xcii In 1813, Prussia introduced military conscription. Then in 1820 the least popular of all reforms was made: the introduction of income tax.
xciii Breslau was the capital city of the Austrian, then Prussian, German and now Polish province of Silesia. It is now called Wrocław.
xciv Despite Wellington’s tactical brilliance at Waterloo, Blücher’s Prussian forces arrived in the nick of time, with Wellington’s centre about to collapse after repeated heavy French cavalry and artillery onslaughts. Wellington was heard riding off through his troops shouting at them not to retreat, “Night or the Prussians must come!” The Prussian forces led by General Blücher and Bülow tipped the balance at the Battle of Waterloo, something that Wellington was later reluctant to give them credit for.
xcv The new German Bund (Federation or Confederation) initially had thirty-eight states, four of which were free cities; this then became thirty-nine when Hanover became part of the Confederation. Great Britain restored its personal union with Hanover as part of the settlement of Vienna following Napoleon’s defeat. The union between Great Britain and Hanover, which in all endured for 137 years, finally came to an end in 1837 when Hanover joined the Confederation. The Palais of Thurn and Taxis once served the family who created Europe’s first postal service. It now became the parliament of the German Confederation, where it remained from 1815–1870. It was destroyed along with 94 per cent of the rest of Frankfurt’s medieval city centre in the bombing firestorm of 22nd March 1944. Until 2008 a concrete car park and shopping mall stood on the site. Today a scaled down pastiche Palais reconstruction has arisen out of the asphalt, with no effort having been made to recreate the interior or its once famed gardens, only to be surrounded by towering new boxes of glass and concrete.(11)
xcvi Frankfurt also saddles the great ‘culinary divide’, with dark sausages eaten in the north and white sausage eaten in the south! (The river Main, which runs west to east, through Frankfurt, has long been known as the Weißwurst Grenze — the white sausage border).
xcvii The alliance system created in Vienna in 1815, the ‘Concert of Europe’, held for over forty years, securing one of the longest spells of peace and reaction in European history. It broke down first with the Crimean War in 1854, and was further weakened by Napoleon III’s foreign interventions during the 1860s.
xcviii The United Netherlands split in 1830 with the southern part forming the new kingdom of Belgium. The Congress of Vienna also guaranteed Switzerland recognition of its future neutrality.
xcix In addition to these acts of violent repression, one needs to consider the fact that Britain executed sixty times more people than Prussia, often for the pettiest of crimes.(15)
c Russian emancipation of the serfs took place under Alexander II in 1861.
ci The Prussian Enlightenment was regarded by many to be far superior to the chaos and terror of the Jacobin Revolution from below in France. Between 1790–1800 no fewer than 800 publications appeared in Germany criticising the Revolution. As one historian stated, ‘At the root of continental conservatism we find the old European tradition of civil society (societas civilis) in opposition to the rise of the modern centralised state. Within this paradigm of societas civilis, as founded by Aristotle and continued by St Thomas Aquinas, no separation between household functions, economic and political status existed. Society was divided into estates and each estate had its role to play in the home, agriculture, trade, war, the judiciary and government. Modern absolutism tended to monopolise all political functions at one central point, where sovereignty was located.’ The long tradition of enlightened conservatism would continue to hold sway in Prussia above the ideals of the French revolution. Even the greatest of Prussian reformers, Hardenberg, considered, ‘… civil liberties to be the generous gift of a wise administration. The administration could withdraw them if deemed proper, and it did so in 1819.’(17)
cii Increased censorship led to a massive increase in the popularity of satirical theatre in Germany. Germany still boasts the highest number of theatres per head of any country in the world.
ciii As for Prussia’s role in the unification of Germany, Prussia has for a long time been depicted as the root of all evil and was abolished as a state for its sins. However, without Prussia the German Confederation may never have united. It is more likely that the south would have gravitated to federation with Austria, and the north to Prussia, but a unified and increasingly centralised German state would have been less likely. This may have been for the best, but it did not happen, and the legacy is that the post-war unified German Federal Republic still sees itself as a successor state to the state of Prussia, with all the baggage and responsibilities that this entails.
