Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  Bismarck’s attacks on what he perceived as Reichsfeinde were always particularly vociferous before an election. Before every election Bismarck raised the spectre of a new threat to the Reich; fear of a resurgent France with ‘war in sight’, the threat of protectionism, then the threat of free trade, but above all, the threat from Rome and from socialism. Although the attacks and ensuing discriminatory laws against the Catholic Centre Party were wound up in 1878, and although during the 1884 election the Centre Party sided with Bismarck on the imposition of protectionist tariffs — in lieu of strengthening the federal system by splitting the receipts this brought in between the central and federal government — the anti-Catholic May Laws remained on the statute book till 1887, and relations between Bismarck and the Centre Party remained terse throughout his tenure in office. However, once the heat had gone out of Bismarck’s attacks on the Catholic Centre Party for their ‘lack of patriotism’ he turned his attentions to the socialists who were defamed for putting class loyalty above national loyalty. Bismarck blamed two assassination attempts on the Kaiser on the socialists and brought his anti-socialist laws before the Reichstag in 1878. Under these laws, socialist and communist meetings, societies and publications were banned, and socialist agitators could be expelled. Socialists were nevertheless allowed to continue to campaign in elections and speak freely in the Reichstag and state legislatures. Despite being initially hindered by these restrictions, the Social Democrats would soon recover their momentum. And Bismarck’s carrot-and-stick approach of the anti-socialist laws accompanied with welfare improvements essentially failed to break the loyalty of the mass of the working classes to the Social Democratic movement.(7)

  In fact, Bismarck’s attacks on these communities only exacerbated the polarisation within German society and his insistence on continuing anti-socialist legislation ultimately cost him the chancellorship. His policies left an enduring legacy that lived on until the German revolution of 1918. The socialists felt betrayed by the other democratic parties that had supported Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation, causing them to reject cooperation with other bourgeois parties in the future and withdraw ever deeper into their own political lager. They developed their own ‘massively elaborate institutional structure, with its cultural organisations, its newspapers and magazines, its pubs, its bars, its sporting clubs and its educational apparatus, (which) came in time to provide a whole way of life for its members and to constitute a set of vested interests…’(8) The development of this counter-culture was seen by their opponents as further evidence that they, like the Catholics, were also a fifth column — a state within a state — whose loyalties to Germany were suspect. But when it came to the outbreak of the First World War, the socialists in Germany, as elsewhere, betrayed the class struggle in favour of making an active and very public demonstration of their loyalty to the state. This was a legacy from the time when Bismarck had never missed an opportunity to impugn their patriotism.

  The Catholic Centre Party, desperate to assert their loyalty to the new Reich as German patriots, had also evolved a similar counter-culture to the Social Democrats, but became stridently nationalist early on, long before the war.cxx So in the party political sphere, Bismarck was not only divisive but also left a bitter legacy for Germany. He had used appeals to patriotism to justify every policy he had introduced and the attacks he made questioned the patriotism and loyalty of all those he singled out as Reichsfeinde. This left the Centre, and later, even the Social Democrats, desperate to demonstrate that they were true patriots, even if that meant reining in their efforts for greater democratisation.

  Bismarck was driven by the need to consolidate and protect his creation by whatever means he thought necessary, believing that greater parliamentary democracy could come after he was gone, when the new German Reich had had time to bed down. However, his greatest legacy for Germany and the world — his revolutionary social and welfare reforms of the 1880s — stood in marked contrast to his reactionary measures of repression against Catholics and socialists. Cynics have accused him of using these reforms, which attempted to pull the rug out from under the socialists, as simply another measure with which to beat the Social Democratic Party at the polls. But this is not an accurate reflection of the man’s inner convictions. Bismarck proclaimed in the vein of Frederick the Great that he wanted to be the ‘King of the Poor’. He advocated patriarchal social conservatism throughout his career, not least in the area of spending on education, which by 1867 accounted for nearly a quarter of public expenditure and gave Prussia/Germany the best schools, technical institutes and universities in Europe. His greatest and most enduring achievements were in the arena of social policy. Germany was the first nation to introduce a welfare system with social insurance, holiday entitlements, health care and pensions, many decades before any other nation.

