Imperial Germany 1850-1918

Edgar Feuchtwanger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134620722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Imperial Germany focuses on the domestic political developments of the period, putting them into context through a balanced guide to the economic and social background, culture and foreign policy.

This important study explores the tensions caused within an empire which was formed through war, against the prevailing liberal spirit of the age and poses many questions among them:

* Was the desire to unify Germany the cause of the aggressive foreign policy leading to the First World War?
* To what extent was Bismarck's Second Reich the forerunner of Hitler's Third?
* Did Bismarck's authoritarian rule permanently hinder the political development of Germany?

Recent debates raised by German scholarship are made accessible to English speaking readers, and the book summarises the important controversies and competing interpretations of imperial German history.

1 German nationalism between failure and revival 1850–1862

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the first big steps had been taken towards the creation of a modern German national state. The French Revolution and Napoleon had destroyed what remained of the Holy Roman Empire and the number of territorial units that comprised it had been reduced from some 380 to about 40. Napoleon was no less important than Bismarck as a unifier of Germany. At the same time German national consciousness had become a force to be reckoned with. The German Confederation of 1815, which took the place of the Holy Roman Empire, was never likely to satisfy in the long run the aspirations for greater unity in the German-speaking lands of Central Europe. The fact that it became closely associated with the policy of repressing liberalism and nationalism further reduced its chances of survival. The early stages of industrialism created powerful material pressures for greater unity. Nevertheless German unification was not inevitable, nor was the form it would take in any way predetermined.

The obstacles to German unification were hardly less formidable than the pressures towards it. The larger remaining separate states in the German Confederation of 1815 still had a strong life and identity of their own. The loyalty of the masses was still predominantly to their particular state and its ruling dynasty, rather than to the idea of a German nation. This was German particularism with its deep historical roots. The German nation was a cultural rather than a political concept and national consciousness was therefore mainly confined to the articulate élites. Two of the states, Austria in the south and Prussia in the north, were major European powers. Their entrenched rivalry was only temporarily overriden by conservative solidarity in the period between 1815 and 1848. Germany was divided into at least two major religious denominations, Catholic mainly in the south, Lutheran mainly in the north. This religious split also carried with it a profound cultural divide. The elements of division that counterbalanced the pressures for greater unity were therefore great even within Germany, but added to them were the obstacles to German unity on the wider European stage. A united and therefore powerful German state would profoundly affect all other European powers and the relations between them. German nationalists often saw this, the hostility of foreign countries to German unity, as the greatest obstacle to their aspirations. When this unity was eventually achieved it owed much to the window of opportunity that existed in the European power constellation after the Crimean War.

The aftermath of the 1848 revolutions

The uprising in Paris in February 1848 that toppled the throne of Louis Philippe was the fuse that lit the fires of revolution throughout Germany. For years there had been many signs of restlessness in the educated classes, but in the middle 1840s there was added to it acute social misery among the poorer sections of German society. Artisans and craftsmen had for long been under pressure from the beginnings of industrialism. The competition between older and more modern methods of production was particularly evident in the manufacture of textiles. The proverbial hardships experienced by those involved in home handicrafts like weaving were now further aggravated by a general economic downturn. The peasants, still the most numerous class in society, experienced a succession of poor harvests in the years immediately before 1848.

