Much of the youthful energy and the spirit of enterprise in Germany, but also the lack of experience, can probably be explained by this volcanic upheaval. In the cities, families tended to be smaller due to high rents and, since the 1880s, the introduction of collective systems of old-age insurance. On the land, parents still wanted many children. But the land could not accommodate them, and wages remained a pittance compared to what industry paid in the cities. So the east-west drift was complemented by a constant movement from the land to the urban agglomerations of Berlin and of the Ruhr, around Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Munich and Nuremberg, Hamburg and Bremen. Cities would soon tear down their ancient walls and develop one ring of industrial estates and housing after another, incorporating nearby villages, linking them by public transport and encouraging industries to set up factories where the workforce was to hand. Near the expanding cities, the sons of lowly peasants, selling some meager holdings for building plots for the future suburbia, became millionaires overnight and in their turn sought lucrative investments. Population growth, rising living standards, technology and the unbridled forces of capitalism created what economic historians call self-sustained growth.
As everything and everybody was on the move, class barriers were no longer insurmountable. To the geographic migration must be added movement up and down the social ladder, but mostly up. Down went the many trades to do with horses and road haulage, which were overtaken by the railway. Many shoemakers and tailors fell by the wayside when modern manufacturers took over and the sewing machine replaced the work of many artisans. In today’s Germany, Schneider, Schuhmacher, Müller and Schmidt are the commonest of surnames, testifying to the strength of such trades before the industrial revolution. But as some avenues were closed, others were opened by the rapid expansion both of higher education and also of scientific training, through universities and colleges of technology—Technische Hochschulen. In addition, there were institutions where middle management could find vocational training in either technology or accounting. In Germany more than in most European countries, there were many educational ladders to higher social status, often provided by the State. The respect for learning shown by the broad population, particularly towards “Herr Doktor”—and to “Frau Doktor,” his wife, who might never have set foot in a university—was a powerful spur to seek higher education.
Other ladders of social advancement included the army and the civil service, especially when twelve years of military service were followed by an appointment to some petty post in the ever-growing administration—be it in a tax office, or the customs and excise, or within one of the many bureaucracies springing up to regulate industrial life. Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, was born into the family of a Prussian noncommissioned officer turned customs official. He was sent to the Gymnasium, studied law at the university, married into a patrician family and in 1917, when just over forty years old, became mayor of his home town of Cologne. This was, by any standards, an outstanding career. But in the enthusiasm for learning and the iron ambition that it displayed, it was archetypal. Theodor Mommsen, the classicist and recipient of the 1902 Nobel Prize for literature, made an equally exemplary ascent, coming from a north German farmhouse and ending as one of the intellectual luminaries—and most vocal critics—of imperial Germany. Many other such biographies could be added here. Invariably, the background is modest, the bookshelves extensive; the Gymnasium is the first step, the university the second, and from there the commanding heights are in sight. Statistics showing that all the senior generals and top administrators were nobles is misleading, since ennoblement, as a rule, came with a certain rank, just as senior British generals and civil servants receive a knighthood today.
Once the Prussian King, by annexing Frankfurt in 1866, had Baron von Rothschild among his subjects, bankers, even Jewish ones, could expect to be promoted to a simple “Von” or a “Freiherr.” Abraham Oppenheim, a Jewish banker from Cologne who was of great repute and did many good works, became a Freiherr, and so did Gerson Bleichröder, whose supreme merit was to have vastly augmented Bismarck’s fortune. The society of fin de siècle Germany was as open to merit, wealth and learning as those of Austria, Belgium and Britain, and certainly more so than that of France.
Women had to wait for the Great War to knock down the fences preventing their full participation in life. It was only after 1900 that women from a middle-class background—the upper crust regarded study as beneath their dignity—set foot in a university as proper students. Some years before the war, not only philosophy and sociology but also the medical sciences were opened to female students. Among the women of the poorer classes, work had been a necessity, not a matter of rights. While the men went out to do the heavy jobs in, for example, the metal industry, the women would stitch and sew in a nearby textile factory, the indispensable grandmother looking after the children. In the artisan world, women had always done the bookkeeping, looking after the wider family and fighting with the authorities. There was no change whatsoever in the pattern of their lives, merely more of the same.
Berlin became the political capital, in defiance of the visceral feeling of many Germans in the west, in the south and in Saxony. “We fear a metropolis,” Goethe allows his hero to say in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, referring to Berlin. Indeed, Goethe only visited Berlin himself once or twice in his life and was not amused. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the German Confederation made its diplomatic headquarters in the baroque sandstone palace of the Princes of Thurn and Taxis in Frankfurt. In 1848 the revolutionary parliament held its meetings in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, until disbanded, humiliated and relegated to the margins of history. Berlin, meanwhile, epitomized a more successful face of German history, becoming the capital of the German customs union in 1834 simply because Prussia was the proponent of free trade in Germany, while Austria was backward, protectionist and always close to bankruptcy. Prussia was by far the most potent economic player among the German states, enjoying healthy finances, a solid silver and gold currency, and a well-organized tax administration. People in the north German Free Cities, in Cologne or in the south German provinces may not have liked having Berlin as capital, but Bismarck certainly did not care to ask them. He may have treated the princes with exquisite politeness, but there was never any doubt where the real seat of power lay.
