Nationalism in Germany, 1848

As contemporaries asked themselves how to redefine German territory and reconfigure German political institutions, the states and populations of the third Germany figured prominently in their plans, aided by the marginalisation of Austria. Recently, historians have resurrected certain contemporaries’ arguments in their quest to revise a long-standing narrative of particularism, reactionary rule, petty court politics, and weakness in the face of the two German Great Powers. Some scholars have emphasised the successes of local patriotism and state-building in Saxony, Württemberg and Bavaria; others have reassessed attempts to reform the German Confederation as a workable alternative to Prussian-led unification.⁶ In terms of population, territory and economic activity, the states of the third Germany were potentially significant if they could act in concert, but they were negligible alone (see Table 4.1). This was one reason why the governments of the Mittelstaaten paid so much attention to the Confederation. It could be argued, however, that the smaller and middling states were significant, not as weights in a German balance of power, but as a source of public opposition to state-imposed ‘reaction’ and of public discussion of German unification during the 1850s and early 1860s. This chapter assesses the role and importance of such discourses about a German nation and state in the light of power-political, territorial and constitutional questions first broached in 1848–49. It casts doubt on the significance of state-based identities, at least as an alternative to German nationalism, and on the viability of the German Bund, which was the principal focus of national debate between 1849 and 1863. In the political milieux and public spheres of the post-revolutionary era, national identification remained a crucial component of politics, especially in the critical forums of the third Germany.

Reaction and Opposition

Beyond the left, which was much more open to persecution because of its willingness to defend the constitution by force during the later stages of the revolution, a much broader political spectrum in all German states was subjected to repression as a consequence of the Bundesreaktionsbeschluss, or reactionary decree, passed by the Confederal Diet in August 1851. The actions of the resulting Reaktionsausschuss, or ‘reactionary committee’, which clamped down in some smaller states on democratic franchises, the budgetary powers of assemblies, and freedom of assembly and expression, were supplemented by the independent efforts of the individual states. The Polizeiverein deutscher Staaten, established by the seven largest states, pooled information about political dissidents across Germany. At the height of such surveillance in 1853, Prussia posted information about 558 individual cases, Saxony 234 cases, and Bavaria 74.⁸ Berlin collected files in this period on up to six thousand political suspects per annum, monitoring travel, publication, house searches and political agitation throughout the monarchy.⁹ Political activity was allowed in most German states, but elections were routinely fixed, since they were open, indirect and limited, in the Prussian case in accordance with the three-class franchise. Saxony dissolved its ‘democratic’ assembly and returned to its pre-March ‘corporate’ Landtag in 1850, Württemberg in 1851, and Hanover, with the backing of the confederal Reaktionsausschuss, in 1855. The disbelief of Biedermann’s circle, with one friend uttering ‘That must be a bad joke’, was widely shared.¹⁰ What was more, if such electoral and constitutional restrictions proved inadequate, a state of siege could easily be declared – in Prussia, by the Staatsministerium in the name of the King – with the effect that articles concerning personal liberty (Art. 5 in the Prussian Constitution of 1850), the independence of judges (Art. 7), press freedom (Arts 27 and 28), and freedom of association (Arts 30 and 31) were suspended. The state of siege declared in 1849 lasted in Baden until 1852 and in Kurhessen until 1854. Under such circumstances, it proved much more difficult than in 1848–49 to form political parties and maintain political debate.

It is worth remembering, however, that the barely restricted freedoms of the revolutionary period, not the constraints of the 1850s, were anomalous, when compared to the conditions of the nineteenth century as a whole, in Germany and beyond. Contemporaries from different ‘parties’ certainly accepted that the ‘reaction’ was counter-revolutionary, reversing the worst excesses or major advances of the March Ministries and the National Assembly, but they rarely, even in conservative circles, saw it as a restoration of an unchanging order. To Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, reaction was a ‘dual struggle’ against ‘a defeated but not extinguished radicalism and against bureaucracy and absolutism’.¹¹ ‘A greater participation of subjects in public affairs’ was to be welcomed as ‘a true achievement of March’, he declared in October 1851, since ‘we, although reactionaries, are not retro-grade’.¹² In the opinion of the Prussian commentator Varnhagen von Ense, who was well connected to both conservative and liberal circles, reaction would not succeed, as Gerlach hoped, in expunging other more objectionable aspects of the revolution and in silencing political opposition. ‘The movement of 1848 cannot be revived according to a plan or randomly; its ramifications endure, however, and continue to work without our doing anything,’ Varnhagen wrote in his diary in September 1856: ‘Reaction makes the greatest efforts, piles one institution on another, and pushes its vigilance to extremes … What they have built and supported for centuries, all their works, can be brought down in one moment, in one breath of wind. Until then our opposition exists in internal strengthening, in the winning of the greatest possible independence of intellectual and civic life.’¹³

They were certainly bad times that the new decade brought to Germany: the failure of all hopes and the return to the Bundestag, and at home experiments with backward-looking laws as well as the disciplining and persecution of out-of-favour men. [Yet] in the fight against reaction, in the belief in the approach of better days, in its serious striving to go forwards, the period was filled with more idealism than the present … The party system was extremely simple: a liberal Bürgertum against a victorious reaction – that was the position. One recovered gradually from defeat, the Bürgertum slowly reunited, one took up again old ties, local elections initially gathered together friends once more, and younger forces, as revealed in 1848, joined the old liberals. The newly strengthened party acted under different names, sometimes called liberal, sometimes called the Progressive Party (Fortschrittspartei).¹⁶

The coups d’état and constitutional modifications of 1849–51 left space for party politics. All save three German states retained representative assemblies in some form, usually with a veto over legislation and with budgetary powers, in keeping with the precepts of ‘constitutional monarchy’.¹⁷ To the liberal historian Georg Waitz, whose Grundzüge der Politik was published in 1862, ‘the essence’ of ‘constitutional monarchy’ – or any ‘constitution-based order’ – was ‘the participation of the Volk or entitled sections of it in the life of the state’.¹⁸ Looking back on the 1850s, it was obvious ‘that we have entered a period in which no one will doubt that our state’s life can only develop on the basis of a constitutional order’.¹⁹ How exactly this constitution was to be set up ‘or, in other words, how the cooperation of king and people, the participation of the people in the state and the life of the state’ was to take place remained to be decided, but that such participation was the foundation of the existing and future order went unquestioned by Waitz.²⁰ Even to more sceptical academic commentators like Robert von Mohl, who asserted in Staatsrecht, Völkerrecht und Politik (1860) that the ‘constitutional system’ had failed, representative assemblies still played an essential part in the German states, despite apparently being incompatible with the power of the monarch: ‘In this way, there are two powers in the constitutional state which are fundamentally independent of each other: the prince in possession of state power; the representatives of the people with the right of appeal and, with exceptions, with the inalienable right to take part in certain government business. Undeniably, a dualism has been created which extends as far as the rights of representation go.’²¹

Most German states maintained such a dual system of government after 1849, albeit with the narrow franchises and indirect voting systems which had characterised the pre-revolutionary period. Württemberg, for instance, reverted to its old electoral law and Landtag, the second chamber of which contained representatives of traditional constituencies, those of seven ‘good’ towns and of the universities, six Protestant superintendants, three Catholic bishops and deacons, and thirteen nobles. About 250,000 men – more than half the adult male population – were eligible to vote in the first round of elections to the second chamber, but under 40,000 – less than 10 per cent of men – could vote in the critical second round. Prussia, which had had no regular Landtag before 1848, kept in place its ‘revolutionary’ one, but with a modified and restrictive – but still comparatively ‘modern’ – three-class franchise of taxpayers imposed in May 1849, in which 4.7 per cent of voters belonged to the first class, 12.6 per cent to the second, and 82.7 per cent to the third, with each class having an equal electoral weight. As in other states, elections were open and indirect, allowing manipulation and necessitating wealth and social standing on the part of deputies, who were voted in by 57,809 notable Wahlmänner.²² Like the Prussian constitution of February 1850, this electoral law was much less liberal than the manhood suffrage of 1848, but it did allow political participation and the existence of political parties, just as the King’s oath to the constitution, ministerial counter-signature and accountability before the Landtag, and the right of the Abgeordnetenhaus to initiate legislation and reject the budget, created the conditions for party politics.

In Saxony, where a complicated voting system of four estates (towns, nobility, farmers and commerce) had made ‘parties’ more difficult to identify, the free professions and commerce, from which liberals were usually drawn, gained between 34.2 (1851–52) and 45.3 per cent (1863–64) of seats in the second chamber, together with between 15.5 (1851–52) and 22.8 per cent (1857–58) of civil servants, officers, judges and mayors, which divided between state-supporting conservatives and oppositional liberals.²⁶ Noble landowners and farmers, which formed the backbone of the conservatives, gained between 44.7 (1851–52) and 38.6 per cent (1863–64) of seats. Although the coup d’état in Dresden had reinstated an electoral system weighted towards agriculture and office-holders, the opposition remained, at the very least, a large minority. The same was true of Hanover, where a mixed bloc of support for the moderate governments of Johann Carl Bertram Stüve (1848–50) and Alexander von Münchhausen (1850–51) was roughly balanced by that of a liberal-dominated opposition, whose numbers had sunk from 41 to 33 seats out of 70 over the course of 1850.²⁷ As the administration moved to the right under Eduard von Schele, the son of the architect of the 1837 coup against the Hanoverian constitution, liberal opposition increased, confirmed by the elections of 1853. Even after the ministry of Wilhelm Friedrich Otto von Borries and Eduard von Kielmannsegg had dissolved the second chamber in 1855 and had reimposed the more restrictive constitution and electoral law of 1840, pro-government factions failed to gain an overwhelming victory – 40 against 30 – over the opposition.²⁸ In spite of a notorious Bund-backed coup, liberal elites were still firmly entrenched in Hanover’s Landtag, municipal councils and local associations.²⁹ Finally, in Prussia, the conservative vote grew until 1855, declining after that date. Even in this period, though, there was a sizeable minority in the Abgeordnetenhaus opposed to the Manteuffel administration. In 1851, the ‘centre’ (85), the left (70) and the Poles (15) won 170 out of 352 seats in 1851, against 114 on the right; in 1853, with greater official interference, the pro-government groups of the right gained 182 seats, with moderate conservatives winning 28 seats, Catholics 65, the left 65 and Poles 12, or 170 seats altogether; in 1855, conservatives and ministerial groups won 218 seats, against 131 in the opposition or unaligned; and in 1857, the pro-government right gained 174 seats, against 172 in the opposition or unaligned.³⁰ As elsewhere in Germany, reaction in Prussia had not stifled parliamentary activity or political debate.

