Bismarck’s successor, Leo von Caprivi, had been a general in charge of the Admiralty. He was keenly aware, like Bismarck, that an unspoken condition of Germany’s continuing security was never to challenge British naval supremacy, but rather to cultivate Britain as a vital makeweight in the European balance of power. Therefore his first step in foreign policy, apart from letting slip the contentious Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, was to follow his own precept of “the less Africa, the better.” He exchanged the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of east Africa, much desired by the British, for the island of Heligoland, in the middle of the Elbe estuary—a red rock of considerable strategic importance for Germany. But Germany’s fervently rightwing colonial lobby did not appreciate this wisdom. The Pan-German League sprang to life and became the voice of Germany’s most vicious nationalism, well endowed with money and media influence.
Caprivi had a keen sense of social equilibrium and also took on the protectionist alliance of Rittergut und Hochofen, the blast furnace and the landed estate. He negotiated the commercial treaty with Russia that Bismarck had constantly refused even to consider—at the cost of losing what remained of Russian sympathies; especially among the landowning classes. For Caprivi, a Prussian general turned Reich Chancellor, it was a vital operation, both for security and for trade, to open the German market to imports from Russia and beyond and in turn to access foreign markets hitherto closed. He introduced the draft treaty with Russia in the Reichstag with the argument: “We have to export. Either we export human beings or we export our products. With this constant increase in population, without an equal increase in industry we cannot live.” Caprivi was keenly aware that the German balance of trade with the world had been constantly in the red for more than a decade. He also understood that, given Germany’s geostrategic situation, domestic rifts could not be allowed to widen. After the anti-socialist law had been abandoned, the Reich administration tried to integrate the trade unions into the body politic of Germany, inviting representatives of organized labor to sit on industrial courts and promoting the self-governing system of mandatory social insurance that helped to bind German society together. In this, for once, Caprivi followed in the footsteps of Bismarck, who had realized that Germany’s precarious position in Europe made it imperative to preserve social peace at home and pay the price of the rapidly expanding welfare state.
But all of this did not endear the general-turned-Chancellor to the protectionist lobby, the nationalist organizations and court society. The landed interest created the Reichslandbund within less than a year, an organization of more than 300,000 card-carrying members, openly declaring that they would learn from the socialists how to agitate, that they would carry their complaints “to the steps of the throne” and that they wanted Caprivi out. William II gave way, Caprivi had to go, and immediately work began to revise the tariffs, which were to reach a new high in 1902 amidst continuing protest from industry. The Caprivi interlude (1890–94)—with its steps towards integrating the working classes and their organizations into political life, accommodating the expanding role of German export industries, changing the climate from Bismarckian confrontation to compromise and practicing détente policies abroad—begs the question of whether industrial Germany could not have become, instead of an uncertain giant, the centerpiece of European stability well into the new century.
In economic and industrial terms, the twentieth century had started long before 1899. With electricity providing a clean and cheap source of energy, a new wave of industrialization swept through the 1890s. It transformed not only the factory floor but also, thanks to electric trams or trains, above and under ground, the faces of cities and the way people organized their lives by day or lit them by night. The house of Siemens, founded by a former first lieutenant in the Prussian Signals Corps, started as a family company in the early days of the telegraph but later, through its intimate alliance with Deutsche Bank, turned into a worldwide operation. Telegraph technology was the foundation of the business, and Siemens was a leader in creating land-based and sea-based cable connections, introducing instant communications to facilitate commerce, strategy and politics. Later, Siemens concentrated on the supply side of the electrical industry. Emil Rathenau’s AEG, having started as a licensee of the Edison patents, focused on the demand side—the transformation of daily life through washing machines, electrical stoves and kettles, refrigerators, irons, etc. Rathenau engaged Peter Behrens, the architect, in 1907. As well as building factories without any reference to former styles, Behrens applied a sober and functional style, owing nothing to the pre-industrial past, to the new equipment that replaced millions of household servants and profoundly changed everyday life.
