With the unification of the German states into the Reich in 1871, Germany became the most populous country in Europe west of Russia, which meant that it also had an advantage in potential recruits for its armed forces. Moreover, the German army was widely regarded as the best trained, with the best officers, in the world. By 1911 there were nearly 65 million German citizens compared to 39 million in France and 40 million in Great Britain. (Russia had 160 million, one of the reasons France valued it so highly as an ally.) Germany was rapidly becoming Europe’s most dynamic economy. In 1880 Britain was the world’s leading exporter with 23 per cent of the world’s trade while Germany had 10 per cent. By 1913 Germany was looking to overtake Britain: it now had 13 per cent of the world’s trade while Britain had slipped to 17 per cent. In some of the sectors in which economic power was measured in that period Germany was already ahead. It overtook Britain in steel production in 1893 and by 1913 was the world’s largest exporter of machinery.
With industrialisation came unions and, even in Germany where social benefits were ahead of most other countries, labour unrest and strikes. In 1896–7 there was a major strike in the great port of Hamburg and from that point on periodic strikes in different parts of the country right up to the war. In most cases the aims were economic but increasingly they were political as well, to bring about changes in German society. Membership of unions grew significantly, from under 2 million in 1900 to 3 million by 1914. Even more worrying for Germany’s ruling classes was the appearance of a powerful socialist party. By 1912 the Social Democratic Party (the SPD) was the largest party in the Reichstag with almost a third of the seats as well as a third of the popular vote.
Germany was not alone in feeling the strains brought by rapid change but it had a political system particularly ill equipped to deal with them. Bismarck, great statesman though he was, had created a gimcrack system and constitution which worked only when he was in charge and not always then. In theory, according to the constitution, Germany was a federation comprising eighteen different states. It had a federal parliament, the Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage, with responsibility for approving federal budgets. It had a federal council, the Bundesrat, made up of representatives from the states, with the right to oversee such crucial areas as foreign affairs and the army and navy. Theory was one thing, reality another. The council never became important; Bismarck never had the slightest intention of sharing his power or that of Prussia. He combined the offices of German Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President and the practice continued until the end of the Great War. He was also Foreign Minister and ran foreign affairs largely out of the Prussian Foreign Ministry. With overlapping jurisdictions it was never clear where responsibility really lay.
Yet Bismarck and his successors could not run Germany entirely to suit themselves; as the years went by they had to deal with a Reichstag that could claim, with reason, to represent the will of the German people and which could mount a formidable challenge to government policies by threatening to withhold approval of the Budget. The decades between 1871 and 1914 were marked by a series of political crises and at times deadlock and both Bismarck and Wilhelm II and his advisers contemplated abolishing the constitution and going back to absolute rule. ‘Blockheads’, ‘idiots’, ‘dogs’: these were the ways Wilhelm talked about members of the Reichstag, and he was fond of saying that it would do them good to be taught who was really the master in Germany.56
Apart from the political uproar that would have caused, it is highly doubtful that such a move would have given Germany a more coherent and unified government. Bismarck and his successors did not believe in cabinets where policies were hammered out and agreed upon or, even, apparently, in basic co-ordination between the different branches of government. So, for example, the Foreign Office would not know what the military were planning and vice versa. Indeed, matters got worse rather than better when Wilhelm II came to the throne because he tried to exert direct control over the army and navy through his own cabinets of advisers and insisted that German ministers report directly to him. The result was even less co-ordination and sharing of information than before.
The new federation was also like a weak rider trying to control a strong horse. Prussia which contained 65 per cent of the country’s territory and 62 per cent of its population, overshadowed and dominated all the other members from the kingdom of Bavaria in the south to the city-state of Hamburg in the north. And Prussia, with a state legislature dominated, thanks to a restricted franchise and carefully managed voting system, by conservatives, remained a strongly right-wing counter force within a Germany in which moderate conservative, liberal and socialist forces were growing, including in Prussia itself. Moreover, the Prussian Junker families held a privileged position in Prussian society and dominated Germany’s institutions, especially its army and its Foreign Office. Their values – loyalty, piety, duty, devotion to family, a reverence for tradition and the established order, an acute sense of honour – were in some ways admirable but they were also conservative, if not reactionary, and increasingly out of step with the modern Germany.57
Wilhelm’s closest companions came from that world and he shared many of their values. In the early years of his reign, however, he did have a concern, which came perhaps from his mother, with improving the lot of the poorer classes in society. This put him on a collision course with his Chancellor, Bismarck. Where Wilhelm wanted to improve working conditions, Bismarck wanted to smash the burgeoning socialist movement. In 1890 the Chancellor lost control of the Reichstag and did his best to stir up a political crisis so that he would have an excuse to destroy it and tear up the constitution. Wilhelm I might have gone along with such a plan but his grandson was not prepared to do so. The new Kaiser was increasingly alarmed by Bismarck’s intransigence and was not in any case prepared to submit to his guidance (or to that of any one else for that matter). The final showdown came in March 1890 when the Kaiser criticised Bismarck for not keeping him properly informed, about foreign as well as domestic issues, and made it clear that he would be the final authority in Germany. Bismarck resigned and left Berlin for his country estate, where he lived out an embittered retirement.