  During the 1880s, Bismarck’s Social Insurance legislation, which gave German workers sickness, accident and invalidity insurance, and old age pensions, not only made German conservatism the most interventionist in Europe, but also made Germany a model for the world in terms of education and social welfare.cxxi (9) Bismarck believed in the ‘right to work’ and had even wanted to introduce insurance against unemployment, giving workers unemployment benefits.(10) His last speech, given to the Reichstag before his fall, was on the importance of welfare policy, which he described as ‘true conservatism’. Others have called it ‘state socialism’ or ‘patriarchal conservatism’. It was supported in the Reichstag by the Conservatives, the Centre and fifty National Liberals in an attempt to build a new social contract between the classes in Germany. They were no doubt also hoping it would help their electoral fortunes and dim those of the Social Democrats.(11) It is hard to escape the conclusion that Bismarck was playing the role of sorcerer’s apprentice to the spiralling and unforeseen consequences of creating the largest nation at the heart of Europe. It was a nation increasingly torn between the forces of rapid change and the reactionary pull of the established elites. While seeking to serve the interests of the old establishment, the middle and the working classes, he also prevented the move towards greater parliamentary democracy, and to that extent contributed to the retarding of Germany’s political institutions. The three-tier voting system in the Prussian Landtag, which Bismarck had once described as the craziest in Christendom, helped to entrench social divisions and protect the interests of the landed gentry of the east Elbian Estates. Bismarck’s support of tariffs to protect their agrarian produce from cheaper imports essentially preserved their wealth and power when the market and modernity would otherwise have swept them away. It is argued that in putting out fires left, right and centre to preserve his construction, he in fact fatally weakened it by allowing an increasingly reactionary minority to stop Germany transforming itself into a modern democratic constitutional monarchy. Germany was not alone in its struggle to try to keep a lid on the rapid changes that engulfed the nations of Europe at this time, but due to the establishment of such a huge new internal market within such a short space of time, these changes — caused by industrialisation, international competition, and growing class divisions — were happening much faster in Germany than elsewhere.

  WILHELMIAN GERMANY: THE GERMAN VICTORIAN ERA

  Kaiser Wilhelm I once famously said, ‘It is hard to be Emperor under Bismarck.’ When he died in 1888, the most dynamic period in modern German history came to an end.cxxii Wilhelm I had been the last Prussian King and the First German Emperor. As the second son he had not been expected to reign at all and had thus been ill-prepared for the role. Aware of this, he had been pragmatic enough to allow those more gifted in that regard to take the reigns. Following Wilhelm’s death, his son Friedrich III only reigned for ninety-nine days before he died of throat cancer. Friedrich III’s son, Wilhelm II, was therefore only twenty-nine years of age when he became Kaiser, and although both Queen Victoria and Bismarck had invested high hopes in him, they were both soon to be disappointed. It seemed hopes for greater libera
l reform, which could take Germany down the necessary road to evolving full parliamentary institutions and achieving a more modern form of constitutional monarchy, had died with Friedrich III.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II was a very different proposition from Bismarck. He had grown up in a fast-changing and increasingly self-confident Germany, where demands for her to take her ‘place in the sun’ were becoming ever more strident. He was the first Hohenzollern monarch raised to be a German Kaiser and, in that sense, he marked a transition point, representing a new age in which Germany found her feet and emerged out of Prussia’s shadow. Wilhelm II was not the type to play second fiddle to anyone, so he soon found Bismarck’s Prussian parochialism and limited horizons for the new Germany stifling.

