Germany in the Twentieth Century (RLE: German Politics)

David Childs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317542278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

The book traces the development of Germany from the Kaiser's Reich in the 1870s to the reunited democratic state led by Helmut Kohl in the 1990s. The author begins by countering the popular view of Germany before 1914 as irredeemably reactionary, and after assessing Germany's part in the First World War, he outlines the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic. The 12 years of Hitler's destructive experiment are presented in a balanced way as part of the overall development of the country. Germany in defeat is then discussed, as is heer rebirth under Four Power occupation. The last chapters explore the two separate German states and the events leading up to the restoration of German unity.

1
Germany before 1918

The spy thriller The Riddle of the Sands, by the Anglo-Irish writer Erskine Childers, was first published in 1903. It was the story of two Englishmen who used a yachting holiday off the northwest coast of Germany to engage in espionage. They discover the Germans rehearsing an invasion of England. The book has remained popular up to the 1990s and, for many of its post-1945 readers, it represents one of the few glimpses they are likely to have of the forgotten world of the Kaiser's Germany. It must have contributed greatly to the negative image, in so far as any image of it exists at all in the English-speaking world, of the German Reich between 1871 and 1918. That image is usually one of marching, robot-like soldiers wearing spiked helmets and commanded by arrogant and often sadistic officers.

The growing German fleet was a cause for concern in Britain but Germany had no plans to invade the British Isles. It had built up the most efficient army in Europe, an army which had a great influence on German society, and was regarded by many in Britain, the USA and elsewhere as, in most respects, the leading European state.

The German contribution to the U S A and Britain

Before 1914 British and American reformers often referred to the German example when they sought to initiate improvements in their own societies. Between 1820 and 1979 more immigrants arrived in the USA from Germany than from any other country. Other German-speakers arrived from Austria. Some of them were political refugees who fled the repression which followed the failed 1848 revolution or Bismarck's anti-Socialist laws (in force 1878-90). Some emigrated as a result of the Kulturkampf against the Catholic church. Many others simply went in search of a better standard of living as well as a little more freedom. They built up flourishing German-speaking communities as far apart as the cities of New Braunfels and Fredericksburg in Texas and those like Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee in the Mid-West. In such places German was taught in the schools and German-style institutions were proudly developed and preserved. They gave the USA much, from beer brewing, Levi Jeans and Heinz '57 varieties' to great orchestras, opera, and libraries. Some of the U S A's most prestigious universities such as Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Chicago were established following the German model, as were the graduate schools of Yale and Harvard.

Britain had no such large German communities but German academics, scientists and businessmen played an important part in the development of education, trade and industry in Britain before 1914. At the top of British society the royal family was intimately connected with Germany. Between 1714 and 1901 the House of Hanover provided the British monarchs. The last of them, Queen Victoria, married Prince Albert, of the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a very minor German state. Wilhelm II, German emperor 1888-1918, was her grandson and nephew of Edward VII, British monarch, 1901-10.

The pages of Hansard, the official report of the proceedings in the British parliament, reveal the great interest in Germany before 1914. While the German fleet bulked large, much was also said about German education, social welfare, railways, local government, industry and technology. In 1901 Sir Charles Dilke raised his voice to deplore the lack of progress made in reducing plumbism (lead poisoning) in the British china and earthenware industry compared with Germany. In that same year a number of Irish and other MPs compared the sorry state of higher education in British-ruled Ireland with the situation in Germany. They attacked the lack of opportunities for Catholics to study in Ireland compared with those for Catholics in Protestant-led Germany. The Liberal, R. B. Haldane, commented in the same debate:

The success of the industries of large towns depends upon the application of skill, knowledge and science. Any of the small insignificant German towns would put Belfast in the shade in this respect.

Belfast was then even more important as the key industrial city of Ireland than it is today. Haldane's remarks applied equally to the poor situation in England and Wales, compared with Germany. Fear of German competition was already leading to some improvements. In 1901 some MPs criticised the fact that the British army used German artillery and the navy had bought Duerr water-tube boilers for some of its ships. These purchases were just two of many signs that Britain had lost its place as the world's leading industrial state and had been overtaken, in many fields, by Germany. The Reich was second only to the United States.