At the turn of the century, the Germans were no longer taking the boat to the New World, but were trying to make a better living in the cities than their forefathers had on the land. Germany was not a land of unlimited opportunity, like the United States of legend, but by European standards it came very close: the collective biography would show not only an abstract rise in income, but also that people consumed more soap, more beef, more wine, more white bread, more shirts and more shoes than ever before. More books were read by a population in which illiteracy was waning, and more newspapers were consumed. The anger of the old, Bismarckian days was largely overcome; even the anger of socialists and Catholics, the one-time Reich feinde. When the twentieth century dawned, it was, by any standards, Germany’s belle époque—an Edwardian age full of energy and optimism, with Cassandra muted and outside the city gates. This century could have been, French philosopher Raymond Aron once observed, the German century. Many Germans at its beginning were entitled to hope so.
What mattered to the great majority of people throughout the German lands was not high politics but daily life, the inexorable changes accompanying it and the ever more painful question of whether yesterday’s experience could be a guide to tomorrow’s challenges. In most cases the answer was a clear no, which in turn called into question the relationship of father and son, of mother and daughter, of husband and wife. Compared to this, what did it matter who was in charge in Berlin, what the Reichstag did or failed to do, or what the Kaiser had to say about the German battle fleet, perfidious Albion or colonial adventures in faraway places like Kiao-Chau in China, Swakopmund in southwest Africa, or Samoa in the Pacific? Herr und Frau Müller or Schmidt had to get on with their daily lives, make a living and get acquainted with the new technologies that were changing almost every trade, every shop, every business—in fact, all the accepted coordinates of people’s lives. Tradition, in spite of all the crowns, the eagles and the lions still proudly displayed on the coinage, on public buildings and on official documents, was eroding day by day. Of course, in rural Pomerania; East Prussia or West Prussia and in the mountains of Franconia or in Upper Bavaria, many hours by train away from old and new industrial centers, daily life looked much as it had for many generations past. But that was not where money, progress, a career and freedom of choice beckoned. Small towns like Rothenburg ob der Tauber, because the railway from Würzburg to Augsburg bypassed them, began to live in a time warp of medieval houses and marketplaces, while the children insisted that there was no breathing space in the quaint old place. Never were the Germans more enthusiastic about the promise of technology, progress and the future than at the turn of the century.
A traveller having traversed the thousand miles of Reichsstrasse I from Aachen via Potsdam and Berlin, all the way to Königsberg in East Prussia in 1870, and repeating that experience thirty-five or even forty years later, would have seen a country fundamentally changed: railways and telegraph lines almost everywhere, the trains carrying not only people, but huge quantities of industrial goods. From time to time, when an aircraft might be seen overhead, children would point it out to each other and vow one day to try and fly themselves. Perhaps there might be a motorcar on the road, driven by an enterprising young man with a lot of money. Most roads, sand or dirt in the old days, would now be pav
ed. In the cities, electric tramcars would now link the center with faraway villages, which were rapidly turning into suburbs for an ever-increasing army of office clerks. The better suburbs would have villas in an extensive, parklike landscape, lit by electric light, where fifty years ago there had been, at best, some modest huts and a small church. Rivers would be crossed by elegant steel bridges, while canals linked the Rhine to the Weser, the Weser to the Elbe, and the Elbe to the Oder— the whole north German plain became on interconnected system of waterways, with its center in Berlin. Rivers had been made navigable during the last few decades; the Lorelei Rock celebrated by Heinrich Heine, and a danger to shipping on the Rhine, had finally been blown up. But the long-projected canal from the Main river across the hills of Franconia to the Danube had yet to be completed. The most conspicuous difference would have been people. The children of the poor were no longer barefoot, begging for something to eat; instead they went to primary and secondary school, later into industrial or artisan apprenticeships, later still into the army and then on into a middle-class way of life, possibly helped by some technical education.
