On 17 March 1879 Heinrich von Treitschke wrote to Franz Overbeck, an Evangelical Theologian and academic colleague, to let out his exasperation with the Jews:
Sometimes it presses deeply on my soul to see how the character of our Folk has been ruined by the Jewish press. Is there a single name—with the exception of Moltke—which Semitic impudence has not spat upon and soiled?109
On 15 November Heinrich von Treitschke, a Bismarck admirer and editor of the influential Preussische Jahrbücher, published an article under the title ‘Unsere Ansichten’ (Our Opinions) in which he attacked the Jews for their role in German public life and for the part they played in the economic collapse after 1873.110 As the historian Theodor Mommsen said of the article, ‘what he said was thereby made respectable.’111 And he was the incomparable Treitschke, the most famous, the most successful, the most popular historian of his age, a respected member of the Reichstag, a popular poet and critic and the editor of the most important intellectual and political monthly journal in the German language. Treitschke represented the Liberal intellectual establishment and his attack on the Jews transformed the debate.
‘Unsere Ansichten’ is a long editorial. It begins with Treitschke’s views of foreign affairs, the Austrian alliance, relations with Russia, the instability in the Balkans, and the liberal defeats in the recent Prussian elections. Finally after ten pages, Treitschke claims to have discovered ‘a wonderful, mighty excitement in the depths of our people’s life’ of which ‘one of the symptoms of the deep change of mood is the passionate movement against the Judenthum [Jewry—JS]’. Treitschke is, after all, no Glagau nor Marr, no Grub Street gutter scribbler but a grand figure, a civilized man, a historian, so he has to be even-handed. He admits that Spanish Portuguese Jews have in England and France caused no trouble but Germany has to do with the Polish Jews, whose behaviour, he admits, has historic causes. The Jews should become Germans but, inconsistently he attacks not just the new immigrants but the cultivated German-speakers. For Treitschke ‘the most dangerous aspect is the unfair preponderance of Jews in the Press … For ten long years public opinion was “made” in many cities by Jewish pens. It was a disaster for the Liberal Party that its press gave the Judenthum too great a freedom to act.’ Of course, the Germans owe the clever Jews a great deal but they introduced a cynical, witty style which lacked ‘respect’ and contributed to the degradation of morals in society. Their jokes and slanders about religion were ‘simply shameless’. As a result, what has happened may be ‘brutal and ugly but is a natural reaction of the Germanic folk feeling against an alien element which has taken up too much space in our public life’.112
Anti-Semitism had now reached the heights of the establishment and soon would reach the court and highest aristocracy as the Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker began to preach sermons against Jews and Jewish influence. One of his disciples was the young Prince William, later Kaiser William II, another was Alfred Count von Waldersee, who had by the 1870s intrigued his way into the succession to Moltke. The Court Preacher sowed dissension in the royal household and ultimately contributed to the fall of Bismarck.
In the German-Jewish community the effect of all this was devastating. Berthold Auerbach (1812–82) may have been even better known than Treitschke and certainly outside Germany much more so. He came from an orthodox Jewish family and would have been a rabbi, had he not been arrested for revolutionary activities. He became a journalist and unsuccessful novelist. Between 1843 and 1858 he published four volumes of ‘Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten’ (Village stories from the Black Forest) which became an ‘incomparable world success, which made Auerbach together with Gustav Freytag the most popular German story-teller of the nineteenth century’. The stories went into many editions and into translation in every European language.113 This patriotic, national writer happened to be Jewish; suddenly in his late sixties he found that it mattered. In November, a week before Treitschke’s article, Auerbach wrote to his brother Jacob:
Lasker has not even been nominated as a candidate in Breslau. The inflammatory campaign against Jews has been at work here too. Yesterday in the local ‘Observer’, there was a piece from a Breslau newspaper, that Jews live in houses they have not built, etc. That is incitement to murder and theft, and we must now experience that.114
Bismarck said nothing throughout the whole crisis. It suited him that anti-Semitism undermined his enemies like Lasker. Windthorst said again and again that one must condemn anti-Semitism. In a speech in the Reichstag on 16 April Windthorst declared that he demanded equal rights and equal protection for all. ‘I will on every occasion represent the rights I claim for the Catholic Church and her servants for Protestants also and not least for Jews. I want this right for all.’115
The Jews under this mounting attack tried two strategies. On 18 June 1880 Bleichröder wrote to William I personally:
I dare call for Your Majesty’s high patriarchal protection for myself, but not only for myself, rather for a whole class of loyal subjects of Your Majesty who surely are not useless citizens of the state. The bitter struggle against Jews [is] a social struggle against property as such … My name is now on the tip of every Christian Social agitator’s tongue; it is invoked not only as a target for persecution but is branded as a prototype of all capital, of the stock market, of all prosperity, and of all evil … [this is] the beginning of the misfortune of a terrible social revolution.116
There was some truth in Bleichröder’s argument that anti-Semitism represented the revolt of the property-less against property but in a much larger sense it represented a revulsion of a deeply conservative society against liberalism. In the Catholic community, Carl Constantin Freiherr von Fechenbach saw in the anti-Semitic agitations a way to end the Kulturkampf by creating a union of conservative Catholic and Protestant groups in a Social Conservative Association dedicated to anti-capitalism, anti-Semitism, and state socialism which would include nationalization of basic industries.117 On 18 July 1880 he wrote to Adolf Franz, the editor of the main Catholic newspaper Germania, that he wanted to unify ‘all truly Christian elements on the basis of a common social programme’.118 Windthorst understood at once that Fechenbach represented a double threat to his leadership and programme. It diverted attention from the struggle to dismantle the May Laws and other Catholic disabilities and it moved the political attention from the Prussian and Reich parliaments where Windthorst’s mastery allowed him to run the Centre Party without formal office to outside organizations. Hence, when on 10 November Fechenbach invited Franckenstein and Windthorst to meet to discuss an anti-Semitic union of Catholics and Protestants; both declined.119 The Catholic lawyer August Reichensperger, like his brother Peter, a Centre deputy, relates in his memoirs that most Catholic parliamentarians were eager at that time to participate in the anti-Semitic campaign. So the threat was real.
On 20 November 1880 the Prussian House of Deputies debated the anti-Semitic agitation. In the name of the Progressive Party, Albert Haniel had asked the Minister of the Interior what position the Prussian government was preparing to take on the Anti-Semites’ Petition. August Reichensperger described it:
The most notable parliamentary event was the great debate on the Jewish question (die grosse Judendebatte) of November 20 and 22 [1880]. It was brought about by Haniel’s interpellation. Within the Catholic Centre group the discussion of the Jewish question had led to very agitated discussions between Windthorst, who was rather friendly toward the Jews, and the great majority of the group which was raring to join the attack. Windthorst stood almost completely alone in his opinion that the Catholic Centre should be as neutral as possible. … The debate before the House was a defeat for Jewry and the Progressive Party whose phrases turned always against them as Kulturkämpfer. The anti-semitic agitation has greatly increased since.120
Berthold Auerbach who heard the debate despaired: ‘I have lived and worked in vain … the awareness of what lies concealed in German breasts and could explode at any time, cannot be eradicat
ed.’121 Eça de Quieroz, a Portugese novelist in Berlin at the time, was appalled by the government’s response:
It leaves the Jewish colony unprotected to face the anger of the large German population—and washes its ministerial hands, as Pontius Pilate did. It does not even state that it will see the laws protecting the Jews, citizens of the Empire, are enforced; it merely has the vague intention, as vague as a morning cloud, of not altering them for the moment.122
On 29 November 1880 Bamberger wrote to his sister-in law Henriette Belmont:
I shall write nothing about anti-Semitism. The newspapers are too full. The characteristic feature is that the ordinary people have nothing to do with it. It is the hatred and envy of the educated, professors, jurists, pastors and lieutenants, stimulated by the spirit of reaction and brutality from above.123
In December Windthorst destroyed Fechenbach’s project by a brilliant parliamentary manoeuvre. He introduced a bill to exempt the administration of the sacraments from criminal prosecution. ‘This motion … forced the Conservative Party to choose between antagonizing Bismarck or exposing the vacuity of its own calls for confessional peace.’124 The Conservatives voted against the bill and thus helped Windthorst destroy Fechenbach and the others who wanted to unite conservative Catholics and Protestant on social questions by showing that Protestants would never give Catholics an inch. He renewed it year after year and thus by restoring the Centre’s freedom of movement allowed it to make electoral alliances with the Progressives in the 1881 elections between the first and second ballot. It removed the possibility that Bismarck might imagine he would not have to pay in concessions on religious matters for the 100 Centre votes he used to pass his conservative tariff legislation.