Wilhelm was now his own master and that of Germany. His concept of what it meant to be the German monarch was, as might be expected, a grandiose one. As he said in a speech in Königsberg shortly after his accession: ‘We Hohenzollerns receive our crown only from Heaven and in the duties connected to it we are responsible only to Heaven.’58 He did not intend, as the dispute with Bismarck showed, to delegate his responsibilities to his Chancellor or a Cabinet. Indeed, he increased the number of officials who reported directly to him and established a royal headquarters to supervise the military. The trouble, though, was that he wanted the power and the glory and the applause without the hard work. ‘You see’, says Rat of Toad in Wind in the Willows, ‘he will insist on driving himself, and he’s hopelessly incapable. If he’d only employ a decent, steady, well-trained animal, pay him good wages, and leave everything to him, he’d get on all right. But no; he’s convinced he’s a heaven-born driver, and nobody can teach him anything; and all the rest follows.’
Wilhelm was both lazy and incapable of concentrating on anything for long. Bismarck compared him to a balloon: ‘If you don’t keep fast hold of the string, you never know where he’ll be off to.’59 Although he complained about how overworked he was, Wilhelm cut back significantly on the regular schedule of interviews with military chiefs, Chancellor and ministers which his grandfather had faithfully maintained. Some ministers saw him only once or twice a year. Many grumbled even so that the Kaiser was inattentive and complained if their reports were too long.60 He refused to read newspapers and tossed long documents aside in irritation. Although he insisted he would be responsible for the annual fleet manoeuvres of his new navy, he lost his temper when he found he was expected to consult with his officers and work out the details: ‘To hell with it! I am the Supreme War Lord. I do not decide. I command
.’61
He also spent more than half his time during his reign away from Berlin or his palace in nearby Potsdam. William the Fidgety, as his cousin King George V of Britain described him, loved travelling, perhaps in part, as one courtier suspected, to get away from his wife’s stifling domesticity.62 He visited his other palaces (dozens of them), went to his friends’ hunting lodges, and took long cruises on one of his several yachts. His ministers had to commute to wherever he was and even then did not always get to see him because ‘Wilhelm the Sudden’ was notorious for changing his plans at the last minute. His subjects joked that Germans no longer sang ‘Hail to the Conqueror’ but ‘Hail to you in the special train’.63
Germans made quite a few jokes about their ruler. When the satirical weekly Simplicissimus had an unflattering cartoon of him on its cover, Wilhelm’s rage against the editor and cartoonist only increased its circulation. When he laid out an Avenue of Victory in Berlin in 1901 and lined it with giant kitschy statues, Berliners promptly called it Puppet Alley. But if the Kaiser was a joke it was not always a very good one. In 1894 a young classical scholar, Ludwig Quidde, published a pamphlet on Caligula in which he describes the Roman emperor’s rushing from one task to another, ‘caught in nervous haste’, his ‘hunger for military triumphs’, and his ‘fantastic idea’ of conquering the sea. ‘Theatricality’, it said, ‘is an ingredient in imperial insanity.’64 The pamphlet sold 250,000 copies in the years before 1914.
Of all his responsibilities, Wilhelm took particular pride in his relationship to the armed forces. Under the German constitution (which he proudly said he had never read)65 he was supreme commander of the German armed forces; officers took an oath of loyalty to him, not to Germany. ‘We belong to each other,’ said Wilhelm to the armed forces in one his first acts after he became Kaiser, ‘we were born for each other and will cleave indissolubly to each other, whether it be the will of God to send us calm or storm.’66 He and his ministers successfully resisted most attempts by the Reichstag to examine military matters and indeed tended to treat elected politicians and much of the general public with suspicion. They must remember, Wilhelm told recruits on one occasion, that he might call on them one day to maintain order in the country: ‘With those recent socialist turnovers, it is totally possible that I will order you to shoot your own relatives, brothers, even parents …’67
Wilhelm adored ‘My Army’ and much preferred soldiers to civilians. Where he could he appointed them to government and diplomatic posts. He almost always appeared in military dress and loved riding at the head of marches and taking the salute. He insisted on taking part in army games which meant that their value as a training exercise was minimal because he always had to win. It was not unknown for him to stop everything so that he could take forces from one side and add them to the other (usually his own).68 He fussed over the army’s uniforms (he made thirty-seven changes to their design between 1888 and 1904). He also tried to keep his beloved military safe from the corrupting influences of the modern world; ‘The Gentlemen of the Army and the Navy’, read one of his orders, ‘are hereby requested to dance neither Tango nor One-Step nor Two-Step in uniform, and to avoid families in which these dances are performed.’69
Wilhelm had considerable powers under the constitution in foreign affairs as well; he could appoint and dismiss diplomats and conclude treaties. He did not regard his Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse or the diplomatic service with the same affection as his military. Diplomats were lazy ‘swine’ who were always seeing difficulties. ‘I will tell you something,’ he once said to a senior official. ‘You diplomats are full of shit and the whole Wilhelmstrasse stinks.’70 Wilhelm thought of himself, though, as a master of diplomacy and insisted on dealing directly with his fellow monarchs, often with unfortunate results. Sadly, he had no clear policies beyond a vague desire to make Germany, and himself, important and, if possible, avoid war. ‘He was peaceful,’ said Lerchenfeld, the Bavarian envoy in Berlin, ‘wanted to be on good terms with all powers and he has tried in the course of the years to ally with the Russians, the English, the Italians, the Americans and even with the French.’71
When Wilhelm dismissed Bismarck, the English satirical magazine Punch carried a cartoon called ‘Dropping the Pilot’. Wilhelm himself said in a triumphant telegram to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar: ‘The position of Officer of the Watch of the Ship of State has come to me … Full steam ahead.’72 Unfortunately, that is just what he was going to do, and with a real navy.