Such experiences often appeared to have kept alive democrats’ longing for German unity, but their views rarely reached a wide audience in Germany during the post-revolutionary decade. Radicals like Carl Vogt, Brentano, Zitz and Bamberger huddled around tables in the Bärenleist bar in Berne or listened to lectures at the Kornhaus, largely cut off from their own lands. ‘The circle which is gathered here largely consists of men who have sacrificed everything for their fatherland,’ proclaimed the Württemberger Carl Mayer in one of a series of lectures at the Kornhaus at the end of 1849:

The burning desire to see it finally free, united and great has driven us from the comforts of peace, from secure careers and from civic activity away to the speaking platforms of the Volk, into the tumult of meetings and onto the battlefield … Nowhere is there a circle of German men who can look back on the past with greater self-confidence and a better conscience. And now you are here, pursued, banished, in destitution and, what is hardest for noble men, living from the hospitality of a neighbouring people for which we are a burden.³⁴

It was essential, wrote Bamberger, still in exile in 1867, to keep abreast of events in Germany and Europe from afar, ‘for all those who fail to do the latter become dry and old extraordinarily quickly here.³⁵ For Ruge, referred to in a Gartenlaube article in 1863 as ‘Der Verbannte von Brighton’, exile proved demoralising and alienating, with little opportunity of publishing under his own name in Germany despite his reputation as a thinker and writer.³⁶ Closely monitored, to the point where Jodokus Temme believed that half of his letters were opened by the authorities and subsequently went ‘missing’, radicals and democrats remained for the most part a beleaguered and silenced minority until the early 1860s, when forty-eighters began to be pardoned and to return to Germany, at the same time as new democrats took advantage of emerging party structures and looser restrictions on their activity. Until then, they were a ‘small parliamentary bunch’, in Ludwig Simon’s words, which ‘stays loyally and courageously together’ under adverse circumstances.³⁷

In Baden, where Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier, Johann Baptist Bekk, Karl Theodor Welcker, Franz Peter Buhl and Adam von Itzstein had all left the chamber after 1849, in addition to Bassermann, Soiron and Mathy, others such as Ludwig Häusser, who became the new leader, remained in situ, joined by younger liberals like Bernhard August Prestinari, a merchant’s son and Ministerialrat in the Justice Ministry, Ludwig Achenbach, an Obergerichtsadvocat born in 1812, Ludwig Kirsner, who had been elected in 1850 after inheriting the Hofapotheke in Donaueschingen, the two innkeepers Ludwig Paravicini and Karl Friedrich, Philipp Artaria, the son of a wealthy art dealer, Eduard Kölle, a banker from Karlsruhe, and the 30-year-old August Lamey, the son of the founder of the Mannheimer Zeitung and the Badische Staatszeitung. For these liberals, it was a question, as Lamey put it later, of ‘achieving something better through steady but also slow steps forward, through sober patience and undeterred persistence, with modest hopes and demands, conciliating and coming to terms with the overwhelming influence of the powers and directions which had been brought to our otherwise so mildly and liberally administered Heimatland mainly by the imbecilities and excesses of the revolutionary movement’.⁴⁸ Contacts between notables, resting on the factions of the Landtag, church, family gatherings and marriages, commerce, the law and the state, town councils, cultural and philanthropic associations, and the press, formed the basis of ‘politics’ after the national institutions of the Frankfurt Parliament and the Provisional Power, together with an incipient set of umbrella associations, had been brought to an end in 1849–50.

Such regional political organisation did not imply that the national aspirations of 1848–49 had been abandoned, merely that vestigial national institutions had been destroyed. In a letter to Haym, the Badenese liberal Alexander von Soiron was not unusual at the start of the 1850s in believing that the liberal – or ‘constitutional’ – party would again become dominant in Germany through its triumph in Prussia. Although it would ‘remain a minority in the chambers for a certain time’, since it commanded only minority support within the limited political ‘Volk’ of the three-class franchise in Prussia, ‘this must change over time’: ‘it truly does not need to despair of victory’.⁵¹ Liberalism, or constitutionalism, would succeed, via a constitutional Prussia, in a united Germany. Seven years later, at the end of 1857, Haym still trusted in the victory of ‘the resolute constitutional party’ and in its ability to unify Germany, notwithstanding his experiences of reaction in ‘miserable’ Halle.⁵² From here, he kept alive many of his Prussian and German contacts and prepared the ground for the re-emergence of national politics. During the reactionary era between 1849 and 1858, Haym corresponded with at least thirty prominent liberals from different German states.⁵³

Rudolf von Bennigsen, a founder of the Nationalverein in 1859, demonstrated how national hopes and local politics could be combined during the years of reaction. Part of the aristocracy with a family seat two miles south of Hanover and related to a series of generals and the Premier and Foreign Minister during the revolution Alexander von Bennigsen, the later National Liberal leader seemed to come from a background different from that of most of his liberal counterparts. As Stüve recalled, nobles ‘had opposed necessary reforms, insisting on their privileges’ before 1848 and they bore ‘the odium of the coup of 1837 in public opinion’.⁵⁴ Bennigsen himself had been willing to take advantage of noble privileges, as he sought to benefit from an aristocratic quota of positions in the judiciary in the early 1850s.⁵⁵ Yet it was already known, he held, that he was ‘almost the only younger aristocrat who is fundamentally against the pretensions of the aristocracy, including their expected interference with the constitution’.⁵⁶ His noble pedigree did not prevent him associating with, and sharing many of the views of, the Hanoverian Bürgertum in the succession of towns – Lüneburg, Hameln and Hanover – to which his father, an officer, was posted and in which he was educated alongside the sons of largely middle-class families. His experiences at Göttingen, where he enrolled as a law student in 1842, were similar, notwithstanding the fact that much of his life there revolved around the Korps Hannovera, to which Bismarck had belonged ten years earlier. As Bennigsen wrote to his mother, virtually all students joined a corps or Landsmannschaft, with the latter being reserved mainly for theologians and medical students: ‘If I am to join a club … so I must choose the side on which I have the most and dearest acquaintances. And that is the corps. Many of my former school friends are in the corps.’⁵⁷ The friends whom he mentioned all came from the Bürgertum, although he went on to befriend a mixture of bourgeois and noble students in the corps itself.⁵⁸ His experiences in Heidelberg, to which he had transferred in 1843 in order to remain close to his family after his ailing father had been sent to Frankfurt and its surrounding spas, were likewise ‘liberal’, alternating between the cultural history lectures of Gervinus, attended by 150 students, and the drinking and duelling of the Korps Vandalia, which – as he reassured his father – had ‘nearly cost him his life’.⁵⁹ Bennigsen’s subsequent decision to enter the civil service as a lawyer, and later a judge, having rejected the army as the only other alternative open to noble offspring, placed him in a position akin to that of many liberal contemporaries, concerned with public affairs but exposed to state manipulation.

Bennigsen, who was born in 1824, was representative of a younger generation of liberals which had not played an active part in the revolution of 1848 but which was influenced by it. ‘True, they are no longer asking, they are demanding with a shrill voice, but they are merely asking for what all previous peoples of history have already taken,’ wrote the 24-year-old to his father in March 1848: ‘The danger for Germany will first come, if at all, several years from now, when, on one side, what has been granted develops consequences and, on the other, when regret perhaps emerges over what was agreed in a moment of fear.’⁶⁰ As the revolution proceeded, Bennigsen was convinced that a republic was likely, given ‘the energy of the democratic spirit, which is growing daily in geometrical progression’.⁶¹ His preference, though, remained a constitutional monarchy, which led him to support the Reichsverfassung of 1849, along with ‘almost all Germany exc. Austria’, as he put it to his mother in June 1849.⁶² Governments such as that of Hanover would not dare to oppose the Reich constitution, he predicted in March of the same year, because the Ministry would be faced with a flood of popular petitions and would ‘no longer dare to dissolve the chambers’.⁶³ Even after the second chamber had been dissolved by Georg V on 25 April, the authorities were careful to give assurances of their support for the creation of a German Bundesstaat.⁶⁴ Although Bennigsen was sceptical of ministers’ intentions, warning in 1850 that ‘we younger ones’, critical of government action over Schleswig-Holstein, ‘will not allow ourselves to be deceived by threadbare promises made in moments of despair’, he was prepared to continue to work as a civil servant throughout the early 1850s and to treat the Hanoverian state as a moderate constitutional monarchy.⁶⁵

Only after the coup of 1855 did Bennigsen begin to talk of abuses of power and to contemplate resigning from his post as a judge, which he did the following year. Nevertheless, Hanoverian ‘reaction’ was understood as a momentary deviation from the established ‘constitutional tracks’ of the German states, along which Prussia, too, had started to proceed: ‘Do they really believe’, he asked in a Landtag debate of April 1858, ‘that they can uphold such a state of emergency in the face of the institutions of the rest of Germany and the resistance of our own population?’⁶⁶ In 1855, he had depicted the change as a temporary one, lasting for ‘perhaps another year’, which ‘a handful of unscrupulous people’ had forced on ‘a quiet land, for which nothing was lacking for its prosperous advancement’.⁶⁷ This was a point that Bennigsen made repeatedly in the reconvened Landtag, to which he was elected, in spite of government electoral interference, in 1857. The Ministry, he declared in a Landtag speech addressed to a wider audience in Germany after Austria’s defeat by France and Italy in July 1859, lacked public backing: ministers themselves ‘would not speak with too much confidence of their following amongst burghers and farmers’.⁶⁸ In Germany as a whole, he went on,

the movement was still very raw and immature in 1848; disunity was not to be avoided. The Prussian ruler did not find in himself the necessary strength to take up the position of power offered to him. It could now be the case that both had changed; that the Prussian government sees itself called on, through its whole position in Europe, to take the head of the German reform movement, and that in the German Volk disunity is no longer so great, the hatred of the parties has rather disappeared, youthful fantasies have been put to one side, and the febrile haste of renewal has been transformed into a steady and reliable decisiveness. There is already rare agreement between constitutionalists and democrats. A practical tendency has gained the upper hand. Vanities and schoolboys’ opinions retreat into the background. As difficult as it might be for the governments, they will have to decide to act in accordance with the movement. The Bavarian and Saxon governments appear in private to have done so; and perhaps even the Hanoverian one will eventually give way to the current of opinion. If you only trust in the nation itself, there is no reason to despair of German conditions … the nation is rising as powerfully and with as much vitality as it ever has done, and it will finally also carry along resistant governments with it.⁶⁹

During the second, ‘reactionary’ half of the 1850s in Hanover, Bennigsen had used the Landtag and had cultivated his party connections in the state and in Germany as a whole to criticise repressive governments and to put forward German unification as a better alternative. As he ‘broke with his whole past, with his entire social milieu … in full contradiction with the state government and the King of Hanover’, the 32-year-old liberal did so in the conviction that ‘the time must finally return when, in the face of a successful reaction in almost the whole of Germany since the suppression of the movement of 1848, civic rights will again come back into force’.⁷⁰ Finally, he went on, ‘the time and happy conditions must come when we succeed in taking up again the interrupted and temporarily disturbed national movement of the Frankfurt parliament in 1848–49, and in giving Germany the political constitution which such a great people, in its entire make-up, deserves’.⁷¹ In the most unpropitious of circumstances, with the Hanoverian state’s increasing restrictions running counter to the loosening of controls in most of its neighbours, nationalist politics continued: its main reference point was 1848.

An important component of national – and occasionally oppositional – politics during the 1850s was to be found in conservative milieux. Even in Hanover, where the aristocracy was widely blamed for the reaction of the government, the Ritterschaft had turned against the ‘arbitrary measures’ of the government by 1856, in Bennigsen’s view.⁷² In most other medium-sized states, conservatives had either merged with political Catholicism, as in Bavaria, or moderate liberalism, as in Saxony, or they had retreated into political insignificance.⁷³ In such circumstances, the best that the government could expect, wrote the former Bavarian Minister-President Pfordten in 1859, was ‘that the nobility did not oppose it with enmity, and that is enough’.⁷⁴ By default, Prussia constituted both the main exemplar and the principal site of organised conservatism in Germany as a whole, with aristocrats and ministries in other states looking admiringly at the Kreuzzeitung and at the various right-wing factions – which Gerlach had termed a ‘conservative party’ as early as 1848 – in the Prussian Landtag.⁷⁵ Yet it was evident to most observers – including Karl von Bennigsen, who likened his son Rudolf to Georg von Vincke – that Prussia’s conservative camp was diverse and often refractory.⁷⁶ The monarch, who was supposedly the hub of conservative forces in Prussia, was weak and dilatory after 1848, admitting to Edwin von Manteuffel that he was ‘really a harmless creature’, ‘harassed’ and with ‘nerves’.⁷⁷ After difficult decisions, Friedrich Wilhelm IV ‘fell apart physically’, wrote Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, ‘dragging his hand over his sweat-drenched brow, while his countenance assumed an expression of utter ruin’.⁷⁸ Usually, such inactivity or inconsistency left the Minister-President and other ‘bureaucrats’ such as the Police President Carl Ludwig von Hinckeldey – the ‘second king’, as Varnhagen put it – in charge of the legitimate government and, in their own estimation, at the heart of Prussian conservatism.⁷⁹

The Manteuffel administration, however, was attacked on two flanks throughout its life from 1850 to 1858. On the right, romantic reactionaries around the Gerlach brothers, who favoured greater autonomy and broader jurisdictions for nobles, labelled the government ‘absolutist’ and ‘Bonapartist’.⁸⁰ Despite their initial proximity within a common front against Radowitz, the Gerlachs were already warning that ‘the absolutist Manteuffel is not to be trusted’ by mid-1851: ‘the domination of a crass absolutism is already in train’, recorded Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach in the July Rundschau of the Kreuzzeitung in 1851, having made ‘enormous steps’ since 1848.⁸¹ As early as the spring of 1850, the conservative newspaper had accused Manteuffel of introducing revolution into the ‘heart-blood’ of Prussia.⁸² Within the ministry, in the form of reactionaries such as the Minister of the Interior Ferdinand von Westphalen and the Kultusminister Karl Otto von Raumer, and at Court, especially in the person of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s secretary Marcus Niebuhr, the camarilla attempted to counter the influence of the Minister-President, to the point where the latter employed a spy, Carl Techen, to steal and transcribe the letters of Niebuhr and Leopold von Gerlach in order to monitor their activity. As Techen confessed in January 1856, ‘the Minister-President believed that these persons were constantly intriguing against him’.⁸³ What was more, the ultra right was also prepared to use its mouthpiece, the Neue Preussische Zeitung, to reinforce its ‘opposition’ to the government, provoking ‘the repeated attacks of the bureaucrats against it’, which in turn threatened the leadership of the ‘conservative party in the land’, as Leopold explained to the King in February 1853.⁸⁴ On the orders of the head of the Zentralstelle für Pressangelegenheiten Rhyno Quehl, anti-government editions of the Kreuzzeitung were seized on repeated occasions in the years up to 1853. In the opinion of the newspaper’s editor Hermann Wagener, Manteuffel was a ‘liar whose own aim is to destroy all parties’ and set up an ‘absolutist Bonapartism’ in Prussia.⁸⁵ Ludwig von Gerlach’s reply to the editor was ‘to remain in place and hold our party together in order to fight Manteuffel’s Bonapartism’, which was ‘exactly what we are doing, and not without success’.⁸⁶ In addition to intrigues at Court, the camarilla was quite willing to make its ‘party’ criticism of the government public.

