by Dan McMillan
In the week before the Battle of Sadowa, the two Prussian armies were separated and in poor communication with each other, and both were quite confused about the location and intentions of the Austrian forces. On July 3, the commander of the Prussian First Army, without informing his commander in chief, launched a frontal assault on a large Austrian army whose existence he had discovered only the night before. Fortunately for the Prussians, the crown prince, leading the Second Army, arrived in time to stabilize the center of the Prussian line and outflank the Austrians on their right, driving the Austrians from the field. Although the Prussians had somewhat better weapons, the outcome of this decisive battle could easily have been different. As a member of the king’s entourage said to Bismarck in the late afternoon of July 3, “You are now a great man. But if the crown prince had arrived too late, you would be the greatest scoundrel in the world.”9
Prussia’s swift defeat of France in 1870 let Bismarck finish the process of welding most of German-speaking Europe into a single country. Because he had delivered the long-sought goal of national unification, Bismarck was wildly popular among liberal voters, and indeed among many liberal parliamentary leaders. In a position of great political strength, he compromised with the liberals on many important points, but managed to create a constitution that kept the elected national parliament in a role clearly subordinate to that of the emperor. This outcome was far from inevitable. Had Prussia lost the 1866 war against Austria, Bismarck would have lost his job, the Prussian parliament would have gained power at the expense of the king, and the German Empire might not have been created at all, or could have been created, but without the authoritarian basis upon which Bismarck established it. As it was, the German people had lost the best chance they would have at parliamentary government for many years to come.10
Despite this setback for an evolution toward democracy, there was still a chance to reform Bismarck’s political system. The national parliament was elected on a democratic suffrage, meaning that all adult males could vote. In turn, the parliament controlled the government’s budget. Parliaments in other countries had used this “power of the purse” to gradually wear down the authority of hereditary monarchs until reaching the point where parliament could appoint the cabinet and control the executive branch of government. If the democratically elected parliament in Germany had used its budget authority to gain control of the executive branch, the country would have become a democracy. Why didn’t this happen? This question has many answers, but probably the most important is that the parliament was fragmented into five or more major political parties, many of them deeply antagonistic to each other. At no time, from unification to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, was it possible for these warring parties to work together to expand the power of parliament.11
The degree of antagonism between Germany’s parties was probably the most important difference between Germany’s political development and that of France, Britain, and other Western nations. German society and politics fractured deeply along the jagged fault lines of region, religion, social class, and the urban-rural divide. Although no European great power had a culturally or socioeconomically homogeneous population, the Germans were exceptionally diverse and divided against one another. This was partly because the different German regions had developed over centuries as separate political units. Such divisions also reflected the extraordinarily rapid industrialization of the country after 1850. In consequence, the German Empire had not only the most reactionary and politically entrenched landed aristocracy in Europe, but also the largest and politically most militant socialist working class. Moreover, whereas most European countries were overwhelmingly either Catholic or Protestant, about 65 percent of Germany’s population was Protestant and roughly 35 percent Catholic.12
Germany’s socioeconomic and cultural divisions, in turn, gave rise to five (and then six) mutually antagonistic sociopolitical blocs, each represented by its own party: conservatives, Catholics, liberals, democrats (who were later replaced by left-wing liberals), socialists, and, finally, after 1918, communists. Their contempt for one another was matched only by the depth of the roots that each party struck in distinct segments of German society. Each party drew its support from a well-defined socioeconomic group: liberals, for example, depended on support from the Protestant middle class, while socialists relied on industrial workers. Frequently, each party’s social base was geographically segregated from the electorate of the other parties.
