Authors: Frederick Taylor
Again the optimists were fated to disappointment. The civil guard was used against workers demanding a social as well as a political revolution. For centuries now, the city had more or less willingly traded civic freedoms for security. There were signs that Berliners were already becoming wary of democratic experiments.
The reactionaries, who had been sulking on their estates and plotting revenge, saw their moment. In November 1848, the King called the
army back to Berlin and dissolved the elected assembly. Faced with the royalist general Baron von Wrangel and his troops, the commander of the liberal militia defending the parliament building declared that he would ‘only react to force’. The baron replied with brutal simplicity: ‘Well, force is here.’
Force would, sadly, always ‘be here’ in Berlin from now on, whether from left or right.
Prussia retained a parliament of sorts, heavily rigged in favour of the aristocracy and the wealthier classes, and without control over ministerial appointments. Frederick William IV’s new-found passion for a united Germany faded in the face of Habsburg opposition. For almost twenty years more, the Emperor in Vienna would still dictate what happened in Germany, even though the actual political and economic balance of power there had long tipped in Prussia’s favour.
It would take another reactionary, the cleverest one in German history, to translate this fact into power-political reality. In 1861, Otto von Bismarck became prime minister of Prussia.
Soon the Germans got a united nation, but on very different terms to the ones the Berlin revolutionaries of 1848 had imagined, and certainly not at all what they would have wished.
In January 1861, Frederick William IV died. His brother, now King William I, faced constitutional deadlock. Despite elections’ being loaded in favour of the propertied classes, since 1848 the liberals, or ‘Progressives’, had gained a majority. They were demanding powers that the Prussian establishment did not want to give them. To force the situation, they were blocking the annual budget, which included funding for a reorganisation of the army.
William’s solution, instead of appointing a liberal prime minister, was to give the post to 46-year-old Otto von Bismarck, a bluff Pomeranian landowner and keen proponent of the divine right of kings.
As a former ambassador to Russia and France, Bismarck knew how to play the political game. He found ingenious ways around the budget issue. For eighteen months he hung on in office, generally hated but retaining the support of the King.
Bismarck’s breakthrough came when the Danish King died. An
international disagreement emerged regarding the status of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, adjoining Denmark, which were held by the Danish crown but remained technically part of the German Confederation. The new Danish King proposed to annex the northern territory of Schleswig directly to his kingdom. The Germans objected. It was a complicated problem. As the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, commented waggishly, there were only three men in Europe who understood the complexities of the Schleswig-Holstein question: Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, who was dead; a German professor, who had gone mad; and Palmerston himself, who had forgotten.
In 1864 Prussia, acting for all the German states, occupied the two provinces in concert with Austria. The arrangement lasted for a year or so, until they disagreed over the province’s ultimate fate. The result, in 1866, was a war in which most of the other German states supported Austria. The Prussian armies won easily, crushing the Austrians and their allies in seven weeks.
Immediately after this victory, Bismarck called elections. He rode a wave of patriotic enthusiasm. The Progressives were soundly beaten. A conservative prime minister now had a conservative parliament at his disposal.
The formal unification of Germany came in 1870, after the last of Bismarck’s victorious wars, in this case against France. William I of Prussia became Emperor William I of Germany—and Bismarck his Reich Chancellor.
In 1862, Bismarck had grimly told the Berlin parliament: ‘The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities…but by iron and blood.’ Tragically, he was all too right. Not just for the nineteenth but for the twentieth century too.
The stage was set for what some would call a ‘revolution from above’. Bismarck would be the architect of this fascinating, ominous new development. In the course of the country’s transformation, Berlin would spread out across what had seemed all those centuries ago to be such inhospitable and unpromising sands and lakes. It would become a great, darkly glittering world city.
ON THE EVE OF
the first great war of the twentieth century, Berlin was the second-largest city in Europe. Since unification, massive industrial growth, a breakneck expansion in construction, and a huge increase in wealth, especially for the middle and upper classes, had transformed the German capital into a boom town comparable with San Francisco or Chicago.