The ‘Kreuzzeitung party’ arguably provided the model for the left wing of Prussian conservatism, led by Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg and founded on the Preussisches Wochenblatt. Like the ultra right, the supporters of Bethmann claimed that they were not part of any ‘opposition’ to the government, but that they were advisers of Friedrich Wilhelm IV: ‘No route which stands in contradiction to the innermost being of the king can lead to our goal’, warned the constitutional lawyer Clemens Theodor Perthes, a colleague of Bethmann in Bonn, in March 1852.⁸⁷ The ‘Kammerverein Stadt London’, which counted 15 deputies in the second chamber of the Prussian Landtag by 1852 and which grew steadily until the Crimean War in 1854, purported to be ‘neither oppositional nor ministerial’ and ‘to be limited by no factional or other external ties’ in the exercise of ‘its free, independent opinions’, true to the ‘king, fatherland and constitution’.⁸⁸ Bethmann-Hollweg himself had been a leading member of the counter-revolutionary Verein für König und Vaterland, a participant in the reactionary Junkerparlament in 1848 and a constitutional lawyer in the ‘historical school’ of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who was close to the Gerlachs. Yet in the aftermath of the revolution, it became clear to the Bonn academic and his supporters that they differed fundamentally from the camarilla in their attachment to the ‘holy’ constitution of January 1850, in their support for the parity of Catholicism and Protestantism, in their criticism of the Bund, in their leanings towards the West rather than the East, and in their opposition to the police measures of the 1850s, ‘put forward and defended by the bearers of an anachronistic, inflexible system – Metternich’s – introduced and maintained by the overwhelming influence of two European Great Powers (Austria and Prussia), supported by the cowardice of second-rank German princes and not fought against by the sleeping German nation’, in the words of the diplomat Robert von der Goltz.⁸⁹ Above all, the ‘Wochenblatt party’, which drew most support from the ‘new’ western territories of Prussia and from Anglophile and Francophile diplomatic circles, was wedded to the national idea: Bethmann-Hollweg was, he declared in his treatise on Reaktion und Sondertümelei (1848), the son of a patrician family of the ‘free’ Reichstadt of Frankfurt who had joined Prussia voluntarily because he believed that it was the main pillar of the German fatherland.⁹⁰ As Goltz had written in the same year, ‘the nation must at last stand as a whole before the outside world, and it must as such gain the means to maintain the position that it deserves amongst the peoples of the earth’.⁹¹

Although Perthes had contended at one of the founding meetings of the Wochenblatt in 1851 that ‘there will be an important party with us, through the significance of its head, if we only attack the Kreuzzeitungspartei, and against us, if we immediately attack the ministry’, the followers of Bethmann were seen to be critical of Manteuffel’s administration from the start.⁹² ‘The contributors to the Neue Preussische Zeitung and the clique of literati behind the Preussisches Wochenblatt speak in public places in a similar fashion, and what I have reported to Your Excellency previously has been fully confirmed – that there exists an agreement between Herr Wagner [sic] and Herr Jasmund [the editor of the Wochenblatt] that it is above all things a question of removing Your Excellency’, reported Quehl in November 1852.⁹³ Between 1851 and 1855, editions of the Wochenblatt were seized on 16 separate occasions for expressing ‘principles and views … which seemed not to be suitable for general dissemination and recognition, which may indeed increase the tendency amongst those who are still undecided to oppose the decrees of the authorities’, in the words of the Polizeipräsidium.⁹⁴ The ‘Bethmann-Goltz opposition and newspaper’ appeared to have defied Bismarck-Schönhausen’s prediction in 1851 that ‘a conservative opposition can only be led with and by the King, so that H. M. is drawn towards interests which are against his own ministers, not through public papers, but through personal influence at the Court’.⁹⁵ ‘With us, every other opposition has no grounds’, he went on, ‘or it must become radical.’⁹⁶ To Friedrich Wilhelm IV, as to many other conservatives, such opposition seemed to mean that ‘the ministry would not be able to maintain itself, the conservatives would join the constitutionalists, and no one would be for the ministry’.⁹⁷ Conservatives and liberals appeared to have colluded in the re-emergence of party politics in Prussia after 1849–50.

In most states, liberals were more commonly joined by Catholics than by conservatives, despite their mutual reservations.⁹⁸ Although contemporaries would have heard ‘as much as nothing’ of ‘our doings and strivings here, of our Catholic faction, our bills and debates’, a Catholic party was forming in several states during the 1850s, suggested August Reichensperger, after the emancipating events of the revolution.⁹⁹ In Prussia, he noted in 1852, a ‘Catholic faction of about 60 members has already been constituted’.¹⁰⁰ By 1858, contended his brother Peter Reichensperger, the Catholic party in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus was the single largest element of the moderate ‘Left’, with 51 seats, together with 20 seats of the Mathis-Bethmann-Hollweg faction, and 28 members of Schwerin-Putzar’s group: ‘The numerically strongest faction, namely the Catholic one, consisted in its majority of Rhenish, Westphalian and Silesian deputies, and these provinces monitored their effectiveness in such a way, as a whole and individually, that there was least need for them to support and further the aims of the faction in large numbers and by the act of voting.’¹⁰¹ In the localities, there was a strong correlation between confession and voting, with most Catholic deputies receiving between 75 and 90 per cent of the votes of the electors in the predominantly Catholic areas of the Rhineland and Westphalia.¹⁰² With a low turnout in the 1850s, typically around 10 per cent, priests, landowners, peasants and petty officials were able to dominate electoral colleges, regularly voting in their co-religionists. In Paderborn, for example, in 1855, such groups made up 68.2 per cent of electors.¹⁰³ Voters in other states with large Catholic populations were slower to form confessional milieux, with most voting either for liberal or governmental candidates in Baden and Württemberg throughout the 1850s and early 1860s, partly hindered by indirect voting, which meant that Catholics only gained three seats in the 1867 election to the Badenese Landtag instead of the 27 seats out of 63 that they would have won in a direct vote.¹⁰⁴ In Bavaria, the influence of confession, although still largely submerged, was more visible, with the ‘opposition between Catholics and Evangelicals’ playing a distinct role, in the opinion of Hugo Lerchenfeld-Köfering: most of the 35–60 deputies not belonging to the liberal and democratic parties in the 1850s were labelled ‘clericals’, although few openly challenged the Bavarian state’s control of the Catholic church, which had been one of the most contentious questions during the revolution.¹⁰⁵

Political Catholicism continued to exist as an element of the ‘opposition’ in the post-revolutionary decade, especially in Prussia, because the sources of confessional difference and discrimination remained in place. As one ‘important personality’ put it in the Kölnische Zeitung in 1853, reprinted in the Catholic Deutsche Volkshalle,’the formation of the Catholic faction has not been brought about by an indeterminate confessional interest, but by a distinct, existing infraction of the constitutional rights and freedoms of the Catholic church’.¹⁰⁶ The press had labelled the faction the ‘ultramontane party’, and later the ‘Catholic party or faction’, which was a name justifiably adopted by Catholic deputies themselves to represent their main purpose: if Bavaria had encroached on the constitutional freedom of Protestants, no one would object to them adopting the name ‘Evangelical faction’, concluded the correspondent.¹⁰⁷ ‘Over centuries, Prussia was an Evangelical state’, wrote one deputy in 1852, after the Kultusminister Karl Otto von Raumer had placed restrictions on Jesuit missions and on Catholic theologians studying in Rome, ‘and in this Evangelical character of the state, as well as through its resulting influence over the smaller Protestant states of the Continent, lay the centre of gravity of its political position, just as much as through the personal significance of its ruler and more than through its material power.’¹⁰⁸ With 7 million Catholics, compared to 10 million Protestants, wrote another deputy on the same occasion, Prussia should not be an ‘Evangelical state’.¹⁰⁹

From that moment on, when all confessions in Germany have complete security that their constitutional rights will be equally guaranteed in the individual states, that a difference of religion will underpin no difference of state entitlement or favour, from that moment on the political unity and power of Germany will rest on the firmest foundations, and an opposition of conscience will only act and clash in a sphere which knows no political boundary disputes, in the sphere of teaching, example and spiritual competition.¹¹²

In a much more limited form and in fewer regions, Catholic politics, like its liberal counterpart, had a national set of aspirations during the era of ‘reaction’.

Some states such as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Sachsen-Weimar, to which Biedermann moved in 1855 to edit the Weimarer Zeitung, were like ‘a happy oasis in the middle of the political desert that covered the greater part of Germany’, where politics could be discussed openly.¹¹⁵ Other states such as Bavaria did not have a system of deposits and had retained jury trials for cases involving the press, which had been introduced in 1848. Pfordten confessed in 1857 that ‘the judgement of charges against the press by juries does not safeguard effective repression of the excesses of the press’.¹¹⁶ This left seizure of copies of newspapers as the government’s main deterrent, which Karl Brater, the Bavarian deputy and newspaper publisher, estimated had been used on 2,520 occasions between 1850 and 1858, making it virtually a daily occurrence; yet it generally took place without further penalty or charge.¹¹⁷ The Bavarian Ministry of Justice itself seemed to doubt the efficacy of press controls, most notably in a 15-page memorandum published in 1869 and looking back to the 1850s and 1860s:

At different times, and namely at times of agitation, the demand resurfaced to again exercise influence over the press, which was usual in the old legal order. The permissibility of confiscation gave a helping hand towards this end. There was at times the fullest and, it cannot be denied, also a barely permitted use of this method. With what success? Individual evil-intentioned voices in the press were silenced, and the admirers of the past were almost and temporarily satisfied, but only by summoning forth in this fashion, and giving actual credence to, new storms and, at the same time, by making the well-intentioned institution of confiscation, which was not incidentally intended to extend beyond the sphere of penal legislation, into the object of unanimous antipathy.¹¹⁸

Officials in other states had similar experiences. In Hanover, the government professed its continuing support for ‘the basic principle of press freedom’ in 1851; in Baden, the Foreign Minister asserted that ‘there can be no talk, as is self-evident, of a reintroduction of censorship’.¹¹⁹ Even in Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV regularly became ‘very agitated over the direction of public opinion’, which refused ‘blindly to trust in his policy’, but wanted ‘to make itself independent’, in Varnhagen von Ense’s words.¹²⁰ When the King was attacked by the Vossische Zeitung for sacking Gustav von Bonin as War Minister in 1854, Hinckeldey reportedly shrugged his shoulders and said that the courts usually acquitted journalists in such circumstances.¹²¹ With 1,160,214 newspapers sold every week in Prussia by 1855, the Prussian state lacked the means to control the press.¹²²

Heimat and Nation

Above all, it is essential that civil servants of all categories devote themselves sincerely to the system and interests of the state, as a powerful lever for the self-consciousness of a Volk, and that each says with just as much passion and pride: ‘I am a Bavarian’ (as one often hears in Prussia: ‘I am a Prussian’).

