It was no coincidence that Bismarck first used the Prussian army in Schleswig-Holstein. Ten days after his appointment on 22 September 1862, the new Minister-President asked the Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke to investigate the possibility of a war with Denmark.1 The struggle between Germans and Danes in Schleswig had been going on for the last 500 years, Georg Waitz had written a decade earlier, and it would certainly continue.2 The duchies, which were joined by a personal union of the monarch to the Kingdom of Denmark, had become the most famous national cause in Germany after Christian VIII had decreed in 1840 that Danish was to be used in the schools, courts and churches of North Schleswig. ‘Our Volk has been brought up politically on the Schleswig-Holstein question,’ declared the Badenese liberal Franz von Roggenbach: ‘It was the first one in which the nation (Nation) participated again with insight, with conscience, after a long period of indifference. This question must be led to a happy end, otherwise the German Volk will lose its belief in itself.’3 Until 1840, German had been the official language throughout the territory, even though at least half of Schleswig’s population of 400,000 – and a large majority in the North – spoke a dialect of Danish. The duchies became a flashpoint not only because of the size and proximity of the German ‘diaspora’ there, accounting for about 700,000 of a total population of 900,000 in 1860, but also because Holstein was part of the German Confederation and because the charter of 1460, signed by the King of Denmark on being elected to what became – in 1474 – the Dukedom of Schleswig-Holstein, had decreed that the two territories should remain independent of the kingdom and closely tied to each other. These ‘old rights’ had been maintained, with separate estates, separate laws of male-only succession and a separate chancellery run by German officials in Copenhagen, as a consequence of Denmark’s inability to incorporate the duchies over the next three and a half centuries.
From a German point of view, such rights appeared to have been ignored by Christian’s ‘open letter’ (Aabene Bref) of 1846, in which he had proposed that the eventual inheritance of the crown by his younger sister Charlotte – since he and Crown Prince Frederik were heirless – also applied to Schleswig, but not to parts of Holstein. In response, the Holstein estates protested to the German Confederation that Denmark was interfering illegally with the relationship between the two duchies, compounding the impression in Copenhagen, after the German majority of the Schleswig estates had voted in 1846 to join the Bund, that the entire territory was gravitating away from the Danish kingdom and towards Germany. The introduction of a new liberal constitution for the whole of the Helstat, including Schleswig and Holstein, in the spring of 1848 gave Germans the impression that the duchies were finally being incorporated into Denmark. When the duchies’ estates insisted on a separate constitution and the entry of Schleswig into the Confederation, Frederik – who had succeeded Christian in December 1847 – replied by appointing a new ministry containing prominent national liberals such as Orla Lehmann and by proclaiming that Schleswig, as part of Denmark, would have the same constitution as the rest of the kingdom, which in turn prompted the establishment of a potentially secessionist provisional government in Kiel.
Prussia had taken up the provisional government’s appeal to the Bundestag for protection, occupying the duchies and invading the rest of Denmark in April, May and June 1848, before being pressured by Russia, Britain and France into abandoning the ‘revolution’ and concluding the armistice of Malmö in July. A series of measures after the war finally ended in July 1850, including the sole use of Danish in schools and joint use in the civil service and church in the mixed areas of Central Schleswig as well as in the North, the imposition of constitutions on both duchies in 1854, and the introduction of a common constitution covering foreign policy, the military, trade and finance throughout the Helstat in 1855, all ensured that Schleswig-Holstein remained the principal site of national contention for both Germans and Danes. Young Germans like Otto Elben often made Schleswig-Holstein a point of pilgrimage on their tours of Europe, marvelling at the loyalty and suffering of their fellow countrymen. The Volk in the duchies was ‘fully German-minded, moved by a firm will not to leave the German fatherland’, wrote Elben on a trip just before the revolution, having completed his law degree at Tübingen.4
This chapter examines the ‘German war’ in Schleswig-Holstein and its consequences between 1864 and 1866, before the outcome of the Austro-Prussian War (1866) allowed the establishment of a new framework for German politics in the form of the Norddeutscher Bund (1867). The conflict with Denmark involved the national movement, the individual German states, Prussia, Austria and the European states’ system. It reinforced the impression in some quarters that the national and constitutional questions were interrelated, a fact which appeared to have been proved by the Polish uprising of 1863, when liberals had had to choose – after Bismarck had agreed in the Alvensleben Convention (February 1863) to cooperate militarily with tsarist Russia against the Poles – between opposing the government or giving it conditional support in the face of a ‘national threat’ to supposedly exposed German communities in the East. In a similar – and much more emphatic – fashion, the conflict between Germans and Danes in Schleswig and Holstein revealed the character of the relationships between the different parties vis-à-vis the national question, with entanglements and aftereffects, particularly those involving Berlin, Vienna and the administration of the duchies, which lasted – via the Gastein Convention (1865) – until the outbreak of war between the two Great Powers in 1866.
The breadth and depth of support for a national war in Schleswig-Holstein in the early 1860s took many contemporaries by surprise, despite the long-running nature of the dispute. Even Bismarck, noted Theodor von Bernhardi in May 1864, ‘was pushed into the affair against his will’.5 All regions, a majority of political parties and large sections of the population appeared to have been affected. About 900 Schleswig-Holstein committees were established throughout Germany.6 According to Sybel’s calculation, 84.4 per cent of Landtag deputies in the third Germany, 53.4 per cent in Prussia and 7.6 per cent in Austria signed the petition for the duchies’ ‘rights’ in 1864.7 Amidst the celebrations of the half-centenary of the battle of Leipzig, wrote Elben, the unambiguous cause of Schleswig-Holstein had surfaced to unite the German Volk:
In great enthusiasm, the mood of the people immediately burst into flames, especially in South Germany. There had been no such movement since 1848; not even in 1859 at the time of the Italian war had such unanimity manifested itself. The gatherings of the years of the reaction had actually only encompassed party members; now, the whole Volk once again flowed together when they were called on to advise about the events of the day. As soon as a Schleswig-Holstein committee was formed, it contained, in fact, all relevant political points of view.8
Unexpectedly, the ‘small German’ Nationalverein and the ‘greater German’ Reformverein had converged in a common national cause, criticising Prussia, Austria and the Confederation. On 21 December 1863, members of the two organisations met in a specially convened assembly at Frankfurt comprised of 490 deputies. ‘Just beforehand, on the occasion of the Fürstenkongress in Frankfurt, the “Grossdeutsche” and the “Kleindeutsche” had strongly opposed each other,’ wrote Karl Biedermann: ‘now they both united in the national cause.’9 Although members of the Reformverein subsequently left the assembly, they continued to cooperate in regional Schleswig-Holstein committees throughout Germany. The movement for the duchies, which was coming to an end by October 1864, reported one correspondent in the Wochenschrift des Nationalvereins, had not merely been an aside but a complete act in the drama of Germany’s national development, creating a unity of purpose on the part of the previously inimical National and Reform Associations which was not to be squandered.10 ‘The Volk is united to a man in the Schleswig-Holstein affair,’ commented the Wochenblatt des Deutschen Reformvereins on 29 November 1863: ‘This is the great favourite bet for the many small German squabbles and German disunity. They completely dissolve in it.’11
During the crisis before war had broken out in January 1864, the Reformverein had passed resolutions – in May 1863 – similar to those of its ‘small German’ counterpart:
1. The grossdeutsch association recognises a considerable infraction of the rights of Germany in the measures of Denmark, which aim to bring about a complete division of Schleswig from Holstein and make the former into a Danish province; 2. The greater German association articulates the expectation that all German governments … will energetically oppose this step … 3. Der grossdeutsche Verein finds in the attempt of Denmark to withdraw from its duties towards Germany new grounds for pointing out the necessity of a Bundesreform, which in particular will consider the creation of a more unified and effective military organisation of the forces of the Bund resting on the military constitution of the German Confederation.’12
Later statements backed ‘Friedrich von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg’ as the heir to the duchies; they claimed that Denmark had forfeited the terms of any treaty by injuring ‘the rights of Germany’ through the ‘signature of the common constitution for Denmark and Schleswig’; they pointed out the ‘inadequacy of the constitution of the Bund’; and they criticised Austria and Prussia for making a mockery of the nation’s rights.13 The Nationalverein made the same points, albeit with more pronounced criticism of Austria and the third Germany, but with no greater leniency towards Prussia.14 Both parties were confident that their stance on Schleswig-Holstein was justified on historical, moral, legal, political and national grounds. ‘The Schleswig-Holstein affair is a struggle for law and right against usurpation, of honesty against lies, a struggle for freedom against arbitrariness and tyranny, for nationality against foreign domination,’ declared a Nationalverein pamphlet in October 1863: ‘But it is also a struggle for the interests and position of power of Germany, for the future of the German Volk, for the honour of the German tribe.’15
The war against Denmark in 1864 was popular, opposed only by a handful of radicals, wrote the liberal historian and forty-eighter Ludwig Häusser in the Preussische Jahrbücher, because Schleswig-Holstein had been the principal national question for the preceding twenty years.16 Many ‘patriots’, complained Treitschke, had thought ‘for years’ that ‘the Schleswig-Holstein question [was] the German question itself; whoever solves one will bring the other to an end’.17 There had been broad agreement in 1848–49 that most, if not all, the territories of the duchies should be incorporated into the Reich and there was a corresponding sense of humiliation and dishonour, recalled a retrospective article in the Grenzboten in 1864, when Schleswig-Holstein was handed back over to Denmark in 1850.18 Austria’s treacherous support for Denmark, Prussia’s self-interested actions as a Great Power, withdrawing from Jutland by the time of the armistice of Malmö in July 1848, the weakness of the Frankfurt Parliament and the inability or unwillingness of the political parties to act all seemed from the perspective of 1864 to have been responsible for Germany’s failure to incorporate the duchies and to protect the German diaspora there in 1848–50.19 Such a reading of history was widely shared, with much of the press concurring with Arndt’s appraisal at the time – published in the Kölnische Zeitung – that Schleswig-Holsteiner were ‘fighting for their German life and for their old right of a fatherland’.20 ‘They stand, fight and bleed not for themselves alone, but for all Germans, for the whole of Germany’, he continued.21 The North German liberal National-Zeitung, the South German liberal Allgemeine Zeitung, and the conservative and Catholic Deutsches Volksblatt all agreed in 1850 that the fight for Schleswig-Holstein was a just national cause on which the fate of Germany itself depended, thwarted by the actions of self-interested Great Powers anxious to perpetuate the fragmentation and impotence of the German lands at the centre of Europe.22
The interpretation of events in the duchies provided by a kleindeutsch periodical such as the Grenzboten was predictable: the Bund had rightly contended that Schleswig and Holstein should not be divided, with the territories belonging by education and culture in a progressive Germany rather than a poor, backward and isolated Danish ‘sham state’, or Scheinstaat (1849); discussion of the duchies by the Great Powers at London in 1852, after Prussia had stood down definitively in 1850, was more significant for the area’s history than 1848 had been, with Denmark effectively mocking a divided Germany despite the risk of revolutionising German public opinion, ignoring the fact that Germans dominated both the state and the culture of Denmark, and sealing off Schleswig-Holstein as a bridge for the spread of German culture to the North (1852–53); the ‘occupation’ of Schleswig-Holstein by Denmark in the 1850s had been the result of German, not merely Prussian, powerlessness, with the duchies – Schleswig in particular, since it was most endangered – remaining an open national sore and a source of dishonour for large sections of the public, notwithstanding the continuing dominance and expansion of German culture (1856–61); and the reopening of the Schleswig-Holstein question, when it occurred in the early 1860s, had been the consequence of public agitation in the face of Prussia’s and Austria’s unreliability as Great Powers, the Confederation’s continuing ineffectiveness, and international hostility (1863–64).23 More striking than such a North German liberal narrative of Schleswig-Holstein’s history was that of the South German Catholic Historisch-politisch Blätter, which shared many common elements with that of the Grenzboten, including the notion that the duchies were part of a natural German organism, that they had been a source of German shame since 1848, when they had been left to fend for themselves against Danish nationalism and centralisation, that they had exposed the inefficacy of German institutions, and that they had suffered from Berlin’s and Vienna’s contraventions of the national interest.24 Cross-party support for a beleaguered Schleswig-Holstein as a German ‘Lebensfrage’, as various correspondents put it, had a long pedigree.25
Historians from the region – Dahlmann, Waitz, Wihelm Beseler, Droysen, Theodor Mommsen – had done much to establish the historical reality, legal rights and national culture of the duchies in the public imagination. The peninsula was portrayed as a ‘German arm’ reaching out to dominate the North and Baltic seas, extending ‘German life, influence and education’ to the British Isles, Scandinavia and the world.26 It was also the battleground between Scandinavians coming South and Germans advancing to the coast and to the North: ‘The archipelago, whose southern half comprises the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, is the bridge over which the Scandinavian North is connected with the South, with the rest of Europe. Again and again, the Danes – the people of the northern tribe which is furthest forward – have tried to gain both domination of the Baltic and possession of the land up to the Elbe.’27 ‘The struggle between the Germans and the Danes here is almost as old as our knowledge of history’, asserted Waitz, underlining the momentousness of contemporary events and national conflicts.28
In the modern era, the duchies had gradually become more unified, despite Danish tutelage.29 Since the seventeenth century, at the latest, they had shared estates, a common law and legal system, and other institutions, much as Prussia and Brandenburg had done: Denmark’s tie to Schleswig-Holstein was no greater than that of the King of Prussia to Poland, proposed Waitz in 1852.30 The relationship had begun to change in the nineteenth century, as Denmark had sought to expand to the South, conflicting with long-established links – presented as if they were in a chain – between Schleswig and Holstein, and between Holstein and Germany.31 ‘In Schleswig as in Holstein, one lived in full consciousness of the linkage with the German Volk … in many respects perhaps too cut off and closed in on themselves, but still advancing along the path of national development’, wrote Waitz more than a decade later.32 In part, such a shift was the corollary of Danish expansionism, with the Danes succeeding in ‘drawing the different Völker and states in their vicinity towards their sphere of power and tying them to their fate’, in Droysen’s words.33 More importantly, it was a result of inevitable national conflicts which, after the revival of ‘the old struggle between Danes and Germans’ and after attempts by the majority ‘Eiderdane party’ to incorporate both duchies into Denmark in the 1840s, had become incontrovertible by January 1848, as Beseler explained.34 ‘A state is always a state, to which – according to modern thinking and practice – individual parts or provinces must be subordinated,’ he continued: ‘One foresaw with certainty that the profound enmity of the two nationalities, the conflict of their contradictory interests, would make a harmonious life together impossible and allow no reconciliation to be found; one foresaw that the government would soon see itself forced into taking embittering coercive measures against the duchies.’35
Map 5 Schleswig-Holstein in 1864
Source: Adapted from
The war which broke out in 1848 was seen to be a defensive and a just one, but ‘Austria was against the cause of the duchies’, Prussia ‘was afraid of bearing the burden alone’ and was pushed around by the other Great Powers, and the National Assembly in Frankfurt ‘lacked absolute decisiveness and power’.36 After Prussia had submitted to ‘Austrian policy’ at Olmütz, concluded Waitz, Copenhagen had attempted ‘the building of a Danish Gesammtstaat’ in the 1850s, treating the duchies like ‘subjugated provinces’.37 When the Danish common constitution had failed, it had tried to incorporate Schleswig, repressing and persecuting inhabitants ‘with brutal violence’ in the northern duchy, and in ‘somewhat more accommodating forms’ in the southern one.38 ‘It required no particular political acuity to foresee the immediate effects of these catastrophes,’ wrote Beseler: ‘Danes and Schleswig-Holsteiner have no particular political, social and material interests in common; in almost all spheres of these interests, they face each other as enemies.’39 ‘The fate of the duchies is and remains chained to Germany,’ he continued: ‘The bonds which nature has created are sacred and indissoluble.’40 Schleswig-Holstein was small and easily overlooked, but its Volk was ‘immortal’, containing a ‘higher life force’ and offering Germany the enticing prospect of national redemption.41
The small and middling states, acting through the Bund, appeared to be the most reliable defenders of Schleswig-Holstein in the early 1860s. In Häusser’s opinion, the states of the third Germany had proved themselves more national-minded than Prussia or Austria, and the Confederation, at the start of the crisis, had acted correctly.42 In February 1858, the Bundestag refused to recognise Denmark’s common constitution of 1855 or Holstein’s constitution of the previous year, since they had not been submitted to the estates as required by federal law. Instead, it made a formal request, on pain of federal execution, for a return to the independent status promised to Holstein – and to the small Duchy of Lauenburg – by King Frederik’s proclamation of January 1852, which had offered Holstein, Lauenburg and Schleswig separate constitutions, ministries and estates. When Denmark promptly suspended the common constitution in the two confederal territories and referred the matter to the estates, the latter called for the restoration of the administrative and legislative union of Schleswig and Holstein which had existed before 1848 and solicited the help of the Bund, Prussia and Austria, complaining that Denmark’s different treatment of the duchies presaged a definitive partition. After twice postponing action in 1860 and 1861, following Danish concessions, the Bundestag decided to proceed on 1 October 1863 with a federal execution against King Frederik as the Duke of Holstein and Lauenburg, since he was threatening to divide the duchies in contravention of the royal proclamation of 1852, having confirmed in April that all legislation passed by the monarch and the Rigsraad, not merely the common constitution, would in future be binding in Schleswig, whereas no legislation would be binding in Holstein without its estates’ consent, in line with the liberal constitution granted on 30 March.
