The year 1866 saw the implementation of the main components of the national solution to the German question which had been agreed in 1849. Schleswig-Holstein, the principal disputed national territory, was incorporated into Prussia and the North German Confederation; the Habsburg monarchy was excluded from Germany; the Bund was abolished; and a prototype of a German constitutional Bundesstaat, the most important features of which were transferred to the Kaiserreich in 1871, was outlined by Bismarck in a draft constitution for the North German Confederation on the Baltic island of Rügen. In these respects, Prussia’s defeat of Austria at the battle of Königgrätz on 3 July, after just over a fortnight of hostilities, appears to be the end of a series of debates about the nation beginning in 1848 rather than a turning-point in itself.1
The war between Prussia and the northern Kleinstaaten, on the one hand, and Austria and the Mittelstaaten, on the other, was rarely seen as a ‘civil war’.2 Few commentators used the word ‘Bürgerkrieg’ in 1866, despite the ubiquity of references in the press and elsewhere to the American Civil War only a year beforehand. Occasionally, Catholic or South German journalists deployed the term as a warning, but they were regularly challenged by others who claimed that any ‘civil war’ was, in fact, a conflict between the nation and the dynasties or the church.3 A larger number of contemporaries called the conflict a ‘Bruderkrieg’, or a war of brothers, acknowledging the consanguinity of their opponents but not their belonging to the same society or country. As such, the term carried an element of prohibition or, even, taboo: if the conflict really were a ‘war of brothers’, remarked Heinrich von Treitschke in the Preussische Jahrbücher, it would be ‘a crime’.4 Yet Treitschke’s point was that the war was not a Bruderkrieg in the full sense of the word, not least because it was associated by both sides with the ‘cabinet politics’ of Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart and Dresden.5 Bismarck had, four years earlier, referred to the notion of a ‘brothers’ war’ as ‘claptrap’.6 The Historisch-politische Blätter condemned the actual war as ‘light-headed’.7 The majority of observers had anticipated the conflict well in advance; many had more or less accepted its necessity. Although Wilhelm I and Bismarck became more popular, with one correspondent from the Social-Demokrat reporting on 1 July that thousands had congregated in front of their residences, there was no sign of the crowds and euphoria in the major cities that accompanied the declaration of war against France in 1870.8 The mood was more often characterised by resignation, with another correspondent of the social-democratic newspaper, who was touring South Germany in August, writing of an anti-Prussian majority in Württemberg, but an anti-Austrian one in Bavaria.9 Most were critical of the irresponsible conduct of the war by their governments and yearned for peace and unification, not revenge.10 In such circumstances, the majority of those alluding to a ‘war of brothers’ were using a common trope, not anticipating or describing an unthinkable act of fratricide.11 Most correspondents refrained from calling the conflict either a Bürgerkrieg or a Bruderkrieg. It was a regrettable but expected event confirming what had long been accepted.
The first part of the German question formally resolved by the Austro-Prussian War involved Schleswig-Holstein. Unlike Posen, where Prussian stewardship was more or less agreed in 1848, with or without a designation of two-thirds of the territory as ‘German’, the northern duchies, which had been claimed on the basis of German culture and language, with the possible exception of North Schleswig, had constituted the main border dispute of an envisaged German nation-state during the 1850s and early 1860s, after Denmark had regained control under the terms of the Treaty of London in 1852.12 The dispute remained unresolved after Prussia’s and Austria’s victorious war in 1864, since both states had acted as Great Powers against the ‘national’ claims of the Bund and the ‘German’ heir Augustenburg. Rapidly, the crisis had become a five-way struggle between Prussia, which continued to uphold – or so Bismarck’s ministry argued – the prerogatives of the Great Powers and appealed directly to the ‘nation’, the Mittelstaaten and the Confederation, which had sent troops to Holstein before Prussia’s and Austria’s occupation of the duchies in January 1864, German political parties and public opinion, Augustenburg himself, and the Habsburg monarchy, which increasingly courted the Bund and hailed Augustenburg as a national hero. After an interim agreement with Austria in the Gastein Convention (1865) to administer Schleswig (Prussia) and Holstein (Austria) separately, the fate of the duchies became interwoven with those of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies in their putative struggle for Germany. The movement throughout – in the debates of 1848–50, the publicising of the conflict in the 1850s and 1860s, and in the actions of the various parties after 1863 – was towards a greater Prussian role in a pivotal national affair.