Berlin was not merely the new capital, but also the largest industrial center on the Continent. It had the advantage of being at the confluence of the Havel and the Spree rivers, within the vast, flat and sandy landscape that was dominated by the river Elbe. But it was also close to the Oder river farther east. Berlin was also the most important center on the international railway system between Paris and Moscow, Copenhagen and Milan. The Cologne-Minden railway, completed soon after 1848, linked western Germany to Berlin, crossing all the major rivers of northern Germany and continuing, once Berlin was left behind, for another 500 miles to the easternmost ports and garrison towns in East Prussia. Unlike in Munich to the south in Bavaria, where the royal administration had always tried to slow down industrial development in order to preserve peace and quiet, in Berlin industry had always been prominent, strongly supported by the Prussian state administration so as to create employment and generate tax revenue. There was a conscious effort, in a country where only sand was in ample supply, to encourage the industrial arts, to make the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg a source of advanced technology, to import industrial know-how from Lancashire and Birmingham, and capital from London. The Protestant work ethic, established by French Huguenots fleeing the religious persecution of Louis XIV, together with home-grown pietism and puritanism, nurtured a spirit of enterprise in Berlin.
After 1815 the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Berlin took shape: apart from some Gothic fantasies, it was rigidly neoclassical. Nearly all the Prussian rulers were devoted builders, so Berlin, compared to Vienna, never lost a certain nouveau air because it was forever being torn d
own and redesigned. The city grew from a population of about 200,000 in 1800 to nearly 4 million by 1900, as people left their villages in the east looking for a better and freer life. West Germans did not feel attracted to Berlin, but for the easterners it held great promise, especially for the Jews living in the Russian-controlled parts of Poland. Rosa Luxemburg came from a rabbinical family of the east European Stetl to attend university in Berlin, before transforming herself into a socialist firebrand. Max Liebermann, the most sought-after painter in Berlin at the turn of the century, with a mansion by the Brandenburg Gate and a villa on the Wannsee, also came from the east. The huge industrial companies there offered great opportunities. Borsig made railway engines, Siemens produced telegraph equipment and, later, AEG manufactured electrical appliances. When Bismarck became Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862, he defiantly stated that the great issues of the day would be settled not by speeches and majority voting, but through “blood and iron.” The economist John Maynard Keynes corrected him when he observed, seventy-five years later, that German unification had been effected through coal and steel. It was in Berlin that all this energy converged.
At the turn of the century, Berlin was the unchallenged centerpiece of this bustling, optimistic, magnetic—in fact, revolutionary—phenomenon, German industry. Berlin was also the hub of Germany’s financial services. After Frankfurt had been occupied by Prussian troops in 1866, demanding a hefty sum in reparations for the city’s mistake in supporting Austria, it did not recover for decades. But in fact Frankfurt had already by then failed to grasp the implications of the new industrial world of big business with its joint-stock companies and joint-stock banks. The first of these banks, protecting its masters against the unlimited risks involved in setting up railway companies and the like, was the Darmstädter Bank, founded by an international consortium led by Sal Oppenheim Jr. & Cie of Cologne. It soon gravitated to Berlin, to be close to the seat of power and industry, as did the Disconto Gesellschaft, the Dresdner Bank, the Commerzbank and many others, while the Deutsche Bank began there. The Berlin stock exchange was the German leader and, after 1873, the Reichsbank added further to the city’s financial importance. Russian loans were managed from there for the next twenty years, as was the trade of the entire Baltic region, and much investment in both North and South America.
The Berlin of Bismarck was much closer to the London of Palmerston and the Paris of Adolphe Thiers than to the loud, gaudy, neurotic Berlin of the Weimar years after 1919, let alone the brutal Reichshauptstadt of the Nazi era. It may have been a powerhouse at the heart of the Continent, but it was also a collection of villages redolent with that atmosphere which Berliners call their Kiez—a sense of local community. It combined the arcadian beauty of the Potsdam parks and palaces with the gravita of Germany’s foremost university, and levels of enterprise more usually associated with America. There was a willingness to give to patriotic causes, whether the National Gallery sponsored by Crown Prince Frederick William, the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft for big science that Kaiser William II promoted, or the vast museum complex under the great artistic panjandrum Wilhelm von Bode. After one generation, even the most skeptical had to admit that Berlin, while representing the worst of modern Germany in its urban squalor, exploitation and organized crime, also showed off the best in the arts, industry, banking, architecture and town planning, not to mention health care, transport and infrastructure.
