Bismarck and the German Empire

1871–1918

Lynn Abrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134229147
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Updated and expanded, this second edition of Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871–1918 is an accessible introduction to this important period in German history.

Providing both a narrative of events at the time and an analysis of social and cultural developments across the period, Lynn Abrams examines the political, economic and social structures of the Empire. Including the latest research, the book also covers:

• how Bismarck consolidated his regime
• the Wilhelmian period
• the factors that led to the outbreak of World War One.

With a new introduction and updated further reading section – including a guide to useful websites – this book gives students the ideal introduction to this key period of German history.

1
Introduction

The Second German Empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871, the culmination of a political, economic, diplomatic and military process concluded by Prussia’s military defeat of Austria in 1866 at Königgrätz and her victory over France at Sedan in 1870. The disparate German lands were unified by ‘blood and iron’. Prussia thus established her military but also her economic and political supremacy in a small German (kleindeutsch) state which excluded Austria under the Prusso-German Kaiser, Wilhelm I, and the Prussian prime minister and German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. More than a century later, having experienced authoritarianism, republicanism, Nazism and division after the Second World War, the two Germanies – the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic – united on 3 October 1990 following a peaceful revolution and the breaching of the Berlin Wall, a process far removed from the militarism that characterized the unification of the nineteenth century.

The new German Reich (also known as the Kaiserreich) rapidly established itself as a leading world industrial and military power. From the mid-nineteenth century Germany experienced rapid industrialization accompanied by urbanization and social upheaval and yet this astonishing social and economic change occurred within a political and constitutional framework that has been labelled at worst pseudo-constitutional, semi-absolutist and at best autocracy based on consent. The new state, then, was something of a paradox. In the words of one nineteenth-century historian, ‘the proud citadel of the new German Empire was built in opposition to the spirit of the age’.¹

The Second Empire lasted forty-seven years. In 1914 Germany embarked upon a disastrous war. Military defeat and exhaustion and disillusionment on the home front precipitated a revolution in 1918. The Kaiser abdicated and the old regime collapsed, to be replaced by the short-lived Weimar Republic. After merely fourteen years of a democratic republican regime, in 1933 Germany experienced the assertion of a form of authoritarianism which bore little relation to that perpetrated by the Second Empire, when the National Socialists, led by Adolf Hitler, came to power and embarked upon twelve years of totalitarian rule and another traumatic and costly war (a topic covered in another Lancaster Pamphlet).² Defeat in 1945 was followed by occupation by the Allied powers. In 1949 Germany was divided into the communist East and democratic West. It was to be another forty-one years before the German people would be reunited.

The Sonderweg thesis and its critics

Interpretations of the German Empire have been heavily influenced by attempts to explain Germany’s more recent troubled past; in particular historians have sought to discover the origins of the Third Reich. In contrast to those historians who had argued that Nazism was contrary to all the traditions of German history and that Hitler and the National Socialists were a bunch of misfits, railing against the modern state that had been shaped from Bismarck onwards, those who advocated continuity suggested that the roots of Nazism were to be found in the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine era; that the Third Reich was not an aberrant or unique regime which had no precursors or origins in Germany’s history, but rather it grew from Germany’s failure to develop a liberal parliamentary system in the nineteenth century. Imperial Germany, in the view of this school of historians, followed a Sonderweg, a peculiar or special path, divergent from the political roads taken by other western states, notably Britain and France. Given the influence of the Sonderweg hypothesis over historians’ interpretations of the Second Empire for at least the last thirty years, the main arguments are summarized here, followed by a brief account of some of the objections to this view.