When Frederik died on 15 November, succeeded by Christian von Glücksburg as Christian IX in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of London (1852), the Bundestag refused on 28 November by 14 votes to 2, against Prussian and Austrian objections, to recognise him as the Duke of Holstein, which had a male-only law of succession, and it ruled that an enquiry should determine whether Christian had a claim not only to Holstein, but also to Schleswig and Lauenburg. Berlin and Vienna narrowly managed – by 8 votes to 7 – to prevent the federal ‘occupation’ from going ahead on this basis by threatening to take military action against the Bund, only to be overruled by 11 votes to 5 on 14 January 1864 in favour of Hesse-Darmstadt’s motion to occupy Schleswig, in addition to Holstein, ‘until the current pending issues’ – that is, the succession question as well as the constitutional one – ‘are resolved’.43 Prussia and Austria, which had agreed in the Treaty of London – along with the other Great Powers, but without the involvement of the Confederation – to guarantee the succession of Christian, declared jointly on 16 January that they would act on their own ‘to make effective the rights of Germany’ by forcing Denmark to revoke its common constitution within 48 hours and to put forward proposals to make good the pledges of the royal proclamation of 1852, if the Bund persisted in interfering in the succession to the Duchy of Schleswig, which lay outside its jurisdiction.44 The Great Powers added that, once they had occupied the duchies, they would not allow demonstrations of support for Duke Friedrich von Augustenburg, who had established an unofficial Court in Kiel. 57,000 Prussian and Austrian troops entered Holstein on 21 January 1864, superseding the existing confederal occupying force of 12,000 Hanoverian and Saxon soldiers, and they invaded Schleswig on 1 February, preventing the Confederation from doing the same on different – and less internationally acceptable – grounds. After defeating the Danish army at Düppel on 18 April and failing to come to an agreement at the London Conference in May and June, the contending powers signed an armistice on 20 July and the Treaty of Vienna on 30 October, placing the duchies under joint control and, with the Gastein Convention of August 1865, under separate Austrian and Prussian administrations in Holstein and Schleswig respectively.
Public opinion and the political parties sided largely with the Mittelstaaten and the German Confederation as war approached, since they had championed the popular causes of Augustenburg and an independent Schleswig-Holstein, but few saw the Bund and the states of the third Germany in a fundamentally new light. Initially, individual governments such as that of Bavaria had coincided in their aims with the most important sections of the political public, especially with what the editor of the Historisch-politische Blätter Joseph Edmund Jörg termed ‘dominating liberalism’.45 To the Bavarian Foreign Minister Karl von Schrenck, the Schleswig-Holstein affair was a ‘holy cause’ and the Schleswig-Holstein-Verein was ‘their association’, ‘composed of very solid people’, which aspiring officials like Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst were advised to join, as ‘this was the means to become a minister’.46 The ‘question was able to gain so great a significance’ in the first instance because of its legal ramifications, and ‘the Germans are a legal people’, wrote Hohenlohe to Queen Victoria on 4 May 1864: ‘Yet, apart from this, everyone in Germany felt the deeper significance of the Schleswig-Holstein question for our internal conditions. Everyone knows that in this question the German question will be decided.’47 What was more, it appeared to both the ministry and the public ‘at the start’, ‘as if the German Mittelstaaten, the truly pure German states, could gain greater political weight through the Schleswig-Holstein affair,’ he continued: ‘Here is the reason why this question has called forth a larger movement in the lands outside Prussia and Austria.’48 The Bavarian government, parties and public opinion had grasped that the defence and formation of an independent, medium-sized Schleswig-Holstein, the most popular national cause since the 1840s, might offer other Mittelstaaten and the Bund, as the principal champions of Augustenburg and the duchies, a more central role in a reconstructed Germany.
Partly because they could more easily imagine themselves in the position of the Schleswig-Holsteiner, partly because they were more threatened by the seemingly imminent resolution of the German question, many Bavarians reacted strongly to the occupation of the duchies, to the distaste of self-confessedly more ‘conservative’ and ‘federative’ onlookers like Dalwigk, who hinted in March 1864 that the former Bavarian Foreign Minister Pfordten had put ‘the subordinate Schleswig-Holstein question’ above ‘the continuation of the German Confederation’ and the states’ relationship to Austria and Prussia.49 This was also the tenor of much early and some later press reportage and pamphleteering, which depicted the Treaty of London as a brutal act of violence and called for the establishment of ‘Schleswig-Holstein as an independent German land’ in ‘the interests and for the honour of Germany’.50 The Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung reported in similar terms that the German states, the Confederation and ‘the German Volk’ should regulate their ‘internal affairs’ and fight Danish aggression with ‘iron and blood’, not just words, albeit in a ‘nobler sense’ than Bismarck.51 ‘The German question does not hinge on Prussia or on Austria, but it has its pivot in the pure German states’, declared the Munich periodical Chronik der Gegenwart, before proceeding to outline its scheme for a ‘West German federation’ of middling states, for which Prussia would need to give up the Rhineland.52 The thrust of Bavarian policy towards Schleswig-Holstein should be to create a counterweight in the Bund to the Great Power pretensions of Prussia, wrote the prominent liberal and founder of the Bavarian Reformverein Gustav von Lerchenfeld as late as March 1866: on the solution of the question ‘rests the continuation or dissolution of the Confederation, the position of its members vis-à-vis the Bund authority and amongst themselves; the question of federalism or hegemony, or, more clearly expressed, of complete subjugation and incorporation of the confederal states which are not Great Powers … whether grossdeutsch or kleindeutsch or, better, grosspreussisch, whether through freedom to unification and, temporarily at least, to unity’.53 To many contemporaries, Schleswig-Holstein seemed, in Hohenlohe’s phrase, to be an ‘Existenzfrage’ for Bavaria.54
Support for the Bavarian state and the Bund was fragile and quickly metamorphosed into criticism. According to Hohenlohe, the reason for initial euphoria and subsequent pessimism was the same, resting on a sense of inferiority and powerlessness:
Whoever has carefully observed the upheavals which have moved Germany in the last fifty years will find that their real motive can be found in the discontentment of the inhabitants of the Mittelstaaten and Kleinstaaten, a population of about 19 million people, which sees itself excluded from participation in the fate of Europe. This population of the middling and small states of Germany can be seen in the condition of mature men, from whom the administration of their own affairs is reserved … In order to escape these conditions, one strove in 1848 for so-called German unity. This movement began in South West Germany. It proved to be impractical, since neither Austria nor Prussia could subject themselves to an ideal power.
The German Volk has made progress in its political education since 1848, and has in particular learned to wait … It is, though, in this state of affairs and by the completely dominant mood in Germany inevitable that the consequences of a solution of the Schleswig-Holstein question which injures the legal consciousness of the people will have the most serious consequences for Germany and, in particular, for the existence of the Mittelstaaten and the Kleinstaaten.
