In the spring of 1870 a south German aristocrat, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, was visiting Berlin. Born of a Protestant mother, brought up a Catholic, and married to a Russian princess, Hohenlohe was liberal in his political views and, unusually for a man of his background, he had come to support the idea of a united Germany under Prussian leadership. Some twenty-four years later he would become the first chancellor of the German Empire who did not come from Prussia. But at the time of his visit in April 1870 the German Empire did not exist, and the only representative political institution linking the recently created North German Confederation with the German states south of the River Main was a customs parliament. Moreover, just six weeks before his visit, Hohenlohe had been forced to resign as chief minister of Bavaria because of his political views. Having spent three years working to improve relations between Prussia and the south German states after they had fought on opposing sides in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Hohenlohe had finally accepted in March 1870 that his policies were out of tune with a Bavarian electorate that was increasingly clerical and anti-Prussian.
Hohenlohe’s mood during his stay in the Prussian capital was gloomy. The future of Germany seemed even less certain than his own political prospects: he told a Prussian diplomat that he ‘should doubtless not live to see the formation of an acknowledged German State’.1 He had serious misgivings about internal developments in the Kingdom of Prussia and the nature of the North German Confederation, established after the war of 1866. There were also rumours circulating in Berlin that Otto von Bismarck, the minister president of Prussia and chancellor of the North German Confederation, was planning to persuade Wilhelm I, the Prussian king, to assume the old imperial title of German Kaiser (emperor) and thereby force the kings of Bavaria and Württemberg in the south to recognize Prussian hegemony.2 On 25 April 1870, Hohenlohe attended the inaugural meeting of a small number of south German national liberal parliamentarians who called themselves the Main Bridge group. As they sat around a large table and drank beer, Hohenlohe heard little to encourage optimism. When one of the deputies suggested that they should drum up support for the national cause by holding a political banquet (as had been done before the revolutions of 1848), another replied waggishly that all the food eaten over the years in the name of German unity could have filled the River Main.3
Only on 9 May, when he witnessed the grand parade of the Berlin garrison on the Kreuzberg, did Hohenlohe adopt a more positive outlook. ‘The whole garrison of Berlin had turned out. A great show of princes, generals and so forth’, he wrote in his journal. ‘I mingled with the crowd and was struck with the interest manifested by the lowest of people in things military. No trace of the former animosity against the military which used to be noticeable among the lower classes. The commonest working man looked on the troops with the feeling that he belonged or had belonged to them.’4 Hohenlohe’s remarks attest to the popularity and prestige of the Prussian army after the Austro-Prussian War, an army which had been reformed and expanded in the 1860s in the face of bitter opposition from the Prussian parliament. Its role in forging the North German Confederation already suggested its new status. But in May 1870 Hohenlohe could scarcely have anticipated how those same troops on parade in Berlin would soon help to turn his dream of a united Germany into a reality. In July 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out as a consequence of Prussian provocation and French diplomatic blunders. On 1–2 September the Prussian army, together with its south German allies, smashed the forces of the French Second Empire at Sedan. Within weeks agreement was reached to found a new German Empire (Reich), which was proclaimed from the Hall of Mirrors at the palace of Versailles outside Paris on 18 January 1871, even before the formal conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. The army had finally overcome the obstacles to political unification and silenced the pessimistic prognostications of national liberal parliamentarians. Henceforth it could claim to be both the guardian and guarantor of German national unity, but its pre-eminent position within the emerging new empire would also cast a long shadow over Germany’s political development.
Bismarckian Germany was born on the battlefield. There were doubtless many forces in the nineteenth century that favoured the emergence of a united German state under Prussian leadership. But it was never self-evident that in less than a decade, between 1864 and 1871, the Kingdom of Prussia would fight three successful wars against Denmark, Austria, and France. Nor, as Hohenlohe’s experience confirms, was it possible for anyone to predict with certainty before the Franco-Prussian War what the future shape and institutional structure of a united Germany might be. In the heady atmosphere of heightened nationalism generated by war against the old enemy France, the south German states instinctively gravitated to Prussia for reasons of self-preservation as well as military obligation. They eventually acceded to the political union in return for very few amendments to the constitution of the former North German Confederation. Just as in 1866 Bismarck himself had remarked, ‘If there is to be revolution, we would prefer to make it than to suffer it’,5 so in 1871 the rulers of Bavaria and Württemberg reluctantly accepted Prussian domination of a new federated empire of sovereign princes for fear that the Franco-German ‘racial war’ (Völkerkrieg) could unleash something far worse. Only the south German state of Baden, whose grand duke was married to the sister of the Prussian king, was enthusiastic about the union.