  Wilhelm’s charm and intelligence were often at odds with his impatience and restless energy. He took a keen interest in social affairs, scientific endeavour and not least in modernising ‘his’ military. Wilhelm II’s temperament and ambition did not sit comfortably with Bismarck’s way of governing and this soon brought the young monarch and the old autocrat into dispute. Bismarck had again intended to use the rallying call against the ‘socialist peril’ as an election issue in 1890, demanding the anti-socialist laws that were due to lapse, become permanent. This was not only a redundant policy, it was a dangerous one, which would inevitably have led to greater divisions within German society, but is also likely to have provoked them to boiling point and turned them into civil strife. Wilhelm wanted to be seen as the Kaiser of all Germans and early on in his reign he intervened in an industrial dispute in the Ruhr where he lectured the employers on their social responsibilities towards their workforce. He proposed a raft of his own new social legislation and got the Reichstag and state secretaries behind his policy and against that of Bismarck’s policy of confrontation with the Social Democrats. Wilhelm told Bismarck that he would not begin his reign by opening fire on his own people. The battle lines had been drawn, and Bismarck desperately tried to cling to power, attempting to put together the most outlandish alliances in the Reichstag to gain the upper hand against the young Kaiser, but to no avail. The leader of the Centre Party, Ludwig Windthorst, who was called to a meeting at the Chancellery with Bismarck in an attempt at one of these political contortions, returned saying he had just returned from the grave of a great man. Many great men are berated for failing to groom a successor, not so with Bismarck; he had groomed his ever-loyal son Herbert, who had entered the civil service in 1874 and was appointed Secretary for Foreign Affairs in 1886. Bismarck had expected, in the interests of continuity, that the Kaiser would make Herbert either Chancellor or retain him as Foreign Minster. But Wilhelm wanted his own man and a fresh start, and neither was offered. Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II parted company in March 1890. Although Bismarck ostensibly resigned over his belief that the Kaiser had embarked on an anti-Russian policy, in reality, the fault lines between them over domestic policy were just as great. At the honour guard and military parade that accompanied Bismarck’s departure from office, the Kaiser added insult to injury by remaining conspicuously absent leaving father and son equally embittered. They would lose no opportunity to denigrate Kaiser Wilhelm during the years that followed.

  Wilhelm II’s stridently bombastic nationalism, his arrogance and insensitivity, and his determination to push Germany to the top table of world affairs — no matter what — quickly began to undo Bismarck’s carefully crafted diplomacy. Wilhelm squandered the cornerstone of Prussian and German foreign policy by allowing the alliance with Russia to lapse. He also wasted chances for an enduring alliance with England, going out of his way to alienate Britain and draw ever closer to an ailing Austria which was by now a galleon so worm-eaten that it was in danger of sinking under the weight of its own internal problems. Bismarck’s policy of keeping France isolated and Austria in check through the Three Emperors’ League began to unravel within months of his departure. But it was Wilhelm’s inner conflict between his ‘Hohenzollern mission’ and his Anglo-German Saxe-Coburg (now Windsor) family roots that characterised much of his reign.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II had a love-hate relationship with England that would test and ultimately break the notion of an enduring fraternal ‘natural alliance’ between Saxons and Anglo-Saxons. Kaiser Wilhelm II was no stranger to Britain. In fact, it is often overlooked just how British he was: he was Queen Victoria’s oldest grandson, born to her beloved oldest daughter, also named Victoria (nicknamed Empress Vicky in Germany). Queen Victoria harboured great hopes for her grandson. She hoped to strengthen royal ties with all the monarchies of Europe, but especially with that of Prussia. Queen Victoria herself was half German and had married Prince Albert, a German from the House of Saxe-Coburg. She spoke German fluently and was a fervent believer in steering Germany towards a more liberal form of constitutional monarchy along British lines. Her ministers encouraged German colonial aspirations and it has even been said that she herself inspired the Kaiser’s aspirations to build a great navy.(12)

  When the young Princess Victoria (Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter) married the heir to the Prussian throne — a man of liberal inclinations and an Anglophile — in the chapel of St James Palace in 1858, hopes for constitutional reform in Germany, and of even closer ties with Britain were high. Much speculation has been made of what would have happened had Frederick III not died so prematurely, thus propelling his young, inexperienced, and headstrong son to the throne. But the auguries did not bode well for Anglo-German relations from the day Wilhelm II was born. Queen Victoria had sent a British doctor and midwife to help with a complicated delivery. Wilhelm was a breech birth — one that nearly killed his English mother — which meant he was wrenched out of the womb rump first with his left arm wrapped precariously around his neck. This arm remained crippled for life. The presumption of Queen Victoria to send her own medical staff to attend to the birth of the heir to the German throne, and the role they played in aggravating his life-long disability, clouded Wilhelm’s view of his English heritage from the outset. Something which was only aggravated further by his English mother’s revulsion for and mockery of his disability. Throughout his childhood, Wilhelm endured a tortuous and agonising regime of exercises to try and strengthen his withered arm. It was a testimony to his strength of character that he learned to ride, shoot and hunt. If you look closely at photographs of Wilhelm II you will see he usually attempts to conceal his withered arm in carefully choreographed poses.