CHAPTER 4
Weltpolitik: Germany’s Place on the World Stage
In the summer of 1897 the Kaiser was a happy man. ‘What a joy,’ he wrote to his friend Eulenburg, ‘to have to deal with someone who is devoted to you body and soul, and also can understand and wants to understand!’1 The object of this enthusiasm was Bernhard von Bülow, his new Foreign Secretary, who would, so Wilhelm hoped, be his Bismarck, putting the Kaiser and his country at the centre of world affairs where they belonged (and perhaps sorting out Germany’s tumultuous internal politics as well). For the years since Bismarck’s dismissal had not gone all that well for Wilhelm. Ministers had combined against him and disagreed with his policies, his fellow German princes had chafed under his and Prussia’s rule, and the Reichstag had impudently demanded a share in Germany’s government.
Wilhelm and his ministers had fought back, urging Germans to bury their differences and work for a greater Germany with, of course, Prussia at its heart. In 1890, the Prussian Ministry of Education decreed that the history taught in schools show the greatness of the Prussian state and its rulers: ‘One of the most essential purposes of the Volksschule [elementary schools] is to point out to the children the blessings which come to them through the regained national unity, independence, and culture which were restored by the hard and self-sacrificing struggle of the glorious Hohenzollern rulers.’ Wilhelm thoroughly approved. ‘We must’, he told a conference of headmasters, ‘bring up nationalistic young Germans, and not young Greeks or Romans.’2
Triumphs abroad were meant to play their part in building the different German states into a strong Reich. Wilhelm was both public and exuberant about his ambitions for Germany and for himself. There would be a New Course in his reign, he told his mother: ‘For ever and ever there will be only one true Emperor in the world and that is the German Kaiser …’3 And both he and Germany should have commensurate influence around the world. As he said to Eulenburg in 1893: ‘Without being a world figure one was nothing but a poor appearance.’4 Germany must have a say in the division of the remaining parts of the world which seemed to be up for the taking. ‘In distant areas’, he said in 1900 as he launched a new battleship, ‘no important decision should be taken without Germany and the German Kaiser.’5 He took to describing himself as ‘the arbiter mundi’ – and, of course, of Europe. On his visit to his dying grandmother he assured the new British Foreign Minister, Lord Lansdowne, that ‘I am the balance of power in Europe since the German constitution leaves decisions about foreign policy to me’.6
The reality, galling to Wilhelm in the first years of his reign, was that Germany’s foreign relations had not been well managed since 1890. Where Bismarck had tried, usually successfully, to keep on good terms with all the other powers, his successors had allowed Germany to drift into one camp, that of the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy. The first costly mistake had been the failure to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia under which each country bound itself to remain neutral if attacked by a third. That it was partly a mistake says something about the indifferent quality of those in charge of Germany’s foreign policy after 1890. The new Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, was a soldier, and, while intelligent and sensible, he had little background in foreign affairs. He allowed himself to be talked out of renewal by the Foreign Office, in particular by its leading figure, Friedrich von Holstein, who had come to oppose a close friendship with Russia. The result was to encourage the Russians to look elsewhere, in particular to France, with who
m Russia signed a secret military agreement in 1894.
4. Heavily influenced by the American naval theorist Alfred Mahan who believed that sea power was the key to world power, Wilhelm II of Germany set out to build his own big navy. He thus set off a costly naval race with Great Britain which in turn helped to persuade the British that they needed to look for allies against Germany.
Moreover what Holstein and his colleagues had hoped for, a rapprochement with Britain, which was on bad terms with both Russia and France, and its closer adherence to the Triple Alliance did not happen. The British already had an understanding with Austria-Hungary and Italy to guarantee the security of the Mediterranean (which largely meant opposing Russian attempts to force the Ottoman Empire to give up control of the crucial passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean or French moves to expand their empire). As a result of the lapsing of the Reinsurance Treaty Russia had more to worry about on its frontiers and was less of a threat to British interests in the Mediterranean. Germany also found that its partners in the Triple Alliance grew more assertive as Germany’s position weakened.
The War that Ended Peace Page 11