Germany too, pressure for political reform was growing. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s decision at the outbreak of war to co-opt the Social Democrats into the national effort and fight with consent rather than simply coercion had worked far better than Austria’s oppressive bureaucratic-military dictatorship, but there was a price to pay. The Kaiser’s pronouncement at the start of the Burgfrieden that he saw ‘no more parties . . . only Germans’, and the Chancellor’s promise of a ‘new orientation of internal policy’, inflamed hope for the abolition of Prussia’s bitterly resented three-class franchise, which had made the votes of the rich disproportionately influential in elections to the lower house of the state parliament.14 While the SPD and unions had cooperated closely with Reich authorities, the latter had still made no real concessions by the spring of 1917. Patience, like everything else in Germany, was running short. The popular mood, which was already fragile after the hardship of the winter, turned uglier as news arrived of revolution in Russia. As Theodor Wolff, the perceptive editor of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt, observed in late March, there was a seething resentment ‘directed against the government, against the estate owners who hoard food and don’t give it out, against the war, against the entire regime’.15

  Even the Kaiser, who possessed a remarkable ability to see only what he wished, recognized that the people’s mood was ‘dangerous’.16 The authorities at first stuck to the view that any reform must be left to the war’s end and they settled on a press campaign to counter the dangerous ideas coming from the revolutionary east. Yet it quickly became clear that this would be inadequate. The SPD’s moderate and patriotic leadership was embroiled in acrimonious conflict with a minority on the left, which fiercely criticized cooperation with Reich authorities, regarded the war as one of aggression and resented that its views and influence were being overridden. The party was on the verge of schism. The leadership urgently needed some concession to demonstrate to its increasingly uneasy members that the Burgfrieden policy was beneficial to proletarian interests. To exert pressure on the government, on 19 March Philipp Scheidemann, the SPD’s parliamentary co-chair, published an article in Vorwärts that pointed menacingly to Russia as an illustration of what could happen when reforms were delayed.17 Officials were concerned and the moderate middle-class parties, the Progressives and some National Liberals, were sufficiently frightened by the thought of revolution in Germany that they joined with the SPD in the Reichstag to press for greater democracy.18

  Throughout March, the Chancellor tried to tread a middle way between castigating conservatives who denied the need for political change while delaying any concrete commitment until the war’s end. However, at the start of April, the United States’ imminent declaration of war changed his view abruptly. With President Wilson declaring America’s enemy to be not the German people but its autocratic rulers, it was essential to demonstrate at home and abroad that such distinction was fantasy, that the ruling system had popular legitimacy and that the country was engaged in a war supported by the people. Bethmann now prescribed a dramatic gesture: the immediate introduction of direct and secret voting under equal suffrage for Prussia’s parliament. His more reactionary colleagues in the Prussian Ministry of State disagreed and diluted his proposal. Consequently, the Kaiser’s ‘Easter Message’ to his people on 7 April 1917 announced reforms that worried conservatives but were too weak to win over sceptical Social Democrats. It pledged to broaden the membership of the Prussian House of Lords and, for the lower house, to abolish the three-class franchise and introduce direct and secret elections. Crucially, however, there was no promise of universal suffrage and the reforms were only to be enacted ‘immediately upon the successful end of the war’.19 Neither a committee created by the Reichstag on 30 March to consider constitutional reform, nor even a promise made by the Kaiser at Bethmann’s urging in July 1917, ever succeeded in imposing equal franchise on the Prussian parliament.20

  Regardless, the German political system was rapidly evolving. In peacetime, the Kaiser and the Chancellor whom he appointed had been the centre of power. However, the overwhelming need to assure the cooperati
on of the population in a ‘people’s war’ meant that leaders with a popular mandate came to the fore. German politics was pushed in two opposite directions. On one side were Hindenburg and Ludendorff, proponents of autocracy and total victory. They had already demonstrated their readiness to intervene in society and the economy and were well aware of the power that their popularity gave them. On several occasions, Hindenburg had used the threat to resign to try to get his own way, knowing that a public outcry would follow were it accepted. The duo were not shy either about intruding on the Kaiser’s prerogative to determine military and political appointments. While at Ober Ost they had intrigued against Falkenhayn, and at the Third OHL they showed no hesitation in attempting to depose Bethmann Hollweg too, once they had decided that ‘lack of resolution’ made him unsuitable to lead. The soldiers first demanded Bethmann’s dismissal by the Kaiser on the day after the unrestricted U-boat campaign had been decided against his opposition. Although initially thwarted, together with conservative allies grouped around the alienated former head of the Imperial Navy Office, Admiral Tirpitz, they persisted throughout the spring and contributed to the Chancellor’s fall in the summer. Reactionaries anxious about the reformist drives in the Reich hoped for a military dictatorship. They saw in Hindenburg and Ludendorff the ‘strong men’ for whom they yearned, capable of not only bringing total victory but also halting the rise of the political left.21