With the duchies, according to the Gastein Convention, becoming part of the Zollverein and Prussia granted the right to build a canal through Holstein linking the North and Baltic seas, Berlin’s intention of dominating the region was obvious. On 23 January 1866, a mass gathering in Altona had called for the convening of the joint estates of Schleswig-Holstein. Playing on Franz Joseph’s horror at such radicalism, Bismarck called for Prussian and Austrian action against ‘revolutionary’ movements in the duchies: Vienna refused in February; Berlin declared its 1864 alliance with Austria invalid and worked towards a ‘decisive political preponderance in North Germany’, as the Crown Council minutes of 28 February put it.13 Unconcealed military preparations went on throughout March, April and May, complicated by the entry of Italy into the crisis, after Prussia had signed a three-month offensive alliance with it on 6 April. With Bavaria and Württemberg manoeuvring in the Bundestag for a standing-down of all states’ armies, the Austrian government replied on 1 June that it was ready to hand over the Schleswig-Holstein question to the Confederation in the face of Prussia’s decision to use force there. Since Vienna was deemed to have broken the Gastein Convention by referring the matter to the Bund, Prussian forces occupied Holstein on 8 June, supposedly to restore a joint Prussian and Austrian authority in the duchy. On the following day, the Prussian representative in Frankfurt effectively broke with the Confederation, which had no say in the duchies according to the Treaty of London, the Austro-Prussian alliance (January 1864), the Peace of Vienna (October 1864) and the Gastein Convention, by calling for a nationally elected assembly to resolve the Schleswig-Holstein crisis. The Austrian envoy in Frankfurt, Aloys von Kübeck, moved successfully for the mobilisation of all non-Prussian confederal forces on 14 June. When Karl Friedrich Savigny, the Prussian envoy, retorted on the following day that the Bundestag had interfered in Schleswig-Holstein without authority, since it was not a party to the Peace of Vienna, and that it had failed to safeguard the security of Prussia (Article 2) by refusing to act against the arming of other German states despite Berlin’s protests, the German Confederation in its existing form had effectively lapsed: Prussia undertook to restructure the organisation fundamentally, relegating Austria to an unspecified wider Bund, in the name of the German nation. The proclivity of Berlin’s policy in all such events, confirmed by the annexation of the duchies in 1866, was to take control of the region, often on purportedly national grounds. If Austria had defeated Prussia at Königgrätz, it is difficult to imagine much more than the inclusion of an independent Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein in a confederal status quo ante bellum.
The exclusion of the Habsburg monarchy from Germany was the second element of the national settlement of 1848–49 which was confirmed in 1866. Technically, the Reichsverfassung had left the question open, explicitly providing for a quota of Austrian seats in the upper Staatenhaus, but Articles 2 and 3 were widely believed to have set unacceptable conditions of entry for Vienna, with a distinct title for the head of state and a separate administration, assembly and law for ‘German’ and ‘non-German’ states. Article 1 stated that ‘the German Reich consists of the territory of the former German Confederation,’ even though it was known that a full or partial severing of Austria’s German territories to form Grossdeutschland was unacceptable to the Hofburg.14 Whereas the majority passing this kleindeutsch constitution in 1848 was small, albeit for a variety of reasons, the articulation of opposition to – and scepticism of – Austrian participation in any type of German nation-state had become more pronounced by the early 1860s. North German, and some South German, liberals adhered to what became known as the doctrine of ‘Gotha’, because of liberals’ post-revolutionary approbation of Prussia at a meeting there in 1849. Democrats, most of whom had been banished or marginalised by the persecution or restrictive franchises of the ‘reaction’, were much less enthusiastic about Grossdeutschland than they had been in 1848. The ‘small German’ proclivity of the Nationalverein and, even, of the Prussian-dominated Fortschrittspartei found considerable support and met with little resistance in radical circles. Many Catholics were much more anxious about the loss to Germany of the largest Catholic state and population, but they were unable to formulate a convincing argument for Austria’s inclusion, not least because of the detachment and distance of the majority of German Austrians from the affairs of Germany.
What was remarkable in 1866 was the ease with which Austria was ‘shut out definitively from any constitutional involvement in the rest of Germany’, in the words of the Historisch-politische Blätter.15 Despite the fact that Prussia’s victory was ‘an unexpected success’, with Austria and the Mittelstaaten stronger ‘on paper’ than the Hohenzollern monarchy, the periodical quickly came to terms with the disappearance of the Habsburg monarchy from German politics – ‘there will never again be a German Confederation (Staatenbund) with two Great Powers’ – and with the replacement of Austria by Bonapartist France as ‘the first factor in German affairs’.16 In a long article on ‘Austria’ immediately after its defeat, the Bavarian publication denied that it had ‘advised Austria to withdraw from Germany’, as had been claimed in Vienna, yet it admitted to having urged the Austrian government to make ‘concessions over Schleswig-Holstein and to refrain from “German interventions” in the question of reform’.17 It had also warned Vienna not to try to halt the growth of Prussian power in the North.18 The Austrian ministry’s refusal to heed such advice had left Germany’s Catholics in an exposed position, contesting claims that 1866 was a victory for Protestantism as well as the German nation, and fending off accusations that Catholicism was tarred by its association with Austria.19 Nonetheless, the periodical argued with some justification that the Catholic press had adopted a strictly German stance in 1866, not an Austrian one, even if many publications had opposed Prussia’s bellicose policy and its alliance with Italy.20 Catholic newspapers in Prussia such as the Kölnische Blätter were much more critical of the Habsburg monarchy, charging it with striving for a war against Prussia and with lacking ‘any definition’, even during the war itself, of ‘Austria’s place in Germany’.21 Defeat had left the Habsburg monarchy, already weak, ‘threatened by internal shocks’, with ‘the friction between nationalities threatening to become more violent than ever’.22 These were the weaknesses, even a Catholic publication could concur, which had prevented the Habsburg monarchy from taking an active part in German politics in the years before the war.