The foundation of the German Empire signified a revolution ‘from above’, facilitated by military conquest and agreed by princes. It appeared to present a definitive solution to the problem of political fragmentation which had bedevilled German-speaking Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Its violent birth overtook decades of debate and discussion among the educated middle classes in parliamentary assemblies, state bureaucracies, social salons, and the press about the future shape of a German national state. It ended whatever prospects might still have existed for the peaceful emergence of modern Germany through the slow, organic convergence of the economic and political interests of the German states. Indeed, almost overnight, what had long been recognized as a complex political problem was apparently rendered simple by the application of military might. Politics and diplomacy in German-speaking Europe were also changed beyond recognition. Less than a month after the proclamation from Versailles, the British Conservative statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, addressing the House of Commons, insightfully remarked that the world was witnessing what amounted to ‘the German revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century’.6
The emergence of a united Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871 was neither a simple nor a definitive solution to the questions surrounding German identity, nationhood, and state formation in Europe. The fallout from the German ‘revolution from above’ would affect Europeans for decades to come, until the First World War and beyond. Moreover, the struggle to achieve a German nation state was scarcely over in 1871; rather, it can be argued that a distinctive German national identity was only just beginning to emerge with the foundation of the German Empire and that German nationalism was now entering a new, more aggressive phase. German political unity under Prussian leadership involved severing centuries-old ties with the Austrian Germans living in the Habsburg Empire; this political and cultural shift would prove particularly challenging to Catholics in the south who had traditionally looked to Austria for leadership on German issues. It also ensured that the Danes of northern Schleswig and over two million Polish subjects in Prussia’s eastern provinces would be incorporated into a new political entity which now laid claim to being a German national state. The Prussian decision to annex two French provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, after the French defeat of 1870–71 signified the inclusion of another disaffected national minority within the new German Empire. How these minorities would be treated and what kind of relationship the empire would develop with the millions of Germans who lived outside its borders was not yet clear.
Nor were the political arrangements in the empire unambiguous. Whether the new entity was really a federation of sovereign states or a state owing allegiance to a single monarch, how power was to be divided between the theoretically sovereign princes and the new Kaiser, and how much weight was to be accorded to the views of the German people, represented in a German parliament (Reichstag) directly elected by universal male suffrage, all remained to be clarified. As with all battles, the struggle for unification involved winners and losers, those who supported the outcome and those who opposed it, men of conviction and fellow travellers. In the euphoria of 1871, inducements were offered, compromises were struck, and doubts suppressed or disregarded. Many liberals were seduced by the fruits of military victory, reconciling themselves to a less centralized and less liberal state than they had anticipated: they hoped that it would have the potential to develop over time into a constitutional nation state more to their liking. Prussian conservatives, for their part, lamented the concessions to liberalism and parliamentarianism and expressed their anxieties over the further ‘dilution’ of Prussia and Prussian values in a larger German entity. The new political arrangements could also scarcely mask the deep social, regional, and confessional divisions which the new German Empire inherited. Thus only time could reveal how permanent these arrangements would be and whether the solutions forged on the battlefield would attract popular support.
These unresolved questions were perhaps most apparent to the man widely acclaimed as the architect of German unification: the first imperial German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck achieved far more in 1871 than he had ever anticipated or believed possible, and he was to spend most of his remaining years in office fretting that his new political edifice could disintegrate, exposing him to the ridicule of the world. From 1862 Bismarck had steered the foreign policy of Prussia as its minister president and foreign minister, but his diplomacy only appears clear-sighted and resolute with the benefit of hindsight. Bismarck was always eager to expand the power of Prussia in Germany and instinctively knew what he wanted to avoid. But ultimately he only groped his way to a solution of the ‘German problem’, almost as a byproduct of his quest to ensure Prussian strength and security in Europe. Moreover, having come to power in 1862 as an entrenched and pugnacious conservative who was determined to defend the powers of the Prussian monarchy against any liberal or democratic encroachments, Bismarck stunned his political opponents by his willingness to trump them with radical initiatives and his propensity to gamble his country’s fortunes in the lottery of war. From 1871 Bismarck was the dominant figure in German political life, determining the political development of the empire for the first nineteen years of its existence until he was eventually dismissed from office—two weeks before his seventy-fifth birthday—by the young Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890. But, despite his awe-inspiring stature as the ‘founder of the Reich’ (Reichsgründer) and his manifest determination to impress his personality on his new creation, it was also far from certain in 1871 whether Bismarck had the requisite political skills to build the broad coalition of domestic support necessary for the future political consolidation of the empire. Nor was it clear whether, in the aftermath of war, he could safeguard the international position of his new Reich, which was bound to have profound implications for the stability of the European state system.