Great tenement blocks, often built in gloomy grey stone, spread out from the heart of the city, especially in the east. Consisting of concentric courtyards like Chinese boxes, getting cheaper as the inner courtyards became darker and more airless and the apartments smaller, such blocks were known in Berlin as
Mietskasernen
(rental barracks). In the west, away from the historic centre, well-to-do suburbs ate into the agricultural land and swallowed up the lake landscape that surrounded the city. The newly rich middle and professional classes wanted space and greenery. Districts such as Grunewald, Wilmersdorf, and Zehlendorf rapidly filled with desirable residences in a variety of inauthentic but grandiose styles, be they colonnaded classical villas or turreted, mock-medieval fortresses.
Bismarck’s long dominance as first chancellor of the German Empire (1871-90) saw the liberal flame that burned so brightly in the middle of the century all but die. Many liberals joined Bismarck’s reactionary project, calling themselves ‘National Liberals’ to make their allegiance clear. Middle-class Germans were content to exchange truly representative government for the wealth, power and prestige that rapidly ensued.
After unification, a national parliament or Reichstag was established. Bismarck’s trick was to make this body electable on the basis of universal male suffrage, thus superficially democratic. However, he gave its members no say over the formation of the Reich government, which
remained wholly the Emperor’s prerogative. Who won how many seats was therefore only marginally important. This hybrid form of authoritarian government was Bismarck’s most problematical legacy.
The ‘Prussianisation’ of Germany continued apace. A large national army on the Prussian model, based on conscription, meant that all German males were influenced by military values. The new regime slyly transformed the liberal idea of the ‘Home Guard’ into a reinforcing element for the authoritarian status quo.
The officer in uniform became a figure of great prestige and privilege, not just in small garrison towns but even in the great, cosmopolitan city of Berlin. Officers might not beat soldiers in public any more, as they had in the eighteenth century, but they were assured of a place at the front of the queue in a store, and of a table in a restaurant. This unique attitude of arrogant invulnerability was much remarked on by visiting foreigners.
Berlin in 1914 was none the less not just a big military cantonment. It was also a great world capital and industrial centre. Especially important were dynamic new areas of manufacturing like the electrical and chemical industries. Germany quickly outstripped Britain in this ‘second industrial revolution’, and also in machine-tools and steel-making. The Reich was now the largest and most efficient industrial power in Europe and, after the United States of America, in the world. It enjoyed a literary and journalistic flowering the equal of anywhere in Europe.
So what was the problem? How did the twentieth century, which started, for Germany and for Europe, with such hope and dynamism, become the most catastrophic in history?
It is true that imperial Germany had its neuroses. So did Britain and France. Think of the Dreyfus Affair. It is true that imperial Germany was jingoistic and insecure. But anyone who looks at Britain and France at the same period will also see distasteful hyper-patriotism, and cities that were breeding-grounds for a host of verminous political movements and ominous social anxieties.
1
German society was militaristic, but then what else was the early Boy Scout movement in Britain (founded by a soldier-servant of the empire in 1907) but a system of military training for boys?
It was also true that, as a counterbalance to nationalist xenophobia, Marxist internationalism had grown into a hugely powerful political
force in Germany. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), founded in 1875, became the defining mass movement of the quickly expanding German working class. When the British Labour Party was not even a twinkle in Keir Hardie’s eye, the German socialist movement had a membership measured in millions, and scores of deputies in the Reichstag. Its myriad clubs, debating societies, self-help groups, trade unions, and welfare institutions amounted to an alternative society within society.
In 1881, Chancellor von Bismarck had created the world’s first comprehensive state-directed social welfare system, in great part as a means of heading off the spread of socialism among the German workers. He persuaded the Emperor to sanction a contributory welfare scheme that would protect workers from the worst consequences of poverty due to ill health or old age. In this way he hoped to bind the masses to the authoritarian status quo.