Statesmen also fully recognise this, which explains why conservative men like Beust and Pfordten have joined the party of movement in this question.55
Many of Pfordten’s actions over Schleswig-Holstein betrayed feelings of insecurity. Like Hohenlohe, he was not at all certain that the small and medium-sized states would survive. In October 1864, for instance, Dalwigk found him ‘very pessimistic about politics’: he ‘is convinced that in fifty years’ time all German Mittel- and Kleinstaaten will be mediatised’.56 When the Hessian first minister had met him in April, he
was very embittered about the course of German affairs. He said Bavaria should leave the German Confederation. It would then play a completely different role. The Great Powers would then have good words to say to a state which has five million inhabitants and could easily have double the number of inhabitants if it wanted to change its legislation concerning marriage and freedom of profession.57
As sections of public opinion began to criticise the government, Pfordten turned on the Bund, already complaining as early as March 1864 that ‘Germany has ceased to exist’ and threatening that ‘Bavaria should leave the Confederation.’58 ‘If the Bund were to dissolve itself,’ Pfordten told the Saxon envoy in Munich, ‘then Bavaria would “not come out of it badly.”’59 The Foreign Minister was increasingly convinced of the ineffectiveness of the Confederation and the bankruptcy of Austria, pushing him – almost despite himself – further towards Prussia, which he portrayed in April 1866 as ‘a young, upwardly striving state, whose urge to strengthen and enlarge itself in order to match its vocation is not unjustified’.60 Consequently, the Hohenzollern monarchy, negotiating from a position of power, was held to be ‘more flexible in the Schleswig-Holstein question’ and a more likely partner than Austria, which had proved itself ‘unreliable in all respects’.61 Even on the eve of the Austro-Prussian war, Pfordten thought that he could persuade Berlin not to annex Schleswig-Holstein by offering it the military command of North Germany within the Confederation.62
If the Schleswig-Holstein affair was a ‘legal question’ for the people, wrote Hohenlohe in May 1864, it was a ‘Machtfrage for the governments and an Existenzfrage for the Confederation’.63 Once it had reverted to a ‘question of power and influence between Prussia and Austria’, the states of the third Germany seemed to have little option but to watch events unfold, not least because the ‘present state of the German Bund’ was one of ‘the most ineluctable confusion’.64 All that a state such as Bavaria could do was to continue to try to set up a trias within the Confederation, but it was unlikely to be successful, given the opposition of South and Central German democrats, the ‘aversion of Austria and Prussia’ and the ‘aversion of different dynasties to renounce a part of their sovereignty in favour of the ruling house which would have to take over the leadership of the narrower Bund’.65 At times, lamented Hohenlohe, it appeared ‘that the Mittelstaaten will be damned to remain, in the future as in the past, in their current condition until they finally fall victim in a great European conflict to necessary territorial alterations’.66
Such weakness and inactivity alienated the public, ensuring ‘that a feeling of dissatisfaction spread further and further in the South German states in respect of the passive role to which these states were condemned in this question that touches on German interests’, noted Hohenlohe.67 Although ‘Schleswig-Holstein is still spoken and written of a lot, the participation of the Volk has diminished’, meaning ‘that the interest in the duchies which manifested itself in such a stormy fashion in the previous year was less for the Schleswig-Holstein question in itself than for the German question, which seemed about to be resolved in this conflict’.68 As Bavaria and the Confederation proved less and less able to act, overshadowed by Prussia and Austria, many contemporaries appear to have become disillusioned with them. Some parties had been sceptical of them throughout the crisis. A minority of Bavarian liberals who were in favour of Kleindeutschland were convinced that ‘the unworthy role’ of the Mittelstaaten had been one of ‘self-interested denial of national duties’ and ‘mean-heartedness, incapacity and vacillating cowardice’.69 For its part, the Bund had again shown itself to be merely the instrument of the German Great Powers: ‘There is only a Prussian and an Austrian, no German policy, in which the strength of the whole nation (Nation) could be realised’, wrote Karl Brater, the editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitschrift, co-founder of the Bavarian Fortschrittspartei and one of the leading kleindeutsch deputies in the Bavarian Landtag:
Even the most stupid today grasp the necessity of a unitary central power and an ordered and constitutional Volksvertretung … Soon the German dynasties will seek the ultimate guarantee of their own security against all the uncertainties of the future in a German parliament, in the necessary limitation of their sovereign rights … The Bundesverfassung is the impotence of the small states under the hypocritical appearance of sovereignty; a Reichsverfassung secures for each single member a worthy place in the great organism of the whole.70
Although liberal politicians like Brater were critical of Prussia as a self-interested Great Power and of Bismarck as a violent adventurer ‘without greatness’, they believed that ‘the German powers [had] been pushed to victory by the pressure of public opinion’: ‘Through the pressure of the popular movement the allied army was led to Schleswig; under the pressure of military victories Berlin’s policy has been obliged to increase its diplomatic demands.’71 The Prussian Minister-President himself, claimed Brater, had been forced, ‘after long toing and froing, to satisfy the desires of the popular assembly and leave the reprehensible path of the policy of 1850. A powerful liberal government would have come to the same decisions without hesitation.’72
The mouthpiece of the Bavarian Progressive Party echoed such sentiments, arguing that a Prussian victory ‘consolidates the rule of the Junkers’ and ‘encumbers the internal struggle for freedom’, but it was also more dismissive of the ‘Austrian Gesammtstaat’, whose interest was ‘not a German interest’.73 According to this reading of events, ‘the nation (Nation), as is the essence of cabinet politics, stands beyond the fighting parties’.74 One part of the democratic party in the South and Central German states, which was made up of ‘conscious or unconscious republicans’, concurred with such a reading and was similarly detached, waiting for a time ‘when a democratic Continental storm would bring down thrones and bring back the happy times of a constituent National Assembly’.75 The other faction of South German democracy, wrote Hohenlohe, belonged ‘in part to the Nationalverein and is striving for the organisation of a German Bundesstaat under the leadership of Prussia. They hold the government of Herr von Bismarck for a temporary evil, after whose dismissal the idea [of Kleindeutschland] would still be implemented.’76 A proportion of the liberal and democratic milieux of Bavaria – more than is suggested by the 16 deputies of the Fortschrittspartei elected in 1863 – rejected Austria’s claims and had lost faith in the Mittelstaaten and the Bund. In such circumstances, cooperation with – or lack of resistance to – Prussia, although an object of contempt under Bismarck, could seem to be the lesser evil.
The Historisch-politische Blätter demonstrated the ambivalence of Bavarian political Catholicism, which constituted – in an undefined form – the second largest political grouping after the liberals, towards the German question between 1863 and 1866. Although its editor Edmund Jörg went on to found the Bayerische Patriotenpartei in 1868 and to oppose national unity under Prussian leadership in 1870, the periodical was highly critical of particularist Mittelstaaten, which appeared to have forged a de facto alliance with liberals and Progressives in support of Augustenburg and against the German Great Powers.77 All Germans were justified on legal and national grounds in resisting Denmark’s illegitimate attempt to annex the duchies and to oppress their German populations.78 Yet Progressives had sought to gain a demagogic party advantage from the affair, even mouthing the arguments of monarchical legitimacy in their quest for a revolution of the relations within and between German states.79 The centralising logic of liberalism – the ‘fault of the all-powerful liberal Zeitgeist’ – on both sides of the border meant ‘that German demands for Holstein are simply incompatible with the essence of the constitutional order of a Gesammtstaat’.80 The Confederation and the middling states had been pushed into a federal execution by the end of 1863 which would be difficult to reverse, ‘not least because an ascendant liberalism feels the undemonstrable need to make a heroically active entry somewhere and therefore must hold up the Danish king each time because it believes that it has least to fear from him’.81 Caught in such a contradictory position, the Bundestag and the individual states had been unable to act, merely proving that the Confederation could not work.82 1864 had proved three things: ‘First, the European states’ system no longer exists. Second, the hope that the whole of Germany (Gesammtdeutschland) would throw itself into the breach as a European balance has as good as disappeared … Third, the status quo of the German Bund is also no longer sustainable and must, in one way or another, become something else’, observed Jörg in 1865.83
By contrast, Austria and Prussia, to whose actions the periodical gave its blessing on 24 January 1864, had bypassed the machinery of the Bund in pursuit of more realistic, internationally acceptable goals, motivated by their own self-interest.84 ‘It was our view from the start that the snatching of the duchies would be at the cost of a war of conquest against half of Europe and that one would not mount such a war in order to found a new little middling state à la Baden or Coburg for the sphere of domination of the liberal-democratic party and to transfer to a puppet of this party the watch over the most difficult border in Germany,’ commented Jörg on 24 April 1864: ‘If a great war is to be carried out for Schleswig and Holstein, then it must have the goal of incorporating both lands in Prussia.’85 The Confederation and the states had naively put themselves at the head of the liberal and national movement, only to fail to achieve their aims in the face of opposition from the Great Powers. Their decisions had left Prussia dominant in Germany. The advice of the Historisch-politische Blätter was to allow Berlin to annex the duchies in order cheaply to satisfy the Prussian state’s hunger to expand.86 Austria, it was held, secretly desired the status quo ante bellum and did not need to be appeased.87 The prospect of Grossdeutschland, espoused in the past by Catholics such as Peter Reichensperger, was no longer worth entertaining.88 The periodical continued to claim that ‘an honest German Bundesreform’ would ‘be very well worth a small world war’, but it was by no means optimistic that such a reform would come about.89 In current conditions, it had little sympathy for a weak Bund and feckless Mittelstaaten.
A shift from a near-consensus over Schleswig-Holstein in 1863, which was framed against Berlin and Vienna, to splintered criticism of one’s own government and of the Confederation after mid-1864 was characteristic of most middling and small German states. By that date, before the Gastein Convention (1865) signalled his demise by ensconcing the administration of the Great Powers and adumbrating the annexation of the duchies, Augustenburg’s popularity had already begun to wane, commented Jörg.90 With a victorious Prussian state continuing to defy its own Landtag, to uphold the Treaty of London’s guarantee of the succession and to refuse to set up an independent state of Schleswig-Holstein, disillusionment with the Mittelstaaten and the Bund was never likely to redound straightforwardly to Berlin’s advantage, even if it had not been further confused by the diverse and complex formation of parties and political milieux in the individual states. ‘The unity with which the German Volk initially stood by the side of the Schleswig-Holstein uprising was dissolved; whereas we in South Germany held that the handing over of the duchies to the Duke of Augustenburg was the sole possible solution, ever greater sources of confusion were introduced into the whole affair: the common administration of Prussia and Austria proved impossible; it became ever clearer that the German question was contained within the Schleswig-Holstein question,’ wrote the Stuttgart liberal Elben in the summer of 1864, after making his fifth trip to the duchies: ‘How should everything be solved? Nowhere was there any clarity. If the Nationalverein had correctly characterised the end-point, and the national-minded here had also signed up to it in principle, the conduct of Prussia was fundamentally designed to destroy every predilection and all trust.’91 As always, continued the newspaper owner, ‘such conditions provided the ground for the creation and splitting of parties’, with the once-united Schleswig-Holstein committee abandoned by the conservatives, spawning a new democratic Volkspartei and pushing the Grossdeutsche to the left.92
A similar pattern could be seen in Saxony, where Beust, who also served as the external representative of the Bund, had rejoiced that public opinion and the policy of the government had naturally coincided over the duchies, and where Biedermann had marvelled that ‘this movement of the people for the right of Schleswig-Holstein found … an unexpectedly powerful echo in ruling circles right up to the throne’, to the point at which the former radical worried that the third Germany might manage to refashion Germany without Prussia into a form of ‘Klein-Klein-Deutschland’.93 As in other states, ‘the victorious deeds of the Prussian army … which showed what Prussia could do … and which also cast light on the army reform that had in the meantime been set into motion, gave another direction to public opinion’, which was more favourable to Berlin, although ‘the general German question, the question about its future form,’ remained ‘open’.94 With the signing of the peace treaty in October 1864, ‘Prussia’s victory was confirmed, not only over Denmark, but also over the German Confederation and over Austria’, wrote the Finance Minister Richard von Friesen in his memoirs, aided by Vienna’s vacillating and contradictory policy after 1849, which had ‘alienated the German Volk from Austria and led it into the arms of Prussia’.95 As in Württemberg, actual conversions in Saxony to support for Prussia were complicated, haphazard and limited in scope.96 Nevertheless, it was also true that there was little support for Beust’s alternative strategy of a Bundesreform. The Schleswig-Holstein crisis, although resolved ‘by the weapons and diplomacy of the two Great Powers’, had fomented a genuinely national, if only briefly united, movement, in which ‘public opinion in Germany’ had had ‘an indirectly shaping effect’ on events, in Biedermann’s estimation.97 The main effect of the crisis outside Prussia was to remove plausible alternatives to a kleindeutsch federal state.
Some democrats took exception to the involvement of Prussia under Bismarck in the future unification of Germany. Their objections drew on a broader antipathy towards the Hohenzollern monarchy in the Mittelstaaten and rested on a long-established debate, prominent in 1848, about the precedence of freedom or unity. Neither set of objections, however, seriously undermined the case for a small German Bundesstaat, as it had been outlined in the Reichsverfassung of 1849. Thus, the effects of the formation of the Demokratische Volkspartei which resulted from the division of liberals and democrats, as well as splits within democratic ranks, were largely limited to Württemberg, even though the party attracted members from other states such as Georg Friedrich Kolb, Franz Tafel (Palatinate), Jakob Venedey (Baden), Johann Jacoby (Prussia), Adolph Rossmässler, Christian Schüler, Wilhelm Michael Schaffrath and Franz Wigard (Saxony). The Volkspartei, which was set up in 1864 from within Progressive ranks by the returning radical forty-eighters Carl Mayer, Ludwig Pfau and Julius Haussmann, quickly gained supporters and standing in the South German state, assuming control of the Beobachter and gaining 1,700 members by 1866, partly because it was able to benefit from the residual popularity of radicalism in the South West, and partly because it acted as a conduit for popular anti-Prussian feeling heightened by the Schleswig-Holstein crisis. ‘Freedom must dissolve Prussia into its tribes and incorporate them in the great federation’, ran one of its founding statements.98 Yet, although it shaped the political landscape of Württemberg, supporting the state’s stand against Berlin in the Austro-Prussian war and provoking the creation by 1866 of an opposing German Party composed of remaining democrats and liberals, the Volkspartei had little impact elsewhere, especially in Prussia, whose radicals and liberals it accused of hypocrisy: ‘The Prussian faction of the German Fortschrittspartei and the Nationalverein never ceases to thunder against the person of Herr v. Bismarck, but it accepts the successes of his violent, specifically Prussian politics as useful.’99 Even in Württemberg, a single parliamentary liberal-democratic faction, which counted at least 44 deputies out of a total of 93, continued to exist until after the Austro-Prussian war, despite the creation of the Volkspartei and the Deutsche Partei beforehand.100 As one greater German member of the faction wrote to Julius Hölder, leader of the German Party, in October 1866: ‘The left should not forget that it belongs together because of temporary differences about the way to our common goal.’101
In the rest of Germany, the incipient division of the democratic and liberal milieu in Württemberg, which caused a drastic fall in Nationalverein membership there, was part of a wider revolt against Prussia in the South, which issued in a meeting of the Abgeordnetentag, designed to protest against the Gastein Convention, on 1 October 1865. Democrats and Southerners played a prominent role, after a meeting of Prussian Progressives, including Unruh, Twesten, Mommsen and Schulze-Delitzsch, had publicly announced that they would not attend in order to try to deflect criticism from Prussia and to avoid displaying ‘the splits of the liberal German party’.102 Of the 268 deputies at the Frankfurt meeting, called a ‘Rump Parliament’ by the Grenzboten because it compared badly to the 490 at the meeting of December 1863, there were only 7 Prussians, as opposed to 79 Bavarians (29 per cent), 37 Frankfurters (14 per cent) and 27 Württembergers (10 per cent).103 Bennigsen, who opposed the convening of the meeting, could merely hope, on 4 September, that ‘those, too, who have decided in favour of a consciously radical and anti-Prussian tendency will soon have to convince themselves that South West Germany, with its democratic plans, can gain no advantage, but will run a great risk, if the assembly seals the rift between the South and the North Germans’.104 In the event, the Abgeordnetentag passed off without incident, restricting itself to ‘mere words’, in the view of the Württemberg radical Carl August Fetzer.105 Although democratic parties were mooted, none, apart from the Volkspartei, was successfully founded. Many well-known democrats remained members of the Nationalverein, Abgeordnetentag and Fortschrittspartei.