On New Year’s Eve 1881 a group of men who had attended an anti-Semitic rally rioted, smashed Jewish shops, and shouted ‘Juden raus!’ (Jews out!).125 On 12 January, when the Landtag reopened, Eugen Richter, a brilliant parliamentary Liberal debater, whom Bismarck hated as much as he hated ‘that dumb Jew Boy Lasker and his following, those theoretical speech-makers’,126 connected Bismarck to the anti-Semitic agitation: ‘The movements begin to cling to the coat-tails of Prince Bismarck and, however much he rejects them and lets his press scold them for their excesses, they go right on cuddling up to him and call to him as noisy children surround their father.’127 That is deeply true. The ‘Jew debate’ reflects a malevolent prejudice in Bismarck against the intelligentsia, against people like Lasker, who insisted on rights and protections against the state and against dictators like Bismarck. In November 1880 he wrote to his reactionary Minister of the Interior, Robert von Puttkamer, that ‘moneyed Jewry’ has ‘interests on balance inter-connected with the maintenance of the institutions of our state and whom we cannot do without’ but property-less Jewry ‘which … attaches itself to all political opposition’ must be crushed.128
Bismarck destroyed German liberalism, his real enemy. If Jews got hurt, so be it. It was not his habitual but characteristic anti-Semitism that caused the damage but his intolerance of opposition. The legacy was so pervasive at the time and afterwards that one has not got to look hard to find its traces. One sees it in a letter from April 1881 from Theodor Fontane, the German novelist, to Philipp zu Eulenburg on Bismarck’s role:
Bismarck is a despot, but he has a right to be one, and he must be one. If he were not, if he were an ideal parliamentarian, who allowed his course to be determined by the most stupid thing there is, by parliamentary majorities, then we wouldn’t have a chancellor at all and least of all a German Reich. It is true on the other hand, of course, that under such a despot only dependent natures and powers of the second and third rank can serve, and that any free man will do well at times to resign. In doing that, the free man does right for him, but the chancellor also does what is right for him, when he doesn’t allow that to cause confusion in his action or inaction.129
Consider what that means. Society in Germany could not achieve anything on its own because parliaments are ‘the most stupid things’, that is, we the people are unable through exercising their rights, to achieve anything. Germany needed to be governed by a genius-statesman who followed his own course. Fontane made a fundamental mistake in that analysis, the free man cannot do what is right for him, because his attitude—the surrender to the genius—shows that he has chosen slavery not freedom. The freedom to resign is not real freedom; that the subtlest social observer of the age fails to see that is Bismarck’s real gift to Hitler.
On Christmas Eve 1881 a truly free man, Eduard Lasker, wrote his political testament in a long letter to the novelist Berthold Auerbach, whose spirits had been deeply depressed by the events of the previous two years. Lasker, a bachelor, a Jew from an orthodox family in Jaroczyn, had risen to be spokesman of rights and liberty in Prussia and Reich by sheer ability. A trained lawyer, he devoted his entire life to a comprehensive and untiring preoccupation with the legislative process. In 1868 against Bismarck’s ponderous opposition, he pushed through legislation to protect free speech in the chambers of the Reichstag and in 1873 he exposed a case of ‘insider trading’ in railway shares carried out by Hermann Wagener, Bismarck’s friend and first editor of the Kreuzzeitung, inside the Ministry of Trade. The ring included the Princes Putbus and Biron and enjoyed the tolerance of the Minister Count Itzenplitz. Lasker exposed them fearlessly, caused the resignations of all involved, and ensured the passage of a law making it illegal for civil servants to engage in commercial transactions connected with their office. He wrote the petition of December 1870 in which the North German Reichstag asked King William I to become Emperor and the first Reply to the Address from the Throne of the new German Reichstag in March 1871.130 Only Windthorst surpassed him as a parliamentary speaker and legislator. On 25 December 1881 Lasker wrote to Berthold Auerbach and set out his understanding of the crisis in Germany about the Jews:
My dear, old friend, I have granted myself a festive pleasure in that I can settle down alone and composed on the first day of Christmas to write to you. … In the moment of danger many in the German Fatherland, among the best of them, have come to understand what you mean to us and expressions of sympathy and compassion from all sides, even from the enemy camp in public life, have been sent. Were these testimonies or even a part of them to come to you, you would no longer cling to the melancholy doubt that your impact on the nation has been ignored or in substance destroyed. After all, it is like a blue streak in the dark clouds that ugly anti-Semitism in a moral sense can be seen to be done for, by which I do not mean the end of the tension. For each revolutionary epoch takes on a confessional colouring and we stand in the middle of a violent revolution, perhaps the most violent I have experienced. But with regard to the particular anti-Semitic agitation the mud has settled and now lies on the ground … In the elections the people have definitely rejected anti-Semitism in its ghastly form and in its dirty content, as completely as could be wished. Not so easily will we be able to deal with the other element of the reactionary power. Bismarck is no enemy to underestimate even when he makes mistakes and acts in passion. In the present stage of society many too many problems exist, and when a powerful government looks around for popular programmes, then they can find effective levers, which after a lot of tapping about and getting lost, will not fail them. In fact it requires great vigilance, careful thought and the most selfless sacrifice to pull the good cause undamaged from the struggle. By good cause I mean the liberation of individuals and the reduction of situations when people see as dictated by fate what is really a situation the powerful seek to control.131
If Fontane missed the deeper meaning of his acceptance of the dictatorship of the genius-statesman in the name of the greater cause, Lasker greatly overestimated the power and civil courage of decent people. The Germans followed Fontane into slavery and not Lasker into freedom.
On 5 January 1884 Lasker died suddenly in New York after a long and successful speaking tour in the USA. Lucius summed up his view of Lasker in his diary on 6
January:
With him ends the one of the most significant and popular parliamentarians of the new Reich. Next to Bismarck and Bennigsen, he was the best known figure in the Reichstag. Thoroughly patriotic, unselfish, full of idealistic aspirations, he had a more destructive than constructive impact.132
The US House of Representatives resolved that ‘this loss is not alone to be mourned by the people of his native land, where his firm and constant exposition of and devotion to free and liberal ideas have materially advanced the social, political and economic conditions of those peoples but also by lovers of liberty throughout the world.’133 When the text of the resolution arrived in Berlin, Bismarck refused to accept the message and returned it to the senders because the description was erroneous. Five Prussian cabinet ministers desired to attend Lasker’s funeral and asked Bismarck for permission. He replied ‘most certainly not’.134
On 28 January 1884 Lasker’s funeral took place in the famous Oranienburg Synagogue in Berlin, the very synagogue at whose dedication Bismarck had been present. Lasker’s parliamentary colleague, Ludwig Bamberger, recorded the event in his diary:
Today the funeral. No minister, no member of the Bundesrat, not one high civil servant, neither Friedberg nor Achenbach, not even the Swiss Minister Roth—apparently the ‘Ordre de Mouft’’. Kapp gave a mediocre speech. Tonight I talk in the Singakademie.135
A month later, on 28 February, Bamberger reflected in telegraph style in his diary on the death of Lasker and the political implications: ‘the aftermath of Bismarck’s opposition to Washington confirms my view. Whether he will be proved right? The people is not born to be free.’136 On 7 March the Reichstag had to be adjourned because of the angry debate when they protested at Bismarck’s discourtesy to their dead colleague and the US House of Representatives. On 13 March Bismarck appeared in the Reichstag at 1 p.m. and made a statement before the opening of formal business with regard to the message of condolence which the American House of Representatives had directed to the government. Bismarck attacked sharply revolutionaries and republicans. In response to an interjection by Hänel he responded wittily: ‘He had no obligation to exchange sentimentalities and in the political duel to let himself be shot down.’ He added his best wishes for the liberal party which Lasker had always led down the wrong path. ‘Solemn assertions of personal regard and friendship only make political opponents more dangerous.’137 He described Lasker as somebody with ‘superior but destructive eloquence’.138 He clearly enjoyed kicking a dead Jew and, when Hilga Spitzemberg called on him two days later, she found him in highest good spirits: ‘At 12 I found him at lunch, as fresh and cheerful as possible, after he had once again spoken the Reichstag, which they now call the “Gasthof zum toten Juden”—“The Guest House of the Dead Jew”.’ It might also be called Gasthof zum toten Liberalismus (the Guest House of Dead Liberalism) because Lasker’s death marked the end of the hope of a liberal regime in Germany.
Bismarck: A Life Page 54