Before 1871 the great powers had traditionally been able to make adjustments to the European balance of power at the expense of the German-speaking lands. This was no longer the case after the German Empire was founded. Moreover, that empire was second only to Britain in terms of its industrial development, and over the subsequent two decades it was to provide ample demonstration of its growing economic power. The foundation of Imperial Germany marked a caesura in European international relations. It not only changed the political map of Europe, it also had a major impact on all its neighbours. With hindsight its dramatic arrival on the scene can be seen as contributing fundamentally to the longterm origins of the First World War. In the first two decades of its existence, the German Empire enjoyed what is often described as a ‘latent hegemony’ in Europe or a ‘semi-hegemonial’ position. Bismarck was adamant about reassuring the other powers that Germany was not a threat to the peace of Europe and he generally cautioned restraint. After 1890 the men in charge of German foreign policy were not so willing to work within these self-imposed restrictions.
The European great powers did not intervene during the Franco-Prussian War to forestall the emergence of a united Germany. Indeed, compared to the alternative of a resurgent France, Prussia’s consolidation of its influence over the south German states appeared to Britain and Russia to be a limited and acceptable aim in 1870. Russia ultimately rejected proposals for international mediation in the crisis, preferring to exploit the war to revise unilaterally the peace terms imposed after its defeat in the Crimean War in 1856. Britain, too, was not inclined to aid Napoleon III, especially after Bismarck publicized the French emperor’s plans to occupy Belgium. The likely emergence of a second-rank German power, soon to be headed by a liberal crown prince who was married to the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, was generally welcomed in London. The new state would surely be a useful counterweight to the Continental dominance of Paris and St Petersburg. Austria, which had so recently been defeated by Prussia in the war of 1866, might have been expected to take France’s side in 1870. But even if its anti-Prussian chief minister, Friedrich von Beust, prayed for a French victory, there was no great animosity towards Prussia within the Habsburg Empire after the relatively lenient peace of 1866; and it was so beset with internal tensions and financial problems after reorganizing its monarchy in 1867 that it ultimately could not run the risk of supporting either side in 1870.
The great powers of Europe may have looked with relative equanimity on the German subjugation of France in 1870–71, but they undoubtedly underestimated Prussia’s military strength during the Wars of Unification and awoke from their complacency to a startling new reality. The outcome of the Franco-Prussian War was in doubt only between 15 July 1870 and 2 September; thereafter the negotiations between Prussia and the south German states to found the empire presented the other powers with a fait accompli. The victory at Sedan helped to destroy any remaining illusions about the military power of the emerging new Germany. The professionalism and efficiency of the Prussian army manifestly eclipsed the military strength of any other Continental power. Moreover, the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine signalled that France and Germany were unlikely to be reconciled and that the issue would be an open wound in European international relations. Bismarck cited political, strategic, and economic arguments in favour of the annexations but, in exceeding his stated goals, he undoubtedly heightened mistrust of his intentions. The German Empire not only incurred the lasting enmity of France; it also now appeared to seek aggrandizement at the expense of its neighbours and to threaten European stability and security.
The political unification of Germany also marked the culmination of a remarkable period of upheaval in Europe, when older forms of diplomacy were discarded and Bismarck harnessed new ideological and social forces to justify and legitimize his foreign policy. In 1866, for example, Bismarck was willing to use revolutionary nationalism to potentially destructive effect against the multinational Austrian Empire, seeking contacts with the leaders of its Hungarian, Czech, and other minorities with the aim of encouraging internal ferment. In 1871 he deliberately whipped up German nationalism as a means of uniting the people behind the war against their old enemy, France. All this further unsettled the established powers of Europe, making them wary of the implications of German unity and unable to predict its consequences. Bismarck and many German nationalists declared themselves satisfied with a ‘lesser Germany’ (Kleindeutschland), which did not include German-speakers in Austria; however, if taken to its logical conclusion, the idea that all ethnic Germans should live in one state or that the new Germany should have a claim on their national loyalty was likely to destabilize Continental Europe. This concern was not unfounded. The euphoria after 1871 lent credence to the arguments of German nationalists who saw the creation of the empire as the beginning rather than the end of a process and who urged that Germany should consolidate the ‘partial unification’ of 1871 by seeking further expansion.
Thus, however complacent the rest of Europe had been about the political unification of Germany, from 1871 onward the new empire faced a variety of external threats, not the least of which was Bismarck’s recurring nightmare that the other European powers might come together in a hostile coalition to undo his work of unification. Bismarck was acutely aware of Germany’s geopolitical and strategic vulnerability, exposed on virtually all sides by the lack of natural borders and with only limited access to the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. However much he assured the chancelleries of Europe that the new Germany was now a ‘satiated’ state with no further territorial ambitions and that it constituted no threat to the balance of power, Bismarck’s reputation for diplomatic cunning created a persistent sense of unease in other European capitals in the 1870s and 1880s.
