The Coming of the Third Reich (7 page)

The liberals were certainly of no help in remedying this situation. They themselves lost heavily in terms of votes and seats in the Reichstag in the course of the 1880s and 1890s, though they managed to retain a good deal of support in Germany’s towns and cities. Not the least of their problems was the fact that they had repeatedly split in the course of the late nineteenth century, and, even after the more left-oriented groups had joined forces again in 1910, this still left two mainstream liberal parties, the National Liberals and the Progressives, whose differences went back to the refusal of the latter to forgive Bismarck for collecting taxes in Prussia without parliamentary authorization in the 1860s. Things were just as divided on the right of the political spectrum, however, where there was not one Conservative Party but two, since those who had supported Bismarck’s merging of Prussian particularism into the institutions of the Reich in 1871—anathema to the die-hard Prussian nobility, the Junkers - maintained a separate identity as the so-called ‘Free Conservatives’. Moreover, these two largely Protestant, north German parties had to contend with an even larger political party of the right, the Centre, whose antimodernism and support for the Reich were tempered by its advocacy of social welfare and its critical attitude towards German colonial rule in Africa. Thus Germany before 1914 had not two mainstream political parties but six - the Social Democrats, the two liberal parties, the two groups of Conservatives, and the Centre Party, reflecting among other things the multiple divisions of German society, by region, religion and social class.
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In a situation where there was a strong executive not directly responsible to the legislature, this weakened the prospect of party-politics being able to play a determining role in the state.