German industrial growth

From being backward in industrial terms in the first half of the nineteenth century, Germany swept ahead in the second half and especially after 1871. Germany had overcome a number of handicaps to achieve this. Except for potash it lacked raw material reserves. Its iron ore was poor, and inferior brown coal had to be used because of the limited amount of hard coal.

Many of its industrial centres were far from the sea. But the removal of internal barriers within Germany and the building of external ones helped to stimulate and protect home industries. The indemnity paid by France after its defeat in the war of 1870-1 helped, and the enthusiasm caused by the creation of the Reich in 1871 was an important psychological factor. The movement of population from the land to the towns was both a result of the industrial upsurge and helped to cause it. The same was true of technical innovation. Finally, Germany, through its extremely well-developed education system was able to provide a skilled labour force and to initiate change based on new technologies.

Fear of German competition had led Britain in 1887 to impose a 'Made in Germany' stamp on German goods imported into Britain. This gradually became an advantage to German exporters as their goods, from toys to musical instruments, cutlery to furniture, motor cars to machines, became recognised for their high quality. Among the inventions Germany gave the world before 1914 were: modern printing and paperback books, fluorescent lighting, refrigeration, synthetic rubber, artificial fertilisers, the concept of vitamins, the x-ray machine, precision optics, the Geiger counter, the Diesel engine, and the motor cars of Daimler and Benz. The engineer Werner von Siemens built the first electric train and electric dynamo and founded the company which still bears his name. The photographer Josef Albert developed the practical foundations of photographic printing and Johann Christian Eberle, Mayor of Nossen, started the first giro bank in 1909.

German education

Between 1901 and 1919 Germans were awarded 18 Nobel Prizes in science—more than those awarded to scientists of any other nation. This was no accident nor was it the result of native German brilliance. It was the outcome of Germany's investment in education over a long period. Britain's lack of such investment was undoubtedly an important factor in its industrial decline.

Influenced by the German example the M P H. H, Mundella attempted in 1870 to have compulsory education introduced in Britain. He failed, Conservative critics claiming such a move would be un-British. Ten years later, as Vice-President of the Board of Education (forerunner of the Ministry of Education), he persuaded a majority to vote for such a measure. Prussia, the main German state, proclaimed compulsory school attendance by royal decrees in 1716 and 1717. The small state of Weimar introduced it in 1619. No doubt these, and similar decrees were not fully implemented until some time later, no doubt the teaching was not always very effective, but there can be no doubt either that most Germans were receiving some kind of meaningful instruction long before the bulk of the population in England, Wales and Ireland.

Germany's system of technical education came to be admired even more than its elementary schools and its long-established universities. At the top of this system was the Technical University at Charlottenburg in Berlin. The T u Charlottenburg was proclaimed a full university by the Kaiser in 1899. There were ten other such technical universities most of them founded in the first half of the nineteenth century as vocational schools. Below them was a vast network of lesser institutions which produced the managers, supervisors, foremen and skilled workers. Finally, there were the continuation schools of more recent origin. They were under local control. In many parts of the country evening attendance was compulsory for two or three years after completion of the Volksschule (elementary school). The pupils were in the 14 to 18 age group and the subjects closely related to the needs of industry. In Britain and America attempts were made to imitate these developments on a very limited scale.

German education faced a variety of critics, both at home and abroad. Some criticised the patriotic indoctrination, others claimed there was too much learning by rote. But such criticisms could have been made about all educational systems at the time. H. M. Felkin, a Nottingham man whose business was in Chemnitz, observed in his pioneering Technical Education In A Saxon Town (1881): 'Everything is taught ... in such a manner, that it is mentally grasped by the pupil, and there is a minimum of learning by rote.' He urged his native city to emulate Chemnitz and helped to create the climate of opinion there which led to the setting up of a university college in 1881. Imperial College in London was also an attempt to imitate the technical universities of Germany.

