by Hew Strachan
On 18 January 1871, at Versailles, in the same hall where, almost five decades later, the leaders of the new republic would have to accept defeat and humiliation, the king of Prussia was declared emperor of a united Germany. Technically the new nation was a federation: the independent German states retained their own monarchs, assemblies, taxation, and—in the cases of Saxony, Württemberg, and Bavaria (as well as Prussia)—their own armed forces. To balance the national parliament, the Reichstag, which was elected by universal manhood suffrage and by a secret ballot, there was an upper chamber, the Bundesrat, made up of representatives of the individual federal states. But in practice the achievement of unification, although long sought by liberal nationalists, was not a triumph for constitutionalism but for the monarchical-aristocratic principle on the one hand and for Prussia on the other. In ousting Austria from Germany, and in effecting unification, Bismarck and Prussian junkerdom had made fellow-travellers of the national liberals, had usurped nationalism for conservative ends, and had thus split liberal loyalties. Furthermore, universal suffrage, by linking the lower classes more closely as allies of the monarchy, was designed to isolate the liberals yet further. The Reichstag was therefore weak because its political parties were weak; furthermore, even should they manage to co-operate effectively, the constitution was so designed that Prussia would act as a counterweight. Prussia held seventeen out of fifty-eight votes in the Bundesrat: it was therefore in a position to block legislation. And the Prussian Chamber of Deputies was elected not by universal suffrage, but by a complicated three-class franchise weighted according to the amount of tax paid. The majority of federal ministers either held office by virtue of their Prussian appointment (the Prussian minister of war was de facto minister for all Germany) or were themselves Prussian: including the chancellor, they were accountable not to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser. The Kaiser himself, in addition to being the king of Prussia, had direct control of those areas of government where Germany most manifested itself as a nation, in foreign policy and in control of the army.
Implicit, therefore, within the new Germany was a host of interlocking structural tensions that required the mollifications of national success and victory on the battlefield. Fundamental was Germany’s status as an industrializing power: Germany industrialized late but very rapidly, the value of her output increasing well over six times between 1855 and 1913. In 1870 agriculture still contributed 40 per cent of the total national product and employed 45 per cent of the total active population, but by 1910 it constituted 25 per cent of the total national product and as early as 1895 employed only 36 per cent of the workforce.8 A political structure designed to meet the needs of an agricultural aristocracy abetted by a compliant peasantry increasingly did not reflect the true range of German society. Economic power shifted from Westphalia to the Ruhr, from East Prussia to Silesia; the contrast between Germany’s ill-adapted constitution on the one hand and the envy of western liberals for the quality and rigour of its secondary and higher education on the other became more pronounced. With the growth of the urban working class, the device of universal suffrage posed a new threat to the Bismarckian settlement, that of socialism. A united and effective majority in the Reichstag could upset the checks and balances so carefully built into the constitution. If this were to happen, the highly personalized nature of Germany’s government and the latent differences between the states could be exposed. Germany in 1871 was sufficiently centralized to upset the feelings of individual states, particularly those of Bavaria but also of Prussia, and yet insufficiently united to get the true benefits of central government. Given the divisions within the Reichstag, the chancellor’s role was to manage the parties, to play one off against another; and yet he himself remained without a true party base. His authority rested on the support of the Kaiser and on the personal relationship between the two of them. This combination of socio-economic trends at one extreme and of individual primacy at the other highlighted the central ambiguity with regard to the constitution itself: because it was given from above, it could as easily be taken away. Political rights were not axiomatic.