According to the proponents of the Sonderweg theory, Germany’s political misdevelopment in the nineteenth century was at the root of her descent into illiberalism, chaos, fascism and war in the twentieth century. And at the heart of this political course was the failure of the bourgeoisie to assume political responsibility. It is argued that Germany never experienced a bourgeois revolution (encompassing the bourgeoisie’s assumption of political power from the aristocracy) as occurred earlier in England and France, and thus Germany’s political development under the rule of Bismarck and then Wilhelm II diverged from the western democracies. This divergence stems from the ‘failed’ 1848–9 revolutions in the German lands when, according to Fritz Fischer, Germany came to a turning point and ‘failed to turn’, that is, the bourgeoisie failed to usurp the aristocracy. At this moment bourgeois liberals did not succeed in creating either a nation-state or a constitutional state and thereafter the German bourgeoisie was excluded from power, effectively abandoning the fate of the new German state to traditional elites, that is the landowning aristocracy, the bureaucracy and the officer corps. When Bismarck was appointed to resolve a Prussian constitutional crisis in 1861 presaged by the attempts of liberals to achieve constitutional reform he pre-empted a so-called ‘revolution from below’ by instituting a ‘revolution from above’: national unity was forged at the expense of liberal political reform. Germany became a nation-state on the foundations of Prussian conservatism avoiding the institution of liberal democracy. The bourgeoisie, it is argued, capitulated, forgoing political reform for economic success and cultural pre-eminence for deference and the assumption of aristocratic modes of behaviour (a process described as the ‘feudalisation of the bourgeoisie’). Thereafter Germany experienced the problems associated with the mismatch between an authoritarian political system which had not adapted to meet the demands of economic and social change and a rapidly modernizing economy and society. And, instead of accommodating the new forces arising from industrialization as Britain had done with a series of reform acts designed to incorporate the new middle and working classes into the political system, the German ruling elites tried to deflect them. This strategy has been described as a ‘Flucht nach vorn’, a flight forward, ‘a resolute – if enforced – attempt to stabilize the prevailing political and social system by making limited concessions to progressive forces and thus to preserve the pre-eminence of the traditional elites despite the changes that were taking place in German society’.³ When this failed and the elites felt their position threatened they began to pursue an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy which culminated in the ultimate diversionary tactic, the First World War.

This view of Germany before 1918 as anachronistic and illiberal, a dangerous combination of backward and modernizing forces, dominated interpretations of modern German history until the 1980s. It was reinforced by studies of the ways by which the ruling elites retained their power. It was argued they sidestepped the Reichstag, reducing parliament to a talking shop, and they resorted to repressive and manipulative strategies to maintain their privileges and influence at the expense of the middle and lower classes. This scenario has been graphically described as ‘a puppet theatre, with Junkers and industrialists pulling the strings, and middle and lower classes dancing jerkily across the stage of history towards the final curtain of the Third Reich’.⁴ However, the picture described here is rather simplistic. It tends to portray the German people as passive and easily manipulated and the elites as calculating and backward-looking. It also airbrushes the bourgeoisie from the history of the German Empire.

Recent studies have chipped away at the Sonderweg thesis, revealing it to be too deterministic and certainly too sweeping in its dismissal of the desire and agency of the bourgeoisie to effect reform. In the first instance, historians who shifted their attention from party politics and national leaders began to examine the hidden areas of German society such as the everyday lives of the working class, women, young people, Catholics and Jews. They showed that the repressive and manipulative strategies enacted by the political elites frequently failed. They described a heterogeneous society which could not be boiled down to a conflict between pre-industrial elites and the masses. Moreover, when historians started to look more closely at the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie they discovered a group which was far more dynamic than the proponents of the Sonderweg thesis had led us to believe. In the work of David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley the bourgeoisie is to be found reclaiming civil society and actively engaging in politics at a regional and municipal level as well as achieving economic and professional success. Far from aping the aristocracy the bourgeoisie created its own values and organizations. To return to the image of imperial Germany as a puppet theatre, in this interpretation the strings snapped and the puppets took on lives of their own.

Finally, even the political elements of the Sonderweg thesis have been subject to revision. Wolfgang Mommsen suggests that the political system put in place by Bismarck should not be described in Wehler’s words as a ‘Bonapartist dictatorial regime’ but as a ‘semi-constitutional system with supplementary party-political features’ which nevertheless was resistant to change because of the severe social tensions present within German society.⁵ And the liberal–bourgeois model against which Germany’s political development was measured by those who emphasized Germany’s peculiarity has been seriously questioned. Every nation experiences its own ‘peculiar’ path of development dependent upon a mixture of external and internal factors. There is no ideal path to liberal democracy. What remains of the Sonderweg thesis perhaps is that Germany’s path was a somewhat more extreme version of the routes to modernization taken by other western states. Today the Sonderweg thesis is not widely accepted as a universal explanation for the course of German history from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich and historians are more likely to stress the particularities of Germany’s development as opposed to the peculiarities and are keen to highlight the plurality and complexity of German society undergoing modernization. In short, the German Empire needs to be understood on its own terms, as a discrete historical epoch, with its own political dynamics, social trends and cultural proliferation, albeit we should not close our eyes to continuities between this era and later regimes.

Personalities

Proponents of the Sonderweg thesis tended to downplay the role of individuals in the course of German history, focusing instead on structures and social and economic processes. More recently, however, Bismarck and Wilhelm II have re-entered the story as key players, perhaps because structural factors have lost the explanatory power they once had and the historian reverts to the role leaders have in shaping events. Even Hans-Ulrich Wehler, in a book which revises his original argument, positions Bismarck closer to the centre of his narrative of the period.⁶ The period of the German Empire is often neatly divided into two: the Bismarckian era (1871–90) and the Wilhelmine era of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1890–1918), indicating the prime importance of these two personalities, at least to a generation of political historians.