The Kaiser's Germany was widely admired for its successful encouraging of the arts. The Labour M P John Burn commented in the British House of Commons in 1901 that the Kaiser 'spent an enormous proportion of his salary in art patronage ... a practice that might well be followed by those in high places here'. Every German state prided itself on its opera, theatre and orchestral concerts. Richard Wagner until his death in 1883, Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, were the great cultural ambassadors of the Reich. The Silesian playwright Gerhart Hauptmann gained the Nobel Prize in 1912 for his contribution to literature, the fourth German to do so since its inception in 1901. Far more significant internationally, however, was to be Thomas Mann whose epic family chronicle Buddenbrooks appeared in 1901. His Nobel Prize came in 1929. The major intellectual and philosophical presence brooding over the period was however that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who went mad in 1889 and died of syphilis in Weimar in 1900. The son of a pastor, he became a self-proclaimed anti-Christ, atheist and nihilist. Appointed professor of classical philology at Basel University at the age of 24, he never liked the job. Influenced by Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism he took up Darwinian ideas, ethical materialism and the free market economics of the Manchester School. He favoured an intellectual hierarchy but was neither anti-semitic nor a German nationalist. His 'superman' was a European intellectual rather than a German warrior. His ideas appealed to the educated liberal bourgeoisie who resented church and aristocracy but feared the rise of the mob, represented in their eyes by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (S P D).

The first welfare state and the S P D

Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Reich 1871-90, and before that Chancellor of Prussia, also feared the spd, Bismarck sought to halt the rise of Social Democracy by introducing welfare measures which, he hoped, would take the wind out of the S P D's sails. During his chancellorship four main laws were introduced, setting up factory inspection (1878); sickness insurance (1883); accident insurance (1884); and old age pensions and pensions for the disabled (1889). The British Liberal government studied the German example when it passed laws in 1905, 1909 and 1911 covering the same areas. Under successive chancellors these measures were extended before 1914 to include regulation of child and female labour and the recognition of Sunday as a rest day.

The S P D rejected these measures on the grounds that they were an attempt to lure the workers into accepting a crust when they could have the whole loaf which, the S P D believed, they had baked anyway. Founded in 1875 at Gotha, the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (S A P D) represented the coming together of two earlier socialist parties. In the new party the followers of Marx and Engels got the upper hand over those of Ferdinand Lassalle. The S A P D preached the inevitability of Socialism and its unalterable opposition to the Kaiser and the German state. It thrived on the problems of the growing working class as Germany industrialised. Bismarck's anti-socialist laws restricted the s a p d's activities but they did not entirely rule out Social Democrats being elected to the parliament, the Reichstag. The party grew nevertheless. The sapd changed its name to Social Democratic Party of Germany (S P D) in 1890, the year the antisocialist laws expired: it emerged from the elections as the biggest single party, and came to attract over one third of the voters. In the last elections of the Kaiser's Germany, in 1912, it gained 34.8 per cent of the votes and 110 seats out of 397. Although it had adopted a Marxist programme at Erfurt in 1891 it was essentially a pacifist parliamentary party. Eduard Bernstein became known as a revisionist because he wanted the S P D to admit its true nature and admit that Marx was wrong in certain essentials. However, spd leader August Bebel felt that such an admission could undermine the morale of the party faithful in this, the first mass political party in history.

Catholics and Jews

The final quarter of the nineteenth century saw the triumph of liberal secularism in many European states and a consequent hardening of opposition to the Catholic church. This happened in Germany as well as France and Italy. The Catholics had not opposed German unity as such but would have liked the inclusion of Catholic Austria rather than a 'small' Germany under the hegemony of Protestant Prussia. The proclamation of the dogma of Papal infallibility in 1870 helped to sharpen suspicion of the Catholic church. A number of laws were passed aimed at reducing Catholic influence in Prussia and, where possible, throughout the Reich. The Jesuit Order was banned in 1872, obligatory civil marriage was introduced first in Prussia and then, in 1875, throughout Germany, and control of education was tightened up. These and other measures and press campaigns against the Catholic church became known as the Kulturkampf or cultural struggle. Part of the Catholic response was the setting up of a political party to represent their interests—das Zentrum or the Centre Party, so-called because it took its seats in the centre of the parliament. In its early days it was led by a Hanoverian aristocrat and former minister of Hanover, Ludwig Windthorst. In 1887 Bismarck reached a compromise with Pope Leo XIII but within Germany the Kulturkampf continued in a milder form. The Centre Party's vote reveals to a degree the changing strength of feeling in Catholic circles: 18.6 per cent in 1871; 23.2 in 1881; 18.6 in 1890; 19.7 in 1903; and 16.4 in 1912. In the 1912 election it is believed to have lost votes to the S P D and the Liberals. It had developed a comprehensive social reform programme and its own trade unions in an effort to counter the SPD influence among Catholic workers. It vigorously defended the rights of the German states against the centralising influences of Prussia and Berlin. It attempted to defend the interests of Polish Catholics within the Reich. It also attacked the excesses of German colonialism.