Bismarck alone determined almost every facet of German foreign policy during the first two decades of the empire’s existence. Indeed, he was also the dominant figure in European diplomacy from 1871. He commanded enormous respect at home and abroad, as well as the awe and obedience of his subordinates in the German Foreign Office. But even he found that the requirements of German foreign policy challenged all his diplomatic ingenuity and skill during his remaining period in office. He initially underestimated the implications of Germany’s latent hegemony in Europe, and he adjusted only slowly to the new reality. Moreover, while his diplomacy is generally seen as successful, especially in comparison to the blunders and hubris of his successors, by the late 1880s he was finding it increasingly difficult to stave off unwelcome international developments, some of which can be seen as the inevitable (albeit delayed) consequence of German unification.
That Bismarck was fully alert to the potential danger of a hostile coalition emerging to undo his work of unification became apparent in 1875 during the so-called War in Sight crisis. The chancellor himself precipitated this crisis between Germany and France, not least to intimidate France, which had revived surprisingly quickly after being defeated and burdened with a heavy indemnity in 1871. But the crisis resulted in Russian and British warnings to Berlin that Germany should not indulge in any further aggression against its western neighbour. The spectre of a possible coalition between France, Russia, and Britain to contain German expansionism now became a real danger for Bismarck—as real as his earlier fear of a coalition of the Catholic powers of Europe, centred on the Papacy, Austria, or France to reverse Prussian gains (though he calculated that France would be less likely to embark on such a course under a republican government than a monarchy). Likened by Tsar Alexander II to Napoleon I, ‘who, at the end of each war sought a pretext to begin another one’,7 Bismarck knew he had nothing to gain in Europe by being seen as an aggressive disturber of the peace.
Such considerations encouraged Bismarck to conclude a series of alliances from the late 1870s to preserve and stabilize Germany’s position in Europe. These alliances were designed to ensure that France rather than Germany would be isolated in Europe, that Germany would always be friends with three of the five major European powers, and that if possible all the great powers, with the exception of France, would look to Berlin for support. Bismarck set out his ideas on German foreign policy in June 1877 in a document known as the Kissingen Dictation. His stated aim was to achieve ‘an overall political situation in which all the great powers except France have need of us and are as far as possible kept from forming coalitions against us by their relations with one another’.8
The lynchpin of this Bismarckian ‘alliance system’ was the Dual Alliance concluded with Austria in 1879 and expanded by Italian accession into the Triple Alliance in 1882. This treaty proved a landmark in European international relations, coming thirteen years after Prussia and Austria had fought to resolve their rivalry for influence over German-speaking Europe. It formed the cornerstone of both countries’ foreign policy right up to their disastrous partnership in the First World War. Cultural and domestic interests linked the two powers, and Bismarck’s intentions are generally seen as defensive in concluding what nevertheless constituted an offensive–defensive alliance. But Austria clearly saw the alliance primarily as a vehicle for German support against Russia, and there were also strategic considerations on the German side which cast some doubt on Bismarck’s professed aims. Despite his frequent assertions of German disinterest in south-eastern Europe, for example, the Dual Alliance was by no means incompatible with an ambition to promote German hegemony there. Kaiser Wilhelm I strongly resisted signing a treaty which he anticipated would constitute a significant snub to Russia, but after six weeks of opposition he eventually submitted to the will of his chancellor.
Bismarck successfully preserved Russo-German friendship after the conclusion of the Dual Alliance with Austria in 1879. Despite mounting Austro-Russian tensions in the Balkans from the late 1870s, he secured both powers’ formal accession to a Three Emperors Agreement in 1881, which ensured their benevolent neutrality in the event of another Franco-German war. The arrangement was renewed with difficulty in 1884 but collapsed under the strain of a protracted crisis over Bulgaria in 1885–87. By this time Bismarck was also concerned about an increasingly nationalist government in France in which the revanchist General Boulanger was appointed minister of war. To preserve Germany’s ties with Russia—the ‘wire to St Petersburg’—and to ensure that France continued to be isolated in Europe, Bismarck thus concluded a Secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887, the existence of which only became publicly known some ten years later, after Bismarck had left office and it had long lapsed. The treaty had to remain secret, not least because it highlighted the duplicitous nature of his diplomacy. It promised German support for Russian interests in the Balkans and thereby contradicted the terms of the Dual Alliance which supported Austria. But, at the same time, Bismarck secured further support for Austrian interests from Britain and Italy by encouraging them to conclude a tripartite Mediterranean Agreement in order to maintain an effective balance in the region. This complicated balancing act is historically significant less because of its intricacy than because it helps us situate Bismarck in a larger historical context. Bismarck’s great strength was to understand the multidimensional nature of European international relations and how Germany’s bilateral diplomacy might have an impact on third parties. Always ready to improvise to achieve his desired aim, he developed a series of alliances centred on Berlin and frequently succeeded in manipulating the other powers of Europe to react in ways which furthered his purposes.