The conflict between Austria and Prussia had demonstrated that ‘the German Bund had created and maintained, not the unity, but the fragmentation of Germany’, continued the Kölnische Blätter.23 The dissolution of the Confederation as a result of the defeat of the Mittelstaaten and the Habsburg monarchy constituted a third element of the revolutionary national settlement reinstated in 1866, since the Bund had previously been disbanded in 1848, only to be revived by Austria in September 1850 and reimposed on Prussia at the Dresden Conferences of January 1851. During the revolution, the governments of the German states had tried to refashion the Confederation into a national institution and ‘their communal organ’, claiming that they were ‘united with the German people in the same love for their fatherland’.24 During the course of 1848, however, the Confederation was gradually sidelined, with the appointment of the Reichsverweser and the establishment of a Central Power in July 1848 on the authority of the National Assembly and, ‘in it, the representatives of the German Volk’, until it was abandoned altogether in the constitution of March 1849, which replaced the confederal structure of the Bund with the federal institutions of a national ‘Reich’.25 After its re-establishment in 1850–51, the Confederation was the subject of a series of proposed reforms during the late 1850s and early 1860s which were initiated by the governments of the Mittelstaaten, especially that of Saxony, in order to harness popular support for national organisations. The plans put forward by Beust, Schrenck, Hügel, Platen, Dalwigk and – in 1863 – Schmerling fell far short of public expectations, concentrating on the creation of a confederal court, a weak central authority, typically a ‘directory’ or ‘trias’, and – at most – an assembly of delegates from the upper and lower chambers of the Landtage, which themselves had restrictive electoral laws. There was no notion that a directory was a standing government – the word ‘executive’ was avoided – nor that an assembly was a ‘parliament’ with a right to approve and reject budgets and legislation. As Beust and others made clear, the institutions of a reformed Bund were designed to coordinate the activities of the existing states under a more acceptable national guise.
Few contemporaries lamented the passing of the German Confederation. Robert von Mohl, the Badenese envoy in Frankfurt, recorded in his memoirs how it had limped on through the war, after Prussia had left on 15 June. ‘Soon the committee meetings became truly painful’, receiving bad news daily from the battlegrounds of Bohemia and losing, first, the delegates of the northern states – Hanover, Kurhessen, Saxony and Nassau – and, then, those of all the rest save Bavaria, Württemberg and Liechtenstein, who were by that time housed in temporary accommodation in Augsburg.26 ‘This staying together until the last spark was extinguished can only have been sad’, concluded Mohl, but even he conceded that the Confederation’s fate was partly the consequence of its own inactivity.27 At best, ‘improvements of the existing constitution of the Bund appeared not to be impossible’: in backing Austria and the other Mittelstaaten in 1866, ‘one had to renounce, perhaps for a long time, a long-held desire for improvement, desires pursued for years directly or indirectly, but at least one avoided positive losses’, wrote the diplomat and academic.28 In January of the same year, he had complained to Baden’s Foreign Minister that the Confederation had been impotent and ignored in the Schleswig-Holstein affair, which had ‘always been seen as a test of whether the German Bund has any political significance at all’.29 It had not been ‘what it could under other circumstances and almost must be, a focus of high politics’, not least because of the ‘internal weakness’ of Austria, the ‘division’ of the Mittelstaaten and the ‘incredible policy’ of Prussia:
Only when the principal members no longer make the life of the Confederation the object of their opposing envy and prefer systematically to cripple it rather than grant each other advantages from it can an independent activity of the Bund be imagined. Only when the views and needs of the remaining German lands no longer have to be placed automatically behind the two Great Powers’ consciousness of their own state and its particular needs is the founding and use of national institutions thinkable. Only when a popular factor can forcefully articulate questions, which have neither their origins nor find favour in the circle of the governments, can a consideration of the desires of the core of the nation be expected and can respect and trust again gradually be won for the Confederation and its organs.30
For most political parties and much of the public, these political conditions had not been met.
The North German Confederation, the provisions of which had been sketched by Bismarck in the ‘Putbus dictates’ – named after the owner of the Rügen estate where he was sojourning – on 30 October and 19 November 1866, seemed to continue the tradition of the Bund, but it was closer, in reality, to the model of the constitutional Bundesstaat outlined in 1849. Bismarck wanted to give the impression of confederal continuity, deliberately relying on ‘inherited concepts of the Bund’ rather than making ‘the King of Prussia into an independent factor in the law-making of the Confederation analogous to the monarchy of a constitutional state’ in order to overcome residual resistance on the part of the King, the Court and the conservative party in Prussia, to appeal to the South German states, and to appease France.31 Accordingly, the Prussian proposals for a fundamental reorganisation of Germany referred back, as Rudolph von Delbrück noted in passing in his memoirs, to ‘The Principles for a New Bund Constitution’ presented by Savigny to the Bundestag on 10 June 1866.32 Thus, although the proposals called for ‘the exclusion of Austria and the Netherlands’ and had ‘transferred the legislative power of the Bund to the Bundestag in conjunction with a National Assembly elected in accordance with the Frankfurt electoral law’, the fiction of the continuing existence of a Staatenbund similar to the old German Confederation was maintained.33 In fact, the Norddeutscher Bund had crossed the critical boundaries between a confederation and a federal state identified by Waitz: namely, a Bundesstaat required a standing government with its own finances, military, powers and jurisdictions formally independent of, although shared with, those of its constituent – state – parts, and it necessitated a direct link between the Volk and the Bund, or central authority, normally in the form of a directly elected National Assembly.34 The Bund authority and the National Assembly, or Reichstag, together had been given control over the basic financial and military means of statehood, constituting ‘a unified tariff and trade area’ and ‘a land and sea power’ with the decision ‘over war and peace’, in Delbrück’s words: ‘The constitution, which was to be built on this platform, had to order all the affairs transferred to the Bund, which were of a fundamental nature, and to create an immediate order, paying attention to the legal position in the individual states, in order to create an entity capable of life.’35