  Wilhelm’s deformity, however, neither impaired his restless sense of energy nor the ambitions he held for his beloved Germany. Wilhelm went on to father seven children and his reign amounted to the equivalent of the British Victorian era for Germany. It was a golden age that was consequently named the Wilhelmian era after him. During his reign, the nation he presided over transformed itself from an agrarian to an industrial society. Where during the Bismarckian era there had been boom and bust and even a worldwide Great Depression, from 1895–1911 industrial output grew at over 5 per cent per annum. From 1895, prices rose, but wages rose faster, demand for labour remained high and emigration to the ‘New World’ dropped off dramatically. Instead, Germany became the second largest importer of migrant labour after the United States, much of it from Poland.(13) Workers’ earnings were 80 per cent higher in 1913 than they had been in 1871 and the working week had been cut back from an average of seventy-two to fifty-seven hours a week. Workers had more leisure time, more social benefits and better municipal services. Capital investment in industry from 1871–1913 increased from 10 to 85 billion Marks. Germany went from being a country where in 1882, 42 per cent of the population and their dependents worked in agriculture to 42 per cent working in industry by 1907. The banking sector developed long-term interdependencies with companies they supported and funded the expansion of firms such as Siemens, AEG and Norddeutsche Lloyd. Germany also became one of the world’s leading exporting nations during this period. This development was all underpinned by a good educational system, producing skilled labour and
investment in R&D, technology and the new sciences at technical institutes (which were often funded by industry) creating a dynamic system of training and apprenticeship which built on older artisan traditions.(14)

  In a strongly federal system where 65 per cent of public expenditure was accounted for by the federal states(15) these also invested heavily in public services, including public transport, hospitals, schools, roads, gas, electricity, water works as well as public arts, leisure and cultural facilities, which meant that by 1913, ‘German cities offered modern services unsurpassed anywhere in the World.’(16) And in 1891 legislation was introduced banning child labour in factories, night shifts for women and youths, and work on Sundays. In 1903, child labour on building sites was outlawed, in 1904 Employment Tribunals were introduced, in 1905 a statutory eight and a half hour working day came into force for miners, and in 1911 an insurance scheme for widows and orphans. The tax burden was increased to fund further spending on these social schemes, on the additional administration necessary to implement them, and on military spending, but taxes remained low by modern standards.(17) In purely economic terms, the period of Wilhelm II’s reign was one of unprecedented progress.(18)

  From a cultural perspective, nineteenth-century German Europe had made an enormous contribution to the treasury of humanity; from the music of Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn and Schubert, to the philosophy of Hegel and the literature of Goethe, Schiller and Heine, as well as contributing the leading scientific advancements of men like Werner von Siemens whose invention of the modern telegraph system had revolutionised communication, as had his invention of the electric dynamo, the electric train and whose endeavours had made Berlin the first city in the world to boast electric street lighting. Wilhelmian Germany and German Europe would add considerably to this explosion of talent in a wide array of fields. The sober middle class style of the Biedermeier period in art, furnishings and architecture gave way to the ever more elaborate and opulent neo-baroque or heavy imperial styles of the Gründerzeit (founders’ era), then to Jugendstil, a German variant of art noveau, and at the turn of the century, to the functionalist modernism of the architecture of Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius. While the romantic works of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and the technically perfect photographic styles of romantic landscape art began to be replaced by a variety of new movements; from Successionism, a stylised simplified form of art which took its inspiration from French Impressionism, and by the modernist styles of Gustav Klimt, Max Liebermann and Paul Klee. In music, Johannes Brahms drew on the Protestant musical traditions of Bach to elaborate new forms of classical music, whilst Richard Wagner attempted to dissolve all genres into one almighty Gesamtkunstwerk (complete work of art), and an array of other wonderful composers proliferated from Bruckner to Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss. Gerhart Hauptman won the Nobel Prize for literature for his work depicting the tragic side of human nature and the evils of materialism. Theodor Fontane’s work highlighted the family and societal strains in a rapidly-changing society, and Thomas Mann’s family chronicle of the Buddenbrooks explored the changes in German society and economic life over the course of the nineteenth century. In the realm of philosophy, German academia produced the greatest minds of the age; Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. And in archaeology, Heinrich Schliemann’s endeavours at Troy and Borchardt’s at Armana stand out as some of the greatest discoveries of all time.