But at the same time as he introduced this welfare system, which put Germany decades ahead of the rest of the world, Bismarck made one serious mistake, which the country would pay for not just during his chancellorship but in the decades to come. The Chancellor attempted not just to hinder but to suppress the expanding socialist movement, whose members he described as ‘rats…who should be exterminated’.
After two assassination attempts against the Emperor in 1878, Bismarck seized his chance. Cynically equating the respectable Left with anarchist regicides, Bismarck enacted emergency legislation to shut down the SPD. Newspapers were banned, homes and offices searched, activists and editors thrown into jail or forced into exile (especially to America). However, it was not possible for Bismarck to stop socialists putting themselves forward for election, or to prevent the foundation of unions, so long as they were not technically affiliated to the illegal party.
The periodically renewable anti-socialist law lasted until 1890. By then thirty-five socialists, representatives of the illegal movement, sat defiantly in the Reichstag. Oppression had, in fact, only made the movement stronger, more defiant and self-reliant. Bismarck’s twelve-year attempt to turn back the political tide failed disastrously.
Emperor William I died in Berlin in March 1888, a few days before his ninety-first birthday. His heir was an enthusiastic liberal, a tendency in which he was encouraged by his wife, the British Princess Victoria.
Tragically, Emperor Frederick III was already ill with throat cancer. He reigned for ninety-nine days. His son and successor, William II, would rule for thirty years and lead the prosperous, united, dynamic Germany he had inherited into unimaginable disaster. He was a believer in his divine right to kingship, and of Germany’s equally divinely ordained position of world dominance, to which, in his eyes, her new strength entitled her.
At twenty-nine, when he became emperor or
Kaiser
, young William was quick-minded but intolerant, stubborn but mercurial, and possessed of a spectacular set of personal neuroses that reflected in important ways the insecurities of his country itself.
The new Emperor was determined not just to reign but to rule. Within two years, he had forced Bismarck out of office. He abandoned Bismarck’s subtle system of alliances, which kept Austria and Russia close to Germany, while France, still smarting from her 1870 defeat, remained safely isolated. William decided that Germany must become a real world power, and she must therefore have a navy to rival Britain’s.
William succeeded only in driving his rivals into each other’s arms. In 1894, France and Russia signed a treaty of alliance. Within another few years, Europe’s ancient enemies, Britain and France, ended hundreds of years of mutual hostility. The agreement they signed covered colonial disputes, but it led directly to a
de facto
alliance and eventually to a triple alliance of Britain, France and Russia. By 1914, this faced the Central European alliance formed by Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The Kaiser heaped fuel on the fire by wild rhetorical outbursts, for which he became internationally notorious. He never learned that being a great power involved great responsibilities. There were plenty of Germans who did understand this, but they were often out-shouted by a new and influential breed of ultra-nationalists. This group was particularly numerous in the prosperous suburbs of Berlin, among the officer corps, the academic élite, and the highly successful industrial salariat, especially those involved in what would later be called the ‘military-industrial complex’.
The paradox within Germany was that, encouraged by the Kaiser, the nationalist Right came to dominate establishment politics, while among the masses socialist internationalism enjoyed ever greater support. In
January 1912, two years before the war, the SPD gained almost 35 per cent of the vote in the Reichstag elections and became the the largest single party. The electoral maps of highly urbanised areas such as Berlin, Hamburg, the Ruhr and Saxony were a sea of socialist red.
The success of the Left in 1912 had no moderating effect on the country’s policies. In fact, it may have persuaded the Right that their anti-democratic ends would be best served by an even more aggressive military and foreign policy, one that would rally support for the ruling élite. Rightists muttered darkly about the ‘encirclement’ of Germany by envious rivals. They complained about the alleged role of Jews in ‘undermining’ traditional authority. They talked of the inevitability of war, and of war as the solution to Germany’s internal divisions.