As subordinate means, the following should be considered: the reawakening of provincial and also local Volksfeste, the celebration of festivals which recall the popular (volksthümlich) government measures of Max I, and also, for example, the refashioning of the Oktoberfest into a more effective national festival for the whole of Bavaria – in addition, careful respect for monuments to which commercial and legendary recollections are tied; the maintenance of popular elements of ritual and domestic mores … and furthering of what is already in place.

Particularly important is, finally, care for the material advantages of the rural population … and care for workers and the poor.¹²⁸

There were recurrent characteristics of state-sponsored allegiance and identity. First, individual states were habitually equated with particular Volksstämme, or ‘tribes’, dating back to the ‘Völkerwanderung’; Württemberg with the Swabians, Saxony with the Saxons, Hanover with the Lower Saxons, and Bavaria with the Bavarians. Every German tribe had the right to its own customs, attributes and, even, language, asserted the semi-official Leipziger Zeitung in 1861.¹²⁹ The newspaper’s editor had argued as early as March 1850 that the German question could only be solved ‘if every German Stamm … is true to itself, does not abandon its own interests and independently unites with the greater whole’.¹³⁰ For this reason, wrote the Neue Hannoversche Zeitung in 1859, the German was an ‘enemy of centralisation’, preferring ‘to observe his own morals at home, his own customs in his towns and his own law in his country’.¹³¹ The governments of the Mittelstaaten had ‘been supported by their people for centuries in the struggle for their independence’, remarked the Staats-Anzeiger für Württemberg two years later.¹³² It was ‘natural’, implied the individual governments, that every Stamm had its own state.

Third, the middling German states were depicted as havens of prosperity and culture, more than compensating for their lack of power. Railways, manufacture (Saxony), agricultural improvement (Württemberg and Bavaria), maritime trade (Hanover), education and culture were all seen to have flourished in the 1850s. History ‘has demonstrated repeatedly that vitality, strength and influence on human development is manifested less often in large states than in states of a moderate size,’ recorded the Staats-Anzeiger für Württemberg in July 1860: ‘It may well be true that the fragmentation of Germany into a myriad of Stämme and states has hitherto prevented her from making her political power felt as it should be; it is at least equally true that precisely because of this, Germany has become a country second to none with regard to the dissemination of culture and knowledge, even among the very lowest classes of the population.’¹³⁴

Loyalty to one’s state and identification with one’s local Heimat, however, were rarely seen to exclude German unity or to require the continuation of the German Bund. Even a ‘realist’ such as Ludwig August von Rochau, one of the most ardent supporters of a Prussian-led nation-state and a critic of ‘anti-national’ particularists in the third Germany, admitted that the four monarchies of Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony and Württemberg, together with Baden and the two Hessian states, which were ‘quite suitably given the name Mittelstaaten’, had been obliged publicly to acknowledge the national idea, even if insincerely: ‘In order … not to antagonise national sentiment openly, the middling states occasionally and gladly associate themselves with a certain German disposition or signal, which is all the less troubling because the obligations which could be derived from it regularly find their limit in the dualism of the two great states, which prevents them from passing from theory to practice.’¹³⁷ For their part, the small states willingly countenanced the national cause, since ‘national patriotism (Nationalpatriotismus) demanded of them no notable sacrifice in terms of state policy’ and all could be given ‘to the nation … because what they had was not worth much for them and was a highly precarious possession’.¹³⁸ Although Rochau was sceptical of treaties and legal constraints on sovereignty, believing that it was won, lost or shared ‘only through violence’, he conceded that the Mittelstaaten had acquired ‘a type of independence’, which made them impossible to ignore in the construction of a single German nation-state, despite the fact that ‘the sharpest corners and edges of particularism have been noticeably ground down through the history of the last centuries and especially of the last generation’ and that ‘the German states’ system’ had been ‘simplified’ by the unlamented passing over the previous 50 years of ‘the religious principalities, a pile of small ruling houses, the majority of the Reich cities, and the Reichsritterschaft’.¹³⁹

Most proponents of Kleindeutschland were more optimistic about the flexibility and longevity of a German Bundesstaat and more appreciative of Germany’s geographical, cultural and political variety than was Rochau. The writers and journalists of the Grenzboten were a case in point. Gustav Freytag, the journal’s editor since 1848, was a strong advocate of Prussian ascendancy in Germany, a conviction cemented by his upbringing in the borderlands of Silesia, but he denied that loyalty to Prussia excluded feelings for his Heimat or a belief in a German nation-state:

I was born as a Prussian, a Protestant and a Silesian not far from the Polish border. As a child of the frontier I learned to love my German essence early in opposition to a foreign national identity (Volksthum), as a Protestant I won a quick entry into science and learning without painful circumspection, and as a Prussian I grew up in a state in which the dedication of the individual to the fatherland was self-evident.¹⁴⁵

In 1847, Freytag moved to Saxony, editing the Grenzboten in Leipzig from 1848 until 1870, and purchasing a house in Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1850. As he recalled in his memoirs, he had quickly settled in Saxony, with ‘a great circle of good acquaintances’, alongside the Austrian and other exiles working on the periodical.¹⁴⁶ His journal, although stressing – like Freytag himself – that Prussia was ‘present and indispensable’ for German unification, did not underestimate the distinctiveness and independence of the other German states.¹⁴⁷ There were, as the Grenzboten noted in 1854, many local differences in Germany: each city tended to be divided into ‘three circles’ – an exclusive one, an oppositional one, and one in the middle trying to mediate – but these ‘local circles, from which the parties constitute themselves, receive their direction from the central point of the party, which is in turn subordinated to local conditions’.¹⁴⁸ From 1848 onwards, after ‘unrest’ had created ‘an extraordinary confusion’ of ‘political concepts’, ‘true party formation’ had taken place in those places in which parliamentary assemblies had gathered, encouraging tensions between the national locus of Frankfurt, where the ‘middle party’ of liberals and constitutionalists had been dominant, and the individual states, where local variations had affected the emergence of parties.¹⁴⁹ In Leipzig, which had avoided a noble reaction, class divisions rather than different political aims determined the establishment of factions; in Königsberg, which had seen government and aristocrats unite in 1848, there was no Mittelpartei, only a democratic opposition. In general, the ‘middle party’ had done well in 1848–49 in smaller states and democrats in the less liberal larger states, with consequences for the post-revolutionary period.¹⁵⁰

Given the Grenzboten’s strong support for national unification, the periodical naturally assumed that all Germans were fundamentally similar. The strength of Germany was greatest, the publication asserted in 1859, when ‘all the individual governments are united with their peoples’: ‘This is only possible because, in spite of all their patriotism (Patriotismus), which exists rather in forms of speech, symbols, flags and provincialisms, all German Völker want the same at bottom.’¹⁵¹ Although some contemporaries claimed to back Austria, few, if any, would think of becoming ‘Austrian’.¹⁵² The problem lay not with the ‘peoples’ of Germany, but with their leaders: in Bavaria, ‘a brave, loyal Volk’ and a well-intentioned monarch faced an illiberal, anti-Prussian government; in Hanover, Stüve had, with some success, mobilised liberals against Prussia and behind the government in its attempt to reform the Bund, but only temporarily, since Hanoverians did not live ‘on an island’ – ‘progress and regression are linked together in all German states’ and ‘a solidarity of interests exists’.¹⁵³ The division of Germany into ‘two halves’ in the North and South, which were ‘geographically split regions’, was the corollary of ‘extraordinary historical conditions’ and could be overcome through an overarching assembly, noted another article in the same year.¹⁵⁴ Germany’s diverse but integral culture was, as one correspondent had maintained in 1850, 300 years old.¹⁵⁵ It would not collapse during a period of transitional and unstable politics after the revolution. It could be incorporated not in a unitary ‘Prussian’ state but in a federal German one, as the Grenzboten repeatedly pointed out.¹⁵⁶ A German Bundesstaat would harness the individual states and Völker without stifling them, it was implied; a Staatenbund was too loose a structure and would fail to contain ‘particularism’.¹⁵⁷

Widespread suspicion of ‘Particularismus’ and ‘Kleinstaaterei’ worked against the establishment of local patriotisms in competition with German nationalism.¹⁵⁸ Such suspicion was especially pronounced in kleindeutsch publications such as the Grenzboten and the Preussische Jahrbücher, which had been set up in 1858 by ‘the decisively constitutional party’ as ‘a national matter’ in the belief that ‘Prussia sooner or later is destined to take the lead in Germany’, in the words of its founder, Haym.¹⁵⁹ To the former periodical, looking back on the 1850s, industrialisation had pushed ‘our smaller, domestic states’ towards the ‘movement of the rest of the world for the first time’ and had witnessed the passage of ‘the life of our nation’ to another ‘phase’, yet it had also created the ‘selfishly material’ and a ‘one-sided spirit of accumulation and speculation’, which – as types of ‘particularism’ – reinforced the traditional particularism of the German states and undermined the ‘earlier, still one-sidedly ideal life of the nation’.¹⁶⁰ ‘The particularism of the bourgeois social elements, i. e. their spirit of privacy, which is still mired in crude private law, one-sided acquisition and possession, and their correspondingly atomistically fragmented condition, also upholds the particularism of the German states against each other’, recorded the same article in 1861.¹⁶¹ Both forms of ‘crude particularistic entity’, aggravated by the external, bureaucratic nature of the modern state, ‘stand in the way of our national unification’.¹⁶² This ‘in no way’ meant that ‘all the national endeavours, with whose final reawakening the nation again first begins to breathe’ were ‘in vain or meaningless’.¹⁶³ Indeed, ‘in the national task we Germans are again given considerable means to counter the soporific and self-seeking power of a mere material spirit of acquisition’, continued the correspondent.¹⁶⁴ Rather, it was necessary to replace the ‘higher ideal tie which once kept Germany together in the medieval Kaisertum’ with ‘independent statehood’, ‘the development of an organic, legal Bürgertum and its professions’, ‘the maturity of a general historical and human development’, which together would create a ‘lasting form of national unity and strength’.¹⁶⁵ Given these general forces, particular loyalties would be overcome. The Preussische Jahrbücher came up with a similar diagnosis. It was impossible to imagine the sovereignty of French departments and cities; yet such circumstances actually existed in Germany, wrote one contributor in 1858.¹⁶⁶ Even in 1848–49, ‘particular interests’ had persisted, with opposition to the creation of a powerful German fleet.¹⁶⁷ ‘If such particular interests opposed an acknowledged unitary central government during a period of national upturn, how much more must this have occurred during a period of downturn, as the Bundesversammlung once again pushed aside the Central Power’, noted another article in the same periodical in 1860.¹⁶⁸ Particularism continued to exist, serving as a foil for the national aspirations and projects of its opponents.

