Modern Germany Reconsidered

1870-1945

Gordon Martel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134899395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First Published in 2004. In this major textbook, leading international scholars provide clear, concise summaries of many of the most important controversies and developments in German history from 1870-1945. Twelve contributors, distinguished for their detailed and original work, summarize the nature of the controversies, explain the various interpretations, and offer their own conclusions and arguments. Each essay is new and has been specially commissioned for this book. Modern Germany Reconsidered represents essential reading for second- and third-year undergraduates on a range of Modern Germany courses. The book has been designed and written exclusively for students, to function as a major course text, or as a set of supplementary readings to support other texts. Modern Germany Reconsidered follows the chronological development of the whole range of modern German history, whilst highlighting themes of special interest: the role of women, economics, German liberalism, the Holocaust.

1

Bismarckian Germany

GEOFF ELEY

TRADITIONS AND REVISIONS

Constitutional crisis—Austro-Prussian War—North German Confederation— Franco-Prussian War—proclamation of the Reich —Congress of Berlin—Dual Alliance. This is one way, an older conservative way, of presenting the birth of the German empire. A sequence of political, military, and diplomatic events brought it into being. Germany was unified politically by ‘blood and iron’, the armed agency of Prussia. Geopolitically, it was a revolutionary creation. Disraeli, commenting on the Franco-Prussian War in the House of Commons, declared that

This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of the last century—I don’t say a greater, or as great, a social event. What its social consequences may be are in the future. Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a single diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away.¹

For Anglo-American historians especially, German unification had a disturbing effect on the European balance of power. In one venerable tradition of German historiography, beginning with Ranke and continuing through the Borussian School of patriotic realists, this geopolitical meaning was not refused so much as given a positive construction: because of the Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy), Germany’s fate was decided by its central continental location and consequent embroilment in Europe’s interstate power struggles. This certainly focused on diplomatic, military and political events as the primary stuff of history. But as a theory of German historical development it also integrated political and socioeconomic aspects, seeing Prusso-German social and political structures as a function of Germany’s Central European vulnerability.

In the 1960s a number of works challenged this assumption. They abandoned the traditional political-diplomatic perspective for one that assigned priority to social and economic developments.² The most direct reinterpretation in this sense was probably Helmut Böhme’s Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht. Böhme sees the empire’s foundation less as a formal act of political unification, of state making in a heroic nineteenth-century sense, than as the consequence of long-term developmental processes that set Prussia against Austria in an economic struggle for supremacy in Germany. Thus

The quarrel over the Zollverein (Customs Union) became of central importance for the development of the German question, and it can be asserted that the ‘kleindeutsch’ [small-German] national state arose chiefly from the Prussian defence against the economic order conceived by Austria for the great Central European region. For, in defending itself against the Schwarzenberg-Bruck conception, Prussia developed the basis for its own future hegemony.³

The struggle for control of the Zollverein and its smaller German character was decisive between 1853 and 1868 in destroying Austria’s efforts at reducing Prussia to secondary status. Given this shift of focus from a political to an economic logic, therefore, 1858 and the opening of the ‘New Era’ in Prussian government becomes less crucial than 1857 and the economic depression, which widened the gap between the Austrian and Prussian-led German economies; 1862 is important less for Bismarck’s appointment as Minister-President of Prussia than for the treaty of free trade with France; Austria’s military defeat in 1866 is less decisive than its exclusion from the Zollverein two years before.

The implications of this approach are all the more radical when applied to the succeeding period, between the defeat of Austria and Bismarck’s change of course in 1879. Böhme substitutes 1879 for 1871 as the terminal date of the German empire’s foundation, and claims that effective, as opposed to formal, unification was not complete until the economic and political settlement of 1878–9. The government’s parliamentary base of 1871–3, comprising National Liberals and Free Conservatives, and corresponding to the dominant free trading interest of east Elbian agriculture, merchant capital and light manufactures, was replaced during this settlement by a new protectionist front of Free Conservatives, Conservatives, National Liberals, and Catholic Center. Through the tariffs of 1879, Böhme argues, Bismarck forged a new combination of agrarian and industrial capital that formed the sociopolitical foundation of the empire until the collapse of 1918. The importance of this departure amounted to a ‘refounding of the German Reich’.⁴ Thus, ‘the Kulturkampf, the formation of the first interest groups, the transition to protection, the rejection of the Liberal Party, and the transition to Anti-Socialist Law, Dual Alliance, and colonial policy are all to be counted within the foundation period of the Reich’. ⁵ In 1879–81, ‘the first terminal point was reached in the 30-year creation of the German Reich’.⁶