However, when those customs and traditions that have governed people’s lives for centuries die, there is bound to be anxiety and fear of the future. The world was not becoming any more reassuring as myths fell apart, taboos were dismissed and the boundaries of human thought and action were daily breached. This outbreak of energy, technological and human, was coupled with a feeling of fin de siècle decadence, that there was a price to be paid and nowhere more so than in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was dying a slow death. The head of Janus in Greek mythology, representing old and young, the past and the future, but also the pain of the fleeting moment, could have been the symbol of Germany’s—and for that matter Europe’s—destiny at the turn of the century. It was in the visionary world of literature and the arts that this ambiguity found its foremost expression; among poets, artists, architects, engineers and scientists. At no other time could Thomas Mann’s epic novel Die Buddenbrooks have been written, the saga of the decline and fall of a patrician family from Lübeck. At about the same time, Walther Rathenau, an outsider among Jews as well as Germans, set out to write his visionary Von kommenden Dingen— the shape of things to come.
In 1889 Otto Brahm, Maximilian Harden, Theodor Wolff (publisher of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt newspaper) and the Hart brothers set up the Freie Volksbühne—literally, the “free popular stage”—to avoid censorship. Their model was the Théâtre libre in Paris, set up by André Antoine. The same year, Gerhard Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang was staged for the first time, with its strong message of social discontent. The result was a public scandal, but this only served to add publicity to the undertaking and to give a second wind to Ibsen’s and Zola’s naturalistic drama and fiction, which aimed for social, even scientific, truth through representing the daily life of ordinary people. In their wake at the turn of the century came Arno Holz’s Die Sozialaristokraten—about the noble poor, reflecting some earlier ideas of Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil: Or the Two Nations (1845). Meister Oelze by Johannes Schlaf broadcast a similar message; so did Die Ehre by Sudermann, Jugend—“Youth”—by Max Halbe and dramas by Otto Erich Hartleben and Karl Schönherr. The greatest scandal came with Gerhard Hauptmann’s Die Weber about the misery of mid-nineteenth-century weavers in Silesia and the greed of the capitalist entrepreneur. The police saw this as a provocation, upsetting public order, and their Berlin chief, Baron Bernhard von Richthofen, banned it. So it was performed privately by the Freie Volksbühne and attracted considerable attention. One year later, a court allowed it to be played in public and it was met with much applause, turning the performance and the reaction of the public into an unmistakable demonstration against the Kaiser’s art criticism. His Majesty, also supreme commander of the army and navy, retaliated by letting it be known that officers should not attend, certainly not wearing uniform, and he canceled his box. What happened in Berlin was repeated in other places, like Schwabing in Munich where the cabaret adopted a sharp and bitter tone. The weekly magazines Jugend, for lifestyle, and Simplicissimu , for political satire, both became great popular successes. The first catered to the dreamland of youthful misfits, creating the floral and romantic German version of Art Nouveau called Jugendstil. The other mocked the establishment, with uniform or without, to the amusement of many of its members. Both journals confirmed the Munich public’s conviction that the middle classes, especially the south German variety, were better human beings than the monocled officers and the stuffy Prussian bureaucrats from Berlin. The cartoons and accompanying articles in the Simpl, as it was called, were biting and showed rifts that officially were not allowed to exist.
A new, lighter lifestyle was emerging in suburbia, normally labelled belle époque, but in Munich known as Prinzregentenzeit, after the Bavarian prince regent who, having succeeded the exotic but mad King Ludwig II, lived an openly relaxed life between Munich and Berchtesgaden and was very popular. A wave of alienation swept middle-class youths, who found official Germany, especially in its Prussian variety, both ridiculous and deplorable. A radical chic also emerged, idealistic more than hedonistic, among young men and women who loved themselves and the art world and who felt pity for the strict conventions of their parents. For them decadence was not a menace but a new, soft and sensitive form of life.
To be young was not only, as in the past, a passing phase en route to a career, but a way of life and a Weltanschauung embracing a willingness to challenge all accepted wisdom and most certainly to defy any lessons that uneasy parents might have to offer. The youth movement would not stay at home, but rather went out to seek nature, singing a farewell to the stuffy world left behind in the narrow cities while enjoying a free life on the mountains. They were serious young men and women together, singing, reading, reciting the poet Rilke’s Kornett and, for the rest of the night, doing what young men and women have always done. They made pilgrimages to the Hoher Meissner, a mountain out of the tales of the brothers Grimm near Cassel in Hesse. In 1913 thousands of students came together there, professing their idealism and promising each other innere Wahrhaftigkeit— truthfulness—and never to become like their parents. They saw themselves as an elite, called upon to create a new land for a new era. Instead it was this same generation of Wandervogel and Jugendbewegung that only one year later, singing “Deutschland Deutschland über alles,” went to die in Flanders’ fields.