The pivotal question concerned what contemporary liberals called the ‘executive’ in Bismarck’s scheme, since it seemed to rest – as Delbrück had indicated – on a modified version of the Bundestag, renamed the Bundesrat, in which the governments of the individual states were represented. Yet there were critical differences between the Norddeutscher Bund and the old Bund. The King of Prussia, in his capacity as ‘president’ (Präsidium) of the Bundesrat, exercised control over foreign policy, declarations of war (Article 11), the convocation and dissolution of the Bundesrat and the Reichstag (Art. 12), the appointment of officials and ministers (Art. 18), and emergency powers in a military context (Art. 19), all carried out on his own authority with the countersignature of the Bund Chancellor, who took ‘responsibility’ for them (Art. 17). The Emperor of Austria, who had presided over the Bundestag, had enjoyed none of these powers or responsibilities, since there was no National Assembly or Bund court to which he or his representative could be responsible. Bund decisions were subject to the vote and veto of individual states in the Engerer Rat and – much more rarely – the full Bundesversammlung. Whereas Austria had had only 1 vote out of 17 in the majority system of the Engerer Rat of the Bund, Prussia had 17 votes out of 43 in the Bundesrat, plus a decisive influence over most of the small states – Mecklenburg, Schaumburg-Lippe, Oldenburg, Sachsen-Meiningen, Sachsen-Altenburg, Anhalt – surrounded by its territory or on its borders. If anything, the new ‘state’, as it was widely known, seemed more likely to become unitary in structure than to lapse back into a confederation. Liberals such as Bennigsen and democrats such as Waldeck, though, were confident that it would do neither, referring to it as a ‘North German Bundesstaat’.36
To contemporary politicians and journalists, it went without saying that the provisions of the Reichsverfassung of 1849 were less ambiguous, for good or ill, than the clauses of the constitution of the North German Confederation (1867). Democrats and liberals, most of whom had approved of the Nationalverein’s adoption of the Reich constitution as the basis of a new nation-state, were critical of the new constitution’s lack of clarity. In the main debate of the Constituent Assembly of the North German Reichstag on 9 March 1867, Twesten had argued that it had proved impossible ‘to draw up a federal (bundesstaatlich) constitution as they have, as a rule, been designed and conceived of in political theories’, which generally referred to Switzerland and the United States.37 Although there was no ‘monarchical example of such a federal constitution’, he went on, ‘one could think of an analogy of these constitutions, and the schemes which were worked out in 1849 in Frankfurt and Berlin imagined such an analogy.’38 In particular, forty-eighters had devised a central power (Zentralgewalt) ‘which was to be separate from the governments of the individual states’ – ‘standing above all the states of the German Bund’ – and ‘which was to be constituted in the fashion of a constitutional government’.39 The executive powers of the 1867 constitution were shared between the individual states in the Bundesrat, the King of Prussia as its president, and the Bundeskanzler as a supposedly responsible countersignatory of the president’s decrees. In such circumstances, complained Sybel, it was misleading to talk of responsibility in the characteristic sense of classic constitutional governments, since the Chancellor had little control over the acts for which he was deemed responsible, unlike the Reich Authority defined so extensively in 1849 (Articles 6–67).40 Nonetheless, it was obvious to such liberals that the essential features of ‘constitutional monarchy’ were preserved within the Prussian government’s bill, as they had been in 1849: the King of Prussia had the power to form an ‘executive’ – the term was used by Bismarck as well as by most other contemporaries – which would be largely independent of both the individual states and of the national assembly. For its part, the Reichstag had the right – as in 1849 – to block legislation and to reject the budget – including, in future, that relating to military expenditure, or 90 per cent of overall spending – but not to remove the Chancellor by a vote of no-confidence. Bismarck himself acknowledged in private discussions with Savigny that the constitution, by making the Bundeskanzler responsible to a national parliament in military, foreign, fiscal and commercial affairs, would establish German affairs above those of Prussia, even though the two were intertwined:
Through the responsibility clause the Chancellor has become to a degree – if not legally, yet actually – the superior of the Prussian cabinet … You are too well acquainted with constitutional law not to realise that the Chancellor thereby receives the power of final decision in the affairs of the Prussian ministries of trade, war, and naval affairs, of the more important parts of the Finance Ministry, and, if the confederal constitution develops correctly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs … He receives this authority due to the circumstance that he influences the Reichstag by granting or withholding his countersignature. Because of this amendment, therefore, the Chancellor must be simultaneously president of the Prussian cabinet if the new machine is to function at all.41
On 12 March and 15 April 1867, Bennigsen proclaimed to the Constituent Assembly, in contrast to ‘many of my colleagues on the left side of this house’, that ‘the constitutional work’ was ‘not logical but coherent’, ‘in need of improvement but also capable of improvement’, promising ‘many and great advantages’ for ‘the internal national development of the German Nation’ and in keeping with ‘constitutional development in Germany’.42 On 16 April, the constitution of the Norddeutscher Bund was passed by 230 to 54 votes in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus, backed by the 80 deputies of the newly formed National Liberal party – created to grant Bismarck indemnity for his role in the Prussian constitutional crisis – and opposed, as Bennigsen had anticipated, by the ‘radical left’, ‘Poles and pessimistic particularists’.43 For many of the constitution’s backers, it seemed possible, in the words of the founding programme of the National Liberal party on 12 June 1867, to bring ‘a monarchical Bundesstaat into harmony with the conditions of constitutional law’ as ‘the first and necessary step on the path to a German state, reinforced by freedom and power’.44