This ‘economizing’ of the approach to German unification—a shift of emphasis from politics and statecraft towards economics, from Bismarck and Prussian militarism to the rise of a national market and the political economy of industrialization—was matched by a similar change of approach to the 1870s and 1880s. Bismarckian politics was reinterpreted through the lens of economic interest. Böhme was himself a pupil of Fritz Fischer, who played some part in urging Fischer to press ahead with his arguments about German aggression in the First World War, and Böhme’s own work on the foundation of the Reich was meant to lend depth to Fischer’s analysis. It was concerned with the origins of the interest-based politics whose primacy Fischer found crucial to the dynamics of Germany’s foreign expansionism: that is, an anti-socialist and anti-democratic authoritarianism linked to the traditional privileges of pre-industrial elites (aristocracy, military, bureaucracy), but regrounded during industrialization in a new coalition of large-scale industry and big-estate agriculture. The continuity of this reactionary politics between the unification years and the First World War has come to be seen as the main obstacle to Germany’s ‘political modernization’ (meaning the creation of a liberal political system) and, over the longer term, it is thought, led to structural instabilities that ultimately explain Germany’s susceptibility to the rise of Nazism. Much ink has been spent in the unfolding and discussion of these ideas during the last three decades, and here I would like to highlight three main aspects, each of which reflects a strong belief in the power of socio-economic causality, and which are now crucial to how the Bismarckian era has come to be understood.

The first concerns the importance of the Great Depression of 1873–96 and the argument that the political history of the Bismarckian years was powerfully defined by economics. Just as the shaping of a national market and the long boom of the 1850s and 1860s provide the main context of unification, in Böhme’s view, so does the Great Depression provide the context of the ‘refoundation of the Reich’ in 1878–9. The key text here has been Hans Rosenberg’s Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeti, published in 1967 as the socioeconomic revisionism of the 1960s was moving into high gear, but originating in arguments first developed by Rosenberg in the 1940s.⁷ For Rosenberg, the big political changes of 1878–9 were causally related to the economic problems produced by the crash of 1873, so that the Kondratiev downswing of 1873–96 is thought to have been reproduced in definite movements of social and political life. Most immediately, these included the turn by major industrial and agrarian interests to protectionist economic policies and away from free trade, culminating in the Bismarkian tariffs of 1879 (the theme of the later part of Böhme’s book). But government policy in the 1880s also consisted of the search for successful ‘anti-cyclical therapy’ to handle the problems of overproduction and declining prices set off by the depression, and the turn to a forward policy of overseas imperialism through colonies and other means has also been read as a response to the structural pressures of the economic downturn.⁸ More radically, Rosenberg’s argument also sees a general atmosphere of uncertainty and crisis as the result of the post-unification economic situation: ‘gloom and the feeling of tension, insecurity and anxiety’ dominated the new German society, and the ‘centre of gravity of political agitation shifted from issues of political policies…to a crude emphasis on economic objectives’. Apart from reorienting policy thinking in business and government, this also mobilized wide sections of the populace into activity, from workers to Mittelstand and farmers, and compelled a refashioning of outlooks in the political parties. Liberalism was the main loser in this process, because its free-trading and universalist ideals dramatically lost ground to the new politics based on sectional economic interest, and to an emerging ‘anti-modern’ ideological complex containing romantic, corporatist, and anti-semitic forms of belief. In the strongest versions, all manner of social, cultural, and intellectual developments were attributed to the originating impact of the depression in this way, including social Darwinism and psychoanalysis, as well as the various phenomena already mentioned.⁹

Second, anti-socialism was a vital aspect of the crisis mentality the depression created. For one thing, the German labour movement, organized into the united Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1875 and already the strongest socialist movement in Europe, was historically a product of the depression years. But a large part of the anxieties described by Rosenberg became focused on the rise of socialism as a revolutionary and subversive threat to the interests and values of the Prusso-German ruling system and as such built up the momentum for some form of anti-socialist legislation. Thus, if the protectionist demands of industry and agriculture provided the positive materials for a new political settlement at the end of the 1870s, anti-socialism was the ideological cement that bound the somewhat disparate interests of the protectionist coalition together and simultaneously broadened its appeal in the electorate. As with the turn to protection, it was again the liberals who tended to suffer: not only did the anti-socialist rhetoric alienate their former working-class supporters and help drive them to the SPD standard, but the demands for exceptional legislation and restrictions of civil freedoms badly compromised liberal principles of constitutional liberty. Moreover, Bismarck manipulated this situation for all it was worth.

Bismarck genuinely shared the fear of revolution and consequently believed in the necessity of anti-socialist measures for their own sake. But at the same time, he hoped to use that fear to break the independent influence of the liberal parties and bring their middle-class supporters more directly to his own side—that is, behind the more right-wing parliamentary coalition being assembled around the demand for tariffs. The protectionism of the mid- to later 1870s was a movement from within the economy to which Bismarck was mainly in the position of responding; anti-socialism was an issue which he manipulated far more creatively in his own favour. In this sense, the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878 was the political complement to the tariffs of 1879.