Dense networks of social clubs and other organizations anchored voters’ loyalty to a party and encouraged them to socialize only with those who shared their political outlook. This was a bit like the way American liberals today watch MSNBC, while conservatives prefer Fox News, only much more all-consuming. For example, an industrial worker who voted for the socialists would live in a working-class neighborhood, belong to a socialist labor union, take his refreshment at a socialist bar, seek recreation in a socialist swimming or gymnastics club, sing political songs in a socialist glee club, and get his news from socialist newspapers. The Catholic Center Party drew similar organizational strength from the numerous institutions connected with the Catholic Church. Making the divisions between political parties even worse, the German parties were very ideological: they offered their members and voters not only specific policies, but also quasi-religious worldviews that sometimes made the parties mutually incomprehensible to each other. For example, the liberals saw themselves as the enlightened agents of human progress; they were resolutely hostile to the Center Party because they saw Catholicism as a bulwark of superstition and backwardness.13
Of the antagonisms that separated the German parties, none ran deeper than the opposition between the socialists and everyone else. The socialists were perhaps the most ideological of Germans, deriving all their principles and policies from a single theory. Sticking closely to arguments presented by Karl Marx, they predicted that competition from large industrial enterprises and department stores would wipe out the bulk of Germany’s urban middle class, driving shopkeepers and craftsmen into the ranks of the “proletariat,” workers who had nothing left to sell except their own labor. Mechanized agriculture, the socialists reasoned, condemned family-owned farms to the same fate. When this destructive competition had advanced far enough, so Marx had predicted, the proletariat would rise up, overthrow capitalism, and institute what Americans usually call “communism”: government ownership of all businesses and centralized economic planning designed to make everyone equal economically. Needless to say, everyone outside the industrial working class lacked enthusiasm for this vision of their future.14
From 1878 to 1890, the Imperial Government, with the support of a majority in parliament, repressed the socialist party without entirely banning it. Thus, although socialist clubs were shuttered and their newspapers banned, men could still run for parliament on the socialist ticket. This repression backfired. It only made the party more extreme, convincing its leaders and members that complete opposition to the regime, and greater commitment to Karl Marx’s radical vision, was the only way forward. In 1890 the government abandoned its failed policy of repression, and from there the party grew rapidly. Socialist clubs of every kind proliferated, a militant socialist press mushroomed in readership, and the socialist-dominated trade unions progressed rapidly. In elections to the national parliament, the socialists took 19.8 percent of vote in 1890, 27.2 percent in 1898, and 31.7 percent in 1903. In the 1912 elections, the last held before World War I, the socialists polled nearly 35 percent and took more seats in parliament than any other party. From 1890 onward, and ever more urgently after each election, the central problem of German politics was what to do about the socialists.15
The profound disunity of the German people had helped to delay the advent of democratic government for nearly fifty years—for how could the German people claim the power to govern themselves when they could agree on so little? And once democracy came, in the incomplete and fragile revolution of 1918, these divi
sions undermined the new Republic, discredited democracy, and helped open the door to Adolf Hitler in January 1933. The promise of overcoming these divisions constituted a central part of Nazism’s appeal for the movement’s committed members. It was also a leading theme in the Nazi Party’s electoral propaganda.16
Although partisan antagonisms blocked the path to parliamentary democracy, the pressure for democracy and greater political participation was enormous, urgent, and growing fast. Germans’ unusually high level of participation in politics, when compared to other nations in the last decades before World War I, proves their determination to have a say in how they were governed. The socialists, representing more than a third of the voters, demanded democracy insistently and loudly, while the more leftist of the two liberal parties, representing much of the Protestant middle class, also called for some democratic reforms.
For the elite of German society, most of whom shared the government’s hostility to democracy and horror of socialism, this pressure for democracy presented a terrifying problem. They responded by using anti-Semitism and aggressive nationalism as political weapons against democracy and socialism. For reasons of their own, much of the German middle class responded to these dangerous ideas and sometimes expressed them in ways that made even the government uncomfortable. Among a substantial fraction of the German people, the demagogic use of nationalism and anti-Semitism produced anxiety bordering on paranoia, a conviction that they faced fearsome enemies both at home and abroad.
CHAPTER 4
A WORLD OF ENEMIES
What we need is to overcome the conflicts of interest between the different classes and occupations through the national idea.
—Leading nationalist Heinrich Class, in his manifesto If I Were the Emperor (1912)1
Beginning in the late 1880s, German politics became increasingly nationalistic, and German foreign policy took on an aggressive, bullying aspect that steadily worsened international tensions. One source of this militant nationalism might be found in the dilemma faced by much of the German middle class. On the one hand, these people actively participated in politics, wanted a say in how they were governed, and might have welcomed democracy if they could have counted on people like themselves controlling the government. But democracy was neither achievable nor even desirable anymore. Actual democracy—real power for the national parliament—would also mean power for the dreaded socialists. German elites and men of the middle class therefore needed a substitute for democracy, an outlet for their frustrated need for power. I propose that their substitute was an increasingly radical nationalism—an arrogant belief in national superiority and demands for an aggressive foreign policy. If they could not enjoy power and self-respect as voters who chose their own government, they could settle for being citizens of a powerful country and members of a nation that allegedly was racially superior.