Although Bismarck had successfully engineered three victorious Prussian wars, after 1871 he recognized that German security largely depended on peace and stability in Europe. His diplomacy accommodated this shift. He deliberately posed as an impartial arbiter in international disputes, most memorably at the Congress of Berlin on the Near Eastern Question in 1878. Then, and during other crises, too, he correctly calculated that Germany had little to gain and everything to lose in a general European war. Above all, Bismarck feared Germany’s involvement in a two-front war. Thus he consistently opposed provoking Russia. By the late 1880s some of his critics urged a ‘preventive war’ against what they perceived as a growing Russian threat. Bismarck always dismissed such a course as ‘committing suicide for fear of death’.9 Yet the chancellor was never converted to the idea of European peace as an ultimate ideal and he never ruled out the possibility of another war. Indeed, he calculated that in all probability Germany would have to go to war against France again sometime in the future. In the meantime he determined to keep France diplomatically isolated and to deflect French ambitions away from Alsace and Lorraine as far as possible, for example by encouraging the French to become involved in colonial ventures and imperialist rivalries with other powers.
Nor did Bismarck baulk at sowing dissension between the other European powers as a means of preserving Germany’s position. The conflicts between the great powers on the periphery of Europe and overseas were certainly not engineered by Bismarck exclusively, and in some respects they gave Germany a breathing space after the Wars of Unification. But Bismarck understood how they could be turned to Germany’s advantage. Paradoxically, in the mid-1880s Bismarck also embroiled Germany in her own bid for colonies, endorsing the acquisition of territories in Africa and the Pacific. He later regretted this move, which was largely determined by domestic considerations and was part of a broader strategy to bolster his personal position at a time when the Kaiser’s health was failing and the succession of the liberal crown prince seemed imminent. Germany’s new colonial empire not only exposed the Reich to international rivalries; it also proved more of an economic liability than an asset. After the turn of the century Berlin found itself obliged to send military expeditions to suppress colonial uprisings in the protectorates of German Southwest Africa and East Africa, which they did with great brutality. Above all, Germany’s bid for colonies in the 1880s seemed to belie Bismarck’s assurances that Germany was now a satiated Continental state and signalled its aspiration to be not just a European but also a world power.
Bismarck’s diplomacy achieved its objectives while he remained in office, but ultimately its cost for the German Empire’s future security in Europe was high. In initiating a series of formal alliances during peacetime, Bismarck contributed to a growing climate of mistrust and insecurity in Europe, in part because the content of the treaties was often suspected rather than known. Moreover, one method by which the chancellor bound the European powers to Berlin was by promising them territory at the expense of the increasingly fragile Turkish Empire, even while he promoted Germany’s relations with the Ottoman regime in other ways. Bismarck lured Austria, Russia, Britain, Italy, and even, on occasion, France with the prospect of German support for their territorial ambitions in Europe and overseas. The logic behind his tortuous and often contradictory diplomacy appeared arcane to some of his subordinates, who never understood its wisdom, and their bafflement only grew as Bismarck’s term of office neared its end in the late 1880s. In 1890, shortly after Bismarck’s dismissal, his successors decided not to renew the Secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, believing it was incompatible with Germany’s other commitments. Their action soon contributed to the formation of a Franco-Russian entente, cemented into a formal alliance in 1894. German diplomacy thereafter had to contend with a far less favourable international environment.
This is not to suggest that Bismarck’s many diplomatic achievements were hollow, but rather that their historical ramifications and significance cannot properly be appraised if we are overawed by Bismarck’s ‘genius’. During Bismarck’s chancellorship the new German Empire was elevated to a dominant position in European international relations. Germany was able to enjoy its latent hegemony, provided it exercised that hegemony with restraint. Bismarck was Europe’s pre-eminent statesman whose abundant skills were satirized in the famous cartoon depicting the chancellor as a juggler able to keep five balls in the air simultaneously. At the same time the empire’s economic dynamism in the decades after unification and the reputation of its army (essentially the Prussian army) further commanded international respect. Nevertheless, by the end of Bismarck’s tenure in office the strains on his diplomacy were already in evidence, and it was becoming increasingly unlikely that his system of improvised checks and balances could endure. Whether he could have prevented Russia from drifting into the arms of France after 1890, even if he had remained in office, is far from certain. It is also by no means clear how far his diplomacy could have channelled and accommodated the new global pressures the empire faced in the subsequent Wilhelmine era.
The major task confronting the German Empire in the first decade of its existence was to achieve national consolidation. Political unification was not synonymous with national unity and the new Reich remained a federation. It comprised four kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony), six grand duchies (notably Baden and Hesse), five duchies (for example, Anhalt and Braunschweig), seven principalities (such as Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe), three free cities (Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck), as well as the ‘imperial territory’ (Reichsland) of Alsace-Lorraine. Since regional, ethnic, and confessional identities often underscored or superseded political, social, and ideological divisions, it became imperative to provide a focus for national loyalty. In this sense German nationalism, encouraged by the state, was to become a much more significant force after political unification than it had been in the decades leading up to the foundation of the empire. A useful means of integrating a diverse majority of Germans into the new polity, an appeal to the superior claims of the nation on every citizen’s allegiance was also used to sometimes devastating effect both against national minorities living within the empire and against the so-called ‘internal enemies of the Reich’ (Reichsfeinde) who never endorsed the settlement of 1871.