The many divisions and disputes on the left over the German question could be misleading. ‘How hard it must be to agree on the German question’, Fetzer wrote to Venedey in September 1865, ‘if friends, who wish each other well and who strive for the same goal by largely similar means, need to use so many words in order to understand each other.’106 With few organisational restraints to keep them in check, democrats and radicals disagreed about the nature of the army or militia, the desirability of a monarchy or republic, the political significance of the social question and economics, and the practicality of popular agitation and revolution. As the controversy surrounding speeches given by Ludwig Simon and Ludwig Bamberger at the German Turnfest in Paris on 27 May 1865 evinced, there were also differences of opinion about unitary and federal government: the former, attacked by Georg Friedrich Kolb in the Neue Frankfurter Zeitung and by Carl Mayer in the Beobachter, defended the ideas of 1789 against ‘German freedom’, contending that ‘France from time to time sacrifices its liberty in order to bind itself together in unity and power’; the latter argued, using the American Civil War as a warning, that ‘Germany’s salvation can only come about … under the banner of a strictly unified Germany, without federalist half-measures.’107
Mayer replied to Bamberger in a long article in the Beobachter in which he identified a four-party system in Germany, with two of the groupings on the left: particularists who strove to maintain the status quo; ‘Gothaer’, or liberals who wanted to submit to ‘the Pickelhaube of Prussian Caesarism’; ‘revolutionary centralists and unitarians’ such as Bamberger; and democratic federalists like himself, who ‘negate both Great Powers … and who, through the temporary coalition of small and middling states … strive for a lever … for the bringing about of a democratic and naturally integrated, real Bundesstaat’.108 At the same time, Mayer distanced himself from the trias put forward in Theorie der Politik (1864) by Julius Fröbel, begging the question of what, exactly, he meant by ‘federalism’. Its precondition was freedom, the entrenchment of whose ‘essence and being’ guaranteed ‘that the victory of federalism is decided in advance’.109 Such trust in freedom took precedence over everything else, in Mayer’s opinion, even loyalty to the nation, as he spelled out in the Beobachter in February 1864: ‘Today, the national question has come into the foreground; but where nationality and freedom come into conflict, our paper will stand on the side of freedom.’110 To the leader of the Volkspartei, the policy of the Nationalverein, which was prepared to back the exercise of power for the attainment of a German nation, was ‘myopic’:
We ideal politicians [pursue] our goal of a free German federal state (Föderativstaat), with the princes or without them, by trying to remove the obstacles which hinder democratic and national progress. Our way is the way of freedom, not violence … If the path of freedom also only leads to the goal after years … we shall take our time and can do enough good in the service of freedom and the Volk, even if we do not ourselves reach the last goal.’111
Yet how many democrats shared Mayer’s view or, in contrast to 1848, believed that freedom and unity were separable?
At the beginning of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, radicals reacted in a manner redolent of 1848. Karl Blind wrote from exile in Britain on 30 January that Prussia and Austria had committed treason, as in the first Slesvig war, and that ‘Not Bavaria and Saxony, not Baden, Coburg and Augustenburg can now be the solution, but the independence of the land of Schleswig-Holstein brought about by the sovereign German nation! … Germany’s fate will now be decided on open ground.’112 From the United States, Gustav Struve returned to print in a series of memoirs which linked his recollections of 1848 to the present crisis: ‘The obstacles which stand in the way of a satisfying solution of the Schleswig-Holstein question are the same as those which permit neither freedom nor unity to emerge in the whole of Germany.’113 The sun of freedom was in the ascendant, rejoiced the radical forty-eighter: the German nation itself had the right to resist and overcome, ‘through iron and blood’, the despotic dynastic regimes of Prussia and of Austria, as had occurred in Italy.114 In Germany, radical forty-eighters such as Kolb, Ruldolf Christmann, Franz August Mammen and Wilhelm Löwe were instrumental at the Frankfurt meeting of deputies on 21 December 1863 in the establishment of a standing ‘36-committee’, typical of the revolution, to coordinate the campaign to free the duchies.
Some radicals such as Venedey suspected, again in a manner recalling the revolution, that democrats, many of whom had not got seats in state assemblies because of restrictive franchises, were being kept away from Frankfurt deliberately since their presence ‘would disturb the unanimity of the Gotha fuddle’, yet they appealed to acceptable revolutionary precedents for the most part: ‘The plan of Häusser & Co., who have taken you in tow … does not aim for a German parliament, but for a Schleswig-Holstein German central committee.’115 Venedey’s criticism of the majority of the Prussian Fortschrittspartei, which was ‘dealing with Herr v. Bismarck’, and his call for a militia of 100,000 gymnasts to expel the Danes from the duchies and for a popular uprising against the ‘Junker’ regime – for ‘if the millions in Prussia … take to the streets and speak, then no resistance would be offered to the command of millions’ – found an echo in radical circles, but it was ignored by most democratic leaders.116 In general, they advanced more realistic proposals, which met with agreement in liberal quarters. Löwe, the spokesman of democrats in the Progressive Party who later mediated between the organisers of the 1865 Abgeordnetentag and the Prussian boycott, had gone as far as to suggest, in April 1863, that any pledge from Bismarck guaranteeing ‘that the important interests of the nation are at least passively protected’ might have been enough to appease the Fortschrittspartei.117 In the crucial debates of December 1863 in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus, he had called on democrats, ‘if the great war should come’, to ‘do your duty’, so ‘that you do not now dam the current of the national movement, but that you let it become stronger and stronger’ in order to get rid of ‘this poor government with the first blow of a real storm’: ‘For if the great war should come, then the Volk will rise up triumphantly.’118 Löwe’s demand for a war to achieve an independent Schleswig-Holstein, backed by the Mittelstaaten and resting on the German Volk, was widely shared by democrats throughout Germany. His contention in December 1863 that it was better for ‘the Volk’ to be ‘under a German government governed by feudalism’ than to be under a Danish one governed ‘in accordance with free principles’ was rarely articulated, but his emphasis on nationality was barely contested.119 Very few radicals thought that Schleswig-Holstein should remain under a free Danish constitution rather than a restricted one under Augustenburg and the estates.
The majority of democrats, with the exception of exiles such as Bamberger and Ruge, converged on the national question between 1863 and 1866. Even those most sympathetic to Prussia refused to countenance Bismarck’s annexation of the duchies: Löwe, who had toyed with the idea of annexation in 1864, backed the independence of Schleswig-Holstein unambiguously in June 1865; Biedermann, who had advocated a return to the National Association’s founding objective of a ‘German Bundesstaat under Prussian leadership’ at its fifth general assembly on 31 October 1864, continued to oppose annexation, becoming embroiled as a result in a public spat with Treitschke.120 Such democrats did not have to decide between unity and freedom, since none considered giving up their campaign against Bismarck’s tyranny in Prussia or giving back Schleswig or Holstein to Denmark. There were, of course, fierce arguments between radicals and liberals about whether to give limited backing or no support at all to the Prussian government. The most well-known debate took place in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus on 1 and 2 December 1863 between the old revolutionary Benedikt Waldeck, one of the spokesmen of the left, and Karl Twesten, who had confessed that he placed the ‘integrity of the German fatherland’ above opposition to Bismarck.121 Before the liberal leader spoke, Waldeck had already restated his position from 1848:
Gentlemen, if this question is certainly a German one, and if it is quite certain that Prussia, as the first German state, has a self-evident interest in every German question, now, gentlemen, you surely don’t mistake, above all things, that statement which I had already uttered repeatedly in 1848–49, which I have impressed on you since 1861 from this tribune and elsewhere, and which has now found general recognition and which has become, I would say, a trivial statement, namely that Prussia can do nothing at all for German freedom and unity as long as it is tied up internally in its own constitutional struggles, as long as it has not achieved freedom internally. (Hear! Hear! Left). That is the job that we have to do for Germany, and that we have to do with all our strength!122
The fact that the Prussian ministry was a ‘feudal, bureaucratic and military absolutism’ intent on destroying the constitution meant that its policies had to be opposed in their entirety.123
Waldeck’s stance, which contradicted the carefully circumscribed opposition of most Progressives, was opposed by other democrats, however. Thus, Schulze-Delitzsch warned him in the same debate not to let ‘the internal situation overwhelm him’; instead, the chamber had to show ‘that the internal constitutional turmoil does not cloud its free and clear view, so that it can take up a position against an external enemy for the honour and the right of the German nation (Nation)’.124 Johann Jacoby, for his part, agreed that Virchow’s and Stavenhagen’s bill, which asked the government to follow a series of national policies in the duchies, could be accepted as a declaration of sympathy for ‘our brothers in Schleswig-Holstein’.125 The Abgeordnetenhaus was in no position genuinely to help the duchies, he continued, since the ministry was in charge. This was still more obviously the case after Prussia’s and Austria’s occupation of the territories, leaving democrats, like liberals, little choice but to continue to refuse to cooperate with the government on financial matters and to criticise its policy towards Schleswig-Hostein. As the Social-Demokrat remarked from the margins of ‘democracy’, professing in December 1864 to be ‘bored’ by the Schleswig-Holstein affair, all Germans could be pleased that a German land had been freed, albeit by Prussia and Austria.126 The other decisions affecting the territories, which would probably lead to their incorporation into the Hohenzollern monarchy, would be taken in Berlin’s and Vienna’s corridors of power, not in popular meetings, the press or state assemblies, leaving democrats – fortunately, in the socialist paper’s opinion – as more or less helpless onlookers.127
Such democrats were no doubt relieved, as Mayer had hinted, that they were not obliged to choose between cooperation with Bismarck for the sake of German unification and the continuation of their struggle for constitutional freedom. Many radicals sought to challenge these assumptions, but they simultaneously emphasised elements of consensus. Like the Social-Demokrat and other workers’ leaders, Friedrich Engels declared that he stood ‘outside the actual conflict’ at home and abroad, as ‘in all conflicts between reaction and the Bürgertum’, allowing him to judge it ‘in cold blood and impartially’, ‘scientifically, historically … [and] anatomically’: ‘the German proletariat will never trouble itself with Reich constitutions, Prussian leadership, a trias and so forth, except to get rid of them’, he announced in 1865, yet workers were to support the bourgeoisie, ‘as long as it remains true to itself’, in its struggle against reaction, since ‘every conquest which the bourgeoisie makes over the reaction is all, under these conditions, to the good of the working class’.128 Venedey had denounced Bismarck’s Progressive collaborators and raised the cry for a popular uprising against Prussia in 1864, but he concurred with most other radicals that Schleswig-Holstein should be part of Germany on national grounds, that ‘the crossing of the German border by foreign troops should silence all internal disputes and unite all parties in the fight against the foreigner’, that the Great Powers had acted in a self-interested, traitorous and un-German way, and that Germany needed to be saved ‘from the “simply anarchic” conditions of the German Confederation’.129
Fröbel backed the plan for tripartite leadership of a reformed Bund and argued controversially that Germany would need to enter an alliance against Prussia and Austria in order to avoid a partition by the German Great Powers, but his preoccupation with the principle of nationality, his stress on the interests of Germany as a whole rather than those of the Great Powers, and his scheme for a democratic and federal nation-state were not thought to clash irreconcilably with other versions of a national Bundesstaat.130 Likewise, in his influential Andeutungen zur gegenwärtigen Lage (1864), the radical forty-eighter Carl Vogt candidly considered the feasibility of a federal constitution, not merely for Germany but for all the Germanic states in Europe, and he recommended an alliance between the Mittelstaaten and Bonapartist France, which had defeated ‘Austria as a Groβstaat’ in 1859 in the name of national rights, to break the repressive grip of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies on Germany. He also doubted whether the people of Schleswig-Holstein would be freer under Augustenburg, given the liberal nature of the various Danish constitutions. Yet his criticism of the Great Powers, his refusal to cooperate with Bismarck unless he gave up his anti-national and illiberal policies at home, and his advocacy of the principle of nationality all met with democratic approval: Schleswig-Holstein was ‘simply a question of whether a German Volksstamm should be under Danish rule or whether it should decide to leave it in accordance with free self-determination.’131 Like most other democrats – or so the Social-Demokrat believed – Vogt assumed that the resolution of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis would provide an answer to the German question.132
Some democrats blamed liberals for dividing the national camp. The Prussian army’s successes in the Danish war, followed by Bismarck’s outmanoeuvring of Austria between the Treaty of Vienna in October 1864 and the Gastein Convention in August 1865, encouraged certain North German liberals to propose Prussia’s annexation of Schleswig-Holstein. Such approval of Berlin’s foreign policy appeared subsequently to have softened liberals’ attitudes to Bismarck’s constitutional, army and German policies. The former dispute reached its climax at the Frankfurt assembly of deputies in October 1865, the latter at the Frankfurt Abgeordnetentag in May 1866. Both involved more or less open rifts between democrats and liberals, and between North and South. The first meeting was called by the Engerer Ausschuss of the Schleswig-Holstein associations, which were preponderantly located in the third Germany, especially in the South West. The resolution which was to be put to the assembly on 1 October criticised the Gastein Convention and demanded self-determination for the duchies. It ended the ‘Berlin Compromise’ agreed by the associations, the 36-Committee and deputies on 26 March, which had insisted on the establishment of Schleswig-Holstein under Augustenburg, but which also granted Prussia control of the duchies’ military. The leaders of the Prussian Fortschrittspartei decided to boycott the assembly, publishing letters explaining their actions in the National-Zeitung. Theodor Mommsen declared that the purpose of the meeting had been met, with the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, and he demanded the disbanding of the 36-Committee: he would only attend the Frankfurt assembly of deputies if it decreed ‘the definitive, perpetual subordination of all the middling and small states under the Prussian Groβstaat’ in advance.133 Earlier in the year, the ancient historian and Progressive deputy had already announced in a pamphlet in favour of annexation that he had changed his mind about the duchies, having previously believed that ‘the honour and interest of Germany’ demanded their independence.134 In his own letter, Twesten claimed that Prussia’s position of power had not been recognised and that the resolution was aimed at the Prussian state rather than at its current government. The letters provoked strong reactions to Prussia’s ‘hegemonic absence’, which threatened to split North Germany from the South.