Occasionally, conservative publications challenged or ignored the negative connotations of ‘particularism’. Thus, the Neue Preussische Zeitung argued in September 1863, at the time of the Fürstentag in Frankfurt, that the German Volk, ‘i.e. the ethnic nation (das völkische Volk)’, had always been diverse, although containing ‘from its origins until today a richer interior than the French and English’.¹⁶⁹ ‘For this particularism of the German tribes in Germany, small entities must be maintained; that is, one must give them the means to maintain themselves, but also one must impress upon them the necessity of bowing, as a matter of principle, to that which sustains those means – for example, protection from the external world, which would otherwise break them’, continued the article.¹⁷⁰ The Bund and the Holy Roman Empire, which were understood as loose, free ‘republics’, alone safeguarded German particularism, which was the source of its strength and richness.¹⁷¹

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the Historisch-politische Blätter, the principal Bavarian and Catholic periodical, agreed with the Neue Preussische Zeitung’s opposition to the Erfurt Union, which it saw as a French-inspired attempt to create a unitary state and to trammel the independence of the German ‘tribes’.¹⁷² In an article on ‘Nationality’ in 1850, the journal sought to protect particularity in Germany from the standardising impulses of the 1848 revolution, which had redirected the cosmopolitan egotism of the French Revolution of 1789 towards an uncompromising, unitary nation-state.¹⁷³ In this revolutionary form, nation-states had become self-contained and exclusive, breaking ties in a Machiavellian fashion with a common God-given humanity and portraying traditional ‘love of the [local] fatherland as one-sidedness’.¹⁷⁴ The old Christian order had allowed diversity and particularity; the modern nation-state did not. In 1850, amidst the backlash against the revolution, the preservation of Germany’s cultural and political particularity was the priority of the Historisch-politische Blätter, although the periodical also conceded that particularity could easily become a damaging source of division:

Germany’s fate is close to that of Greece; we are one in terms of our descent, language and historical ties; but we are politically separate, and not just in recent times … We have in Germany a natural, genetic, historical and literary fatherland, and we have loved it, perhaps most recently with less hue and cry, but with greater introspection, than any other Volk has loved its own. But we do not have a political fatherland, and whoever wants to impose it on us in this sense does at once violence and injustice to nature, to facts, to the whole Volk and to the individual states which comprise it. Politically … we are Austrians, Prussians, Bavarians and so forth, according to our tribes and our circumstances, not just by the form and existence of our governments, but as the result of an age-old customary community (Gemeinschaft) of our public existences, our morals and attributes, our fates and matters of honour, our suffering and joy.¹⁷⁵

If this has taken longer amongst Germans than amongst other nations, the cause lies in their fragmentation. Each of the small state structures in Germany was split from the others, in each small land the inhabitants lived together like the tenants of a great estate; the little people (Völkchen) became old with its ruler, it could only think of its own existence in conjunction with the family of this ruler; it had no need of political freedom, and therefore the concept could not emerge.¹⁷⁷

It was obvious, went on the same correspondent, that ‘no German state can see itself today as cut off; each must recognise common affairs, as the nation has long recognised them as such. More and more, Germans see their salvation in the unified handling of these affairs. The Bund, as it is now, no longer suffices.’¹⁷⁸ If Germans wanted the affairs of the Bund to be ‘concentrated’ and dealt with more effectively by a central body, ‘this desire has resulted from a re-awakened national sentiment’, a feeling ‘more general than any other’, making it impossible for even ‘the fastidious servant of the Court’ to ‘parade his particularism’.¹⁷⁹ The German nation had woken again, in spite of attempts to thwart it over the previous 100 years, confirmed the periodical in 1859 at the time of the Franco-Austrian War. The ‘crudest sectional system (Sonderwesen)’ had existed, paradoxically bolstered by ‘the constitutions of the German states’, which at the same time pushed the ‘life of the state into the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) and awoke civic sentiment’, creating the conditions for national criticism of particularism.¹⁸⁰ The actions of the individual governments before 1848 had convinced the Volk that ‘a powerful institution for the unification of our fatherland’ would never be constructed by the states themselves, but by free institutions.¹⁸¹ ‘Thousands of the best men’ who joined the national movement were united in their recognition of ‘the weakness of the Bund and the wretchedness of its authorities’ and in the belief ‘that the individual states should give up a small part of their sovereignty’ and ‘that alone the devoted caring for national interests’ guaranteed the survival of the individual states.¹⁸² ‘The great majority of the nation shared this opinion’, concluded the correspondent.¹⁸³ The fear of appearing to be a ‘particularist’ prevented significant sections of the population, even in the patriotic South West, from arguing for the sovereignty of the smaller and medium-sized states, remarked the Historisch-politische Blätter in 1865.¹⁸⁴ In retrospect, Joseph Görres himself, the spiritual father of the publication and son of the German fatherland who had died in 1848, was purported to have opposed particularism on the grounds that it had deprived Germany of its just desserts after national liberation in 1813–15.¹⁸⁵ After the unsettling events of the 1848 revolution, no state in the third Germany except perhaps Bavaria, whose government alone sometimes sought to popularise the idea of a Bavarian nation, considered itself popular or strong enough to exist in its own right, independently of a German Staatenbund or Bundesstaat. Against the threat of revolution and invasion, it was necessary for the individual states to cooperate and to sacrifice some of their sovereign powers, noted the Minister-President of Hesse-Darmstadt, Reinhard von Dalwigk zu Lichtenfels in 1861: ‘The purely German monarchies, whether great or small, are on their own vis-à-vis the enormous danger that confronts them. They can only save themselves through firm, honest solidarity, by discarding all particularist interests.’¹⁸⁶ The ‘organisation of their military forces’ was needed to defend the states ‘against revolutionary attacks’ ‘in view of the growing boldness of organised revolution’, and a united position was required ‘against Prussia and Austria in the Confederation’ and ‘against das Ausland’, especially if Austria were threatened.¹⁸⁷ If the Habsburg monarchy were distracted, as seemed likely throughout the 1850s, or were weakened, as was the case after 1859, it ‘would inevitably bring the collapse of the German individual governments in its wake’, warned Dalwigk.¹⁸⁸ For their defence, the German states had traditionally relied on Prussia and, in particular, Austria as Great Powers, but such reliance was dangerous by the 1850s, given Berlin’s and Vienna’s rivalry and pursuit of their own interests after 1848–49. ‘The Mittelstaaten have another enemy apart from democracy,’ wrote Dalwigk in a memorandum on the reform of the Bund in 1861: ‘This is the dualism of the two German Great Powers.’¹⁸⁹

Most other German leaders shared the Hessian Minister-President’s mistrust and his sense of his own state’s weakness: even Ludwig von der Pfordten, the former and future Bavarian Foreign Minister, believed that, ‘in fifty years, all German middling and small states will be mediatised’.¹⁹⁰ To Beust, the Saxon first minister, the single-minded antagonism of Prussia and Austria, which frequently blinded them to the other German states, could be compared to that of North and South in the approaching American Civil War.¹⁹¹ From Olmütz and Dresden onwards, when Germany seemed to be ‘on the brink of a Bürgerkrieg’, through the Crimean and Franco-Austrian Wars, to the Fürstentag and the Gastein Convention of 1865, the third Germany seemed to have been tossed around by the currents of Great Power diplomacy and Austro-Prussian rivalry.¹⁹² Since ‘the times were, thank God, over when a German state could seriously think of separating itself from the German land of brothers’, proclaimed Beust in 1863, the governments of the individual states had little choice but to join forces.¹⁹³ For the Saxon Minister-President, as for the ministers of all the medium-sized states except Baden, the German Confederation constituted the most likely framework for such cooperation: to this end, he put forward proposals to reform the Bund at the Dresden conferences of 1851, at the Bamberg conference of 1854 and at other points during and after the Crimean War in 1855, 1856 and 1857, at the Würzburg conferences of 1859 and 1860, at the Saxon Gesamtministerium of October 1861, at the Frankfurt Fürstentag of 1863, at the Nuremberg conference of ministers in the same year, and at a similar conference in Augsburg in 1866.¹⁹⁴ This reforming zeal derived, as Dalwigk made plain in his commentary on Beust’s plan of 1861, from a frank assessment of a medium-sized state’s options during the 1850s and early 1860s:

Those German states which, like the Grand Duchy of Hesse, are not in a position, as a result of their political, historical and geographical relations, to step forward as independent powers in the European states’ system, find in the German Bund, which ensures for all its members internal and external security, independence and inviolability, the best guarantee of their existence and prosperous development. The dissolution of the Confederation would expose these states’ requirements for life to the greatest dangers.¹⁹⁵

Reform of the Confederation

And when one looks carefully at the current political situation, not only in its momentary meaning but in conjunction with the history of the last decades, certain aspects stand out, which make it seem like the task of a conservative policy aiming to preserve the monarchical principle in the individual German states to search for the solution of the problem of how, on the foundations of the existing order of things, the desire of the German people for a more powerful, long-lasting representation of its interests as a whole can be satisfied more fully.¹⁹⁸

It does not exclude the feeling of tribal particularity and uniqueness, for it flows from the same source as these.

One should not, above all, mix up the consciousness of national unity, i.e. of belonging together through the same descent, language, morality, and so forth, with the demand of political unity. It is this demand which brings the independence of the individual states into question and which might exclude Austria; any consciousness of the counter-case, as for example has been thoroughly announced at the Volksfesten of recent years, takes the individual German states as such and entwines them as a whole with a confederal (föderativ) tie.²⁰¹

The same priority of states’ jurisdictions and powers was present in governments’ discussion of a representative assembly for the Bund, combined with distaste for ‘democracy’. At Dresden, the debate about a representative assembly had been bitter, marked by Wihelm I of Württemberg’s leaked accusation that Vienna was not interested in the setting up of a confederal Volksvertretung. Beust argued that such an assembly was ‘a real need’ as long as it did not take on ‘the nature of a parliament with the right of approval etc.’:

If the suggested assembly of delegates of the estates is only convened in individual, exceptional cases, if it only has to consider bills put before it by the Bundesversammlung, if each and every initiative is constitutionally removed from it, if it has nothing to do with a responsible ministry, and if, finally, its sessions do not take place in public, such an assembly will have to be remarkably lucky if it is to become a second Paulskirche.²⁰⁴

Note: * This figure corresponds to the population of the Thuringian states in their entirety.

Source: J. Angelow, Von Wien nach Königgrätz (Munich, 1996), 323; idem, Der Deutsche Bund, 117.

By 1859, under pressure from the Nationalverein and the ‘Gotha party’, the Bavarian Foreign Minister Schrenk, whose predecessor Pfordten had opposed reform throughout much of the 1850s, urged his counterparts ‘in no way to reject’ the idea of a Bund assembly composed of delegates of individual chambers, since it could help to harmonise and constrain the activities of state parliaments.²⁰⁷ The subsequent agenda of the Würzburg conference of the same year, though, made no mention of a representative assembly, merely resolving to publish the proceedings of the existing Bundesversammlung and to establish a confederal court.²⁰⁸ Only after the Grand Duke of Baden had introduced a bill at Frankfurt to turn the Bund into a Bundesstaat in August 1860 and, in conjunction with the liberal leader Roggenbach, had begun to agitate for Prussian leadership and a national Volksvertretung did Beust revive the plan of the Weimar envoy to Dresden, Carl Friedrich von Fritsch, to create a confederal government, assuming the competencies of the Engerer Rat, and a Bundesrat made up of delegates from states’ assemblies, proportionate to population, and from governments, with one for each of the 36 administrations.

Beust himself, the main advocate of confederal reform, betrayed the defensive and conservative character of the proposed changes to the Bund. Radowitz had attempted in 1850 to introduce a Bundesstaat, wrote the former Saxon Minister-President and Habsburg Reichskanzler in his memoirs. Since the Habsburg monarchy, according to Radowitz, had ‘no place in a Bundesstaat’, for those who ‘wanted to continue the confederal community with Austria, it followed, with compelling logic, that there could be, once and for all, no talk of a Bundesstaat and its like, but the Staatenbund must be maintained and sanctioned anew’.²⁰⁹ Prussia’s demand of complete obedience had ensured that ‘one was, at times and mostly with reluctance, “anti-Prussian” in Munich and Stuttgart, as in Dresden and Hanover’.²¹⁰ Prussia’s supposed penchant for uniformity and exclusion ran against the grain of Beust’s aristocratic upbringing in Saxony and his university education in Leipzig and Göttingen, where he had been taught law by Eichhorn, history by Heeren, and politics by Sartorius, all of whom were supporters of the cultural and political patchwork of the Bund. From a reading of his later recollections, the young son of a relatively impoverished noble official, born in 1809, seems to have been troubled by the complicated and well-intentioned manoeuvring of King Friedrich August I, who had elected to back Napoleon at the battle of Leipzig in 1813 – witnessed by the five-year-old boy from the family estate outside the city – in order to avoid the French treating Saxony ‘as a conquered land’, if they had won.²¹¹ Ludwig Senfft von Pilsach, a neighbour of the Beust family at their estate of Zöpen, had decided to transfer to the Austrian diplomatic service rather than to return from Prague with Friedrich August, but he had nevertheless warned Beust in the 1840s not to ‘judge the king too severely’, since allegiances and calculations had been so finely balanced during the Napoleonic wars. To an extent, this sense of the intricacy of dynastic and Court politics had been confirmed by the future Foreign Minister’s entry into the Saxon diplomatic corps in 1831 at the age of 21.