This interpretation of German nationalism has the drawback that it is difficult to prove or disprove with documentary evidence. Obviously, no nationalist politician gave speeches saying, “Germany needs overseas colonies so that I will feel better about being powerless here at home.” By its nature, this would have been a psychological process of displacing and refocusing painful emotions whose existence was easier to repress than to acknowledge. Such an internal emotional struggle necessarily leaves few traces in history’s written records, although there is some indirect and circumstantial evidence. Although many historians may reject this argument, most do agree about another motive that drove the radicalization of German nationalism: the desperate need to undermine the socialist movement.2
Nationalist propaganda and an aggressive foreign policy were supposed to weaken the socialist movement in at least three ways. First, industrialists and merchants argued that colonies would expand foreign trade and thereby improve living standards in Germany. A better standard of living would, they hoped, convince workers to accept capitalism and lose interest in the socialist cause. Second, acquiring colonies and otherwise making Germany look like a great power would make the government more popular. Finally, and most importantly for understanding the later rise of Nazism, nationalists and their allies in government hoped to escape social conflict by persuading Germans to forget their differences by uniting against foreign enemies. They also hoped that socialist workers would forget the economic and social-status differences that separated them from the middle class and elites, and focus instead on what they had in common with the other classes, namely their “German blood,” often defined by excluding German Jews and claiming that they were an alien nationality.3
Starting in the 1880s, more than half a dozen major nationalist pressure groups sprang up in Germany, each with membership in the tens of thousands, all promoting an intensified national pride and demanding that the government expand German power abroad or persecute ethnic minorities at home.4
The German Colonial Society was founded in 1887 with the aim of calling on Germany to acquire overseas colonies. The organization, which reached a membership of 39,000, argued that gaining colonies would secure raw materials for German industry and captive markets for German products. The colonialists also claimed that Germany’s explosive population growth drove too many Germans into emigration, where their skills and energies were lost to Germany. Instead, or so they imagined, these surplus Germans could settle in colonies and remain part of Germany. These nationalists also wanted colonies for prestige: colonies were status symbols among nations, a sign that a country had become a major power.
The Eastern Borderland Association, founded in 1894, devoted itself to persecuting Germany’s Polish minority, which lived mostly in eastern Prussia. By 1900 this pressure group had 54,000 members in roughly 400 local clubs. Prussia had acquired most of its Polish population in the eighteenth century when it had joined Russia and Austria in carving up Poland between them. At the end of the nineteenth century, more than 3 million Poles lived in eastern Prussia. Nationalists feared Poles as a threat to Germany’s territorial integrity in the region bordering on Russia: as Poles increasingly embraced their national identity, Germans feared a revival of the Polish nation-state that had been extinguished in the eighteenth century. A restored Poland, which was in fact established after World War I, could only come into being by taking territory from Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. The men of the Eastern Borderland Association wanted nothing less than to completely “Germanize” the Polish minority, to eradicate the Polish language and culture and destroy the Poles’ identity as a nationality distinct from the Germans. They hoped to ban the Polish language, even from churches and private clubs, and to reduce most Poles to landless agricultural laborers who could not practice urban occupations. Thus Poles should be forbidden to move into cities, and the government should confiscate Polish-owned farms so that they could be sold to German settlers.
The association energetically spread ideas of Slavic racial inferiority, and the government gave these men a lot of what they demanded. A 1904 law empowered the government to block Polish attempts to purchase land. A 1908 law allowed the state to confiscate Polish farms after compensating the owners. Other laws banned the Polish language in schools, government offices, courtrooms, and some private clubs. These discriminatory policies, and the virulent anti-Slav racism that was used to justify them, paved the way for some of Nazi Germany’s greatest crimes during World War II: the lethal mistreatment of Poles in areas under German occupation, and the German Army’s murder of more than 3 million Soviet POWs.5
The most radical, viciously racist, and intellectually influential pressure group was the Pan-German League, founded in 1891. The Pan-Germans believed in the racial homogeneity of all Germans and in Germans’ clear superiority to other “races.” They demanded overseas colonies in part to settle a supposed surplus population; in addition, they promoted German settlement in central and southeastern Europe, saying it would anchor Germany’s economic domination of that region. The Pan-Germans appointed themselves advocates for the allegedly abused rights of Ge
rman minorities elsewhere in the world—for example, in Latin America—envisioning a German protectorate over these minorities, eventually as part of a German “world empire.”6
German elites’ strategy of using nationalism to fight socialism was a miserable failure. Undeterred by facts, however, Germany’s ruling class continued to cling to this failed policy. A tragic consequence of this chest-thumping nationalism was World War I. The war had many causes, but none weighed more heavily than Germany’s aggressive foreign policy after Bismarck left office in 1890. A prime example is Germany’s construction of heavy battleships after 1898, which challenged British naval supremacy and set off an arms race between the two countries, driving Great Britain into an informal alliance with France. Germany’s interest in acquiring overseas colonies was also dangerously provocative. Other European powers had acquired most of their colonies long before a unified Germany came into being in 1871. By 1900, almost the entire world had fallen under the direct or indirect influence of the United States or of Germany’s neighbors, so Germany could usually acquire colonies only at the expense of another country. One consequence was risky diplomatic confrontations, such as the Moroccan Crisis of 1911, in which the German government foolishly challenged France’s established influence in that North African country.