The French revolution of February 1848, the third since 1789, therefore hit Germany at a time when the system established in 1815, usually associated with the name of Metternich, was already badly undermined. When the spark of rebellion spread to the German states, most of their governments saw no alternative to saving themselves by making concessions. This was most conspicuously the case in Vienna and Berlin. In March 1848 Metternich himself had to flee into exile in England, while in Berlin Frederick William IV gave way to the insurrection of his subjects by installing a liberal ministry and allowing the election of a Prussian national assembly. In the area of the German Confederation as a whole preparations went ahead for the election of a national parliament. It met in May 1848 in the St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. The triumph of the revolution was deceptive. The moderate liberals who dominated the Frankfurt parliament had to rely on the existing governments of kings and princes to achieve their dual objective, to unify Germany and to turn it into a constitutional state. For a time they had moral power, but they never had real power. Monarchical government had been only temporarily weakened, for the armies, on which the monarchies had ultimately to rely, continued to obey their commanders. They were recruited from the peasantry, which was as yet scarcely politicized. By the end of the year 1848 the revolution had been crushed by force of arms both in Vienna and in Berlin. The Prussian national assembly was dispersed and a constitution was imposed which left the king in control of the executive government. The Frankfurt parliament was seen to be an emperor without clothes and when its delegates offered the imperial crown of Germany, excluding Austria, Kleindeutschland, to Frederick William IV of Prussia in April 1849 it was hardly worth accepting. Against the opposition of the Habsburg empire backed by Russia it would have been dangerous to accept. Within weeks the rump of the Frankfurt parliament was ignominiously dispersed. In the early summer of 1849 there were further radical uprisings, particularly in southwest Germany. The aim of the radicals was to establish, at a late hour, a united republican and democratic German state, the cause which in their eyes the moderates had betrayed. These risings were suppressed by force. The principal objectives of the revolutionary movement of 1848, to replace the German Confederation of 1815 with an externally more unified and internally more progressive framework, had not been achieved.

The last chapter in the catalogue of failure was the attempt to form a union of states around Prussia, loosely linked to Austria, which came to an end with the Treaty (Punctation) of Olmütz of December 1850. This union was an early version of what came about twenty years later, a German Reich without Austria established from above. The attempt to create such a union from below had failed with the refusal of Frederick William IV to accept the imperial crown offered him by the Frankfurt parliament. Frederick William hated revolution and one of the main reasons for his refusal was that he did not wish to wear a crown that to him was tainted by revolution. Yet he was romantically attached to the idea of a more unified German fatherland and would have welcomed something like a revival of the Holy Roman Empire. He naturally wanted to increase the power and influence of Prussia, but he was reluctant to exclude Austria from her traditional German role. He adopted the union project under the influence of Josef Maria von Radowitz, with whom he had formed a close friendship. Radowitz was a Catholic and, although not of Prussian birth, had risen in the Prussian service. This was not unusual, for many who distinguished themselves in the service of Prussia, for example Stein, the great reformer of the Napoleonic age, were not themselves Prussians. Radowitz persuaded the king that some elements of the national as well as of the constitutional aspirations of 1848 needed to be satisfied to achieve a new stability. The union project was to be realized through agreement with the other German rulers, but it was to have a constitution with an elected parliament. The moderate liberals of the Frankfurt parliament, who had offered the German imperial crown to the Prussian king, accepted the union as the best they could obtain in the circumstances and as a way of rescuing something from the wreckage of their hopes. The parliament of the union, elected on the restrictive Prussian three-tier franchise (see p. 10), met in March 1850 in Erfurt.

In the meantime, however, Austria was rapidly recovering her power and was not prepared to forgo her traditional leading position in Germany, which would have been the consequence if the Erfurt union had succeeded. Prince Felix Schwarzenberg was now the effective controller of Austrian policy, having gained the ear of the young Emperor Francis Joseph. He was determined to reassert the position of the Habsburg Empire as a coherent whole, as a great European power as well as the premier German power. Frederick William IV was indecisive and ultimately not prepared for a confrontation with Austria. He was torn between asserting the interests of the Prussian state and restoring the solidarity of the conservative powers that existed before 1848. Radowitz had many enemies, particularly among the Prussian ultra-conservatives, who regarded the union project as revolution in disguise. Austria’s time of weakness, when the Prussian union might have had a chance of success, was allowed to pass. It was crucial for the Habsburg empire that it had the support of the Russian Tsar, Nicholas I, in eliminating what remained of the revolution, particularly in Hungary, and in shoring up its German position. Nicholas was suspicious of the Prussian union, again because it smacked too much of revolution. In Germany Schwarzenberg made the re-establishment of the Confederation of 1815 in a more effective form the means of regaining Austria’s position as the first power. Bavaria, the largest of the medium states and traditionally close to Austria, had never signed up to the Prussian union, considering it incompatible with the preservation of her sovereignty. Gradually the other medium and smaller German states abandoned the Erfurt union and rejoined the old Confederation. Only the small North German states surrounded by Prussian territory remained in the Erfurt union.