The second meeting in Frankfurt on 20 May 1866 was convened by supporters of Prussia in order to discuss the impending war between the German Great Powers and Bismarck’s proposal for a reform of the Bund on 9 April, with a National Assembly elected directly by universal manhood suffrage. The resolution of the Abgeordnetentag’s committee backed the call for a parliament elected according to the election law of 1849 and it condemned the coming ‘dynastic’ war and called for neutrality, with Landtage being asked to tie war credits to purely defensive actions. Partly because the invitation was sent out on 12 May, only 14 deputies came from Bavaria and 2 from Württemberg; 36 deputies out of 250 came from Baden, 34 from Nassau, 30 from Kurhessen, 30 from Hesse-Darmstadt, and 17 from Prussia. The committee’s resolution was passed by a large majority: Rochau estimated that it was opposed by between 50 and 70 deputies. It was widely seen to vindicate Prussia’s reform plans and to safeguard its pre-war position in Germany.
Increasingly forceful backing of Prussia lay behind such actions. In public, most pro-Prussian liberals were still circumspect, with the exception of mavericks such as Treitschke, who advised readers in January 1865 to ‘leave the ground of the law’ and to carry out ‘the Anschluss of the small states to Prussia’ in order to achieve ‘Germany’s unity’.135 One month later, he was calling it ‘the first duty of the German patriot to defend and increase the power of this state’, as he reiterated the case for Berlin’s annexation of Schleswig-Holstein.136 The majority of liberals were more cautious. Rudolf Haym, Treitschke’s colleague from the Preussische Jahrbücher, organised the first public petition by Prussian liberals in support of Bismarck – the Halle Declaration – as late as 26 April 1866. In private, pride, triumphalism and admiration of Bismarck were more common, together with a disdain for Klein- and Mittelstaaten. ‘I am not making up an “ideal Prussia” for myself, as the article which you send me claims,’ wrote Duncker to a correspondent in Kiel about a piece in the Viennese Neue Freie Presse on 26 April 1865: ‘My heart is attached to the “real Prussia”, whose whole history since 1640 has meant the saving of the German nation and German existence with all its strengths and weaknesses, with its suffering, emergencies and struggles.’137 Germany’s freedom would be created by Prussia’s power: ‘You know that I don’t just want power and success for Prussia’s sake; every strengthening of Prussia is a considerable relief for the solution of the German question,’ he went on: ‘The stronger Prussia has become, the less resistance Austria will necessarily offer, the more easily the merger of the smaller German states will occur. To hinder Prussia’s growth at a certain point in time so that it can later form an entire Bundesstaat is a false doctrine.’138 If Schleswig-Holstein were made independent, he concluded, it would have a life-long problem with Prussia and particularism.139 Annexation was desirable, Duncker told Theodor von Bernhardi in January 1866, even if it was necessary to delay it until Hungary seceded from Austria.140
Droysen, another dinner guest of Bernhardi’s, was equally ebullient, declaring ‘in a raised voice’ in May 1864 that ‘the taking of Düppel is … one of those events which are epoch-making in the life of a nation’.141 ‘The army has won such confidence, such trust in itself, that it is now equal to any enemy; it now knows what it can do. The population has developed a love for and trust in the army; it has shown what part it can play in the public realm, in the honour of Prussian arms,’ he went on: ‘A swing in favour of Bismarck has certainly taken place. Bismarck, too, has truly significant attributes. He [Droysen] had recently said to Gruner: “If you were at the helm, we would still be standing at the Eider! Bismarck’s impertinent, even cocky, attitude to foreign powers has its advantages.”’142 When Bernhardi took the opportunity to aim a blow at ‘Samwer and his like’, referring to the Badenese liberal as a cipher for small-state, southern parochialism, Droysen’s response was ‘Quite right!’143 Such a liberal, proclaimed the Berlin diarist and go-between, was ‘completely wrong about these things’:
he is a Kleinstaatler and has no idea of the self-confidence of the population of a large state, which has a glorious history closely tied to the life of the Volk. He has no other picture other than that of a population, whose current state conditions are matters of indifference or disfavour, which could and would – in part gladly, in part without resistance – be transferred to the first and best other state, and which imagines that Prussia can be worked into a progressive Germany more or less in the same way as Lippe-Detmold.144
In such accounts, it could seem that Prussia was different in kind from other German states, entitled to annex Schleswig-Holstein and to expand, even under the ministry of a reactionary Junker, with little reference to the rest of Germany. Southern German liberals, from this point of view, could be portrayed as compensating ‘for the narrowness and impoverishment of their political conditions with the dreams of Grossdeutschland’ appealing to ‘poetic fantasy’ but repellent to ‘a political mind’, in Baumgarten’s summation.145 Liberals in the third Germany rightly worried about ‘the fate of Schleswig-Holstein’, conceded the Karlsruhe historian, fearing that their own states might be annexed next.146
Pro-Prussian, North German newspapers made such views known to a wider public. Initially, publications like the National-Zeitung and the Grenzboten represented the broad sections of the reading public which clamoured for an undivided, independent Schleswig-Holstein under Augustenburg. As in 1848, the press regularly contended that both duchies were ‘German’ and should therefore be incorporated into the Bund. ‘A partition of Schleswig according to nationality is nothing other than an illusion of those who comprehend nothing of the matter, for there are not two nationalities in the land but one, even if two dialects are spoken’, reported the National-Zeitung in March 1864.147 In North Schleswig, the only area which was not clearly German, Danish-speaking rural communities existed alongside German towns and a German culture, noted the Grenzboten after the failure of the London Conference, but did Danish-speakers really want to belong to Denmark rather than to Germany?148 Whereas the German Great Powers ignored the principle of nationality in pursuit of their own interests, the German Volk recognised and came to the aid of their brethren intuitively, it was suggested.149 ‘As long as the possibility of a national act still lies before us, which cannot happen without Prussia since it alone can really vouch for the reinvigoration and renewal of Germany’, the Hohenzollern monarchy had the chance to lead the national movement, but it seemed not to want to do so, mired in its own ‘deep humiliation’, the Preussische Jahrbücher had remarked in August 1863.150 As early as November of the same year, the periodical had already advised the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus ‘to place all the means at the state’s disposal which it needs for its ethical elevation (Erhebung)’.151
When the Prussian state did act, much of the liberal press, notwithstanding doubts about the Great Power’s motives and its refusal to adopt the objectives of the national movement, nonetheless came to support it. By the summer of 1864, the Grenzboten was openly considering the possibility of Prussia’s annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, concluding that it had a moral right and an actual opportunity to do so, given the impotence of the Confederation and the Mittelstaaten.152 By January 1865, the periodical was still undecided about what to do, declaring grandly that the essence of liberalism was ‘to think well of humanity’ and to emphasise ‘the self-determination of Völker everywhere.153 ‘The final mystery of our strength lies in our respect for the will of the Volk’, continued the journal, before recommending a very carefully circumscribed referendum offerering a choice between annexation or merger.154 Constantin Rössler asked the same leading question in the Preussische Jahrbücher in March.155 In either event, the duchies were to join Prussia, as the National-Zeitung had hinted in August 1864, while still formally backing their independence: ‘We rejoice in the yearned-for freedom of Schleswig-Holstein, but we cannot think that this new state will allow the conditions in which it was born to be forgotten’; ‘“so-called rights” without power’ were a ‘mere claim and wish’.156 The Grenzboten had already been much blunter a month beforehand: Bismarckian policy ‘coincides, in the main, with the truly national’.157 It was Prussia’s right, intimated important sections of the liberal press, to merge with Schleswig-Holstein, and later with Germany, on its own terms.
The widely perceived arrogance of Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein, combined with animosity towards Bismarck, helps to explain the fluctuating opinions of liberals in the South German states. Whereas the Landtage of Hanover, Braunschweig, Hesse-Darmstadt, Weimar and Nassau complied with the Abgeordnetentag’s request for a declaration of neutrality, which benefited Prussia, in May 1866, those of Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden, all of which had liberal majorities, did not. ‘Neutrality was preached among us’, wrote Elben of the Swabian monarchy, ‘but in vain: blind passion against Prussia was too powerful in the leading circles.’158 The experience of Badenese liberals is arguably most illuminating, since they not only dominated the Ständeversammlung but also ran the government between 1861 and 1866, and they were, until the resignation of Franz von Roggenbach in September 1865, the most consistent proponents of Kleindeutschland. On taking up his office, backed by the liberal-minded Grand Duke Friedrich, Roggenbach had outlined his plan for a reform of the Bund in a circular dispatch on 28 January 1862, resurrecting most of the elements of the Reichsverfassung; the idea of a narrower and a wider Bund to overcome the dualism between Prussia and Austria; extensive federal competencies for the individual states; a strong central power; and a National Assembly. As in 1848, he warned Beust, whose Bundesreform he was criticising, there was a ‘great societal-political movement’ towards a German parliament and a Bundesstaat:
The danger of the return of similar uprisings is not ruled out, as long as the deep unrest about the lack of any national achievement can blacken the present order with the reproach that it is to blame. Should such shocks not fail to occur, then it is to be feared that their consequences could be serious for the throne as well as for the existence of the individual states.159
Five days later, Austria sent out its own note, in which it spelled out its opposition to all small German plans to reform the Confederation. On 11 February, the Grand Duke sent an authorised letter to his father-in-law Wilhelm I to find out what Prussia intended to do and to offer assistance in reconciling the monarch and the Prussian population, since the constitutional crisis seemed likely to push the Prussian Court and government to the right, endangering Roggenbach’s scheme for Kleindeutschland. The King of Prussia replied curtly that ‘concessions which run against my principles of government … will not come from me’.160 When the Grand Duke sent a second letter, Wilhelm’s reply was much fuller, claiming that the Abgeordnetenhaus was fomenting ‘revolution and civil war in Germany’, and protesting that ‘time must have an effect and do its work, and reason gradually forge a path’.161 It was the first of a series of blows dealt to Friedrich I and Roggenbach by the Prussian government.
When Bismarck was made Minister-President, Roggenbach’s response was that ‘the man and the system must be attacked pitilessly’.162 Prussia’s conduct in Schleswig-Holstein, just prior to the conflict, was traced by the Grand Duke to ‘Bismarck’s treason’.163 The Gastein Convention in August 1865 adumbrated, as Wilhelm and Bismarck hinted at a meeting with Roggenbach in Baden-Baden at the end of the month, the annexation of the duchies and, the Foreign Minister was sure, war between Prussia and Austria. ‘Whether a development towards a Bundesstaat can still be kept in view, given these tendencies of Prussia, is very doubtful,’ he wrote on 1 September: ‘the situation seems, rather, to be assuming such a form that the German states must make a decision whether they dare to make an ultimate push for their own independence or whether they want to give a fillip to a completely new development of the fatherland with considerable sacrifices of their own independence.’164 Roggenbach eventually decided to back Prussia’s ‘completely new development’, the outcome of which was difficult to predict. Unlike many of his counterparts, he accepted the logic of his belief ‘that the position of Austria has become impossible in Germany, and that the German Bund in its existing shape is no longer the correct expression of the fundamental political relations which now obtain in Germany’.165 Friedrich I refused to follow him, helping to precipitate the Foreign Minister’s resignation later that month.
The Grand Duke refrained until late May 1866, when it was too late, from contemplating the other choice – independence through a war against Prussia – which Roggenbach had put before him. By that time, his own Foreign Minister Ludwig von Edelsheim had already agreed with the other ministers of the Mittelstaaten to the Bund’s intervention on the side of Austria, provided that Vienna allowed the Bundestag to decide the succession to the duchies, which it did on 1 June. ‘I was in Karlsruhe over the last few days,’ wrote Robert von Mohl to his brother on 11 May: ‘The Grand Duke is vacillating and not at all a man for clear decisions. There is no real unity; namely, my new minister Edelsheim is going much further towards Austria than is the case with any of his colleagues.’166 Many Badenese liberals were as disunited, indecisive and confused as their monarch and some of their ministers. On 11 April 1866, the second chamber voted almost unanimously – with only three votes against – in support of Bismarck’s proposal to reform the Bund, which was later rejected even by the Nationalverein. The measure’s Bismarckian provenance was not enough to deter deputies from voting for it, as Carl Eckhard and Friedrich Kiefer, the leaders of the Fortschrittspartei, made plain: ‘First let us have this, then we want to have done with the Junker Bismarck.’167 On 29 May, the second chamber voted unanimously for war credits for the Badenese government as it prepared to enter the war on Austria’s side. The decision, however, did not imply an outright rejection of a Prussian-led small German Bundesstaat on the model of 1849, much less an acceptance of a confederal or Austrian solution to the German question. Despite beginning his speech with the statement that virtually no one in the chamber or in the land was in favour of Baden’s neutrality or an Anschluss with Prussia, Eckhard went on to claim that there was also no desire in liberal ranks to join an illiberal Austria: rather, it was vital that the individual states ally with each other and with the national movement to create – immediately – a Volksarmee and a Volksvertretung, elected in accordance with the law agreed in 1849. Kiefer added that, only a few weeks ago as the Prussian Bundesreform was put to a vote, he had seen Bismarck as a German Cavour, but he had been disabused of this belief by the current arming of Prussia in order to fight a Bruderkrieg: nevertheless, he still saw in the Hohenzollern monarchy, if it would give up its present policy, the power which could solve the German question.