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Far from causing a general disillusion with politics, the competition of all these rival political parties helped heat up the political atmosphere until it reached positively feverish dimensions by 1914. Universal manhood suffrage in Reichstag elections, backed by a more or less secret ballot and strict rules of electoral propriety, gave voters confidence in the electoral system. Voter participation reached the astonishing figure of 85 per cent of those eligible to cast their ballot in the Reichstag election of 1912.
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All the evidence goes to show that voters took their duty seriously, and thought carefully about how to reconcile their ideological position with the broader political scenario when it came, as it often did, to voting a second time in run-off ballots under the system of proportional representation adopted by the German constitution for elections to the Reichstag. The electoral system, guaranteed by legal provisions and safeguards, opened up a space for democratic debate and convinced millions of Germans of many political hues that politics belonged to the people.
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Moreover, the daily press in Imperial Germany was almost entirely political, with each newspaper explicitly tied to one or other of the various parties and putting its point of view in almost everything it published.
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Politics were not just the staple diet of conversation amongst the elites and the middle classes, but formed a central focus of discussion in working-class pubs and bars and even governed people’s choice of leisure activities.
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Political discussion and debate turned increasingly after the beginning of the twentieth century to the topic of Germany’s place in Europe and the world. Germans were increasingly aware of the fact that Bismarck’s creation of the Reich was incomplete in a number of different ways. To begin with, it included substantial ethnic and cultural minorities, the legacy of previous centuries of state aggrandisement and ethnic conflict. There were Danes in the north, French-speakers in Alsace-Lorraine and a small Slavic group called the Sorbs in central Germany; but above all there were millions of Poles, inhabiting parts of the former Kingdom of Poland annexed by Prussia in the eighteenth century. Already under Bismarck the state increasingly tried to Germanize these minorities, attacking the use of their languages in the schools and actively encouraging settlement by ethnic Germans. By the eve of the First World War, the use of German was mandatory in public meetings throughout the Reich, and land laws were being reformed in such a way as to deprive the Poles of their fundamental economic rights.
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The notion that ethnic minorities were entitled to be treated with the same respect as the majority population was a view held only by a tiny and diminishing minority of Germans. Even the Social Democrats thought of Russia and the Slavic East as lands of backwardness and barbarism by 1914, and had little or no sympathy for the efforts of Polish-speaking workers in Germany to organize in defence of their rights.
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Looking beyond Germany and Europe to the wider world, the Reich Chancellors who came into office after Bismarck saw their country as a second-class nation when compared with Britain and France, both of which had major overseas empires that spanned the globe. A latecomer on the scene, Germany had only been able to pick up the scraps and crumbs left over by European colonial powers that had enjoyed a head start on them. Tanganyika, Namibia, Togoland, Cameroon, New Guinea, assorted Pacific islands and the Chinese treaty port of Jiaozhou were virtually all the territories that made up Germany’s overseas empire on the eve of the First World War. Bismarck had thought them of little importance and lent his assent to their acquisition with great reluctance. But his successors came to take a different view. Germany’s prestige and standing in the world demanded, as Bernhard von Bülow, Foreign Secretary in the late 1890s, then Reich Chancellor until 1909, put it, a ‘place in the sun’. A start was made on the construction of a massive battle fleet, whose long-term aim was to win colonial concessions from the British, lords of the world’s largest overseas empire, by threatening, or even carrying out, the crippling or destruction of the main force of the British Navy in a titanic confrontation in the North Sea.
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These increasingly ambitious dreams of world power were articulated above all by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, a bombastic, self-important and extremely loquacious man who lost few opportunities to express his contempt for democracy and civil rights, his disdain for the opinions of others and his belief in Germany’s greatness. The Kaiser, like many of those who admired him, had grown up after Germany had been united. He had little awareness of the precarious and adventurous route by which Bismarck had achieved unification in 1871. Following the Prussian historians of his day, he thought of the whole process as historically preordained. He knew none of the nervous apprehension about Germany’s future that had led Bismarck to adopt such a cautious foreign policy in the 1870s and 1880s. Admittedly, the Kaiser’s character was too erratic, his personality too mercurial, for him to have any really consistent effect on the conduct of state affairs, and all too often his ministers found themselves working to counter his influence rather than implement his wishes. His constant declarations that he was the great leader that Germany needed merely served to draw attention to his deficiencies in this respect, and played their part, too, in fostering the nostalgic myth of Bismarckian decisiveness and guile. Many Germans came to contrast the ruthlessness of Bismarck’s amoral statesmanship, in which the end justified the means and statesmen could say one thing while doing, or preparing to do, another, with Wilhelm’s impulsive bombast and ill-considered tactlessness.
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Personalities aside, all of these features of the Germany that Bismarck created could be observed to a greater or lesser degree in other countries as well. In Italy the charismatic example of Garibaldi, leader of the popular forces that helped unite the nation in 1859, provided a model for the later dictator Mussolini. In Spain, the army was no less free of political control than it was in Germany, and in Italy, as in Germany, it reported to the sovereign rather than to the legislature. In Austria-Hungary, the civil service was just as strong and parliamentary institutions even more limited in their power. In France, a Church-state conflict raged that was not far behind that of the German ‘struggle for culture’ in its ideological ferocity. In Russia, a concept equivalent to that of the Reich was also applied to domestic politics and Russia’s relations with its nearest neighbours.
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The Tsarist regime in Russia repressed the socialists even more severely than did its German counterpart and did not yield an inch to the German authorities in its drive to assimilate the Poles, millions of whom were also under its sway. Liberalism, however defined, was weak in all the major states of Eastern and Central Europe by 1914, not just in the German Reich. The political scene was still more fragmented in Italy than it was in Germany, and the belief that war was justified to achieve political aims, in particular the creation of a land empire, was common to many European powers, as the outbreak of the First World War was to show with such terrible clarity in August 1914. All over the Continent, the growing forces of democracy threatened the hegemony of conservative elites. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the age of nationalism not just in Germany, but everywhere in Europe, and the ‘nationalization of the masses’ was taking place in many other countries as well.
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Yet in no nation in Europe other than Germany were all these conditions present at the same time and to the same extent. Moreover, Germany was not just any European country. Much has been written by historians about various aspects of Germany’s supposed backwardness at this time, its alleged deficit of civic values, its arguably antiquated social structure, its seemingly craven middle class and its apparently neo-feudal aristocracy. This was not how most contemporaries saw it at the time. Well before the outbreak of the First World War, Germany was the Continent’s wealthiest, most powerful and most advanced economy. In the last years of peace, Germany was producing two-thirds of continental Europe’s output of steel, half its output of coal and lignite and twenty per cent more electrical energy than Britain, France and Italy combined.
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By 1914, with a population of around 67 million, the German Empire commanded far greater resources of manpower than any other continental European power with the exception of Russia. By comparison, the United Kingdom, France and Austria-Hungary each had a population of between 40 and 50 million at this time. Germany was the world leader in the most modern industries, such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals and electricity. In agriculture, the massive use of artificial fertilizers and farm machinery had transformed the efficiency of the landed estates of the north and east by 1914, by which time Germany was, for example, producing a third of the world’s output of potatoes. Living standards had improved by leaps and bounds since the turn of the century if not before. The products of Germany’s great industrial firms, such as Krupps and Thyssen, Siemens and AEG, Hoechst and BASF, were famous for their quality the world over.
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Viewed nostalgically from the perspective of the early interwar years, Germany before 1914 seemed to many to have been a haven of peace, prosperity and social harmony. Yet beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, it was nervous, uncertain and racked by internal tensions.
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For many, the sheer pace of economic and social change was frightening and bewildering. Old values seemed to be disappearing in a welter of materialism and unbridled ambition. Modernist culture, from abstract painting to atonal music, added to the sense of disorientation in some areas of society.
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The old-established hegemony of the Prussian landed aristocracy, which Bismarck had tried so hard to preserve, was undermined by the headlong rush of German society into the modern age. Bourgeois values, habits and modes of behaviour had triumphed in the upper and middle reaches of society by 1914; yet simultaneously they were themselves being challenged by the growing self-assertion of the industrial working class, organized in the massive Social Democratic labour movement. Germany, unlike any other European country, had become a nation-state not before the industrial revolution, but at its height; and on the basis, not of a single state, but of a federation of many different states whose German citizens were bound together principally by a common language, culture and ethnicity. Stresses and strains created by rapid industrialization interlocked with conflicting ideas about the nature of the German state and nation and their place in the larger context of Europe and the world. German society did not enter nationhood in 1871 in a wholly stable condition. It was riven by rapidly deepening internal conflicts which were increasingly exported into the unresolved tensions of the political system that Bismarck had created.
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These tensions found release in an increasingly vociferous nationalism, mixed in with alarmingly strident doses of racism and antisemitism, which were to leave a baleful legacy for the future.

GOSPELS OF HATE

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