The national and political legacy of the first unification of Germany in 1848–49 left a significant imprint on the second one after 1866. The revolution had witnessed the emergence of political parties and the rapid development of political networks and milieux, on the one hand, and the unexpected posing of a series of questions about the character, territory and polity of the German nation, on the other. Nationalism and politics were therefore linked together at a crucial moment, as party organisations and doctrines were being created and the nation-state was being designed. ‘The foundations of the old political life have been shaken’, recorded the welcome address of the Bundesversammlung to the Frankfurt National Assembly in May 1848, ‘and a new giant has arisen, greeted by jubilation and with the trust of the entire German people (Volk): the German parliament.’45 ‘The power of extraordinary events’ had transformed political practices and institutions, linking them in new ways to the quest for a nation-state.46 Rather than the mystical dreams and cultural yearnings of unpolitical Germans subverting the idea of the nation, they rapidly yielded to the sudden imperatives of practical politics and state interests, with Arndt’s romantic hope of a German fatherland composed of the lands of the Confederation, Switzerland, the whole of Austria and beyond being sacrificed for a realisable set of borders which left Alsace to France, German areas of the Baltic to Russia, and ‘old Austria’, Bohemia and Moravia to the Habsburg monarchy. In this sense, the notion that there was an enduring and balanced debate between proponents of Kleindeutschland and Grossdeutschland is misleading: most contemporaries came to realise in 1848–49 that the Austrian government, backed by a majority of German Austrians, would resist the creation of a ‘greater Germany’ which sought to detach German-speaking lands from the rest of the monarchy, since such detachment would probably provoke the state’s collapse. The revolution had demonstrated that liberals and others in the Habsburg territories of the Confederation were, as Schmerling put it, Austrian first and German second.
A similar statism existed in Germany, limiting the extent of territory in cases where it was necessary to avoid conflict with the Great Powers, but extending borders as far as possible in Posen and, it was anticipated, in Schleswig-Holstein, where the claims of national opponents were not backed by a major state. In 1848–49, many liberals, democrats and cosmopolitan Catholics and conservatives had renounced their romantic championing of Polish and Italian national self-determination, they had given up Mazzini’s hope of a peaceful coexistence of nations during the ‘springtime of the peoples’ and they had sought to form as large a territory and population as possible in order to achieve Great Power status in the states’ system. ‘In the West and in the East, we have lost valuable old German land through our own fragmentation, through political foolishness and false cosmopolitanism,’ declared the Catholic courtier and Frankfurt deputy Radowitz to an appreciative National Assembly in July 1848: ‘should we push away … our fellow nationals and transfer them to the dominion of a foreign nation? Such a suggestion would be inconceivable in the chambers of the other great European peoples.’47 Such hard-headed ‘realism’ preceded any supposed shift to Realpolitik during an era of reaction in the 1850s. It was, above all, a response to the challenges facing an emerging German nation-state during the revolution: most deputies had come to believe that such compromises of political principle were needed to safeguard the state militarily and strategically and to give Germany the place in Europe which it deserved. This territorial and international realism was a product of the revolution, not the reaction, and it characterised both the reactionary 1850s and the more liberal 1860s.
The revolutionary intertwining of nationalism and politics did not lead to a national subversion of liberalism and democracy as much as to the limitation of contemporaries’ cultural fantasies of the nation and delusions of national superiority. There was an emancipatory component to German nationalism after 1848 as a consequence of its political origins, with mass support for a nation-state, or a political framework for the German Volk, coinciding with the emergence of a democratic party and the rise to power of a nationwide liberal party. These political networks and milieux were restricted by the reaction of the 1850s, particularly through the persecution of radicals and the outlawing of inter-state organisations, but they were not destroyed, with political discourses continuing in the Landtage, in the press, in the major cities, and in the more liberal states. The memory of 1848 remained in the forefront of many politicians’ and journalists’ minds, resurfacing in the programmes of the national and party organisations – the Nationalverein, Progressive Party and Abgeordnetentag – of the early 1860s. The principal carriers of the national idea in and after the revolution continued to believe, with few exceptions, that freedom and unity were compatible. Although it is true that they – like the majority of their European counterparts – had come to define politics exclusively during the revolution, regularly equating citizenship with nationality, and that they continued to believe in the necessity of a lingua franca, assimilation and a hierarchy of cultures, favouring the claims of their own superior nation and emphasising the backwardness of other nationalities, German liberals and democrats had refused to give up what Rochau termed – in 1869 – their ‘civic struggle for freedom’, winning advantages ‘from the princely power and bureaucracy’ in the form of ‘the most important constitutional questions, press freedom, public judicial proceedings, jury trials, the independence of judicial officials, the separation of justice and administration, in short the majority of civic and bourgeois wishes for which liberalism has deployed its best efforts over the last half century’.48
These individual freedoms and ‘advances of civilisation (Zivilisation)’, even a realist like Rochau believed, would temper, order and render human the relations between individuals, of whatever nationality, which in theory were regulated by the same ‘final judgement of history’ and ‘the same law as disputes between states and peoples’; namely, ‘that one is stronger’ and another weaker.49 As the maintenance of the constitutional campaign against Bismarck during the war for Schleswig-Holstein demonstrated in 1864, the struggle for emancipation at home was barely compromised by the need for unity abroad. The reorganisation of Germany continued to be a largely liberal and democratic project, with the entrenchment of political freedoms, constitutional and representative government, direct elections and universal suffrage as its main objectives. All ‘the citizens of the states which make up the Reich’ – or ‘the German people’ in an open sense – were to be granted ‘basic rights’, declared the Reichsverfassung of 1849, including ‘the non-German-speaking people of Germany’, who were ‘guaranteed their national development, namely, equal rights for their languages, in so far as they exist in their territories, in ecclesiastical matters, in education, in administration of local affairs and of justice’ (Article 188).50 Despite their confused, contested and pragmatic nature, these constitutional provisions continued to be supported by Progressives during the 1860s, echoing the hope of revolutionaries that such individual and collective rights would compensate and integrate minority nationalities.51