The constitution of the new German Empire provided it with only two genuinely national political institutions. The federal states were represented in a Federal Council (Bundesrat), which was theoretically sovereign but in practice was easily dominated by the largest and most populous state, Prussia. The other national political institution was the Reichstag, which was directly elected by all men aged twenty-five years and over—a progressive suffrage for the time. The practice of voting every three years in national elections was to prove very important in forging a sense of German national identity as well as in encouraging the gradual emergence of a democratic civic culture. But despite significant budgetary and legislative powers, the influence of the Reichstag—and of party politicians more generally—over decision-making in the empire was severely limited. While the parliament genuinely represented the male half of the population and gained weight as a focus of national political life during the empire’s existence, it was never effectively able to call Germany’s rulers to account. Its scope was particularly limited with respect to foreign policy, and most domestic issues in the empire were regulated by the various federal state governments and parliaments rather than at a national level. Neither the Reich nor the Prussian constitution recognized a role for organized political parties, and the political parties in Imperial Germany never had to take responsibility for governing.
The Kaiser’s potential as a national monarch was also circumscribed because he always also held the Prussian crown and was theoretically only ‘first among equals’ alongside his fellow sovereigns. He was granted specific powers and privileges in 1871, such as the right to conduct foreign policy, declare war, and conclude peace. His control of appointments and, above all, his personal control of the army made him a very powerful figure. But Kaiser Wilhelm I remained steeped in Prussian traditions throughout his life. Only his grandson, Wilhelm II, attempted after 1888 to elaborate and expand his role as an imperial monarch and national figurehead. There was also no provision for a national German government in 1871. The only man charged with responsibility for coordinating the affairs of the diverse empire was the imperial chancellor. Over time Bismarck developed a growing staff of subordinates to help him: their position was formalized in the late 1870s when a series of imperial offices were created, each headed by a state secretary. But all these men remained under the chancellor’s authority, and the chancellor himself was appointed solely by the Kaiser. In Prussia, too, the king still ruled in a semi-autocratic way, appointing a government of higher civil servants and military men, not parliamentarians who represented the people. The role of the executive in Prussia and the Reich was to serve the Crown; it had no organic relationship with the legislature or the people.
The empire thus remained true to Germany’s federal traditions, but the continuing vitality of the states and the Reich’s political arrangements created a powerful obstacle to national consolidation. From 1866 Bismarck forged a tactical alliance with liberal nationalists. Throughout the 1870s the support of the National Liberal Party, the largest party in both the Reichstag and the Prussian parliament (Landtag), was essential in furthering the economic and legal unification of Germany. Yet the chancellor never identified with the National Liberal aim to create a more unitary, centralized, and liberal German state. On the contrary, he mainly sought to safeguard the position of the federal states, above all Prussia, and ensure their rights were protected. In the early years of the empire he proved more willing to adopt elastic and ambiguous terms in describing the power relationships in the new empire which could allow for evolution over time. But as the empire began to develop a momentum of its own, his interpretations lost their flexibility and his solutions to problems became more authoritarian and prescriptive. In 1878–79 Bismarck finally broke with many of his liberal allies, helping to split the National Liberal Party. Thereafter he sought to rule as far as possible ‘above the parties’ with shifting coalitions of support in the parliaments according to the issues. By the late 1880s Bismarck was unapologetic in his efforts to shore up what he regarded as the conservative pillars of the state against mounting pressures for change.
Although his methods often proved highly controversial and counterproductive, Bismarck’s domestic policies were driven by his determination to consolidate the new national state. There is little doubt that when he supported universal male suffrage as the basis for elections to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation in 1867, he believed that it would result in a more compliant, conservative, and monarchist parliament than the plutocratic and liberal lower chamber he had been forced to contend with in Prussia in the 1860s. He clearly did not anticipate that a strong Catholic party would emerge in 1870–71—the German Centre Party, which rapidly sought to mobilize support from all those who resented their inclusion in a new Germany dominated by Protestant Prussia. Nor was he impressed in 1870–71 by the activities of the handful of popularly elected socialist deputies in the Reichstag. He was incensed when their leader, August Bebel, condemned the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, opposed further credits for the Franco-Prussian war, and extolled the virtues of the revolutionary Paris Commune.
