THE SECOND REICH - An essay in universal history

5. THE SECOND REICH
After the North German Confederation led by Prussia had defeated France at the battle of Sedan, the new German empire was born on January 18, 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles. There the 23 German princes offered the title of emperor to the most powerful amongst them, King William I of Prussia. Richard Evans writes: "Built by Louis XIV, the 'Sun King', at the height of his power nearly two hundred years before, the palace was now turned into a humiliating symbol of French impotence and defeat. This was a key moment in modern German and indeed European history. To liberals, it seemed the fulfilment of their dreams. But there was a heavy price to pay. Several features of Bismarck's creation had ominous consequences for the future. First of all, the decision to call the new state 'the German Reich' inevitably conjured up memories of its thousand-year predecessor, the dominant power in Europe for so many centuries. Some, indeed, referred to Bismarck's creation as the 'Second Reich'. The use of the word implied, too, that where the First Reich had failed, in the face of French aggression, the Second had succeeded. Among the many aspects of his creation that survived the fall of Bismarck's German Reich in 1918, the continued use of the term 'German Empire', Deutsches Reich, by the Weimar Republic and all its institutions was far from being the least significant. The word 'Reich' conjured up an image among educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bismarck created: the successor to the Roman Empire; the vision of God's Empire here on earth; the universality of its claim to suzerainty; in a more prosaic but no less powerful sense, the concept of a German state that would include all German speakers in Central Europe - 'one People, one Reich, one Leader', as the Nazi slogan was to put it. There always remained those in Germany who thought Bismarck's creation only a partial realization of the idea of a true German Reich. Initially, their voices were drowned by the euphoria of victory. But with time, their number was to grow.
"The constitution which Bismarck devised for the new German Reich in 1871 in many ways fell short of the ideals dreamed of by the liberals in 1848. Alone of all modern German constitutions, it lacked any declaration of principle about human rights and civic freedoms. Formally speaking, the new Reich was a loose confederation of independent states, much like its predecessor had been. Its titular head was the Emperor or Kaiser, the title taken over from the old head of the Holy Roman Reich and ultimately deriving from the Latin name 'Caesar'. He had wide-ranging powers including the declaration of war and peace. The Reich's institutions were stronger than those of the old, with a nationally elected parliament, the Reichstag - the name, deriving from the Holy Roman Reich, was another survival across the revolutionary divide of 1918 - and a number of central administrative institutions, most notably the Foreign Office, to which more were added as time went on. But the constitution did not accord to the national parliament the power to elect or dismiss governments and their ministers, and key aspects of political decision-making, above all on matters of war and peace, and on the administration of the army, were reserved to the monarch and his immediate entourage. Government ministers, including the head of the civilian administration, the Reich Chancellor - an office created by Bismarck and held by him for some twenty years - were civil servants, not party politicians, and they were beholden to the Kaiser, and not to the people or to their parliamentary representatives. With time, the influence of the Reichstag grew, though not by very much. With only mild exaggeration, the great revolutionary thinker Karl Marx described the Bismarckian Reich, in a convoluted phrase that captured many of its internal contradictions, as a 'bureaucratically constructed military despotism, dressed up with parliamentary forms, mixed in with an element of feudalism yet at the same time already influenced by the bourgeoisie'."46
According to Dominic Lieven, “Bismarck was determined to restabilize Europe after his wars of 1864-71 and to reassure Germany’s neighbours that Europe’s new potential hegemon was a satiated power with no further territorial ambitions. As one perceptive German observer later commented, this reassurance was necessary. The same historical arguments used to justify the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, for example, could also have justified taking much of Switzerland. In geopolitical terms, the Netherlands were not much more than the estuary of Germany’s most vital artery, the river Rhine. German security in the east might have been served by pushing back the Russian frontier, and German nationalists might have welcomed the annexation of Russia’s Baltic Provinces, whose elites were German and Protestant. Only Bismarck had dissuaded William I and his general from demanding the annexation of the Sudetenland as tribute from Austria for the victory of 1866. As a result of Bismarck’s moderation, commented the writer Paul Rohrbach in 1903, no European government now believed that Germany hankered after its territory or had ambitions to expand within Europe…”47
Nevertheless, while Bismarck was no war-monger, his military victories had elicited a change in spirit in Germany that was to have long-term consequences… Germany's victory over France in 1870 served to calm the passion of wounded German pride elicited by Napoleon’s victories over Prussia. However, the victory also had the opposite effect, stoking up national pride in the new, united nation-state and a new belief in its rights in relation to its neighbours. Thus while Germany's problem in 1806 had been defeat in war, the temptation after 1870 was victory and the hubris that came from it. War had humbled the old enemy and united the nation (almost): why should it not continue to cure the nation's ills?