civ As the King had promised in 1848, censorship laws were lifted in favour of closer scrutiny of political groups. In 1850 the Central Press Association was formed (Zentralstelle für Presseangelegenheiten). It even had its own newspaper to help disseminate the government line, Die Zeit.(29)
cv Wilhelm was the brother of Friedrich Wilhelm IV who had called for the troops to put down the rioters in Berlin in 1848 and who had to leave the country for self-imposed exile in London during the revolution. Wilhelm became Regent in 1858, following Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s stroke. Friedrich had no children, and when he died in 1861 his younger brother became Wilhelm I, King of Prussia in 1861. In 1871 he would become German Emperor.
cvi Olmütz (Olomuc) is a beautiful historic city, formerly part of the Austrian province of Moravia, now in the Czech Republic.
cvii Napoleon III had returned France to Bonapartist authoritarianism in 1852, after four years of chaos following the revolution of 1848.
cviii Bismarck was a Prussian and his German compass was firmly fixed on the German north-east throughout his lifetime, not least on the proximity to and importance of keeping on friendly terms with Imperial Russia.
cix During the nineteenth century, German Europe gave birth to Marxism, Socialism, the Welfare State, the most democratic and widest franchise in Europe, the philosophy of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, the psychoanalysis of Jung and Freud, the poetry and writing of Goethe and Schiller, the art of Casper David Friedrich and the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Liszt, Schumann, Strauss and Wagner, the archaeological discoveries of Schliemann at Troy and Borchardt at Armana, and unparalleled scientific endeavour and industrial expansion in a tumultuous century in which Germany would overtake Great Britain and come to rival the United States.
cx Dreyse & Collenbusch in Germany was the first company in the world to mass-produce the first practical breech loading rifle, the M41, adopted in 1841, which helped the Prussian army to victory in the wars of 1864–70.
cxi Königgrätz (Hradec Krolove) and Nikolsburg (Mikulov) are now both part of the Czech Republic.
cxii When war broke out an atmosphere of heightened nationalism against the old enemy France, military obligation and self-preservation made the south German states gravitate towards Prussia. Bismarck and the nationalists then cajoled the southern states into the new Reich, the former to keep them in the war and prevent them making a separate peace, the later to get as many Germans into a unified state as possible. It was not part of a grand design, it came in the heat of the moment; one that Bismarck would live to regret. He had no desire for so many Catholics under the roof of his new house.
cxiii Bismarck had hoped that rapprochement with France would be possible and that just as she had gotten over Trafalgar and Waterloo she would get over Sedan. A brief period of rapprochement did ensue in the 1880s until the French General Boulanger began the sabre rattling again calling for ‘revenge’. It appeared the inherited enemy remained a threat and that French desires to poach on German lands were far from dead.
cxiv Pan-Germans proclaimed the ‘Triple Alliance’ as the reconstitution of the Holy Roman Empire, which up to the start of the sixteenth century had included much of Italy. Bismarck however had no time for the Italians whom he regarded as having ‘a l
arge appetite but poor teeth’.(21)
cxv In his final meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II at his Friedrichsruhe estate near Hamburg in December 1897, Bismarck accompanied Wilhelm to the door berating the Kaiser for his policy of driving Russia into the arms of France and antagonising Britain with a naval arms race. His parting words to the Kaiser were, ‘Jena came twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great; the crash will come twenty years after my departure if things go on like this.’ Indeed it did, in November 1918.(24) (Jena was the disastrous battle at which Napoleon crushed the Prussian army in 1806.)