With the exception of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Germany’s Financial Times of the day, all the important newspapers were published in Berlin, often bringing out two or three editions daily, and reporting the Reichstag debates in great detail. This was a lively, nervously aggressive and undeferential media world, concentrated in Kochstrasse just to the south of the political square mile represented by Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelmstrasse and Unter den Linden, between Schlossplatz and Pariser Platz, near the Brandenburg Gate. All the major pressure groups and organized interests set up headquarters in Berlin, channeling information, lobbying, dispensing money, throwing parties and publishing pamphlets that few would ever care to read. They came into their own when free trade gave way to protectionism as a result of the great depression starting in 1873. The argument about state intervention, closely linked to the new Reich’s need for revenue, drew new lines not only across the economy, but also across the party system. Bismarck was masterful in his management and manipulation of the many alliances between politics and business, and all of this took place between the Chancellor’s office in the Wilhelmstrasse, the Adlon Hotel on Pariser Platz, the Hotel Esplanade and two or three fashionable restaurants like Borchardt’s and Lutter & Wegener on Gendarmenmarkt. The Bismarckian system, often described as bordering on autocracy, was as much a matter of lobby politics as any to be found in other industrial nations—France, Belgium, Great Britain or the United States.
Many felt overwhelmed by the speed of change, and not a few feared that the breathless march of life and politics in Berlin was putting at risk everything that had been won. But there were many more who shared the feeling of optimism that prevailed throughout Europe, buoyed up by industrial growth, colonial expansion and a rise in the standard of living. It was when that same mood slipped over into a feeling of unbridled strength that the real danger beckoned.
“The statesman must be a pessimist,” Konrad Adenauer once observed, reflecting upon the rise and fall of imperial Germany. “Dangers are looming in every corner.” But this was not the mood in Germany at the height of the industrial revolution, when Bismarck seemed to be in control of the European system and when every day widened the horizons of power, the sciences, and industry. History, for once, seemed to be allied with the Germans, and no ghosts were allowed to attend the party.
4
THE WILHELMINE ERA
The Bismarckian endgame was full of drama and futility. It began in 1889, not center-stage in Berlin, but in Upper Silesia and the Ruhr where around 150,000 miners went on strike for higher wages and better accident protection. The army’s coal reserves were threatened, so Bismarck wanted to encircle the mines with troops and declare a state of emergency. Kaiser William II, advised by Oberpräsident Baron von Berlepsch who sympathized with the miners’ complaints, wanted nothing of the sort. Instead he received a workers’ delegation and promised to take up the matter—a wise move, but an insult openly directed against Bismarck and his political system of repression, drama and deterrence.
In addition, the Reichstag elections in the spring of 1890 went badly for the Bismarckians: they lost their parliamentary majority. Serious debate began in the public press, at the court and in the Reichstag, about discontinuing the anti-socialist law, which Bismarck wanted to keep, while the Kaiser, industry and the generals were all for giving up, since it had only served to get the socialists more sympathy and, what was worse, an ever increasing number of votes. The Kaiser adopted a sanctimonious tone, saying, “I do not wish to stain my reign with the blood of my subjects.” To force the decision, Bismarck studied ways to engineer a coup d’état from above, a pre-emptive strike against the socialists, suspending parliamentary government. The Chancellor’s office was instructed to prepare a new military bill and, in addition, an enhanced version of the anti-socialist law. All this might result in turmoil, but it would merely make the old captain that much more indispensable.
This was too much. The Kaiser saw Bismarck no longer as the solution but as the problem, and asked for his resignation. The old man, forever the master of tactics, made it sound as if great issues of foreign policy had been at stake, even war with Russia. But there is no doubt that Bismarck was out of step, that this time the young Kaiser had more wisdom than the old Chancellor, and that most people gave a sigh of relief on the news coming out of Berlin. The Dowager Empress Frederick, Queen Victoria’s daughter, welcomed Bismarck’s fall as if a new day was dawning:
How we suffered under that régime! How his influence corrupted a whole school—his staff, Germany’s political life! He made life in Berlin almos
t unbearable if one did not wish to become his depraved slave! His party, his followers and admirers are fifty times worse than he is himself . . . It will take years to undo all the damage done. He who only sees the outside thinks that Germany is strong, great and united, with a huge army . . . If only the price were known that all this has cost.
History, over the years, has been kinder to Bismarck, his fragile system of alliances better understood, his sense of equilibrium vindicated, his achievements shining out in contrast with William II’s vainglorious brinkmanship, let alone Hitler’s nihilism. His pessimism about Germany and the Germans had always been profound. One evening he told his guests that sleep gave him no respite: “I continue to dream my waking thoughts. Recently I saw the map of Germany in front of my eyes, with one rotten patch after the other peeling off.” Or, some years later: “This people does not know how to conduct itself. The propertied do not work. Only the hungry ones are assiduous, and they will devour us.” His achievements did not spring from the fact that he was in tune with his age, but rather that he was against it; his dearest wish, after he had saved Prussia’s ancien régime, was to stop history in its stride. But it was only through a revolution from above of his own making that he could have his wish granted—and then only for a time. Even revolutions from above are, ultimately, revolutions.
When societies change their fundamental modus operandi, it is rarely announced in the marketplace. Not so in Germany in 1890. After twenty-eight years at the helm Bismarck was dismissed by his imperial master, William II. This marked not only a dramatic change of generations, but also contained the message that the social fabric of Germany was in the midst of deep and irreversible change. In terms of investment, numbers employed and value of goods produced, industrial output overtook agriculture, with the small but rapidly expanding service sector—banks, insurance, education, civil service, etc.—catching up.
The German Empire Page 6