In 1888 Wilhelm II ascended the throne, his father’s reign cut short by cancer of the throat. The new Kaiser was young, energetic, and for many the representative of the waxing vigour of Germany itself. But the immaturity concomitant with these qualities was never outgrown, never supplemented with the wisdom of experience. ‘Not quite sane’ was a description that readily occurred to observers. His withered arm had prompted the withdrawal of his mother’s love, leaving him deeply insecure, with a strong animosity towards her and towards her native land of Britain. He constantly asserted his personality and prejudices, but proved himself unable to sustain the hard work or the serious thought required to endow them with consistency. Anxious to be the shining leader, he succeeded only in endowing his decisions with theatricality rather than substance. The aged Bismarck concluded that, ‘The Kaiser is like a balloon. If you do not hold fast to the string, you never know where he will be off to.’9
The Kaiser was the public image of Germany: both before and during the war his upturned moustache and spiked helmet shaped foreigners’ perceptions. Nor was the image without reality. The Kaiser exercised personal rule, in which he devoutly believed, and which was allowed him by the ambiguities of the constitution, in two key ways. First, he had the right of appointment to all major governmental and service posts; and secondly, once appointed, a large number of those officials had the privilege of direct audience with the monarch. The army was the main buttress to Wilhelm’s idea of monarchical authority, and by 1914 over forty officers—including all those commanding the military districts of Germany—had access to him. In addition, his personal entourage at court was increasingly dominated by military influences. Wilhelm himself said that it was in regimental life that he found the security, the family and friends that he had hitherto lacked. But the officers with whom he surrounded himself were even more conservative and traditional than the officer corps as a whole. Nine out of ten came from noble families, and nineteen out of twenty from landowning or military backgrounds; the cavalry dominated over the technical arms, and the guards over other types of infantry. Furthermore, once attached to the court an officer might stay a very long time: 108 served continuously throughout the reign. The entourage constituted a cocoon into which the influences of industry and commerce, western and southern Germany could only rarely penetrate. The dominance of these military and traditional influences was never complete, but gradually— and especially after 1906–8—it grew. And as it grew the contrast between it and the rest of the army increased also. A major plank of the Kaiser’s personal rule was his supreme command of the armed forces, but his grasp of the complexities of exercising that command remained rudimentary.
MAP 1. EUROPE IN 1914
Moreover, it was in foreign policy that the Kaiser’s personal rule remained most clearly untrammelled by constitutional considerations, and it was through imperialism that the Kaiser sought to legitimize the authority which he craved.
Germany’s position in Europe after 1871 was at once threatening and vulnerable—threatening because central Europe was now dominated by a major power, casting shadows over Russia to the east and France to the west, and vulnerable because the new state had long, exposed land frontiers in the same directions. For Germany the danger of a revivified France, anxious to revenge the defeat of 1870–1 and to regain the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, was real enough: the memory of Napoleon’s victories and the subsequent French occupation of Germany coloured Bismarck’s determination that France should be weak and isolated as long as possible. But simultaneously Bismarck sought to reassure the states of Europe, to accustom them to the presence of a united and powerful Germany. The alliance with Austria-Hungary of 1879, guaranteeing mutual support in the event of an attack by Russia, therefore had stability as its primary objective. Bismarck hoped to restrain Austria in its dealings with Russia, and to persuade Russia that, rather than war with Ge
rmany, it should seek better relations. In 1882 Italy joined Germany and Austria-Hungary, and thus the Triple Alliance came into being.
In 1890 Wilhelm dismissed Bismarck—with good reason, as the chancellor was increasingly dominated by his own vanities and decreasingly able to manage the Reichstag. The situation which Bismarck left was in large measure the legacy of the settlement which he had achieved in 1871. Agricultural depression and economic recession had highlighted the differences between East Elbian grain producers anxious to protect their frontier with high tariffs against imported food (particularly from Russia) on the one hand, and the representatives of new industry keen to free trade so as to secure markets for their manufactured goods on the other. The mutually reinforcing weaknesses of the Reichstag and of its parties encouraged these economic interest groups to form extra-parliamentary pressure groups, which themselves confirmed the weakness of the political structures. Within the Reichstag the effects of universal suffrage began to be felt as the social democrat vote almost trebled between 1877 and 1890, and reached over 2 million—or 27 per cent of the whole—in 1898. The split in the liberal vote, already exploited by Bismarck, was deepened as the national liberals supported the interests of industry, while the left-wing liberals, the Progressives, lacked organization and were unclear in their response to social democracy. The independent peasant farmer, the small shopkeeper, the white-collar worker—the so-called Mittelstand of Germany— alienated by big business and hence by national liberalism, turned to conservatism, or—if Catholic—to the Catholic Centre party. To combat these fissiparous tendencies and, above all, to rally industry and agriculture to a common cause and to oppose socialism, Germany needed—it was argued increasingly from 1895—a policy that would unite and reconcile rather than divide, a Sammlungspolitik.