In the gilded world of diplomacy, dominated by Metternich, whom Beust later met and always greatly admired, war with Austria, as was contemplated after 1850, had been inconceivable: ‘who would have dared even to think such a thing, not to say articulate it!’²¹² The machinations and power-political calculations, against a backdrop of war and regular crisis meetings of foreign ministers travelling rapidly by train to their respective capitals and resorts, had been difficult to imagine at the start of the young diplomat’s career in the 1830s, as he made the five-day trip by carriage to Munich to arrange the engagement of the Prince Regent with Princess Maria of Bavaria. His chief of mission, who travelled in top hat and tails, insisted on setting up a formal ‘cercle’ every morning and having a full dinner and supper on every evening of the voyage, reminding the Saxon diplomat of ‘the old Court life of the previous century’.²¹³ Nobility, with Beust proud of his family’s 64 quarterings, concern for etiquette and disdain for long trousers in the 1830s, and loyalty to one’s monarch, with King Johann’s praise of the young Foreign Minister’s steadfastness in the May uprising of 1849 constituting the ‘most honourable proof’ of his service, all unobtrusively circumscribed the actions and outlook of the first minister.²¹⁴ Although ministers considered it natural to pursue the interests of their own dynasty and land, to the point where Beust ‘never raised objections’ to being labelled an ‘anti-Prussian particularist and reactionary’, they unthinkingly stopped short of actual conflict.²¹⁵ Prussia, where the Legation Secretary was stationed between 1836 and 1838, was seen to be one of the pillars of such cabinet politics, ‘the seat of the strictest legitimacy’.²¹⁶

1848 undermined the workings of cabinet diplomacy and reset the terms of the debate about ‘Germany’. The ‘European party of movement’ had already noticed ‘the weakness of the larger governments’ in 1847, adumbrating ‘the bankruptcy of the Metternichian system’.²¹⁷ After 1849, it proved difficult to reinstall the old order, with observers like Beust conscious of its artifice. His distance from the ‘reaction’, of course, did not result exclusively from a change of view during and after the revolution, but derived in part from his enlightened education, overseen by his highly educated mother, from his experiences as an assiduous scholar at university and from his postings in Paris (1838–41) and London (1846–48), which he viewed as ‘a second Heimat’, reinforcing the ‘liberal’ attitudes of his Göttingen days in the ‘English’ state of Hanover.²¹⁸ Although such Anglophilia was arguably rooted in an overestimation of the powers of the monarch, the aristocracy, and the Court, where he was well acquainted with Prince Albert, together with a realistic assessment of Britain’s limited franchise and an appreciation of its relative tranquillity in 1848–49, the Saxon Foreign Minister’s ‘liberalism’ certainly made it easier for him to countenance the creation or maintenance of representative assemblies and the use of national rhetoric in Germany after 1849. ‘We have never forgotten to recognise that the national question is the upshot of a real need, and is thus a lasting and practical one, which must be brought into line with existing conditions, wrestled free from the revolution and solved on the ground of the Bund’, wrote Beust in 1851.²¹⁹

Since the Confederation was ‘a young institution in the state order of Germany’, it required ‘more time to embed itself in the legal consciousness of the nation (Nation)’, he declared in 1858.²²⁰ The Bund, after all, had presided over a period of national prosperity and peace, which warranted a reassessment of its successes: ‘In the period of time which belongs to it, there has been no reduction of German territory, during its existence no German armies have fought against each other, and no German land has made an alliance abroad against another German land.’²²¹ At the very least, the Confederation had not inhibited Germany’s ‘steady progress’.²²² As Beust told the audience at the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Leipzig in 1863, ‘the princes of Germany and their governments not only recognise and comprehend the upturn that a general German consciousness has benefited from … they also sincerely welcome it, because they have learned to recognise in this development of German sentiment the best point of support for their own endeavours’.²²³ The Foreign Minister even went as far as to imply, in a memorandum of 1861, that the founding of the Bund in 1815 had given rise to ‘the first expression’ of the striving for national unity in Germany.²²⁴ The Confederation was more likely to succeed if it could be recast as a national institution.

The Saxon Minister-President knew, however, that his own conception of a national Confederation was viewed sceptically by much of the population, as part of a ‘reaction’ which was ‘mostly understood as a type of conspiracy’ directed ‘through secret intrigues and then with open violence against the progressive institutions and liberal elements in the state’.²²⁵ Beust was conscious that his plans were widely associated with ‘petty statehood (Duodezstaaterei), small-state misery, Bundestag mismanagement (Bundestagswirthschaft), Confederation-of-the-Rhine-ism (Rheinbündelei) etc.’ The Bund was not popular, he confessed in 1861, not least because the principle of nationality was generally associated with the revolution and with the idea of a constitutional Bundesstaat, a central executive and a directly elected National Assembly, not with a loose organisation of semi-sovereign states within a confederation.²²⁶ A confederal nation was different from a federal one:

It would be blindness not to see that the German Bund has never put down deep roots in the heart of the German Volk, and that the two are not connected by a firmer tie than that of habit, indeed that the feeling of indifference with which it is linked has made way for a worse feeling.

It is true that the revolutionary ideas, whose mother is not Germany but Europe, have contributed to this … One is inclined, in general, to trace this phenomenon back to two things: first, to the resistance which the long-lasting police regime of the Bund elicited, and then to an unsatiated national consciousness, which demands a united action for Germany as a European power.

The push for national unity, the demand for national power in Germany are, of course, older than the nationality principle, preached in the West for three years now … Only … as the revolution … broke out … did the ideals of the German Bundesstaat, the German title of Kaiser, and the German parliament see the light of day. A revolution can call them once again into being.²²⁷

Some ministers pushed for more thoroughgoing reform than others. Notably, the government of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which became the main sponsor of the Nationalverein in 1859, believed that its aim of establishing a Bundestaat and of ‘strengthening national ties’ matched ‘the wishes of the great majority of the nation’.²³¹ Most were much more cautious. Thus, although Roggenbach argued in August 1860 that ‘German development must progress from the form of a Staatenbund, which the Acts of Confederation and Vienna Final Acts laid down, to that of a Bundesstaat’, the Badenese government had traditionally contended that a confederation was ‘the form which corresponded to the historical and legal relations’ of Germany’: ‘In the further construction of common institutions (e.g. of military institutions, of forts, etc.), in the rapprochement, if not identification, of the relations of civil society lies both the mettle and the strength of the national idea. Raised and strengthened by the governments themselves, this would unfold more and more relentlessly and give healthy nourishment to the sense of solidarity.’²³² The Badenese Foreign Minister, Ludwig Rüdt von Collenberg, was consequently content to back Bavaria’s moderate proposals for legal convergence alone in 1855, albeit on clear national grounds: ‘In this way, the common interests of the German nation would be considerably furthered, public opinion would without doubt be satisfied, as far as it deserves consideration, and an enhanced, consensual effect internally, and therefore a greater position of power externally, would be achieved.’²³³ Such national but conservative aims could be discerned in Württemberg, where Wilhelm I had backed the idea of a German parliament in 1851: ‘If we are to withhold from the nation (Nation) its deserved part in the highest affairs of its state life as a whole, we cannot hope to reconcile it with the constitution of the Bund and, just as little, bring the revolution in Germany to a standstill.’²³⁴ Yet, as in Baden, the government generally supported the view that the Bund was a confederation with the principal task of serving, in a ‘political and national context’, as ‘an indissoluble connection abroad’ rather than as an agent for change or reform at home.²³⁵ The demands of a national-minded opposition were unlikely to be met by such limited proposals.

Dalwigk, like Beust, acknowledged the risks of attempting to harness popular nationalism, but saw little alternative for the states of the third Germany during the 1850s. Unlike ‘democracy’, with which it was often paired, ‘the national idea has nothing to do with the form of the state’ and ‘can just as well become prominent in a monarchy as in a republic, and there were and are enough states in which the aristocracy respectively was or is the principal carrier of national thought’.²³⁶ Whereas democracy was predicated on the notion of equality and tended towards republicanism and revolution, nationalism could be combined with different regimes and was, ‘by nature, positive in content and, as far as it rests on tradition and history, conservative’.²³⁷ Indeed, national feeling ‘originates from the same source as one’s sense of family or Heimat’: ‘For just this reason, national sentiment is very well suited to serving as the foundation for a strong government and healthy political life (Staatsleben),’ noted the Hessian Minister-President in 1861.²³⁸ Whilst democracy was cosmopolitan, spreading ‘throughout the whole world’, nationalism was exclusive, serving to cement feelings of internal belonging against a hostile external set of rivals: ‘Each Volk has its own particular national policy, which exists for the most part in the pursuit of specific interests at the cost of other Völker.’²³⁹ Any feeling of sympathy for Poles, Italians and others could quickly be extinguished, finding satisfaction in the fact ‘that these peoples will be subordinated to German power’.²⁴⁰ Such feelings could be exploited by the states of the third Germany, especially, since they alone were ‘purely German’, in a common phrase of the 1850s. Moreover, the Mittel- and Kleinstaaten could take advantage of the circumstance that national belonging was cultural and ethnic, not political. ‘National consciousness in no way demands a unitary state,’ asserted Dalwigk: ‘It does not exclude the feeling of tribal particularity, uniqueness, for it flows from the same source. One should, above all, not confuse consciousness of national unity, i.e. of belonging, as a result of the same descent, language, customs etc. with the demand for political unity.’²⁴¹ This cultural unity was built on the diversity of the whole, as could be witnessed in the national festivals of the period, involving Schiller, shooting, choral, gymnastics and other associations. It was also compatible with ‘a confederaltie’.²⁴²

The problem, of which Dalwigk was aware, was that democracy and nationalism had been pushed together as a consequence of government repression before 1848, which had not distinguished between the different types of ‘opposition’.²⁴³ ‘In the revolutionary movements of Germany, democratic and national tendencies have always been united,’ continued Dalwigk in 1861: ‘The Bundestag succumbed to a united attack by both elements in 1848. Today, too, the governments face a united front, and even if the present opposition movement has not nearly regained the intensity of those of 1848 and 1849, its scope – one cannot deny this – has grown considerably; it has extended to circles from which it previously was distant.’²⁴⁴ Although, in the event of an uprising, order could be restored, given that the army remained loyal, it would not be ‘a lasting tranquillity’.²⁴⁵ It was necessary for the reactionary governments to divide and rule, seeking to separate nationalism and democracy and to qualify the particular interests of Austria and Prussia by appealing to overarching national interests, but such an undertaking was not bound to succeed, not least because Dalwigk and his counterparts continued to view nationalism as a ‘means’, not an ‘end’.²⁴⁶

Incidentally, all those attempts, and indeed not only the different reform plans of the Mittelstaaten but also the negotiations of the Frankfurt Fürstentag, remained completely within the bounds of theoretical ideas and considerations; these ideas themselves … remained without any practical success … Prussia … did not at all want a reform with the retention of the confederal character of the constitution and with the participation of Austria, as Austria itself and the Mittelstaaten alone desired and – through agreeable talks – could accept; rather it aimed solely at a complete dissolution of the Bund and its replacement by a Bundesstaat with a Prussian leadership and with the exclusion of Austria.²⁴⁸

Bismarck, who merely followed the policies of his predecessors with greater ruthlessness, had the ‘clear intention, without any regard for Austria … of lowering the German Bund in public opinion and making it feel its actual impotence’.²⁴⁹ A three-way relationship had come into being between the German Confederation, the Mittelstaaten and the Habsburg monarchy, which rapidly unravelled in the 1850s, contended Friesen. ‘The opaque, perpetually vacillating and contradictory policy which Austria followed after 1849 abroad and at home – all this destroyed almost every sympathy for Austria in the public opinion of Germany and led, more than all the efforts of Prussia, to alienate the German people from Austria and drive them into the arms of Prussia’, noted the Saxon minister, before explaining that ‘the power and status of Austria in Germany depended entirely on the trust and dependency of the governments of the German Mittelstaaten, which in part had already become very mistrustful and in truth could only be moved to support Austria by the fear of being raped by Prussia’.²⁵⁰ In turn, the ‘significance of these Mittelstaaten rested exclusively on the German Bund’; ‘if this common tie, which encompassed them all, were destroyed, then all of them, with each standing on its own, were meaningless, and could no longer be a support for Austria’.²⁵¹ In effect, this house of cards looked likely to collapse throughout the 1850s and early 1860s.