Matters came to a head in the summer of 1850 over Schleswig-Holstein and Electoral Hesse. The clash between German and Danish nationalism in the two northern duchies bulked large in the events of 1848. When Prussia in September 1848 signed an armistice with Denmark and refused to continue the fight on behalf of the Frankfurt parliament, it was a great blow to the revolutionary cause and the impotence of the parliament was cruelly revealed. After a final flare-up of conflict the two duchies were returned to the Danish crown and their future was settled internationally. In Holstein a regime that owed its origin to the revolution resisted the return of the Danes. The Confederation, obligated by treaty, ordered a federal execution against the Holstein authorities. Prussia objected to this move, Frederick William IV uncharacteristically aligning himself with German national sentiment. In Electoral Hesse the situation came even closer to an armed clash between the two major German powers. The Elector Frederick of Hesse had demanded the intervention of the Confederation against his own parliament, civil service and army, who were resisting his counter-revolutionary policies. Electoral Hesse was still a member of the Erfurt union and Prussia was directly challenged in her vital interests. Her lines of communication to her Rhine provinces lay through Electoral Hesse. In face of Austrian pressure, backed by Russia and most of the smaller German states, Frederick William IV gave way and Radowitz was dropped. The result, Olmütz, was widely seen as a Prussian humiliation, but neither did Austria fully realize her aims. The full restoration of the German Confederation was left to a later conference. The adherence of the Habsburg empire as a whole to the Confederation, the key element in Schwarzenberg’s policy, was left in abeyance.

The conflict between Austria and Prussia in Germany was thus left unresolved. It was the problem of deciding between Germany including Austria, Grossdeutschland, or Germany without Austria and therefore led by Prussia, Kleindeutschland, that was the single most important reason for the failure of the 1848 revolution. The German-speaking areas of the Habsburg Empire could not be integrated with the desired German national state without splitting that empire. By 1849 it was too late to make the other alternative, a Prussian-led Germany without Austria, a reality. The price of excluding Austrian was even then seen to be high and for many, certainly for most German Roman Catholics, too high.

The dilemma between Grossdeutschland and Kleindeutschland was the most intractable aspect of the double task that faced the men of 1848. They had simultaneously to create a nation and accomplish a transformation of the internal power structure of that potential nation. The difficulties of the internal transformation occasioned equally deep divisions. The majority of the men who came together in the Frankfurt parliament were moderate liberals, who wanted to transform Germany into a constitutional state with the consent of the existing monarchical governments. To do this they needed the popular thrust which in the spring of 1848 frightened the kings and princes into making concessions. Yet the liberals were afraid of these popular forces and were at least as concerned to limit the chaos that might threaten from the streets as they were to limit the powers of the monarchies. The popular revolution soon ebbed and disillusionment with the parliamentary liberals was a factor in this decline of revolutionary fervour. The democrats and republicans who sought to direct the popular wave were themselves not a coherent force. Moderate democrats blamed the extremism of the republicans and socialists on their left for the failures. Everything was vastly complicated by the regional diversity of Germany. The revolutions of 1848 did not succeed anywhere in Europe in permanently setting up democratic republics. The peasantry, still the majority of the population in Germany, had limited interest in change and soon reverted to support for the status quo. Armies, largely made up of peasant recruits, remained loyal to their rulers.

The disasters which overtook Germany in the twentieth century have led many to see in the failure of the 1848 revolution one of the great wrong turnings of history, with a permanently damaging effect. The consequences of failure should certainly not be underestimated. It created a lasting feeling among many Germans that they lacked political talent and contributed to the perception that politics was ‘a dirty trade’, of which it was better to steer clear. There was, however, not that irrevocable weakening of liberalism which has been too categorically asserted by many subsequent commentators. Liberalism retained the potential to prevail in the future. The German Bürger was still convinced that the tide of history favoured him and his way of life and that absolute monarchies and the aristocracies arrayed around them were bound to decline. This conviction survived the disillusionment and self-criticism that followed the collapse of the euphoria of 1848. The revolutions of 1848 had shown that the bourgeoisie was fighting on two fronts: against monarchical absolutism above and against the masses below. By and large the German middle classes were still convinced that in this two-front battle they represented the general good, that they were the ‘general estate’ transcending narrow class interests. Moreover, the forces of reaction that appeared to have won by 1849 were not simply able to turn the clock back. In most German states, most notably in Prussia, constitutions were left in place after the revolutions. Monarchies were therefore no longer absolute but subject to some legal limitations. Parliaments, however unrepresentative and restricted in their powers, provided an arena for political activity which had not existed before.