A largely liberal public and political sphere had been created in Germany during the revolution, resting on the existing political milieux of the larger cities and state assemblies, together with readers of newspapers and periodicals, and tourists, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, journalists and university students who travelled to other German lands. As the liberal leader and newly converted proponent of Kleindeutschland Heinrich von Gagern revealed in March 1849, attempting to convince sceptics that he was ‘a South German’ and not an instrument of Prussia, experiences before the revolution could be surprisingly circumscribed: ‘I have lived in the North for little time. I only recently … saw Berlin for the first time.’52 Many deputies, arriving in Frankfurt in 1848, gave the impression that they were venturing into a foreign land. By the early 1860s, their counterparts were regularly travelling by train throughout Germany to meet officials, journalists and other politicians and to attend the meetings of the Nationalverein, Handelstag and Abgeordnetentag. To one commentator, it was ‘no exaggeration’ to say that ‘the gulf that separates the years 1873 and 1773’ as far as trade and communications were concerned ‘is greater than the gulf separating 1773 and the Phoenicians’.53 To the politicians of the 1860s, looking back on the expansion of the public sphere and the creation of a national network of political centres in 1848–49, at a time when Frankfurt was only connected by railway to the South West and Munich was merely linked by train to Augsburg, the linkages between the two periods appeared obvious, as parts of an evolving but – because of the reaction – not linear story of national progress. With his warnings of the consequences of fragmentation, foreign domination and national decline, Treitschke could not be called an optimist, even in the 1860s, but he recognised that the material and imaginary bases of politics were changing, with hundreds of thousands from the ‘Mittelstand’ reading in their newspapers of the ‘reason of universal suffrage’ and with Germans coming into contact with each other ‘more regularly from day to day’ as a consequence of ‘the immeasurable upswing of transport and communication’.54 With borders between small German states seeming ridiculous to the passengers of trains, theories of the nation had become ‘fashionable’, already adhered to ‘by a good part of the half-educated’.55 Mockery of particularism and Kleinstaaterei, which very few were prepared to defend, was part of this wider movement of public opinion. When states such as Saxony, Württemberg and Hanover attempted to cultivate local patriotism, they usually did so by demonstrating – or, at least, not denying – its connection to the heroic and pathos-laden history of Germany.56
As the prominent Catholic Bishop of Mainz Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler conceded in 1862, liberals dominated the press, just as they dominated politics.57 Internal critics such as Mohl and external ones like Stahl agreed that the ‘party’ had been successful before 1848, dominating ‘the party of movement’ or the ‘opposition’ to government factions.58 During the revolution, at least 47 per cent of Frankfurt deputies belonged to the liberal groupings of the centre left (Württemberger Hof, Westendhalle, Deutscher Hof) and centre right (Casino, Landsberg, Augsburger Hof). In the 1850s, with the leaders of the democrats in exile or on the fringes of politics, liberals were preponderant in the oppositions of most German states, coming briefly to back the governments of the New Era in Prussia and Bavaria, and to enter government in Baden. Liberals won 55 per cent of the seats in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus in 1858, 69.5 per cent in 1861, and 70 per cent in 1862 and 1863, despite – or perhaps because of – the constitutional crisis. Over the same period, conservatives won between 3 and 13 per cent of seats, and Catholics between 7 and 16 per cent. In the Bavarian lower chamber, liberals held between 58 and 76 per cent of seats from the mid-1850s to the early 1860s, and in Hesse-Darmstadt, between 68 and 84 per cent from 1862 to 1868. These parties and factions were borne, in Rochau’s view, ‘exclusively by the middle classes’: at least 88.4 per cent of Frankfurt deputies came from such strata in 1848–49; and similar figures were recorded for state Landtage in the following decades, with Württemberg counting 95.2 per cent of deputies from the Bürgertum in the early 1850s (1851–55), for instance, and 92.5 per cent in the mid-1860s (1862–68).59
These liberals had no reason to panic in the decades following 1848–49. The revolution, although defeated by the forces of the reaction, had not ‘failed’, as one of its harsher liberal detractors, Rochau, made clear: ‘The measure of success cannot … be placed on the momentary, but must be placed on the lasting effects of the revolution. It is not a question of how much ground revolution wins in the first instance, but how much ground it wins altogether.’60 The revolution, went on the liberal publicist and later leader of the Nationalverein, had instilled new life into German politics, challenging existing institutions. Liberals like Rochau had weathered the counter-revolution, as they had predicted, and they – together with democrats in the Fortschrittspartei – had reassumed a dominant position inside and outside the assemblies of Prussia and most Mittelstaaten during and after the New Era, setting up a network of national and other associations and controlling the majority of the biggest-circulation newspapers and periodicals – the Kölnische Zeitung (60,000 in 1866), the Berlin Volks-Zeitung (22,000 in 1861), Die Berlinische Zeitung (13,000), the National-Zeitung (8,500), and Kladderadatsch (39,000).61 The seven large liberal papers in Berlin during the constitutional crisis had a joint circulation of 71,000 compared to only 11,330 for the four conservative publications.62 With such a presence in the public and political spheres, liberals and Progressives had every reason to put forward their political and national demands with confidence, notwithstanding a decline in membership of the Nationalverein – which was not widely reported – and anxiety about the loyalties – either Catholic or socialist – of the ‘mass of the Volk’, were it ever to vote in large numbers. For the moment, liberals were in the ascendant. The feeling for the majority was too novel and the task too great to allow of widespread pessimism or defensiveness.