Of the many new avenues to a better future, none was more exciting and revolutionary than the discovery of sexuality and its unexplored wonderland. For centuries, the attraction of men and women to the opposite sex had been something never to be mentioned, and was depicted only in terms of gods courting goddesses or shepherds flirting with innocent shepherdesses—something that was part of God’s great creation, but outside the conventions of polite society. The Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Sigmund Freud took the ground from under the establishment itself, eroding its rigid standards of marriage, parenthood, property and conjugal fidelity. Suddenly, men and women were facing each other in an unforgiving but also seductive light. They did not have to read psychiatric journals to understand that vast changes were in the air. The fundamental message was one of liberation, but the defenders of tradition sounded a note of caution, pointing at the price to be paid in terms of human unhappiness and frustration. What seduced people also undermined civil society, and linked to the exciting news about sexuality there was also an ominous hint about the role of violence. Moreover, if people were driven by forces inside themselves and beyond their control, what would happen to the age-old notions of responsibility, accountability and morality? The pillars of society were beginning to shake. What would happen to marriage, to time-honored institutions built upon the suppression of sexuality?
In Tannhäuser and elsewhere, Richard Wagner’s music theater had already, two or three decades before, given serious and disconcerting hints, as the emotions on stage corresponded to the sound and fury from the or
chestra. This music signaled the end of all conventions, but still coded it in a language of an ancient, mythological past. But the scandalous, subversive message was there to be seen and heard by those who, every year, made the pilgrimage to the festival of Bayreuth. Bismarck, by denying to Bayreuth a subvention from the Reich budget, had shown a fine instinct that Wagner’s music encouraged more dangerous upheaval than many of the socialist speeches delivered in the Reichstag.
Theodor Fontane, through many graphic descriptions in his “Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg,” sang the praises of the Prussian nobility and idealized their country seats. But he was also, in his novels, a sensitive observer of how moral standards were being eroded by the constant struggle of emotions, recently liberated, against the established class structure. In E fi Briest the heroine is cruelly punished when her illicit admirer is killed in a duel. Stine tells the sad story of a love affair that cuts across social barriers, and so does Irrungen Wirrungen. Fontane allowed his characters to suffer and to fail in their futile, premature pursuit of happiness. But Ibsen and Strindberg, among the following generation, were more aggressive and found fault not so much with the frailty of the human soul as with the rigidity of worn-out conventions. What Flaubert did to Madame Bovary and Tolstoy to Anna Karenina—that is, turning those heroic fools for love into casualties in a deadly struggle—found daily expression in lives up and down Europe, and most certainly in Germany. People had tasted the bittersweet fruit of knowledge and were now facing a world that was neither hell nor heaven, but defied every conventional wisdom.
Moral ambiguity became the keynote of modern times. Equipped with the knowledge afforded by modern science and troubled by doubt in God’s existence, and so in his own destiny, man was failing to find easy answers to the great questions. Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and Chekhov were all asking for the ultimate meaning of the human condition, but were finding nothing but shaking walls and cracked façades. In Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker the rats conquer the white knights, while St. Petersburg’s court society gave its applause. Wedekind’s Frühling’s Erwachen and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Reigen became more specific and were regularly banned, which only made them more fascinating. They presented a sophisticated web of cynicism, hypocrisy, frigidity and empty desire—with love and warmth as the victims. Richard Strauss in Salome took away the last veils of the past. What was to be discovered, off stage, were the unknown lands of the human soul. As they were explored, they revealed an infinite recession of labyrinthine strongholds. Poets and psychologists, however, were not to blame for what followed. They did no more than give expression to the upheavals in the collective soul of Europe.
The German Empire Page 7