Bismarck launched campaigns against both the Centre Party and the socialists in the 1870s in an effort to choke off their popular support. But neither of these campaigns was successful and both ultimately encouraged the emergence of two parties with mass support in the empire. Furthermore, as he came to regret the Reichstag suffrage which gave Catholics and the working classes political representation, the chancellor began to look for ways to neutralize or undermine the influence of a parliament he could never control. He considered ways of bypassing the Reichstag constitutionally, for example by creating parallel or rival institutions, and he sought to influence the outcome of elections by precipitating domestic crises or manufacturing timely war scares to heighten the electorate’s national consciousness. As the founder of the Reich, he never regarded its political and institutional arrangements as fixed and was quite prepared to threaten to revise them if he could not secure his own way. Throughout the first twenty years of the empire’s existence, the political parties thus constantly had to labour under the threat of a possible coup d’état from above (Staatsstreich), an enforced change of the constitution backed up by military power. This might have involved revising the democratic Reichstag suffrage to ensure a more conservative chamber, or it might have entailed abolishing the parliament altogether and renegotiating the alliance of princes on which the empire was based. In the 1890s, too, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s response to opposition from parliamentarians was not infrequently to threaten to send in the army to shoot the lot of them.
In the early 1870s, with enthusiastic liberal and popular anticlerical support, Bismarck and the Prussian government waged the Kulturkampf—which can be translated as the ‘struggle for civilization’ or the ‘cultural struggle’—against political Catholicism. One of the campaign’s main aims was to reconstruct (or restore to what it had been in 1840) the relationship between church and state in Prussia. State control was established over education and the appointment of the clergy; compulsory civil marriage was introduced; and the Jesuit Order, seen as an alien presence that served a hostile power, was expelled from Germany. But many excesses were committed during the struggle. Priests were imprisoned, parishes were left without clergymen, and church property was confiscated. Bismarck’s commitment to the Kulturkampf was first and foremost an act of political calculation. He saw the Centre Party and the Roman Catholic Church as subversive forces within the new nation state that he wished to consolidate. In his view they were sustained by Germany’s foreign enemies, they stirred up the hostility of Prussia’s Polish population, and they even incited otherwise loyal Catholics to murder him (as was attempted by a twenty-one-year-old cooper’s apprentice, Eduard Kullmann, in 1874).
The Centre Party mobilized its supporters against what it saw from the outset as an anti-Catholic onslaught; it became a far more formidable and cohesive political force as a result. Catholics (who made up about one-third of the German population), disgruntled particularists (whose first loyalty was to their state), Poles, Guelphs (from the former state of Hanover, which Prussia had annexed in 1866), federalists, and democrats all rallied to its banner. Many devout Protestants were also alienated by the attack on confessional peace. If Bismarck’s primary aim was to suppress in its infancy a movement which he saw as a major threat to the work of national construction, he failed miserably. Far from facilitating national unity and strengthening the state, the Kulturkampf was deeply divisive. Bismarck was too astute politically not to recognize its effects and seek to undo the damage. From the late 1870s he found some basis for cooperation with conservative Centre Party politicians on economic issues; and in sanctioning the slow dismantling of the Kulturkampf legislation from the mid-1880s onwards he undoubtedly hoped that, with the removal of the most blatant grievances, the Centre Party might eventually wither and disappear. But German Catholics never forgot or forgave the chancellor for the Kulturkampf: the Centre Party remained hostile to the government on a wide range of issues, even if its stance softened after 1890. The struggle left deep and lasting scars on German society, and the Centre Party continued to be a powerful force in German politics until Hitler’s accession to power in 1933.
In the late 1870s Bismarck shifted his attention away from political Catholicism and launched an assault on the nascent German socialist movement. Like German Catholics, Social Democrats were branded and persecuted as ‘internal enemies’, this time because they preached international class solidarity rather than national loyalty and sought to ‘infect’ the working class masses who otherwise—Bismarck believed—had monarchist sympathies. After two assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878 (though there was no evidence of socialist involvement in them), Bismarck supported the introduction of an Anti-Socialist Law that would effectively proscribe their organization and prevent socialists from campaigning effectively. This was an ‘exceptional’ law because it singled out members of one political party for persecution.
In declaring war on Social Democracy, the chancellor was also intent on undermining democratic liberalism, for left-wing liberals could never agree to such an illiberal law. Thus he used the issue of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1878 to force new Reichstag elections, which resulted in liberal losses and the eventual passage of the law by a majority of National Liberals and conservatives. Bismarck then further exploited the growing clamour for economic protectionism in 1878–79 to divide his erstwhile allies in the National Liberal Party and free himself from his years of dependence on a liberal parliamentary majority. But just as the anti-socialist legislation, which remained in force until September 1890, could not retard the growth of Social Democracy, so Bismarck could not seriously contemplate governing on any lasting basis with shifting parliamentary coalitions that excluded the majority of those most supportive of the idea of a national state. Ultimately the support of National Liberals was essential to his project: outside Prussia, they represented the only enthusiastic adherents of the imperial idea.