Whatever one’s view on the role of leaders and personalities in shaping history, historians of nineteenth-century Germany cannot afford to ignore the role of Otto von Bismarck, the most commanding political figure in Germany for almost three decades. Bismarck has been lauded as a hero, a man of action, a truly great statesman, architect of German unification and Prussia’s and Germany’s great-power status. Others have cast him in the role of villain, arch-manipulator or puppet-master, and the primary cause of Germany’s failure to embrace liberalism and democracy before 1918. Neither of these polarized approaches does Bismarck justice although Bismarck’s own attempts to justify his policies in his memoirs, published in the year of his death, 1898, are not to be relied upon either.

Bismarck remarked after his fall from power: ‘One cannot possibly make history, although one can always learn from it how one should lead the political life of a great people in accordance with their development and their historical destiny.’ Yet few historians would agree entirely with this self-assessment. Bismarck was a key player in the making of Germany’s history, not least in his role as architect of the Second Empire’s constitutional and political system. At the same time, however, having set certain forces in motion – in short, having set Germany upon the path of economic modernization and social and political change – Bismarck was forced to ‘cling to God’s coat-tails as He marched through world history’.⁷ Far from being the puppet-master, personally responsible for the tensions and difficulties of the Reich, he was instead, in the words of one of his biographers, Lothar Gall, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a victim of forces which he was at least partially responsible for unleashing. Most historians would now agree that Bismarck bears considerable responsibility for the problems that beset Germany following unification and more especially those tensions that escalated following his fall from office in 1890. Both his style – he could be arrogant, ruthless and a bully at times – and his policies were not in tune with a Germany whose economic maturity was increasingly some way ahead of its political structures. His attempts to govern by exploiting a fragile equilibrium between old and new forces, between the monarchy and parliament, ultimately brought about his downfall. By 1890 he had become an anachronism; he no longer had anything to offer a Germany which had changed immeasurably since he had assumed office. Moreover, most historians would concur that he left a ‘poisoned chalice’ for his successors. According to David Blackbourn, the system Bismarck bequeathed to his country was ‘designed by and for one man’.⁸ Moreover, that system was not fit for the purpose of forging social stability at a time of great economic change. The governmental system gave precedence to the traditional forces in German society at the expense of the new so that when tensions arose – for instance when the working classes demanded greater political recognition and influence – the constitution prevented change.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, on the other hand, was traditionally credited with far less personal influence over the course of German history. Indeed, it has been suggested that after Bismarck’s fall no one effectively ruled in Berlin and one contemporary, his uncle Edward VII, described him as ‘the most brilliant failure in history’. The Kaiser’s personality traits and character defects have been minutely documented and this information tended to bolster the view of a meddlesome monarch as opposed to an influential one. Wolfgang Mommsen for instance argues that Wilhelm’s character was simply too inconsistent for him to fulfil a leadership role. Wilhelm II certainly does not fall into the category of great statesman. Recently though, historians have been reassessing the Kaiser’s role, the extent of his personal rule and the influence of his court entourage, mostly in negative terms. According to Seligmann and McLean, ‘many of the disasters which befell Germany after 1888 can be attributed to the actions of Wilhelm II’ and while he may have contributed little coherent to policy-making, his views on foreign policy and in particular his desire to turn Germany into a world power had concrete and disastrous consequences in the decade before 1914.⁹

In the following chapters the aim is to provide a rounded insight into the Germany of Bismarck and Wilhelm II between 1871 and 1918 by drawing on old and new interpretations and new lines of research. Political developments will be discussed as part of a broader canvas of economic, social and cultural shifts incorporating the lives of the mass of German people and not merely politicians and diplomats. Chapter 2 describes and analyses the political, economic and social structures of the new German state upon its foundation in 1871. The main theme of the chapter addresses the paradox of an authoritarian political system superimposed upon an advanced industrial economy and one of the most diverse social structures in Europe, and the problems this presented. Against this background I shall examine the consolidation of the Empire under Bismarck between 1871 and 1890 in Chapter 3. The strategies adopted by Bismarck and the ruling elites to mainta...

Table of contents

• LANCASTER PAMPHLETS IN THE SAME SERIES
• Contents
• Foreword
• Glossary and abbreviations
• Chronological table of events
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The new German state
• 3 Bismarck and consolidation 1871–90
• 4 Confrontation and integration 1890–1914
• 5 War and revolution 1914–19
• 6 Interpretations
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index