In 1791 revolutionary France was the first European state to emancipate the Jews, granting them all the rights and duties of other citizens. This became a disadvantage for German and other Jews after the defeat of revolutionary/Napoleonic France in 1815. While continuing to be persecuted as the slayers of Christ, they were now linked also with the terror and disorder of the French revolution. Jewish emancipation was adopted by the North German Federation in 1869 and was extended to the German Reich as a whole on its foundation in 1871. Because of the earlier restrictions placed on them the Jews were heavily concentrated in certain trades and professions. In rural areas they were often horse traders, corn merchants, travelling traders and money lenders—all activities which could cause resentment against them from time to time. In the cities they became heavily involved with the stock exchange, retail trade, the theatre, the textile trade and the liberal press and publishing. The crash of the stock market in 1873 exposed them to the anger of many small investors who lost their money. In anti-s P D circles the Jews were regarded with suspicion, since Karl Marx and Lassalle were of Jewish origin as were a number of prominent Social Democrats. At a political level anti-Semitism was organised by Adolf Stocker in his Christian Social movement. Stocker was elected to the Reichstag in 1881 and joined the Conservatives, but his movement failed. However, the German Conservatives adopted an anti-Jewish plank as part of their Tivoli Programme in 1892. This was later abandoned. At the intellectual level Heinrich von Treitschke, professor of history and National Liberal member of the Reichstag, 1871-1884, was probably more effective in pressing the anti-Semitic message. Anti-Semitism existed throughout Europe at the time. In Russia and Hungary there were pogroms. In France the Dreyfus affair revealed the strength of anti-Jewish sentiment. In Britain the first immigration control measures were introduced before 1914 to control the flow of Jews from eastern Europe. Anti-Semitism was also widespread in the U S A. On the other hand, Jews did reach the highest levels of society in Germany as well as in France, Britain and elsewhere despite much unofficial discrimination. Albert Ballin, an unbaptised Jew, rose to be head of the great Hamburg-Amerika shipping line and a friend of the Kaiser. Albert Einstein became the symbol of Jewish intellectual achievement, but there were many others in science and the arts such as Max Liebermann, the painter, and Max Reinhardt, the theatre director. If anti-Semitism was alive and well in the Kaiser's Germany, it failed to succeed in an organised political form while Jewish organisations flourished and individual Jews climbed the ladder to success.

Universal suffrage but unrepresentative government

Election to the parliament of the Reich, the Reichstag, was by secret ballot and universal, male adult suffrage. On the face of it this made the German parliament the most democratic in 1871. Yet the reality was somewhat different. Firstly, the constituencies became more and more unrepresentative, not taking account of the population drift from the conservative rural areas to the more radical towns. Secondly, parliament had only restricted competence. The individual German states retained limited powers and some matters, defence for instance, were only put before the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the third edition
• List of abbreviations
• Maps
• 1 Germany before 1918
• 2 From Defeat to Democratic Republic
• 3 Weimar from Crisis to Stability
• 4 Weimar Crisis and Capitulation
• 5 Hitler's Germany, 1933-39
• 6 Phoney War, Total War and Total Defeat
• 7 Germany under Occupation
• 8 Adenauer's Germany
• 9 Ulbricht's Leninist State
• 10 East Germany in the Sixties
• 11 West Germany in the Sixties
• 12 The Social-Liberal Coalition
• 13 Kohl's First Term
• 14 German Unity Restored
• Biographies of 152 Germans, 1871-1991
• Tables
• The Flag
• Chronology 1871-1991
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of persons