Bismarck launched further initiatives which he believed would promote national and social cohesion. Not all of these were successful, however. In the Reichstag elections of 1881 and 1884 the oppositional parties (including a vigorous, new, left-liberal Radical Party) were victorious, and thereafter they could effectively block many of the government’s proposals. Bismarck’s efforts, for example, to place the empire on a more secure financial footing were largely a failure: the Reich remained dependent on income from customs and tariffs as well as on contributions from the federal states. Throughout most of the empire’s existence, the states alone had the power to raise direct taxation; over 90 per cent of the imperial budget was spent on the army (which occupied a unique position as ‘a state within a state’ and was answerable only to the Kaiser). Although raising tariffs on agricultural and industrial products was one way of increasing the Reich’s revenue in the 1880s, in the longer term the empire became a victim of its own success, confronting a mounting deficit that could not be resolved without fundamentally changing the constitution.
One of the most innovative domestic developments in Bismarckian Germany was the introduction of social insurance legislation in the 1880s. A series of laws provided German workers with sickness, accident, and invalidity insurance as well as old age pensions. Imperial Germany became a model for other countries to follow, because these measures provided real benefits for Germany’s rapidly growing working-class population. This programme of reform was supported by Bismarck because he believed it would give the lower classes a stake in the state and help to woo them away from socialism. But it proved no more successful than Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation in undercutting the appeal of the Social Democratic message to the working class. The social welfare legislation increased the power of the state, which generally became more authoritarian and interventionist in the 1880s once it no longer felt itself to be in thrall to its liberal allies. But, for a variety of reasons, Prussia and the Reich proved conspicuously unable to ameliorate many of the serious economic and social problems that confronted the urban and rural poor as Germany developed rapidly into a more urban and industrialized society in the decades after unification.
Finally, in the last years of his chancellorship, Bismarck launched campaigns against Germany’s national minorities in his effort to consolidate and fortify the empire. Germanization policies were aimed above all against the Poles in Prussia’s eastern provinces—a substantial minority whom Bismarck had always seen as a major threat to Prussian security. These policies were supported by the National Liberals, who endorsed a concept of German nationality based on language and ethnicity. The measures introduced by the Prussian government involved enforcing the German language in schools, imposing German customs on the Polish population, and implementing a land purchase programme to settle Germans on land previously owned by Poles. However, as with the Kulturkampf, these harsh and illiberal measures were ultimately counterproductive in their effects. They mobilized the opposition of the Prussian Poles and politicized formerly loyal subjects of the monarchy. Similarly coercive policies were considered against the French-speaking population of Alsace-Lorraine in 1887 and pursued against the Danes in northern Schleswig from 1888.
Such measures undoubtedly reflected a growing climate of racism, xenophobia, and intolerance in the 1880s, fuelled in part by economic insecurities associated with the rapid transition of Germany from an agrarian to an industrial society. After the optimism and triumphalism of the empire’s ‘founding years’, there was a perceptible shift by the 1880s to a more pessimistic and conservative era. The adoption of protectionist economic policies was a response to the slowdown of economic growth after the post-unification boom (contemporaries referred to the period from 1873 to the mid-1890s as the ‘Great Depression’) and to growing competition within an increasingly global market. But it was also symptomatic of a deeper political and cultural malaise. Just as the international outlook appeared bleaker than it had been in the dynamic years after unification, by 1890 even a political observer who was sympathetic to the chancellor could complain that ‘a terrible miasma’ was affecting all aspects of domestic policy.10
The ageing Reichsgründer who, in office, had always been a divisive rather than a unifying figure, was also increasingly perceived by a younger political generation as out of touch and an impediment to change. Liberal hopes that the accession of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm might reinvigorate German political life and remove the obstacles to reform were soon dashed. Not only did the old Kaiser Wilhelm I prove far more resilient than anyone anticipated, but his son became fatally ill with cancer of the throat. Friedrich Wilhelm finally succeeded to the throne as Kaiser Friedrich III (a title which emphasized his Prussian heritage) in March 1888. He reigned, however, for a mere three months, during which time he was even more dependent on the chancellor he detested than his father had ever been.
In the end it was to be Friedrich’s son, Wilhelm, who proved to be Bismarck’s nemesis. When he succeeded to the throne in June 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, Wilhelm inevitably could not share the perspectives of the ‘iron chancellor’ who had already held high political office for almost twenty-six years. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to rule personally and, despite the contradictions in his personality, he sought to embody a Germany that was modern, confident, and outward-looking. He soon clashed with Bismarck, who refused to relinquish power gracefully. If the ensuing political crisis was protracted, its outcome was never in doubt. In Berlin the young and the ambitious were inevitably drawn to the ‘new sun’ and had high expectations of basking in its glory. By March 1890 the young Kaiser felt sufficiently emboldened to insist on the old chancellor’s resignation after a final rupture between the two men. The Bismarckian era thus gave way to the Wilhelmine age. The test of the latter was to be how far the empire could prosper and live in peace with its neighbours in the absence of its creator.