There were compelling reasons why the majority of Badenese liberals, apart from a small group of hardened pro-Prussian deputies led by Roggenbach, Karl Mathy, Julius Jolly and Hermann Baumgarten, failed to back Prussia in 1866. Liberal deputies had traditionally adhered to a truce on the national and confessional questions, tolerating differences of opinion for the sake of party unity. Roggenbach had exploited this political space, which was typical of many states with their strict interpretation of raisons d’état and cabinet diplomacy, in order to formulate a kleindeutsch policy largely insulated from party opinion. Likewise, his successor Edelsheim, who was a university friend and former kleindeutsch protégé of Roggenbach, was able to design and implement his own policy, ‘with the Bund, at present, as the sole national bond of the German nation, despite some transient internal tumult’.168 As the former Badenese envoy to Vienna, he was willing to court the Habsburg monarchy to a much greater degree than any of his contemporaries and to present the ministry and second chamber with a series of faits accomplis, including agreements with other German ministers to go to war in 1866. Partly as a result of such agreements, Edelsheim was able to argue in the debate on 28–29 May that a small border state such as Baden had no option but to act in concert with the other Mittelstaaten. Any other decision would mean that the state would be completely isolated in Germany as a whole, surrounded by enemies. Even kleindeutsch opponents of the Foreign Minister’s claims such as Bluntschli were obliged to admit in May 1866 that neutrality would be a contravention of the law of the Bund. He was therefore obliged to contend that confederal law was no longer valid. ‘Although Baden, too, has at all times loyally met its obligations to the Confederation and will do so in future, it cannot regard formal confederal law as the highest law at that moment when the entire existence of the present constitution of the Bund, which is seen on all sides as untenable, is itself in question’, the constitutional lawyer told the first chamber on 14 May, ‘and when a break between the two German Great Powers destroys the foundations on which the present law of the Bund rests. Rather, in this case, Baden must reserve the right to take its own free decisions as an independent state.’169
Given the uncertainty surrounding the decision to go to war in 1866, liberal deputies would have required a strong predisposition towards Prussia to ignore the legally binding decisions of the Confederation. With Bismarck in charge in Berlin, the majority of deputies were not sufficiently predisposed towards Prussia to take such a momentous step. As Eckhard had pointed out on 29 May, echoing Roggenbach’s earlier admission in September 1865, support for the Hohenzollern monarchy in the war might entail an actual merger, or Anschluss, with Prussia within a new form of state, the details of which were not known in advance. With a despised, aggressive figure such as Bismarck at the head of a state widely known for its rule of violence and its military tradition, few liberals were confident about a German future dictated by Berlin after a victorious war. By contrast, sanctioning the probable mobilisation of the Bund‘s forces against Prussia did not seem to presage an Anschluss with Austria – a point made by Eckhard as if it were self-evident – for even those most sceptical of the Hohenzollern state appeared to have viewed the Habsburg monarchy not as the harbinger of an alternative vision of Germany but as a means of delaying any decision. This attitude had already been articulated in April 1865 by Robert von Mohl, one of Edelsheim’s confidants. Although he was pleased that ‘the carrying out of the old Gotha plans cannot be considered now or for a long time’, he was not, as a consequence, in favour of Grossdeutschland or Austria:
I see the whole Grossdeutschtum, whether it is in a direct relationship to Austria or through a Sonderbund under Bavarian hegemony, simply as a barely concealed ultramontanism, that is, subjection to a principle which I hold for the most damaging of all; or, on the part of democrats, as a concealed revolutionary means to arrive at a republic. I don’t know which result I would dislike most … at least, we have been spiritually free in Germany until now, if also politically powerless.170
Mohl’s recommendation was to give up the idea of German unity altogether, having lived through ‘the school of 1848 and 1849 and now the experience of the last four years’: ‘I am no enthusiast of German unity.’171 Few Badenese liberals, less independent and original than the academic and diplomat, were willing to go so far. They agreed, however, that it was better to wait and see on the side of Austria, which stood a good chance of winning the war, than to await an uncertain future, even if victorious, on the side of Prussia.
The actions of Bismarck’s ministry at home and abroad placed great strain on Germany’s national movement. After eight years of reaction and four years of the New Era, the liberals who had created the movement were confronted, over the next four years, with a constitutional crisis in Prussia which seemed to endanger the centrality of the Reichsverfassung as the basis of a German nation-state, with a cabinet war in the national heartland of Schleswig-Holstein, and a conflict in 1866 between ‘brothers’ in the Confederation, the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies, the anticipation of which had cast a shadow over politics in the preceding year. It is remarkable in such circumstances that liberal and national organisations, despite their novelty, continued to play a central role in the German public sphere, disposing of mass memberships, contacts in the press, extensive links with each other and with the Landtage, and influence over governments. Thus, when Bismarck sought, in 1866, to canvass support for his proposed reform of the Bund and to ensure the states’ neutrality, his officials met Baumgarten, Bluntschli, Jolly and Roggenbach in Baden and the Progressive leaders Karl Braun and Friedrich Lang in Nassau, who requested the convening of an Abgeordnetentag.‘If Bismarck wins with the emphatic support of popular forces, then liberal Prussia wins,’ wrote Baumgarten on 11 May: ‘If it wins, whilst the liberal Volk joins in with the howling of the Kölnische Zeitung and the Jewish Volkszeitung, then the Prussian Volk will turn its back on liberalism.’172 On the same day, Roggenbach wrote to Bennigsen, the leader of the Nationalverein, about ‘which of the two Groβstaaten will in future determine and dominate the fate of Germany – on which side the wishes of the German people must stand seems to me beyond doubt’ – and about the course of the Bundesreform: ‘I would very much regret it, if the aversion against the current regime could lead to the German Volk preferring to renounce such a reform than to back one in which Bismarck participates … the current regime is working under high pressure, which lets it take decisions that many other regimes would shrink away from.’173
On 14 May, the second day of the Nationalverein committee meeting called in preparation for the Abgeordnetentag in Frankfurt a week later, Bismarck invited Bennigsen in person to a meeting at nine o’clock in the evening. Bernhardi, who was the intermediary, hinted at the reasoning of both sides. Bismarck had to promise a reform of the Bund and to offer a German parliament as the price of the war for other parties, an offer which ‘old liberals’ like Bernhardi thought was worth accepting.174 Bennigsen desired the measures, but he was opposed to Bismarck, deciding in the end neither to accept nor refuse the Minister-President’s proposals; he was ‘very concerned in respect of the chances in a war’.175 The Berlin diarist reassured him that the Prussian army was in ‘an outstanding state and good spirit’ and that Bismarck was capable of leading Prussia to victory; indeed, and ‘this is also Roggenbach’s opinion’, ‘only he can’, since a liberal ministry ‘would never overcome … the resistance of the Austrian-leaning party in the personal entourage of the king’.176 For his part, the Minister-President was characteristically contemptuous when confronted with the commonplace idea ‘that he cannot conduct a war at all because he has public opinion against him’: ‘One doesn’t shoot with public opinion, but with gunpowder and lead.’177 Yet he was visibly interested in the stance of the Nationalverein and other national organisations, admitting that he was ‘not happy about Bennigsen’s statements’ on 28 April.178 The Minister-President’s initiation of talks with liberals after that date betrays the extent of his concern.179
The Nationalverein and Abgeordnetentag maintained a coherent and more or less consensual line in 1866 under considerable pressure from German governments and from its own heterogeneous membership. Immediately after meeting Bismarck, Bennigsen reiterated the mantra, published in the Wochenschrift des Nationalvereins on 17 May, that the German nation could not believe in a German constitution, especially given ‘the uncertainty of its content’, put forward by ‘a system of government’ which had contravened and suppressed its own constitution in Prussia.180 Any public announcement of the National Association’s willingness to reach an agreement with Bismarck while the constitutional crisis in Prussia remained unresolved would have led to dissent, resignations and, even, secessions. The Nationalverein’s membership had, after all, declined from approximately 21,000 in 1863 to 10,681 in 1865, although such a fall was offset by a switch of members’ activities to the Schleswig-Holstein committees in 1864 and it was concealed by higher figures published for 1864 and 1865 at the time.181 Rather than collapsing, organisations like the National Association and the Fortschrittspartei remained prominent in public life, maintaining a sufficiently consistent and acceptable stance during the various crises to safeguard their integrity and their role.
The Nationalverein’s strategy in May 1866 was to ignore Bismarck’s proposals for a Bundesreform, restating the need for a German parliament elected by the law of 1849, and to criticise Berlin’s policy on Schleswig-Holstein at the same time as guaranteeing the neutrality of states hostile to Prussia, by asking liberal-dominated Landtage to refuse them war credits except for purely defensive purposes. The resolutions submitted by the committee of the Abgeordnetentag to the general meeting on 20 May were almost identical. They proved unobjectionable to both supporters and opponents of Prussia. ‘The core point of the resolutions advanced today’ was the neutrality of the third Germany, reported the Prussian envoy in Frankfurt Karl Friedrich von Savigny: ‘the other declaration, partly directed against the Prussian policy in Schleswig-Holstein, is only intended to marshal all those towards an acceptance of the core point who have absorbed the widely-held diatribes against Prussia over the years into their political catechism’.182 Despite a heated discussion about an alternative resolution which was more critical of Prussia’s annex-ationism, about 170 of the 220 votes cast supported the committee’s wording: the entire delegation from Schleswig-Holstein, who desired a clearer statement of the duchies’ independence, made up a good proportion of the fifty or so deputies who voted against the resolution. A similar pattern had been discernible at the general assembly of the National Association in October 1865, where the resolution, again opposed by about fifty votes, had repeated the organisation’s adherence to the Reichsverfassung and had given its continuing support to the constitution of a state in Schleswig-Holstein under Augustenburg, but with Prussian control of its military. This concession to Prussia had been agreed in the so-called ‘Berlin compromise’ between liberal and national leaders in March 1865 and was a watered-down version of the ‘February demands’ outlined by Bismarck, which had required economic as well as military cooperation if a separate state were to be set up. As in May 1866, when the terms of the compromise had altered, the Nationalverein, after a full-blooded debate, secured the backing of a large majority for its position.183
Despite the fragmentary effects of Bismarck’s policies on German politics, why did national, liberal and democratic organisations and milieux not splinter and break apart, as had begun to occur in Württemberg? First, they had benefited from the wave of support for Schleswig-Holstein in, and before, 1863. It was founded not only on national grounds, although these were the most important, but also on historical and legal ones, prompting a slew of expert opinions from prominent liberal constitutional lawyers and historians, which underlined the moral legitimacy of the cause.184 Notwithstanding the difficulties caused by Prussian and Austrian policy, this moment of national awakening had long-lasting consequences, which the Nationalverein and Abgeordnetentag harnessed by refusing to accept annexation.
Second, Schleswig-Holstein was seen by the majority of liberal and democratic nationalists as the German question ‘writ small’, as Treitschke sarcastically put it.185 As efforts to gain the independence of the duchies stalled because of the opposition of Prussia and Austria, the attention of many contemporaries was deflected to the German question writ large, with the prospect of a war between the German Great Powers. Once Berlin and Vienna had removed Schleswig-Holstein from the Danish monarchy, a number of solutions surfaced in public discussions of the territories, including referring the problem to the Bund or a reconstituted National Assembly, military or economic cooperation with Prussia, and annexation with or without violence. Many liberals, mocked Treitschke, were content to leave it to, ‘not Prussia, but the whole of Germany to decide!’, to which ‘we reply’, ‘Where is Germany? Where is the legal political organ of our nation?’186 As the Schleswig-Holstein question became greyer and dimmer, it lost some of its divisive force.
Third, most liberals saw no need to make a choice between freedom and unity. This was even true of Twesten, who had helped to establish the dichotomy in his speech to the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus on 2 December 1863: if presented with the choice whether to extend the Bismarck ministry ‘by some time’ or give up Schleswig-Holstein ‘forever’, he would chose the former, but his question was deliberately a hypothetical and leading one.187 He correctly assumed that he would not be faced with the dilemma: ‘I cannot hide it from myself: there is the possibility that the present government will emerge from a European war as a victor and that its duration will be lengthened for some time by a war or by the measures which precede a war’, independently of any decision made by deputies in the second chamber.188 In the event, Bismarck made many of the relevant decisions concerning the duchies, and liberals had little alternative but to look on, either in public protest or private approval.