The instrument chosen to effect the rallying of Germany was one that lay specifically within the Kaiser’s competence, a more nationalist and imperialist foreign policy. It was Wilhelm who appointed the main architect of Weltpolitik, Bernhard von Bülow, first as foreign minister in 1897 and then in 1900 as chancellor, and in 1897 Bülow himself stated that he would be a ‘tool’ of the Kaiser’s personal rule.10 Bülow subscribed to the feeling of inevitability associated with German overseas expansion, the product of Germany’s status as a major power and of the need for markets to satisfy its burgeoning manufacturing industry. In the late nineteenth century interstate relations frequently employed the vocabulary of social Darwinism. The belief that man’s environment, rather than his individuality, determined his behaviour challenged liberal views of the relationship between the individual and the state. Rather than a minimalist role for the latter to allow the fruition of the former, social Darwinism suggested the subordination of the first to the second, and went on to clothe the nation with an identity and vitality of its own. States were dynamic entities, rising or declining according to fitness. Max Weber, in his inaugural lecture as professor of political economy at the University of Freiburg in 1895, reminded his countrymen:
We must understand that the unification of Germany was a youthful prank performed by the nation in its old age and that, because of its expensiveness, it would have been better left undone if it was meant to be the end and not the beginning of a German policy of world power.11
But the connection between Weltpolitik and the war’s outbreak is not a direct one. What Weltpolitik certainly did not imply was territorial expansion within Europe: the incorporation of subordinate non-national groupings into a greater Reich could only promote the fissiparous tendencies Weltpolitik was designed to dampen. Rather, the first focus of Weltpolitik could not have been geographically more distant—its hub was China and its apogee the acquisition of Kiaochow in 1897.12 That Germany should wish to obtain colonies did not in itself surprise or alarm to an excessive degree the power most likely to be affected by that decision, Great Britain. In 1890 the two countries collaborated to the extent of exchanging Heligoland and Zanzibar. But as the disparate threads of domestic, colonial, and naval policy were woven together, so the whole acquired a vocabulary that was much more threatening to the status quo. The notion of pax Germanica replacing the pax Britannica, however irenic in theory, promised radical revisionism in practice. By 1914 the reality had not come close to matching the rhetoric. The empire which Germany had acquired barely deserved the title: it covered a million square miles, attracted one in a thousand of Germany’s emigrants, absorbed a paltry 3.8 per cent of Germany’s overseas investment, and accounted for 0.5 per cent of its overseas trade.13 It was the manner of German foreign policy more than its objects, let alone its achievements, which was to provoke the other powers before 1914.
Nor was the conclusion that German objectives remained consonant with peace a misplaced one. For all the provocative phrases of Weber or his publicist, Friedrich Naumann, Bülow’s objectives remained domestic. The purpose of Weltpolitik was to achieve integration within Germany, to reconcile agriculture and industry, to woo social democracy. By pointing liberalism overseas, in the pursuit of markets, Bülow hoped to minimize the friction with conservatism, and to produce the economic benefits which might still the political demands of the workers. Politically, Weltpolitik manifested itself in a series of bargains between interest groups; externally, it aimed at a sequence of minor successes. It spoke the language of a grand design but practised short-term expediency. However, the longer it survived the more its rhetoric created exaggerated popular expectations. And, given that Sammlungspolitik rested on ad hoc compromise, it had constantly to present itself with new targets.14 Furthermore, the principal method used to implement Weltpolitik, the creation of a sizeable German navy, carried with it all the elements that would generate fresh problems—the challenge to Britain as a seapower, the need for hyperbolic and expansionist propaganda to get financial support for ship construction, and the potential subordination of diplomacy to arms policy. Much of Bülow’s effort in foreign policy was to be directed to providing the cover for the fleet’s creation.