5
The Second Reich: In An Age Of Global Imperialism
First and foremost, the new ‘Reich’cxvi needed some symbolism. If Hohenzollern Prussia’s mission had been to unite Germany they had done very little to prepare for it: The new Germany of twenty-six states was composed of the four kingdoms of Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria and Württemberg, three free cities and nineteen other ‘principalities’ of varying shapes and sizes. The new nation had no flag, no national anthem, no national holiday and no national army (only a Prussian one); it had none of the symbols normally associated with statehood. These would only be put in place in the years after unification.
Under Bismarck, Germany would only reluctantly be drawn into the race to colonise the remaining parts of the globe that had not already been overrun by the great imperial powers. However, under the energetic auspices of a young and impetuous new German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, his new Reichskanzler (Reich Chancellor or equivalent to Prime Minister) Bernhard von Bülow, would coin a phrase in which Imperial Germany would now also ‘demand its place in the sun,’ and set Imperial Germany on a new course of equality of aspiration in the European powers’ global carve-up. This chapter will seek to contextualise Imperial Germany’s role in the European race to colonise the planet, in an age when all too many nations viewed ‘world domination’ as an apparently entirely acceptable foreign policy objective.
THE SECOND REICH
In practice, the Second German Reich began its life in much the same way as the first; as a federation of German princely kingdoms. The difference, this time, was that one prince was a real king among kings. Although the princes had agreed to Wilhelm I’s coronation as Emperor, future Kaisers would no longer be elected by the leading princes; the Hohenzollerns had become hereditary emperors. Also, there was no longer a loose federation of competing strong German states. Prussia made up two-thirds of the new Germany both in terms of population and territory. Her pre-eminence was overwhelming. German nationalists, who wanted to see Prussia broken up into smaller bite-sized regions and eventually dissolved within the German Empire, were opposed by Prussian particularists who could not envisage the dissolution of their beloved Prussia. Furthermore, they regarded such demands as downright ingratitude, if not betrayal. The duality between Prussia and Germany continued well into the First World War. Bismarck, Wilhelm I and many of their contemporaries felt Prussian first and German second, and regional particularism remained a strong theme in the new Germany. Bismarck held on to his dual roles of Prussian First Minister and Foreign Minister, alongside his roles as Chancellor and Foreign Minister of the German Reich, to ensure that Prussia followed the lead he gave Germany.
Leading articles from the post-Second World War period in Germany that discuss the democratic deficits of the Second Reich do not recognise it as Germany’s first democracy; they give that title to the Weimar Republic, established in 1919. This is disingenuous, particularly when comparing the Second Reich to the level of democracy that existed elsewhere in the late nineteenth century.cxvii Bismarck had given the Germans a parliament with the widest franchise in Europe. The Reichstag was elected by all men over the age of twenty-five, which was a uniquely progressive form of suffrage in its day. It could also initiate legislation. Germany was also a Rechtsstaat, a state based on the rule of law. Although a unified and decentralised judicial system was put in place by 1873 (with the court based in Leipzig), and an Imperial Court of Appeal was added in 1879, the civil and criminal codes had been in place before unification. By this time, the last remaining restrictions to trade and industry within the borders of the Reich had also been removed. And some of the first and perhaps foremost changes came in the form of economic integration, a single currency and a unified financial and banking system. The gold standard was adopted in 1873 and a central bank, the Reichsbank, by 1875. The practical and institutional elements forging unification happened extremely rapidly.