In the 1850s German industrialization entered a take-off phase. This greatly restored the self-confidence of the German Bürgertum, but it also began to change its composition. The German bourgeoisie had been overwhelmingly a Bildungsbürgertum, an élite based on education. The Frankfurt parliament was sometimes dismissively called an assembly of professors and it was true that professors, teachers, officials, lawyers and journalists made up a large proportion of it. Less than ten per cent of the deputies were businessmen. In the future entrepreneurs and businessmen, Wirtschaftsbürger, were to become more prominent among the middle classes. Economic expansion would boost middle-class confidence, but it would also turn the bourgeoisie into a class defined mainly by material interest, rather than an élite of education that could claim to speak for society as a whole. Even before 1848 there was little left of the old urban patriciate that flourished on the basis of special legal privileges in the small pre-industrial towns of Central Europe. A radical-liberal journalist, August Ludwig von Rochau, drawing the lessons from the failures of 1848, popularized the term Realpolitik, that liberals would in future have to pay less attention to ideals than to the material forces that shaped the course of history. The dilemma between spiritual forces and material power is age-old and Rochau, in recommending greater realism in the future, was still confident that liberals, relying more than in the past on their economic self-interest, would prevail. The breathtaking material advance of the 1850s inspired pessimism as well as optimism in Germany, as it had done in Britain a generation earlier, when the ‘dark satanic mills’ began to impinge on public consciousness. There were doubts, even among liberals, that laissez-faire capitalism and unalloyed individualism had all the answers. There was, after 1848, a greater appreciation among liberals that a flourishing economy required a strong state to promote and control it. The prevailing mood was that in 1848 only a battle, not the war, had been lost.

Nationalism was the other great force which could not be weakened by the failures of 1848. Ever since the Napoleonic era it had gripped the educated classes in Germany. It was the new secular religion of the age and was the driving force of events across the whole of Europe. The economic progress which in the 1850s restored the confidence of the German middle classes also gave a strong boost to nationalism. Only unity beyond that achieved by the Zollverein, the customs union which since 1834 had embraced most of Germany outside the Habsburg empire (see p. 15) would allow the potential of industrialization to be fully realized. Up to 1848 German nationalism had been mainly an ideological force; it now paired with the economic self-interest of Germany’s most dynamic class to demand a greater unity.

Economy and society during the restoration

The economic pressures that had helped to generate a revolutionary situation before 1848 were mainly agrarian, poor harvests and high prices, although early industrial developments and their consequences for trades such as weaving were also a factor. The years from 1849 to 1857 saw an upswing in the economic cycle, the early signs of which contributed to the ebbing of the revolutionary tide. The boom was briefly interrupted from 1857 to 1859, and again in 1866, but there was a prolonged slow-down only after 1873, often labelled the great depression. Economic cycles were as yet imperfectly understood phenomena. They were international and indicated that the development of a world-wide, interdependent capitalist market had begun. Britain was still at the centre of this emerging economic system and retained her enormous lead as the first industrial nation, but the area of the German Zollverein, from which Austria was excluded, held by the 1860s a respectable fifth place after Britain, France, the USA and Belgium. The boom of the 1850s was centred, in Germany as elsewhere, on railway building, which in turn stimulated other sectors like coal, iron and steel. The expansion of the railway network made transport and therefore many goods much cheaper and contributed to the growth of major cities. In 1850 the railway network in the area of the German Confederation amounted to 5856 km, by 1860 it had nearly doubled to 11,175 (see Appendix: Table 1). Of this 2967 was in Prussia in 1850, 5762 by 1860. In the area of the German Zollverein iron production rose from 214,560 tons in 1850 to 530,290 tons in 1860, steel production from 196,950 to 426,260 tons. Germany was catching up with the British technological lead in areas such as machine building. Borsig, the largest German manufacturer of locomotives, completed its five hundredth locomotive in 1854, its thousandth in 1858. The extent to which industrialization favoured Prussia as against Austria can be gauged from the estimate that in 1860 the area of the later German Reich had a per capita industrial production of £310 as against £200 in Austria-Hungary, in 1880 sterling prices. In 1869 two-thirds of employment in Austria, excluding Hungary, was still in agriculture, while in the area of the later German Reich it had dropped to just over half (see Appendix: Table 2). In this period of transition from an agrarian to a predominantly industrial economy industrialization and urbanization were concentrated in a few regions, especially those favoured by the local availability of raw materials like coal. The RhineRuhr area was such a region, as was Central Germany divided between Prussian Saxony and the Kingdom of Saxony, while in the Habsburg territories such regions were fewer and less developed. In the Ruhr area the production of coal increased from 1,961,000 tons in 1850 to 11,571,000 tons in 1870, the number employed in coal mining from 12,741 to 50,749, the average number of miners per pit from 64 to 236.