As with Weltpolitik and Bülow, so with the navy and its architect, Alfred von Tirpitz, the Kaiser’s role was direct and vital. Wilhelm’s personal passion for his fleet was the customary blend of absurdity and energetic enthusiasm. He felt it appropriate to wear his admiral’s uniform to performances of Wagner’s Derfliegende Holländer, and yet was fired by technical interests in the ships of the British navy and in 1894 read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s influential book The influence of seapower upon history. Seeing Germany as a potential colonial power, Wilhelm at first advocated the construction of cruisers, but in 1895 the naval high command recommended the creation of a battle fleet able to meet the French or the Russians in a major action in home waters. It argued that Germany’s ability to flex its oceanic muscles was entirely dependent on its capacity to break out of the North Sea, and thus cruisers could not be effective in isolation but only as adjuncts to battleships. The Kaiser was convinced and ordered the planning of a fleet of twenty-five battleships. The Reichstag was less easily persuaded, and so in 1896–7 the need for a press campaign to popularize the navy and thus win over the Reichstag had become clear. In June 1897 the Kaiser appointed Tirpitz, still a relatively junior admiral, to head the Imperial Naval Office; his was the responsibility of guiding the naval programme through the Reichstag.15
The domestic functions of the navy laws were conciliatory. The navy was above all a creature of the new Germany, not of the old Prussia: unlike the army, it was a product of unification, an armed service that belonged to all the nation, and particularly to the industrialized middle class. Its officer corps was more bourgeois than that of the army (although its members were socially divided from within, and its middle-class origins did not prevent it from aping the mannerisms of the Prussian aristocracy). The creation of a regular building pattern was designed to please heavy industry, to provide a buffer against cyclical depression, and to take the sting out of socialism by ensuring full employment. These were the strengths on which Tirpitz could base hi
s propaganda effort: he established an information service in the naval office to liaise with the press, and by 1914 the Navy League—which was founded in 1898—could boast a membership of over a million. Tirpitz proved a consummate manager of the Reichstag, of its parties and its parliamentary committees, persuading its deputies that the fleet was a vital auxiliary to the expansion of German overseas trade, that its size would be modest and its purpose defensive, and that a fixed programme which would tie the Reichstag was not a programme without controls. When opposition within parliament became too strong, when liberal imperialism began to smell a rat, Tirpitz cowed it with the popular support of the pressure groups—the Colonial Society and the Pan-German League, and in due course the Navy League. The broad lines of his policy—the emphasis on battleships rather than cruisers, and the calculation of the fleet’s overall size on the basis of arithmetic rather than combat efficiency—had already been established before he took up office. In 1898 the Reichstag approved a target of nineteen battleships, eight armoured cruisers, and twelve large and thirty light cruisers, to be completed by April 1904; it also agreed that battleships should be replaced every twenty-five years. In 1900 a new law aimed for thirty-eight battleships, twenty armoured cruisers, and thirty-eight light cruisers. Tirpitz planned that Germany should possess sixty capital ships by 1920, and hoped to have the cycle of their replacement so fixed that the Reichstag’s approval would be redundant and the Kaiser’s whims irrelevant.
Tirpitz had hoodwinked the Reichstag, both as to his domestic objectives and as to his international aims. The naval staff continued to plan for war with France or Russia, and viewed the possibility of hostilities against Britain with horror. But from the outset Tirpitz’s putative enemy was the Royal Navy. He shared the Anglophobia of his royal master, and he linked commercial rivalry with Britain to the navalist propaganda emanating from the Imperial Naval Office. Tirpitz hoped to create a sufficiently large fleet to ensure that the Royal Navy would not risk a naval battle with the Germans for fear that—even if it won the engagement—it would then be too weak to face a third naval power. He recognized the possibility of a pre-emptive strike by the British before the German fleet was complete, a rerun of Nelson’s sinking of the Danish fleet in harbour at Copenhagen, and so required Bülow’s foreign policy to create the right conditions to cover the period of vulnerability by mollifying the British and even seeking agreement with them. On almost every count, Tirpitz’s calculations with regard to likely British responses proved to be wrong.