The individual states proved incapable of cooperating with each other in the interests of a greater national good or mere self-defence. Despite successfully standardising important components of commercial law and practice, German governments failed to reform the Bund itself.²⁵² Prussia had been forced to accept the Confederation at Olmütz and Dresden, but it generally used confederal institutions to oppose Vienna and block cooperation between the other states, as Friesen recognised. The Prussian cabinet had ‘only gone back to the Bund in a coerced way’ and welcomed ‘each failure with a kind of Schadenfreude’, lamented one Bavarian diplomat in November 1851.²⁵³ Austrian administrations, although deploring Bismarck’s cynical disregard for the legality of the Bund and his predecessors’ obstructionism, tended to ridicule the inefficacy and powerlessness of what Schwarzenberg had called ‘the old, downtrodden, despised Bundestag’, ‘an unwieldy, used-up thing, in no way sufficient for current conditions’.²⁵⁴ Austrian attempts to reform the Bund in 1863 came too late to convince many contemporary observers that Vienna’s position was genuine. For their part, the governments of many small states feared ‘mediatisation’, or a forced merger with the larger states, as a consequence of any reform. ‘We come off best if as little as possible changes in the old constitution of the Bund’, wrote the plenipotentiary of Nassau at the start of the Dresden conferences, prior to the full restoration of the Confederation.²⁵⁵ The governments of other, liberal, small states such as Sachsen-Weimar opposed an extension of the powers of the Bund because they viewed it as an agent of reaction: ‘One must remember … that Germany is not a Bundesstaat but a Staatenbund, and that all measures going beyond this constitutional form will shake its foundations.’²⁵⁶

More importantly, Bavaria, the largest and most powerful middling state, blocked reform of the Confederation until the early 1860s on the grounds that it endangered Bavaria’s independence as a first-rank German power. As Pfordten asserted in a memorandum of 1852, ‘the individual German states can be divided into two classes in their relationship to the Bund; namely, into those through which the Bund exists, and those which exist through the Bund. Certainly, Austria, Prussia and Bavaria belong in the first class, all the rest probably in the second.’²⁵⁷ Though it was true that Bavaria was not like Prussia and Austria, as European Great Powers and with some of their territories outside the Bund, its constitution had been predicated on its continuing independence. With Vienna and Berlin pitted against each other, concluded Pfordten, Bavaria’s need to retain its independence in order to use ‘its weight according to its interest’, to increase its influence, and to tip the balance one way or the other.²⁵⁸ Bavaria could ‘allow the German Bund no more incursive intervention in its internal affairs than could Prussia’, wrote Pfordten to Max II in October 1856.²⁵⁹ To Ludwig von Montgelas, it was natural that this freedom be extended to all the Mittelstaaten.²⁶⁰ The result, as Bavaria began to reconsider its policy on a reform of the Confederation around 1860, was that ‘one was fully unclear and clueless about the means to solve this problem’, with little prospect of ending the ‘many-headedness’, ‘the unwieldiness’ and the ‘envy’ which characterised confederal politics, in the opinion of the Bavarian envoy to Stuttgart.²⁶¹ ‘The individual states are setting themselves up again,’ reported his Badenese counterpart in Berlin: ‘A common feeling for the Bund can only be talked of as far as the latter can be used for certain particular ends.’²⁶² Even the ‘conservative party’ – ‘i.e. the governments’ – frequently seem to have believed that such ‘particularism’ prevented any national reform of the German Confederation.²⁶³

Much of the German press and most political parties were critical of the Bund, rejecting it as a viable and effective structure for national politics. The hope ‘that something other than the old Bundestag’ would emerge from the revolution and its immediate aftermath had been disappointed, lamented the Saxon Constitutionelle Zeitung in its annual review on 31 December 1851.²⁶⁴ The period had not witnessed anticipated reforms, concurred the Bremen Weser-Zeitung, but ‘the completion of a merely negative reaction’.²⁶⁵ By the time of the Crimean War, when the Bund was first tested, as many parties came to oppose the pro-Russian ‘neutrality’ of Prussia, there was a ‘sharply defined impression in public opinion’, wrote Beust, that the Bundesverfassung was ‘only an empty form’ and that ‘the other German states constituted a sort of second contingent beside the two Great Powers, destined to be put at the disposal of both powers’.²⁶⁶ To the Weser-Zeitung in 1854, the Bund had already proved that it was ‘fully unsuited’ to dealing with the crisis and representing Germany abroad.²⁶⁷ The ‘material side of national unification’ had occurred by the end of 1856, asserted the newspaper, but ‘political unification’ was still ‘an ideological phantom’: ‘The sole advances which Germany has made towards unification had nothing to do’ with the Confederation.²⁶⁸ ‘The matter of national progress is in the following state: the only national institute that we have in Germany has done nothing positive for national progress’, concluded the report.²⁶⁹ Even previously supportive publications such as the Kasseler Zeitung believed that it remained to be proved that the Confederation was ‘a European potency, equipped with all the requisites for survival’, ‘not merely a fictional constitutional concept’.²⁷⁰

Beust’s claim in 1858 that a German Bundesstaat with a stronger executive and a National Assembly was incompatible with the monarchical system was roundly rejected by newspapers like the Constitutionelle Zeitung, which contended that the Saxon minister was opposed to ‘German unity’ in favour of ‘the full sovereignty of the German Kleinstaaten’, and the Nuremberg Korrespondent von und für Deutschland, which declared that his statement was a ‘break’ ‘with all national hopes’ and ‘the declaration of insolvency of a German policy’.²⁷¹ In the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, the same newspaper printed – without objection – the opinion of the Preussisches Wochenblatt that small and medium-sized states had used the Confederation to gain influence beyond their actual significance and to act – or to block actions – ‘at the cost of the majority of the German Volk’.²⁷² In spite of some initial support for the Bund, it was widely accepted that it had not worked effectively during the crisis.²⁷³ Throughout the period, the refusal of the governments of the individual states to introduce a directly elected National Assembly was condemned in the press, with the suggestion in 1862 and 1863 to set up an assembly of delegates from the upper and lower chambers being dismissed as a ‘deception’, in the words of the official Karlsruher Zeitung.²⁷⁴ Looking back in 1865, the Heidelberg liberal Ludwig Häusser, writing in the Preussische Jahrbücher, maintained that the Bund had done nothing, especially in respect of the main national question for the previous 20 years in Schleswig-Holstein.²⁷⁵ The German Confederation, he went on, relied on the states of the third Germany, which were internally divided and were mistrusted by the German Volk, in part because they had traditionally been contemptuous of public opinion.²⁷⁶ As a result, the Bund had been weak and ineffective since its restoration.

Prominent liberal publications, particularly in North and Central Germany, agreed with Häusser’s diagnosis. The Confederation not only had a history of oppression, wrote the Grenzboten in 1850, it also lacked any connection with the German nation.²⁷⁷ The Congress of Vienna in 1815 had created Germany from a series of small states, in opposition to the wishes of Prussia, which had proposed a united German Bundesstaat with a central administration, continued the same publication in 1855.²⁷⁸ The Bund which emerged, rather than binding the individual states, constituted ‘a loosening of German ties’.²⁷⁹ It was designed to prevent civil war, countering the divisions caused by the Reformation and the French Revolution, not to ‘make possible a positive policy for Germany’.²⁸⁰ Small states in the Confederation were unlikely to exercise full sovereignty or to take military action in the manner of Austria or Prussia, which helped to safeguard peace, but they also diminished ‘the productive power of the Volk’ as a corollary of their lack of coordination and obstruction.²⁸¹ Like the Holy Roman Empire, which ‘did and could do nothing for Germany’, even to the point of failing ‘to prevent alliances of the German princes with the hereditary enemy’ of France, the Bund could not be reformed: ‘Further development of this constitution is not conceivable, least of all through the well-meaning but absurd means of a representative assembly in the Bundestag. True development, for the moment concerning only material questions, takes place outside the Bundestag, in the Zollverein, treaties about currency, weights, and so forth.’²⁸²

Beust’s plan for a Bund assembly in 1858 seemed disingenuous and unrealistic to the Grenzboten, given the minister’s unwillingness to introduce a strong executive and to coordinate the separate bureaucracies of the individual states. ‘The German Bund is not a confederation (Föderation) of the different German “tribes”, of the Austrians, the Prussians, the Hanoverians, the Hessians, and so on, but a confederation of the princes and cities, declared sovereign by the Acts of Confederation, in which certain rights were guaranteed to the former Reich princes’, continued another article in 1858.²⁸³ The Confederation was unable to intervene ‘to protect the rights of subjects against the powers of the government’ and it had ‘few means to represent the great awareness and rise of, and enthusiasm for, the nation’.²⁸⁴ With the geographical and historical division of Germany between North and South, together with the self-interest of the individual states, there was little chance of reforming the Confederation, claimed one correspondent in 1859: ‘True, no Bundesstaat’s official policy takes issue in principle with the necessity of a Bundesreform; but with the passing of each year, the wonderful agreement of their leaders is strengthened in the assurance that “the right moment” has not yet come.’²⁸⁵ By the early 1860s, it was obvious, declared the Grenzboten, that the Bund was not defending Germany; Prussia, Austria and, even, Bavaria were.²⁸⁶ Although Prussia’s desire to annex Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 was probably illegal and counterproductive, it demonstrated a willingness to act on behalf of the nation, whereas ‘the Bund has done next-to-nothing’.²⁸⁷ Many had accepted Austria’s proposed reform of the Confederation in 1863 only half-heartedly, as a stop-gap, because of the inadequacy of existing arrangements:

It is true that the Bund richly deserves the neglect with which the governments regard it in private and the contempt which works against it in the Volk … The old Bund was, as an unpopular institution condemned by governments and public opinion, perfectly designed to prepare the ground and struggle for a well-organised Bundesstaat for the national party. It was anachronistic, its faults obvious; it was powerless even in obstruction.²⁸⁸

To publications like the Grenzboten, the German Confederation was beyond reform.

Few political parties championed a Bundesreform with any zeal. In Prussia, only ultra-right-wing reactionaries and Catholics treated the Confederation sympathetically. To Ludwig von Gerlach, the Bund was both enduring and legal, having been sidelined unconstitutionally by the ‘anti-confederal events of March’.²⁸⁹ With the Confederation restored, he went on in December 1850, ‘we are now uniting and founding Germany, creating our old alliances – the power and status of Prussia in Germany and in Europe – these are the goals by which we now set our compass’.²⁹⁰ If the individual states desired, asserted the reactionary Neue Preussische Zeitung in March 1850 in direct opposition to Radowitz’s Erfurt Union plan, they could construct a strong Bund: the only alternative was a unitary republic, since a centralised German nation-state was incompatible with the continuing existence of German princes and with the monarchical principle.²⁹¹ The Franco-Austrian War in 1859 merely confirmed that there was nothing with which to replace the Confederation, after the moderate conservative government of the ‘New Era’ had stood aside while Austria – in the name of Germany – was defeated.²⁹² In the opinion of the camarilla, such inactivity demonstrated Prussian ministers’ ‘liberal and Gotha-style Tendenzpolitik’.²⁹³ Although the reform of the Bund had been dogged by abstraction, reported the newspaper in 1863, it had achieved some of its goals, not least the defence and coordination of the ‘facts’ of Germany; namely, its diversity and particularity, its confessional division, and its tribes.²⁹⁴ Within such a loose ‘republic’ (res publica), which described even the Holy Roman Empire, some type of confederal structure was needed in order to maintain order.²⁹⁵

Many Prussian Catholics agreed. There was a danger, argued August Reichensperger in 1864, that ‘the overwhelming majority in our Abgeordnetenhaus’ had been led astray by French constitutional theory and the model of Young Italy, prompting them to see ‘in multiple statehood a thoroughly serious, scarcely surmountable obstacle’ rather than the natural complement of Germany’s diversity: ‘Monotone, more or less abstract unity contravenes Germanic sensibilities, which strive for harmony – that is, for difference in unity, in which is based an awareness that only here the forces and attributes of our Volkstum can fully unfold.’²⁹⁶ The Confederation, which allowed the inclusion of the largely Catholic power of Austria in Germany, was still the assumed framework for what Hermann von Malinckrodt called ‘the national task of the German Volk’: ‘This task demands harmony and a firmer unification (Einigung) of all the parts (Glieder) of Germany, it demands a reform of the Bund and the founding of a central power, but it does not allow the destruction of the Bund and the fragmentation of the nation in the name of a closer connection of its parts.’²⁹⁷ Although most calls to form a ‘Catholic party’ during the 1850s made little mention of the Confederation, in common with other ‘purely political questions’ in which ‘freedom of conscience’ was the rule, they generally appear to have assumed its continuing existence.²⁹⁸