It was in the context of this public and political sphere that liberals and Progressives resurrected the national and political demands of 1849. In doing so, their actions appeared to belie important elements of the traditional – but still widely held – view of German nationalism’s role in the process of unification. First, few liberals or democrats thought that the revolution had simply failed.63 They were thus willing to take up the agreements reached during the revolution itself on the question of borders, the exclusion of Austria, the abolition of the Bund, and the establishment of a central Reich authority and a Reichstag – the name was used in both 1849 and 1867 – elected by a direct vote and universal suffrage within a federal constitutional monarchy. They also retained many of the revolutionaries’ hopes of emancipation, rights, social equality, freedom of expression, political organisation and representation. Second, the reaction did not destroy liberal political milieux, party activity or national aspirations, it merely limited them to individual states and to articulation in the press, despite censorship.64 Networks of democrats, which were more recent than those of liberals and had grown more dramatically in 1848–49, were disbanded or disrupted in some states, but this dispersal and persecution was seen by some liberals as removing a potential menace. The significance of any hardening of attitudes after 1849 is difficult to gauge: there was certainly pragmatism, an aversion to utopian schemes, and a realistic assessment of the strength of the different states and parties, but it did not imply, even for Rochau, the worship of power or a readiness to sacrifice basic liberal principles. Much of the ‘realism’ of the 1850s and 1860s dated back to compromises made during the revolution. It is possible that, in some cases, the reaction had the effect of preserving, or delaying full discussion of, the revolutionary settlement. Third, the liberal party was not, in spite of continuing criticism, perceived to be weak or declining in the 1860s.65 In Prussia, the Fortschrittspartei had maintained its opposition to the ministry and monarch during the constitutional crisis and it had, partly as a result, gained votes. Liberals in Bavaria had forced the resignation of Pfordten in 1859, and liberals in Baden had entered government for the first time in 1860, including former revolutionaries like Karl Mathy. Such figures saw no need to give up liberty in order to achieve national unity. Even Baumgarten could ask, in December 1866, ‘Is unity not itself a part of freedom?’66 Fourth, liberalism remained central to the definition of a future German nation-state, existing alongside and overlapping with the rituals and symbols of cultural forms of nationalism perpetuated by large festivals – most notably, the half-centenary of the battle of Leipzig in 1863 – and mass organisations such as the gymnastics, shooting and choral societies.67 Treitschke regretted that the ‘great festival of the fatherland’ was necessary in the absence of a German parliament, since ‘the vast majority of people believe solely what they experience in person’ and ‘only in hearty personal contact with much abused neighbouring tribes does the mass of half-educated learn that we belong together’, yet he was confident that the ‘hollow generalities’ and simplifying acclamations of such occasions and associations ‘naturally must stop at the point where the political work should first begin’.68 Party politics and political types of nationalism were not displaced by cultural ones.
Lastly, the political and national claims of liberals and Progressives, which rested on the platform of 1849, set many of the terms of the debate about unification in the 1850s and 1860s, qualifying the notion of a Bismarckian revolution ‘from above’.69 Whatever his other motives, which leaders such as Bennigsen were sure that they would have to confront in future, the Prussian Minister-President appeared to have altered his position since 1849 much more significantly than had liberals and democrats, availing himself of the rhetoric of German nationalism and designing the prototype of a federal and constitutional small German nation-state with a directly and universally elected ‘Reich’ assembly. Against opposition from reactionaries, he had also consolidated the Zollverein on the basis of free trade, confirmed by Prussia’s commercial agreement with France in 1862, and he had tied – in perpetuity – the South German states militarily to the North German Confederation, with the command of southern armies passing to Prussia in the event of war. He had not granted a parliamentary system of government in 1866–67, but few liberals had asked for one. While it is true that the manner in which Bismarck pursued his aims – Great Power diplomacy in Schleswig-Holstein, army reform at the cost of constitutional crisis – and that his ultimate aims – the harnessing of a conservative, rural Volk via universal suffrage, Prussian domination in Germany – differed from those of Progressives and other liberals, the actual measures that he put forward and the results that he achieved closely resembled the objectives of liberal nationalists.