The third feature of the post-1960s revisionism I wish to highlight is the idea of social imperialism, which illustrates a similar dualism of emphasis on socioeconomic causality and political manipulation. On the one hand, the problem of overproduction during the depression produced a remarkably broad consensus in business, journalistic, academic, political, and governmental circles behind the need for protected markets overseas, and during the late 1870s and early 1880s this translated into a powerfully orchestrated demand for colonies. Thus, so far from being an opportunistically motivated diplomatic maneuver (the commonest older explanation), Bismarck’s grab for colonies in 1884–5 was a necessary response to pressures developing in the economy, just as the tariffs of 1879 had been. Colonial markets and investment opportunities would help counteract the irregularities of economic growth, stimulate renewed expansion, and in the process ease the pressures that were fuelling socioeconomic discontent. On the other hand, colonial acquisitions could become objects of popular enthusiasm and were skillfully manipulated by Bismarck for political purposes, most immediately in the 1884 elections, when he used the colonial issue to build support for the government parties and win votes away from the left-liberal opponents of an overseas empire. More generally, Bismarck’s colonial policy amounted to ‘social imperialism’, or the deliberate attempt to use the economic and political arguments for empire to strengthen popular support for the governing system and its elites. Thus, the expansionist foreign policy of the 1880s and later is related by this explanation to the same combination of factors noted above: the economic context of depression, resulting social tensions and conservative political manipulation in the shape of Bismarck. As social imperialism, it involved ‘the diversion outwards of internal tensions and forces of change in order to preserve the social and political status quo’; it was a ‘defensive ideology’ against the ‘disruptive effects of industrialization’.¹⁰

Taken as a whole, this has been a persuasive and influential approach to the history of the Bismarckian period. It casts German state making in the light of social and economic history, but without turning Bismarck into the cipher of impersonal forces. For, while upholding the importance of economic factors in the unifying and consolidation of the new state, and while relating the political history of the 1870s and 1880s to the irregularities of economic growth and social tensions resulting from industrialization, such an approach also stresses the effects of a particular kind of manipulative politics. In fact, the turn to economic and social history has done very little to dislodge Bismarck from his role as the directive genius of German history between 1862 and 1890, and the works of Böhme and Wehler in particular leave him right at the centre of the historical narrative.¹¹

The story such historians tell is one of a backward state and a modern economy—that is, an essentially unreformed Prusso-German state presiding over a massive process of economic modernization and seeking to preserve its traditional structures of authoritarian rule against the disruptive social and political effects of that process. The political history of the Bismarckian era, they argue, is contained in that contradiction, for the stability of the new state could be guaranteed over the long term only by building those ‘modern’ political institutions—Western parliamentary ones—adequate for dealing with the new forms of social conflict. Otherwise, a gap would open between the narrow base of the regime in the privileged interests of preindustrial elites and the broader, more complicated range of interests in the emerging industrial society; and without structural reform that gap could be bridged only by artificial forms of ‘secondary integration’, of which social imperialism was the strongest and most dangerous example. Thus, beginning with Bismarck’s colonial policy, it is argued, popular nationalism was consistently exploited as a ‘long-term integrative factor’ that was supposed to ‘stabilize an anachronistic social and power structure’. Support for expansion abroad was used to ‘block domestic progress’ and the chances for ‘social and political emancipation’, an effective ‘technique of rule’ for defeating ‘the advancing forces of parliamentarization and democratization’.¹²

What, more precisely, were the social interests and relations of domination such diversionary techniques of rule were meant to defend? At the institutional level of the state these are easy to see: the monarchy and its traditions of military and bureaucratic independence; the relative freedom of the executive from parliamentary controls; Prussia’s special status in the empire; a restricted franchise in most of the individual states; the socially weighted tax system in Prussia and elsewhere; and so on. But within this framework of institutions, historians have also detected a more specific social interest, namely, ‘the predominance of the feudal aristocracy’.¹³ The social basis of Germany’s constitutional authoritarianism, in this view, was the ability of a ‘pre-industrial elite’ of landowners to preserve the essentials of their power by subordinating the state machinery to their interests. The instruments of aristocratic power were control over the military and bureaucratic apparatuses of the state, a privileged position in the Prussian Landtag, fiscal immunities and a transmuted seigneurial authority over a dependent rural population east of the Elbe. To these factors may be added the preferential economic treatment that emerged from the tariff settlement of 1879. Thus, despite the capitalist transformation of German society and industry’s growing predominance in the economy, it is argued, ‘political power remained in the hands of the economically weakened pre-capitalist ruling strata (Junkers, bureaucracy, military)’.¹⁴

To maintain itself in this way the landed interest needed allies, not least because of its diminishing economic base. To deal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1: Bismarckian Germany
• 2: Wilhelmine Germany
• 3: Industry, Empire and the First World War
• 4: Culture and Politics in the Weimar Republic
• 5: The Nature of German Liberalism
• 6: The Rise of National Socialism 1919–1933
• 7: Women in Modern Germany
• 8: Nazism and Social Revolution
• 9: Hitler and the Coming of the War
• 10: The ‘Final Solution’
• 11: The Economic Dimension in German History
• 12: German History—Past, Present and Future
• 13: Bibliographical Essay
• Notes on Contributors