Fourth, opposition to the Prussian government’s contravention of the constitution was a point of agreement in the national movement, not discord, as Twesten had indicated in the same speech: ‘I do not, as Herr v. Vincke expressed it in one of the previous sessions, take the gentlemen at the ministerial table to be a temporary embarrassment, but perceive the ministry to be a serious danger and misfortune for the fatherland.’189 The main difference of opinion concerning Bismarck, notwithstanding Vincke’s passing remark, was the degree to which deputies should cooperate with the Prussian ministry in the realm of foreign policy and – for a minority of right-wing liberals – associated war credits, not in constitutional or routine budgetary matters. Few doubted that the constitutional struggle should continue. The Abgeordnetenhaus had gone on to reject the government’s request for war credits by a large majority shortly after Twesten’s intervention. ‘There is no higher interest for Prussia than the removal of a system of government which eats away at the marrow of the state and consumes the moral strength of the Volk, which dishonours the state and makes the Volk despicable in the eyes of the world and in its own eyes,’ wrote Rochau, sketching the official viewpoint of the Nationalverein in its Wochenschrift in February 1865, after the Abgeordnetenhaus had again refused the budget: ‘For this purpose, no price is too high.’190
Finally, liberals in the national movement had grounds to be confident, whatever their other fears, that their constitutional and federal conception of a German nation-state including Prussia was gaining ground, partly because of the perceived self-exclusion of Austria and failure of the Bund. Outsiders such as Treitschke, who put the case for a unitary state, recognised that they were arguing against the orthodoxy of a German Bundesstaat.191 When the young Hanoverian liberal Johannes Miquel formulated a similar set of arguments for a Prussian–German Einheitsstaat at the committee meeting of the National Association on 28 October 1865, his comments were removed from the record presented to the general meeting. The Reich constitution of 1849 remained the foundation of a liberal German nation-state until 1866.
Liberals could rightly claim that some conservatives, including Bismarck, had adopted important elements of their national programme: notably, the principle of nationality, legal equality, constitutionalism, a small German parliament, federal government, a strong central authority and even universal suffrage. Circles close to Gerlach, however, vehemently resisted what the founder of the Kreuzzeitung had called the ‘un-German Nationalverein’ for its propaganda on behalf of ‘a domestic system of revolution’ designed ‘to push Prussia into the abyss of 1848’.192 As was to be expected, Gerlach continued to champion the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies as the twin pillars of the German order – stating in 1864 that ‘the German Great Powers should not allow themselves to be pushed into the role of mere German members of the Confederation’ – yet he believed that they should be bound by God, history, law and the Bund.193 The German Confederation had ‘great faults’, he wrote in May 1866, ‘but I don’t pulverise my family or my fatherland because they have faults’.194 With foreign policy closely tied to domestic affairs, in Gerlach’s view, the ‘Schleswig-Holstein swindle’ was above all a pretext for revolution at home and abroad, he declared in two articles – ‘1848 und 1863!’ and ‘Die Demokratie und Schleswig-Holstein’ – in the Kreuzzeitung in December 1863: ‘The captivated crowd allows itself to be fanaticised for the real or supposed rights and interests of Holstein and Schleswig. But the leaders know what they want. The fall of Prussia as a Great Power; the German revolution; thereby the overturning of Austria – those are their aims.’195 Although Gerlach had supported Bismarck as Prussia and Austria confronted the national movement over Schleswig-Holstein in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of London, heralding Düppel as a defeat for the Nationalverein and for those German states which had been led astray by democrats, he soon began to distance himself from the Minister-President’s departure from the letter of international treaties and his manipulation of Austria in the course of 1864 and 1865. It was only on 8 May 1866, with the publication of ‘Krieg und Bundesreform’ in the Kreuzzeitung, that he broke with Bismarck completely, who wrote back via an intermediary that the article had injured him more seriously than an assassination attempt on the same day.196 In the field of politics, diplomacy and war, Gerlach wrote, Bismarck – whom he did not name in this context – was guilty of ‘patriotic egotism’, ‘as if these fields had no higher law’.197 The Minister-President’s threat to go to war against Austria risked dealing a fatal blow to the life-organs of both parties and his Bundesreform proposals of the previous month were condemned as a sign of ‘political bankruptcy’.198 Gerlach had already been told by Moritz von Blanckenburg on 15 April that the reform was ‘not at all … a mere diplomatic chess move – it is intended very seriously’.199 Bismarck’s ‘Bonapartism’, his ruthless pursuit of self-contained interests of state, and his flirtations with ‘revolution’, or with liberals and nationalists, risked alienating the conservative party permanently, warned Gerlach.200
The question asked by contemporaries of Gerlach was: which conservative party? Twesten went as far as to suggest that there would soon be no party at all:
The conservative party in Prussia is caught in a new instance of decomposition, which great but undesired service I attribute to Herr v. Bismarck … such a great service that I in fact believe that after Herr v. Bismarck there will be no conservative party in the sense of the word to date. Gentlemen, in internal policy it has already abandoned everything that they denoted as the tasks of conservative policy under Friedrich Wilhelm IV … They follow Herr v. Bismarck, although he denies their previous principles, because he is the man through whom they can govern.201
Gerlach, too, was worried about the conservative party, which appeared to have little direction, lapsing unthinkingly into ‘war enthusiasm’ at one moment and lethargy the next. ‘The dead, cold self-complacency of the conservatives, their weary defence, indifference vis-à-vis the most important things, their sinful contempt (and ignorance) of their opponents etc. struck me everywhere’, wrote the reactionary in March 1863.202 In such circumstances, there was less of a counterweight to Bismarck – and to his experimentation with national and liberal ideas as well as with acts of force – than many contemporaries believed. Bernhardi’s assessment of the strength of the ‘Austrian’ party around the King was mistaken. The circles close to Gerlach were far less well connected than in the 1850s, so that Gerlach himself complained of being isolated at the Kreuzzeitung, which had also largely adopted Bismarck’s line in 1865–66, and he was reduced to trying to gain access to the throne via Prince Albrecht of Prussia, one of the King’s nephews whom he had taken up as an unlikely protégé. Although he still had meetings with Bismarck, he was so unsuccessful in convincing his former charge that he started writing to the Minister-President’s wife, requesting her to read his letters to her husband. His attempts in 1866 to change the King’s or the ministry’s course were unsuccessful. By that date, Bismarck’s own position was much less precarious.
Bismarck’s ministry was notorious for its refusal to take national sentiment into account. As early as 1856, the future Minister-President had told his Danish counterpart in Frankfurt, admittedly in part to reassure him of Prussia’s bona fides, that ‘he was no friend of a sentimental or national policy and much too Prussian to make any distinctions in his feelings between Spaniards, Bavarians, or Danes. His only concern was whether Prussia had an interest in quarrelling with Denmark or disrupting the Danish monarchy. For the time being this was not the case.’203 In different circumstances, Bismarck had said the same thing in 1864 to Rechberg, the Austrian Staatsminister and former envoy to the Bund in Frankfurt, avowing that he would not be disorientated by the dogmatic ‘sentimentalism’ of German nationalists.204 On one level, the Minister-President’s policy in 1864 could be understood as the antithesis of a national German one, continuing a traditional policy of Prussian aggrandisement, as Bismarck told Wilhelm at a Crown Council on 3 February, two days after the invasion of Schleswig: ‘I reminded the king that each of his immediate forebears, except his brother, had won for the state an increase in territory … and encouraged him to do the same.’205 This, of course, corresponded to many contemporaries’ views of the Prussian ministry. On another level, however, the ministry was in a weak position and was forced to take German nationalism into account. Thus, at the meeting of the Crown Council, Bismarck invoked the glorious record of Hohenzollern expansionism in order to overcome Wilhelm’s qualms about the ultimate purpose of Prussia’s and Austria’s war with Denmark. Like much of the Court, the monarch was at once closer to the position of the Bund and of German liberals, who were calling for an independent Schleswig-Holstein. For this reason, Wilhelm added to the protocol of the Crown Council of 3 February that annexation was merely one possible outcome of the war, not Berlin’s fixed objective. In his Gedanken und Erinnerungen, Bismarck later recalled that his injunction to the King to follow the example of his forebears and increase the size of Prussia’s territory ‘was missing from the protocol’:
The Geheimer Rat Costenlohe, who was in charge of the protocol, said, when I asked him to comment, that the king had said that I would prefer it if my disclosures were not recorded in the protocol; His Majesty seems to have believed that I had talked under the Bacchanalian influence of a good breakfast and would be happy to hear nothing further of the matter. I insisted, however, on their inclusion, which did indeed occur.206
Opposition to the Minister-President’s stance was not limited to the monarch. During the council, Bismarck went on, ‘the Crown Prince had, as I spoke, raised his hands to the heavens, as if I had lost my senses; my colleagues remained silent’.207 Even his own ministers appeared unwilling to back the Minister-President. As in the constitutional crisis, Bismarck’s actual position, notwithstanding his bluster, was uncertain.
Such uncertainty did not mean, in itself, that the Prussian Minister-President was influenced by the counsel and criticism of liberals and nationalists between 1864 and 1866. He appears to have been averse to the national enthusiasm surrounding Schleswig-Holstein, referring to its inhabitants disparagingly as ‘the old inseparables’, who ‘must eventually become Prussians’, and indicating to Schleinitz in 1861 that ‘we have greater concerns and dangers to face than the misdemeanours of Danish overlords in Schleswig, and the Holsteiners are, it seems to me, not favourable to the idea of being saved by German troops’.208 As he confided to Robert von Keudell at New Year celebrations in 1864, sitting before the fire and – unusually – talking about politics, he ‘could not be responsible for shedding Prussian blood to create a new small state, which in the Confederation would always vote against us’.209 He had already said exactly the same thing to the Prussian envoy in Baden a year before in order to deter Roggenbach from using the duchies to revive the case for Kleindeutschland: ‘I cannot take it to be a Prussian interest to wage a war to install a new Grand Duke, in the most favourable case, who votes against us in the Bund and whose government would be a willing object of Austrian intrigues.’210 An independent Schleswig-Holstein under Augustenburg would, like Hanover, Saxony and Hesse, be an envious opponent of Prussia within Germany and it would be a bridgehead for an attack against the state’s northern flank. However, it was ‘as good as clear that H.M., in spite of the danger of breaking with Europe and suffering a worse Olmütz, will give way to democracy and the Würzburger [the Mittelstaaten] in order to establish Augustenburg and create a new medium-sized state’, he wrote to Roon in January 1864.211
In the same letter, he admitted that the refusal of the liberals in the Prussian Landtag to back a war loan, in addition to continuing to vote against the budget, was wearing him down: ‘I have not slept a wink this night and feel miserable, and don’t really know what to tell these people, who will for sure refuse to vote credits.’212 Unlike their refusal to sanction the budget, which did not impede the collection of taxes, the deputies’ rejection of a war loan was likely to affect the government’s creditworthiness. When Bismarck accused the Abgeordnetenhaus of endangering Prussia’s foreign policy for domestic and party ends in the debate on 21 and 22 January, underlining its ‘lack of confidence in the present ministry’ and seeking ‘to establish in Prussia the dictatorship of this House’, Virchow retorted – like the Minister-President, for the King’s benefit – that Bismarck was turning into a Kreuzzeitung man: ‘He is no longer the man who joined us with the feeling that he was going to accomplish something with an energetic foreign policy.’213 Quite possibly piqued, the Minister-President answered:
I did incidentally, when I came here, cherish the hope that I should find in others besides myself a willingness, should the need arise, to sacrifice the standpoint of party for the overall interest of the country. I shall not, lest I offend anyone, go any further into how far and in whom I have been disappointed in this hope; but disappointed I have been, and of course that affects my political position and relations.214
Whether this was Bismarck lifting his mask, betraying his real intention of working with the national movement, is open to debate, since he had an interest in trying to discredit the Augustenburg cause and ‘Schleswig-Holsteinism’ – and Wilhelm’s and the Court’s sympathy for them – as self-interested party politics.215
What is indisputable, though, is that the Minister-President was acutely conscious of party positions, especially that of the Progressives, and he often seemed uncertain that he would escape their logic. As he wrote in his memoirs:
I saw the situation which I absolutely thought that I must avoid as that which was put before public opinion as a programme by our opponents – that is, to fight at the head of newspapers, associations, volunteers, and the states of the Bund, except Austria, for a struggle and war on the part of Prussia for the erection of a new Grand Dukedom, and without the certainty that the individual governments would carry out the thing, whatever the danger. I have never faltered in the conviction that Prussia, supported purely by the weapons and comrades of 1848, public opinion, Landtage, associations, volunteers and small contingents in their state at the time, would have made a hopeless start and would have only found enemies amongst the Great Powers, in England, too. I would have seen any minister as a swindler and a traitor who had fallen back into the false policy of 1848, 49 and 50, which would have prepared a new Olmütz for us.216
The Minister-President was determined to steer a course acceptable to the Great Powers and to avoid the pitfalls of 1848. Yet the fact that he depicted liberals and public opinion in these terms also revealed how significant he thought they were.