Expansion of economic activity on this scale needs entrepreneurs to organize it, capital to finance it and institutional and legal forms to shape it. Many of the early entrepreneurs were men launching out on their own, who then continued to control the enterprises they built up. Alfred Krupp or August Borsig and their likes ruled like monarchs over the firms that carried their names. But the joint-stock company was becoming increasingly important, though in Prussia the bureaucracy dominated by the old élites of education and birth were suspicious of it. Men like Ludolf Camphausen, David Hansemann and Gustav Mevissen were active as general business leaders in a number of sectors and organized the accumulation of capital through the joint-stock or the commandite principle. Characteristically they were also leaders of moderate liberalism and played important roles in the events of 1848. Hansemann and Mevissen were involved, after overcoming bureaucratic and legal obstacles, in the foundation of joint-stock banks, the Darmstädter Bank and the Berliner Disconto-Gesellschaft, both of which occupied commanding positions in the development of the German economy well into the future.

Although industrialization was the most salient economic transformation of the 1850s, even Prussia remained a predominantly agrarian country. Agriculture itself experienced rising prosperity and productivity, a kind of golden age, which underpinned the confidence of the traditional agrarian aristocratic élites, especially in East Elbian Prussia. In the quarter century after 1850 German agricultural production rose by 76 per cent. Even before 1848 agriculture had become increasingly market orientated. Feudal restrictions and obligations were abolished and what remained of them after 1848 disappeared in most German states, including Austria, in the 1850s. A class of landless agricultural labourers was created, some of whom migrated into towns and from east to west, providing the cannon fodder for industry. In Prussia’s eastern provinces market forces had brought about a considerable turnover in the ownership of estates. A lot of these were heavily mortgaged and only a third of those that changed hands in the thirty years from 1835 passed through inheritance, the others were sold and about six per cent were forcibly auctioned. Many estate owners were therefore from the bourgeoisie, often successful businessmen who, as in Britain, were taking on the lifestyle of the landed gentry. Nevertheless even in 1885 more than two-thirds of the large estates in Prussia’s East Elbian provinces, covering between them one-third of the total area, were still in the hands of the nobility. It was of considerable political significance that, up to the time of the depression in the 1870s, the great estate owners of Prussia shared the free trade orientation of the industrial and commercial sector. In southern Germany the situation was rather different. The typical aristocratic landowner did not cultivate his own land, but lived on the income from rents. Small peasant farmers tilled the land. Driven to desperation by poor harvests and low prices, they supplied much of the initial revolutionary impetus in 1848, particularly in south-west Germany.

At the bottom of the social hierarchy the transformations of the post-revolutionary era created the beginnings of an industrial proletariat. Such a proletariat, as opposed to the heterogeneous urban underclasses, was numerically still small in 1848, amo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Maps
• 1 German nationalism between failure and revival 1850–1862
• 2 The wars of unification 1862–1870
• 3 Imperial Germany – the liberal phase 1870–1879
• 4 Bismarck’s system in decline 1879–1890
• 5 The Wilhelmine age
• 6 Towards Weltpolitik and social imperialism 1890–1909
• 7 Stagnation at home, ‘encirclement’ abroad 1909–1914
• 8 Germany during the war years 1914–1918
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Tables
• Suggestions for further reading