Nevertheless, Catholic leaders such as the Reichensperger brothers remained sceptical of the Bund and seem to have doubted at times whether it could be reformed. Despite the fact that the improvement of the Confederation was one of ‘Germany’s Next Tasks’, as one of their pamphlets put it in 1860, the Bund had ‘unfortunately done nothing since its foundation’ and had ‘failed in many things’.²⁹⁹ Kleinstaaterei, which – it was believed – ‘owed its existence exclusively to the German Confederation’, was held to constitute ‘an insuperable obstacle for the greatness and development of the power of the fatherland’, to the point where even the Reichenspergers were not willing to plead that ‘the continuation of 35 Bundesstaaten, without any exceptions,’ was ‘a European or also merely a German necessity’.³⁰⁰ It was not obvious, in such circumstances, how ‘the organic extension and reconstruction of the confederal constitution’ would occur: the Catholic deputies were left little option but to hope for a renewal of the German spirit and the emergence of new German leaders akin to those of 1813, which might introduce ‘more movement and alacrity through a greater unity of organisation’ in the Bund.³⁰¹

Other political leaders in Prussia were much harsher in their criticisms and more pessimistic in their appraisals of future reform, as August and Peter Reichensperger acknowledged. The liberal party of Gotha and the Nationalverein had risen to prominence precisely because of ‘the previous failures of the external and internal aspects of German policy’.³⁰² Thus, though a handful of democrats – with Jakob Venedey the most well-known – went on supporting a grossdeutsch and confederal solution to the German question, a large majority of Prussian liberals and radicals were critical of the Bund. At the Abgeordnetentag of August 1863, which was intended by its old liberal architects as a form of Vorparlament to overshadow the Fürstentag, most of the 319 participants, including a majority of the 26 democratic and 58 Prussian deputies, were willing to rule out reform of the Confederation by setting unacceptable conditions for Austria, Saxony and other proponents of a Bundesreform; namely, a National Assembly directly elected according to the law of 1849 and with the right to sanction any reform of the Bund, the parity of Prussia and Austria in the envisaged directory, and the inclusion of East Prussia and Posen.³⁰³ The bill of the standing committee on the question of a Bundesreform, which was approved unanimously, welcomed the Austrian initiative almost sarcastically as ‘a happy sign of a belief, victorious everywhere, in the inadequacy of the existing form of the Bund and of the pressing necessity of its restructuring’.³⁰⁴ ‘Now, as previously, the Abgeordetentag can hope for the complete satisfaction of needs only from a federal unity (bundesstaatliche Einheit), as it found its legal expression in the German constitution of 28 March 1849, which offers the German nation both freedom and unity, security and power’, read the resolution, before conceding that the assembly of deputies could not afford, given internal crises and external threats, to treat the Austrian proposals for a ‘Staatenbund with a closer collegial executive and with a representative assembly’ ‘simply negatively’.³⁰⁵ The effect and intention of the resolution was, however, merely negative.

Liberals, especially, believed that the Confederation had failed and was likely to fail again. They were joined by a significant number of radicals, including socialists, and by moderate and governmental conservatives. The ‘small Germans’ had become dominant, wrote the Lassallean Social-Democrat in January 1865, by convincing democrats, amongst other things, that there had been no growth in Germany under the Confederation.³⁰⁶ The Bund was rotten and ineffective, concurred conservatives, leading Bethmann-Hollweg to push Friedrich Wilhelm IV to accept the title of Kaiser in 1849, gossiped Ludwig von Gerlach to the Queen in January 1853.³⁰⁷ ‘The Confederation, which should be a pledge of the nation’s unity and power vis-à-vis the external world, is in truth the cause of its fragmentation and weakness’, reported the Preussisches Wochenblatt seven years later.³⁰⁸ Manteuffel himself had argued, in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus in 1852, that there were better options for Germany than the Bund, even if they were not possible, for the time being, ‘without great martial catastrophes’.³⁰⁹ In Prussia, across the political spectrum, the Confederation found little support.

In the rest of Germany, parties and the press were occasionally more sympathetic towards the Bund, but they recognised that they were in a minority. Beyond government circles, the most supportive publication was the Allgemeine Zeitung, which argued that the ‘political unit of the Confederation’ should act on behalf of the German nation in the Crimean War, the Franco-Austrian War and the Schleswig-Holstein War.³¹⁰ At the same time, the newspaper conceded in 1854 the ‘necessity of the improvement’ of the Bund and admitted in 1859 that its military constitution was ‘flawed’.³¹¹ By the time of the Danish War, despite the publication’s hope in 1864 that ‘the rest of Germany, resting on the joyful self-sacrifice of the Volk, will show the astonished world that it is a great power even without the two Great Powers’, the Confederation was seen to have demonstrated its weakness, pushing the Allgemeine Zeitung to countenance backing Prussia despite the ‘setback’ that this would cause the ‘confederal system’ (Föderativsystem): the ‘German group of states’, which had to be the ‘principal representatives and supports of the confederal system’, had proved incapable of acting.³¹²

‘Opposition’ political parties in the third Germany rarely took issue with such a judgement. At the Frankfurt Abgeordnetentag in August 1863, deputies from the German Klein- and Mittelstaaten had made up 82 per cent of the total, joining forces – in effect – to vote against Austria’s planned reform of the Bund.³¹³ In Bavaria, the Chamber of Deputies had already toyed with the idea, put forward by the ex-Frankfurt liberal Peter Ernst von Lassaulx in September 1855, of sponsoring ‘a rebuilding (Neugestaltung) of the German Bund in accordance with the needs of the time’, including a National Assembly and supreme Bundesgrericht, before finally accepting Pfordten’s call for moderation.³¹⁴ When the Bavarian diplomat again became Foreign Minister in November 1864, he was obliged to admit that the state’s parties and public opinion were against his policies in favour of the Confederation.³¹⁵

In Württemberg, deputies had spoken out earlier and more forth-rightly than in Munich, criticising the strict neutrality of the Bund in the Crimean War and calling for ‘national’ backing of Austria and the West.³¹⁶ In August 1864, the Chamber of Deputies adopted a bill demanding the fulfilment of ‘the long recognised and increasingly pressing need, as a result of recent experiences, for the rebuilding of the public and legal relations of Germany in the direction of unity and the active participation of the German Volk in the leadership of its common affairs’.³¹⁷ Politicians complained vociferously in accompanying debates that the Confederation had done nothing ‘for the unity of the nation at home’ or for ‘the position of Germany in external affairs’.³¹⁸ Such complaints surfaced at other times. In May 1862, for instance, a number of bills demanded the creation of a ‘Volksvertretung’ and the ‘transformation of the Bundesverfassung with a National Assembly’.³¹⁹

Finally, in Saxony, deputies who had hesitated to speak on German affairs until 1858 came to criticise the cautious Bundesreform proposals of their own minister, Beust. At the very least, declared the conservative Rittergutsbesitzer Carl August Rittner in the main debate in February, ‘the German Bund has to come to the conviction that, if it gradually succeeds in uniting German material interests, it must also move to lead the German peoples to agreement (Einigkeit), if not unity (Einheit), in the political sphere’.³²⁰ The moderate democratic deputy Christian Gottlieb Riedel was less guarded, accusing the Confederation of merely protecting ‘the rights of the dynasties inside Germany’ and of ignoring ‘the rights of the Völker’.³²¹ Notwithstanding a polite word of ‘thanks to His Majesty’ at the end of the session, the second chamber had refused to back Beust, with the Constitutionelle Zeitung’s sarcastic ‘sincere thankyou to the Staatsminister’ for his ‘open explanation’, which would have ‘a doubly significant effect’, much closer to the overall tone of the debate.³²² The Minister of State was similarly unsuccessful in harnessing party support in the early 1860s, despite transient cross-party support for the Bund – as in other states – during the early stages of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in 1864.³²³ As the Progressive politician Carl Heyner, who met Beust in February 1864, put it, the policy of Mittelstaaten such as Saxony had ‘nothing, not even their own Volk, behind it’, and could not have, ‘after it [had] given it cause for mistrust over 14 years and [had] suppressed every initiative’.³²⁴ An ineffectual Bund and unpopular state governments were seen by opposition deputies to have combined in stymieing national unification.

The force of such arguments could be witnessed in the shifting stance of the Bavarian and Catholic Historisch-politische Blätter, whose anti-Prussian and grossdeutsch leanings initially encouraged it to take the Confederation seriously. Prussia, argued one article in 1862, constituted merely one-third of the Bund’s population.³²⁵ With the third Germany united, except for Baden, it matched the Prussian state’s population and exceeded its resources, leading it to favour some sort of trias, possibly within a reformed Confederation.³²⁶ Yet the periodical harboured doubts about confederal institutions from the start, lamenting that Germany was capable of more than the Bund allowed as early as 1850.³²⁷ Contemplating the ‘interregnum’ of ‘reaction’ from the standpoint of 1858, the publication admitted that the Confederation had failed as a national organisation, especially in the military sphere.³²⁸ By 1862, some correspondents denied that a Bundesreform was feasible, despite its promising origins, in 1815, when ‘one could imagine the Bund however one wanted’.³²⁹ In fact, the Vienna Final Acts had turned the Bund, via an international treaty, into an inter-state confederation. Thus, what was necessary was not ‘reform’, but complete reconstruction: ‘What one could call the reform of the Bund satisfies no party today,’ asserted the correspondent: ‘Reform presupposes the retention of the original character of the institution which is to be reformed; but precisely in this character lies the obstacle to the fulfilment of the German Bund’s tasks.’³³⁰ ‘When Germans really demand the unity of the fatherland, they demand the Bundesstaat instead of the Staatenbund, and if they don’t want this, they want nothing at all’, the article continued.³³¹ It was difficult to see how the demands of the age – a constitution, the participation of the Völker, a National Assembly, a stronger executive tied to the ‘life of the Volk’ – could be combined with the existing structure of the Confederation.³³² The Bund could no longer simply defend Germany against external enemies; it had to harness the country’s internal, national energies and establish itself as a Central European Great Power.³³³ There were doubts, however, whether this would be possible, given the narrowness and international character of the Confederation, and the inability or unwillingness of the states – especially Prussia – to cooperate.³³⁴

Partly because of these doubts about the Bund, partly because of a long-standing fascination with the ‘Reich’, the Historisch-politische Blätter put forward its own solution to the German question – the ‘Kaiseridee’.³³⁵ Such a greater German Kaisertum was designed to be more effective than the Bund, with one leader not a directory, and to allow the incorporation of a German parliament, the dynasties, and Austria. Some Catholic authors desired the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire, but the principle of nationality had necessarily moved the focus of power from Rome and Vienna to Germany itself, asserted one article in 1862.³³⁶ Unlike liberal conceptions of Kleindeutschland or the individual states’ notion of a trias, the ‘grossdeutsche Kaiseridee’ allowed Germany to become a world power at the centre of Europe, now that the artificial settlement of 1815 had come to an end.³³⁷ Catholics differed from liberals in viewing the reform or replacement of the Bund not as a domestic constitutional problem but as the main foreign-policy question of the century.³³⁸ Yet it soon became apparent, by 1864 at the latest, that neither Grossdeutschland nor a Bundesreform was likely in the near future, given that they were only supported by particular sections of Prussia’s Catholic population, with many Catholics backing the Progressives’ national programme.³³⁹ After Prussia’s successful war in Schleswig-Holstein, Berlin’s resurrection of the 1849 Reichsverfassung plan to establish a German Bundesstaat with parliamentary rule under the Prussian crown – a plan which was championed by the Nationalverein – had few, if any, rivals.³⁴⁰ The Bund, which had seemed to be a superior, national alternative to the Holy Roman Empire 46 years earlier, was widely believed by the mid-1860s to be weak and incorrigible.³⁴¹ Contemporaries mistakenly believed that the transition to a national Bundesstaat would be straightforward, opined the Historisch-politische Blätter in 1866, but there seemed to be no other possibility in view. Such despair was the culmination of scepticism about the Bund, even on the part of the main Catholic and Bavarian periodical, since its restoration in 1850.

4 The Third Germany and the Bund

Reaction and Opposition

Heimat and Nation

Reform of the Confederation