Public and party debates about a German nation-state before 1866 had narrowed the range of workable and popular solutions to the German question. The majority of participants in such debates had accepted the exclusion of Austria from a German nation-state, even if it were included in a wider union with Germany, they had given up any hope that the Bund could be reformed in a national sense, and they were highly critical of the ‘particularism’ of the Klein- and Mittelstaaten. None of these points of political agreement meant that German unification inevitably took the small German, Prussian-dominated form that it did, but they do modify the findings of recent research into unification, which has tended to emphasise the significance of Austria in German affairs until a late date, the plausibility and achievements of the Confederation and the third Germany, and the weaknesses of national organisations in the period immediately before the Austro-Prussian war.70 Fear, resentment, mistrust and hatred of Prussia were pronounced in the South German states, helping to explain popular support for the Habsburg monarchy in 1866. Liberal milieux in the South had long been divided about the desirability of Kleindeutschland, with many preferring to ignore the question altogether, even in Baden, where Roggenbach – as Foreign Minister between 1861 and 1865 – was one of its main advocates. More importantly, democratic organisations in Württemberg and Catholic milieux in Baden and Bavaria were being mobilised in the second half of the 1860s for the first time since 1848–49, creating an anti-Prussian majority in the South in the 1868 elections to the Zollparlament, set up by Bismarck to ease the path to unification. About 50 opponents of Prussia were returned out of the 85 seats allotted to southern states; 27 opponents to 12 proponents in Bavaria, with a further 9 deputies undecided, 17 to 0 in Württemberg, 6 to 8 in Baden, and 0 to 6 in Hesse. These results were confirmed by elections to the Landtage of Bavaria in 1869 (76 liberals versus 79 Catholics, conservatives, and Bavarian Patrioten) and Württemberg in 1868 (30 for the democratic Volkspartei, 29 for Catholics and conservatives, and 12 for the pro-Prussian Deutsche Partei), though not in Baden in 1869, when the Catholic Volkspartei gained only 4 seats.71
Such votes reveal division and uncertainty within southern electorates and suggest that the full unification of Kleindeutschland remained in the balance. However, the choice facing political elites and voters in Bavaria and Württemberg was, as Helga Grebing has indicated, not one between a Prussian-dominated small Germany and a greater Germany or some other arrangement, but between ‘Klein-Deutschland’ and ‘Kein-Deutschland’ – that is, no unification at all.72 Faced with such a choice, deputies and ministers in the two southern states were left to weigh up ‘a national linking of the South German states with the North German Confederation’ within what the pro-Prussian Minister-President of Bavaria Hohenlohe could still present as a ‘Staatenbund’ against the benefits and drawbacks of life alone in their own Heimat, which was already tied militarily and economically to the Norddeutsche Bund, for any Südbund mooted in the Treaty of Prague (1866) was likely to fail because of Badenese resistance and Swabian fear of Bavarian domination.73 Even for the founder of the Bavarian Patriotenpartei Edmund Jörg, the predicament was not a comfortable one, given his previous criticism of particularism and his advocacy of a national ‘Reich’. At the very least, the endless discussions of national unity and unification over the previous two decades, which had been informed by liberals and joined by democrats, Catholics and conservatives, seemed to have closed off alternatives to a small German nation-state which now needed to be reopened. It was difficult to predict how liberals and others would react when confronted with the choice of coming to terms with Prussia or giving up the prospect of inclusion in a German nation-state which many of them had previously supported. In the event, a national war against Germany’s long-standing French enemy made their decision easier, but it did not, in itself, preclude actual and later resistance to unification and its consequences, such as happened in Italy. The relative ease with which unification occurred, during and after wartime, was largely the consequence of the debates about a German nation-state which had taken place in the two decades after 1848.
The North German Confederation and the Kaiserreich, of course, were not revolutionary regimes.74 The absence of a declaration of basic rights (Grundrechte) in the constitutions of 1867 and 1871 was not merely important symbolically; it also left open the question of the ultimate location of sovereignty, whether popular or monarchical, which remained unresolved throughout the history of the German Empire and even found an echo, albeit within the formal realm of popular sovereignty, in the debates about the emergency powers of the president during the late Weimar era. Nonetheless, to the majority of liberals and many others, the rights promised in the Reichsverfassung of 1849 would, it was expected, be consolidated and safeguarded, if far less systematically than in a revolutionary order, within the legal, constitutional and representative polity of the Reich. Although the freedom of religious conscience and association seemed to have been restricted during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s and the period of anti-socialist legislation between 1878 and 1890, they had been curtailed within legally defined limits and with the connivance of many liberals. Few contemporaries entertained the possibility of a return to the reaction of the 1850s or to ‘absolutism’. Rather, the German ‘Rechtsstaat’ and ‘constitutional monarchy’ which had been established between 1867 and 1871 appeared to offer the possibility, within an admittedly precarious and undefined polity during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, of individual liberties, regional autonomy and representative government.75 The sharing of sovereignty between a monarchical executive and a popular assembly was intrinsic to this ‘constitutionalism’, which was later seen by commentators – including liberals – as a specifically ‘German’ form of rule, allowing the Reichstag to sanction all legislation and increases of expenditure.
Such assumptions and expectations help to explain why National Liberal and Progressive deputies voted for the North German Confederation, in spite of the predominance of the Hohenzollern monarchy within it – made worse by Berlin’s annexation of Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Kurhessen and Frankfurt in 1866 – and despite widespread fears of an emerging ‘greater Prussia’. Many, like Bennigsen, believed that the Norddeutscher Bund would be a staging-post on the way to a fully-fledged German nation-state. Obviously, there were many opponents and victims – frequently marginalised as ‘Reichsfeinde’ – of the new regime, which carried out, on repeated occasions, acts of repression and which countenanced many forms of injustice. The structure of the new order, though, was broadly liberal, as critics of a German Sonderweg have pointed out.76 It came into being as a consequence of the complex negotiations and arguments which had taken place within the public sphere and between parties and governments in the post-revolutionary period. Notwithstanding the justified criticisms of its detractors, the Kaiserreich could be seen as the product, not of an invidious compromise, but of a necessary relationship between nationalism and the state. The fact that the political unification of Germany occurred comparatively quickly, without open resistance, after 1871 was the result, amongst other things, of support for a national system of government outlined in 1848–49, and refined and modified in the years before 1866.