But there were indeed democratic deficits. The German Chancellor was not selected from the largest political party in the Reichstag, nor was he accountable to it. Parliament could obstruct and restrain the Chancellor but never control him and he was appointed by and responsible to the Kaiser. In Prussia the three-tier voting system remained in place in parliament. A franchise that had been built upon the pillars of the old Estates and weighed heavily in favour of the landed nobility, who with the third of the vote reserved for the top 5 per cent of taxpayers, held power way beyond their numbers, in a system that came to look increasingly anachronistic as the century progressed. Another key weakness in the system remained the power the Kaiser had over the military and foreign policy. Article 63 of the Prussian legal code had simply been grafted on to Germany giving unlimited command of the armed forces to the king, including the right to declare war and peace. The Chancellor could only attempt to control the whims of his Kaiser if he had a solid majority in the Reichstag behind him. Or in Bismarck’s case, by brow-beating him and threatening to resign, which he did in 1869, twice in 1874, again in 1875 and 1877 and for the last time with Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1879, by which time he had broken the old Emperor’s will to resist. Wilhelm finally concluded, ‘Bismarck is more necessary than I am.’(1) So although Bismarck had effectively reduced the role of his Kaiser to that of a figurehead of state, he had done so by the force of his personality and not through constitutional change; the fault line remained, should a weak Chancellor and an impetuous Kaiser come to power.
The Reichstag had significant budgetary, tax-raising and legislative powers, but its decision-making powers, especially in relation to driving forward further political reform, were limited. Bismarck consistently remained aloof and above party politics, refusing to build a stable, loyal, long-term parliamentary majority with one coalition; he did not want to weaken his own power and indispensability to the Kaiser. Bismarck did evolve the office of Chancellor by creating numerous Secretaries of State, but these were only responsible to him — not to parliament or the Kaiser — and he continued to play a game of divide and rule with the Reichstag, to enhance his own power. This did little or nothing to further the interests of liberal parliamentary democracy. It was only after he had left office and there was a new Kaiser on the throne, who Bismarck regarded as a buffoon, that he came to rue the weakness of Germany’s parliamentary system vis-à-vis the Kaiser.
Throughout his tenure Bismarck broke political parties and parliamentary alliances when it suited him or in accordance with the issues of the day. One could say he played the role of government and opposition all by himself, arguing forcibly for laissez-faire and free trade from 1860–78, and then just as forcibly against it. He was also not averse to using the threat of a Staatsstreich (a coup from above) if parliament did not conform to his will. Bismarck also showed no reluctance in using bouts of tears and hysterics with Wilhelm I when he did not get his way.cxviii (2)
Consolidating the new state and keeping enough crises on the horizon to keep himself indispensable to his Kaiser remained Bismarck’s modus operandi. When it came to consolidation, he targeted a particular group in society that he called Reichsfeinde (enemies of the state), setting himself the task of forging national unity within his new empire by focusing on these ‘enemies within’. Bismarck focused on two groups in particular: The Catholics — whose strongholds were in the Rhineland, Ruhr, Bavaria and parts of Silesia; and the Socialists — who eventually became the first mass political party i
n the world. The former were considered representatives of foreign powers in both Rome and Vienna. The latter were conversely criticised for being godless expropriators of the establishment and lacking patriotic virtues.(4)
When Pope Pius IX proclaimed the edict of ‘Papal Infallibility’, in other words that the Pope could not be wrong, Bismarck saw it as a political act designed to drive a wedge between Protestants and Catholics, and impair the allegiance of Germany’s Catholics to the new Reich. Bismarck increasingly came to see the Catholic Centre Party, led by the diminutive, near-blind but exceptionally quick witted and gifted orator, Ludwig Windthorst, and its affiliate organisations that boasted over a million members, as a fifth column for the Pope and Austria in Germany, and as such, a threat to the unity of the Reich itself. Bans on Jesuits and the implementation of non-denominational schools kicked off what became known as Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (cultural struggle) which raged from 1871–78 and continued to a lesser degree until his departure as Chancellor. It took Bismarck a long time to realise how entirely counter-productive the Kulturkampf had been in his attempts to build a greater sense of national community. Additionally his desire to undermine the Centre Party — the only political party in Imperial Germany that drew voters from across all classes — failed utterly, as the Centre Party continued to return ever more representatives to the Reichstag. In fact, the Centre Party’s share of the Catholic vote increased commensurately from 23 per cent in 1871 to 45 per cent by 1874, becoming the second-largest party in parliament after the National Liberals.cxix (5)
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