Bismarck was obliged to pay attention to the public, assemblies and clubs because of his aims in Germany, where many of the states were swayed by public opinion, and because of his position at Court and in government, where he was creating a platform for himself between the ‘absolutism’ and would-be ‘dictatorship’ of the far right and the liberalism of the Crown Prince’s circle and the old Wochenblatt party in the diplomatic corps. The Minister-President had, at least, to use liberalism, frequently in an unorthodox fashion, in both his domestic and foreign policy, as his memoir entries on ‘Schleswig-Holstein’, whatever their other biases, make plain:
If German unity could not be produced by Landtag resolutions, newspapers and shooting festivals, liberalism nonetheless put pressure on the princes, which made them more willing to make concessions for the Reich … it is unlikely that [Wilhelm I] could have been led onto the path of the Danish and, therefore, the Bohemian wars without his previous experiments and endeavours in a liberal direction, and without the commitments into which he had thereby entered … The Holstein question, the Danish war, Düppel and Alsen, the break with Austria and the deciding of the German question on the battlefield: he would perhaps never have entered this whole balancing act without the difficult position into which he had been brought by the New Era.217
The liberalism of important sections of the Court and foreign ministry was bolstered in the Schleswig-Holstein affair by the legitimism of the succession of Augustenburg, who was an old friend of the Crown Prince from his days at university in Bonn, and by the stance of the German Confederation, which had been a traditional focus of conservative loyalty. In such circumstances, Bismarck opined in January 1864 to Roon, in an attempt to bring Wilhelm back from the brink of a war for Augustenburg, an independent Schleswig-Holstein and the Bund, ‘I have the premonition that the cause of the Crown against the revolution is lost, for the heart of the King is in the other camp and his confidence rests more with his opponents than with his servants.’218 ‘Bismarck is unfortunately the only, completely clear, completely firm man in the government,’ wrote the Minister-President’s close friend Moritz von Blanckenburg in November 1863: ‘All the others are more or less intoxicated and are urging war, the worst is the furor militaris which goes up to the highest circles.’219 From this point of view, Bismarck’s exchange of letters with Robert von der Goltz, the Prussian ambassador in Paris, adviser to the King and former member of the Wochenblatt party, takes on a different complexion. Rather than being a straightforward statement of contempt towards parties and public opinion, the Minister-President’s letter of 24 December 1863 was a tactical move in a competition for the opinion of the monarch, the Court and the right, a fact to which Goltz had already alluded in his letter of 22 December as he warned Wilhelm that his own future, ‘that of the dynasty, Prussia’s position as a Great Power and the existence of the conservative party’ all hung on the decision to champion the Schleswig-Holstein movement.220 Bismarck’s verdict that ‘the chase after the phantom of popularity “in Germany”, which we have been pursuing since the forties, has cost us our position in Germany and in Europe’ was designed to convince Goltz and the King that his own Great Power policy in 1864 was the correct one: ‘we shall not regain [our position] if we let ourselves be driven by the current in the belief that we are guiding it, but only if we stand firmly on our own feet and are first and foremost a Great Power, and only then a federal state’.221 ‘If we now turn our backs on the Great Powers in order to throw ourselves into the arms of the policy of the small states, which is caught in the net of the democracy of associations, that would be the most wretched situation in which one could bring the monarchy internally and abroad,’ he went on, revealing in the process that many German states were in democracy’s net, in his opinion: ‘We would be pushed instead of pushing; we would support ourselves on elements which we do not control and which are necessarily hostile to us, to which we would have to surrender ourselves unconditionally.’222
Bismarck deliberately overstated the menace of democracy, which he knew that Wilhelm believed had advanced too far in Prussia and Germany, but at the same time he acknowledged that many conservatives were prepared to join democrats and liberals in a national cause. ‘You believe that there is something in “German public opinion”, in the parliaments, newspapers, etc., which could support or help us in a policy aimed at union or hegemony,’ he continued, ridiculing the means which Goltz proposed towards their shared end of a Prussian-dominated Kleindeutschland: ‘I consider that a radical error, a fantasy. Our strength cannot emanate from parliamentary and press politics but only from armed Great Power politics.’223 His intention was to frighten the King, once again mustering the threat of parliamentary rule, which few contemporaries supported: ‘are we a Great Power or simply a German federal state’, meaning, ‘in the first case, we are to be governed monarchically, or, as would be permissible in the second case, by professors, circuit judges and small-town gossips?’224 Bismarck had already spelled out on 20 December that ‘the more reflective and moderate elements’ in the national camp ‘form a tiny minority’, making ‘an open fight against rather than an alliance with the incipient national and revolutionary movement’ more likely, at least for the moment; all the same, he was prepared to hint to Goltz that, ‘possibly, other stages will yet ensue that are not so far removed from your programme’.225 For all his posturing in support of his Great Power strategy in Schleswig-Holstein, the Minister-President was conscious that a large majority was in favour of a German national policy and he was, himself, willing to consider such a policy in future.
Bismarck’s use of nationalism had important antecedents, dating back to the revolution and the Erfurt Union. On 16 June 1866, two days after the Bund had agreed to Austria’s request to mobilise its forces against Prussia, Bismarck drafted a proclamation for Wilhelm I entitled ‘To the German Volk’, recalling Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s call ‘An Mein Volk und an die deutsche Nation’ on 21 March 1848. In the manifesto of 16 June, the King of Prussia declared that only the ‘living unity of the German nation remained’ after the Bund, which had been powerless and ineffective for half a century, had committed an illegal act of war by mobilising against Prussia and had therefore caused its own demise. Prussia was fighting for the unrestricted ‘national development of Germany’, the unity of which required ‘a new, vital expression’.226 This Prussian policy of appealing to the German nation in a struggle against the Confederation, the Mittelstaaten and Austria preceded Bismarck’s Minister-Presidency. On 7 September 1861, the recently appointed Foreign Minister Albrecht von Bernstorff, a former member of the Wochenblatt party, had met Roggenbach along with Wilhelm I at Ostend and had accepted the Baden proposal for a reform of the Bund, although disavowing its references to ministerial responsibility and the direct election of a German parliament. The Prussian and Badenese plan was put forward by Bernstorff on 20 December as an immediate rejoinder to one of Beust’s schemes for a trias under Austria: only a small German federation within the existing confederation could meet the need for German unity, declared the Foreign Minister, invoking the spirit of Radowitz.227 When Vienna then took up the question of a Bundesreform in 1862, proposing a directory of the governments’ representatives, a confederal court and an assembly of Landtag delegates, which was presented to the Engerer Rat of the Bundestag on 14 August, the Prussian envoy Guido von Usedom, with Bernstorff’s backing, denounced the plan and challenged the representatives of the other states to join in a genuinely German reform, with a strong executive and a National Assembly – since the Austrians had argued that their chamber of delegates would be purely advisory, in part to avoid the necessity of submitting their proposal to a unanimous vote as an organic change to the confederal constitution.
On acceding to the office of Foreign Minister on 8 October, Bismarck continued to pursue the same national policy as his predecessor, having argued in a memorandum (‘Das kleine Buch’) to Prince Wilhelm as early as March 1858 that Prussia should use the press and parliaments to stir up the German public against Vienna’s policy in the Confederation.228 Consequently, in response to Austria’s refurbished plan for a reform of the Bund at the Fürstentag in August 1863, which added an assembly of German princes to the previously floated idea of an assembly of Landtag delegates, the Minister-President made the institution of a ‘true national representative body founded on the direct participation of the entire nation’ a condition of Prussian agreement, along with a joint presidency of Prussia and Austria in the proposed directory, and a Prussian and Austrian veto against all but purely defensive confederal wars.229 He submitted the same proposal to the Bundestag on 9 April 1866, again after Vienna had mentioned a ‘German parliament’, specifying that his proposed German assembly would not only be elected directly but by universal manhood suffrage. His tactic throughout was to call Austria’s and the middling states’ bluff, knowing that they could not agree to the principal objective of the national movement.230 If Vienna tried to court the states of the third Germany in the name of the nation, Bismarck would not hesitate ‘to rub a bit of black, red and gold under its nose’, he boasted to Robert von Keudell in September 1865, shortly after the signature of the Gastein Convention.231 The same applied to the Klein- and Mittelstaaten: ‘What are the little princes after?’ he asked rhetorically in the same year: ‘The governments are more reactionary than I – who would even make use of the party of change if it were to Prussia’s advantage; they want most of all to stay on their thrones, and while they may be afraid of us they are even more afraid of revolution.’232 Unlike his counterparts in other German governments, with the exception of those of Baden and the liberal Thuringian states, the Minister-President was prepared to countenance the formation of a representative national Bundesstaat in order to give weight to his claim that the ‘legitimate power position of Prussia’ and the ‘legitimate interests of the [German] nation’ were closely linked, as he had put it in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung at the time of the Fürstentag.233 Prussia’s and Germany’s fates were intertwined. This was the message that Wilhelm and Bismarck gave to the critical Crown Council of 28 February 1866, as they warned the assembled ministers and the Crown Prince – together with the specially invited Generals Moltke and Alvensleben, Goltz as the King’s adviser, and Edwin von Manteuffel as the Governor of Schleswig – that the Hohenzollern monarchy was on the verge of a war against Austria: Prussia’s ‘natural and very justified’ mission was to lead Germany, averred the Minister-President.234
The standard rejoinder to such utterances was that Bismarck did not believe in the national cause. The Minister-President’s Progressive opponents, of course, were well aware of his cynicism. Mistrust, created by the manoeuvrings of a four-year-long constitutional crisis, prevented virtually all liberals and democrats from contemplating – at least in public – a rapprochement with the Prussian ministry. When Bismarck mooted a German parliament, to be elected directly by universal suffrage, in April 1866, there was widespread disbelief. The liberal satirical journal Kladderadatsch, the most popular publication of its kind, announced that it would be closing down, since it could not compete with the Minister-President’s sense of humour: ‘We have been dealt a hard blow … The Bismarck cabinet appeals to the German nation and supports itself upon the people! Hahahaha! Who’s laughing? All Europe and adjacent parts of the world! We aren’t up to such competition.’235 Yet the Minister-President, who was cynical towards all political parties, as reactionaries such as Gerlach recognised, does appear to have taken liberal nationalists seriously, courting them at great length in the build-up to war with Austria. In a series of meetings with Bennigsen, Roggenbach, Bernhardi, Twesten, Unruh and others in April and May, he emphasised his understanding and acceptance of their national point of view, to the extent of claiming improbably to the leader of the Nationalverein that reform of the Bund and the establishment of a German parliament had been his ambition since 1848–49. At his meeting with Bennigsen on 14 May, Bismarck demonstrated that he fully comprehended his interlocutor’s aims, assuring him that his intention, ‘as soon as Austria is defeated’, was ‘to introduce a federal constitution in Germany, with the participation of the population, which should be summoned, with the most extensive electoral system possible, to an assembly to help decide a constitution’.236 His tone in most of the meetings appears, at times, to have been flippant and insincere, telling his opponents not to worry ‘about the little bit of liberalism’ that they would forfeit by backing him: ‘You will later be able to recoup that within six weeks under the first good liberal cabinet, and in any case a new government will take office under the Crown Prince.’237 But his main promise of a national reorganisation based on ‘a revision of the constitution of 1849’, which Bismarck pledged to ‘accept with a kiss’, was not dismissed out of hand, even though the committee of the Nationalverein, after inconclusively canvassing the opinion of its local agents, declined to support the Prussian ministry publicly.238 The Minister-President’s plan, recalled Bennigsen 23 years later, corresponded ‘to what was later carried out in the North German Bund’s constitution and in the German Reich’s constitution. It also corresponds for the most part to what Herr von Gagern, as the Minister-President in 1848–49, put forward as the German Reichsverfassung and … what the Nationalverein adopted in its statutes and the resolutions of its programme in 1860 and 1863.’239
Map 6 The North German Confederation in 1867.
Source: Adapted from J. Breuilly, Austria, Prussia and Germany (London, 2002), xvi
In the event, as Bennigsen recognised, Bismarck kept his word and introduced a German constitutional Bundesstaat, to the surprise and chagrin of the ‘anti-German particularists’ of the reactionary right.240 ‘The power of the monarchy in Prussia must be supported by a powerful army,’ the Minister-President reportedly told Friedrich Wilhelm on 4 July 1866: ‘But it must go with the opinion of the nation. It is the duty of every Prussian minister to regard the will of the king as authoritative, but at the same time to let the will of the king be saturated with the opinion of the nation.’241 The North German Confederation was merely to be a ‘stage’ on the path to German unity.242 Doubtless, Bismarck told the liberal Crown Prince what he wanted to hear, just as he had provided an echo of the ideas of liberal leaders a few months earlier. Nationalism had proved useful at home and, especially, abroad. Indeed, from the 1850s onwards, Bismarck had toyed with realigning Prussia with the ‘national’ and ‘revolutionary’ power of France, earning himself a reputation as a ‘Bonapartist’ in conservative circles. His officials and agents had contacted Hungarian and Serbian nationalists in the years before 1866 with a view to undermining an Austrian war effort against Prussia: he later bragged that he would have incited an insurrection in the Habsburg monarchy if it had joined France in July or August 1866 in a two-front war, after its defeat at Königgrätz on 3 July; at the time, he had instructed Goltz, the Prussian ambassador in Paris, to threaten ‘a national uprising in Germany’, ‘the complete ignition of the national spirit’, if the Bonapartist regime had attacked the Hohenzollern monarchy.243 The ambassador was to warn the French government that ‘Progressives and democrats’ were prepared ‘for every sacrifice in a war against France’.244
Whatever the short-term diplomatic and domestic advantages of ‘nationalism’ and ‘revolution’, it is difficult to explain why Bismarck actually introduced a democratically elected Reichstag in 1867 at the height of his power, having been granted – by 230 votes to 75 – an indemnity by the Prussian Abgeordnetentag on 3 September for his actions in the constitutional crisis. A month earlier, on 29 July, Friedrich Wilhelm had asked himself the same question: ‘Without letting myself be in the least blinded or deceived by Bismarck, I cannot deny that I am astonished at the reasonable liberal views which the man is now putting forward and wants to implement.’245 Even if the Minister-President hoped that a democratically elected German parliament might eventually produce a rural, conservative majority, why would he take such a risk, had he not already accepted the necessity of establishing a constitutional and federal nation-state in germ form? Certainly, for the majority of German liberal nationalists, who came – between 1866 and 1871 – to endorse Bismarck’s actions, the Prussian Minister-President seemed to have reconciled himself with some of their most fundamental beliefs.