The roots of war-worship were to be found in Germany's not-so-distant past. Gradually, from the time of Clausewitz, the idea became entrenched that war is a cleansing process sweeping away the decadence that comes from too much peace. And then there was Hegel's idea that "the German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom." Clearly war could not be taboo to the advocates of "unlimited self-determination". As Barbara Ehrenreich writes: "In the opinion of Hegel and the later theorists of nationalism, nations need war - that is, the sacrifice of their citizens - even when they are not being menaced by other nations. The reason is simple: The nation, as a kind of 'organism', exists only through the emotional unity of its citizens, and nothing cements this unity more decisively than war. As Hegel explained, peace saps the strength of nations by allowing citizens to drift back into their individual concerns: 'In times of peace civil life expands more and more, all the different spheres settle down, and in the long run men sink into corruption, their particularities become more and more fixed and ossified. But health depends upon the unity of the body and if the parts harden, death occurs.' Meaning, of course, the death of the nation, which depends for its life on the willingness of the citizens to face their own deaths. War thus becomes a kind of tonic for nations, reviving that passion for collective defence that alone brings the nation to life in the minds of its citizens. Heinrich von Treitschke, the late-nineteenth-century German nationalist, put it excitedly: 'One must say in the most decided manner: "War is the only remedy for ailing nations!" The moment the State calls, "Myself and my existence are at stake!" social self-seeking must fall back and every party hate be silent. The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of the whole. In that very point lies the loftiness of war, that the small man disappears entirely before the great thought of the State.'"48
The militarist spirit of the Second Reich was a continuation of 18th-century Prussian militarism. “It was above all in order to protect the autonomy of the Prussian officer corps from liberal interference that Bismarck was appointed in 1862. He immediately announced that 'the great questions of the day are not decided by speeches and majority resolutions - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood'. He was as good as his word. The war of 1866 destroyed the Kingdom of Hanover, incorporating it into Prussia, and expelled Austria and Bohemia from Germany after centuries in which they had played a major part in shaping its destinies, while the war of 1870-71 took away Alsace-Lorraine from France and placed it under the direct suzerainty of the German Empire. It is with some justification that Bismarck has been described as a 'white revolutionary'. Military force and military action created the Reich; and in so doing they swept aside legitimate institutions, redrew state boundaries and overthrew long-established traditions, with a radicalism and a ruthlessness that cast a long shadow over the subsequent development of Germany. They also thereby legitimized the use of force for political ends to a degree well beyond what was common in most other countries except when they contemplated imperial conquests in other parts of the world. Militarism in state and society was to play an important part in undermining German democracy in the 1920s and in the coming of the Third Reich.
"Bismarck saw to it that the army was virtually a state within a state, with its own immediate access to the Kaiser and its own system of self-government. The Reichstag only had the right to approve its budget every seven years, and the Minister of War was responsible to the army rather than to the legislature. Officers enjoyed many social and other privileges and expected the deference of civilians when they met on the street. Not surprisingly, it was the ambition of many a bourgeois professional to be admitted as an officer in the army reserves; while, for the masses, compulsory military service produced familiarity with military codes of conduct and military ideals and values. In times of emergency, the army was entitled to establish martial law and suspend civil liberties, a move considered so frequently during the Wilhelmine period that some historians have with pardonable exaggeration described the politicians and legislators of the time as living under the permanent threat of a coup d'état from above.
"The army impacted on society in a variety of ways, most intensively of all in Prussia, then after 1871 more indirectly, through the Prussian example, in other German states as well. Its prestige, gained in the stunning victories of the wars of unification, was enormous. Non-commissioned officers, that is, those men, who stayed on after their term of compulsory military service was over and served in the army for a number of years, had an automatic right to a job in state employment when they finally left the army. This meant that the vast majority of policemen, postmen, railwaymen and other lower servants of the state were ex-soldiers, who had been socialized in the army and behaved in the military fashion to which they had become accustomed. The rule-book of an institution like the police force concentrated on enforcing military models of behaviour, insisted that the public be kept at arm's length and ensured that, in street marches and mass demonstrations, the crowd would be more likely to be treated like an enemy than an assembly of citizens. Military concepts of honour were pervasive enough to ensure the continued vitality of duelling among civilian men, even amongst the middle classes, though it was also common in Russia and France as well.
"Over time, the identification of the officer corps with the Prussian aristocracy weakened, and aristocratic military codes were augmented by new forms of popular militarism, including in the early 1900s the Navy League and the veterans' clubs. By the time of the First World War, most of the key positions in the officer corps were held by professionals, and the aristocracy was dominant mainly in traditional areas of social prestige and snobbery such as the cavalry and the guards, much as it was in other countries. But the professionalization of the officer corps, hastened by the advent of new military technology from the machine gun and barbed wire to the aeroplane and the tank, did not make it any more democratic. On the contrary, military arrogance was strengthened by the colonial experience, when German armed forces ruthlessly put down rebellion of indigenous peoples such as the Hereros in German South-West Africa (now Namibia). In 1904-07, in an act of deliberate genocide, the German army massacred thousands of Herero men, women and children and drove many more of them into the desert, where they starved. From a population of some 80,000 before the war, the Hereros declined to a mere 15,000 by 1911 as a result of these actions. In an occupied part of the German Empire such as Alsace-Lorraine, annexed from France in 1871, the army frequently behaved like conquerors facing a hostile and refractory population. Some of the most flagrant examples of such behaviour had given rise in 1913 to a heated debate in the Reichstag, in which the deputies passed a vote of no-confidence in the government. This did not of course force the government to resign, but it illustrated none the less the growing polarization of opinion over the role of the army in German society."49
It was Germany more than any other country that used the recent major changes in military strategy, science and technology to increase her power in many ways. Even more important was the German ability to mobilize the whole of society towards the nation’s ends. Indeed, according to Bobbitt, "the Prussian solution to the requirement of vast numbers of soldiers to exploit the opportunities of decisive battle was to militarize the entire society. After the 1873 depression, the German state nationalized the railroads, introduced compulsory social insurance, and increased its intervention in the economy - in order to maximise the welfare of the nation. Throughout the nineteenth century Britain refused to adopt a mass conscript army; it was Prussia that militarized as it industrialized. The railways, telegraph, and standardization of mechanical tools that industrialization made possible allowed for dizzying increases in the speed and mobility of military dispositions. The use of the telegraph, in concert with the railroad, allowed generals to mass widely dispersed forces quickly and to coordinate their operations over a vast theatre... An entire society could be mobilized for war, replenishing the front when necessary as the conflict progressed. But this was only possible if that entire society could be made a party to the war..."50
The new Reich soon had more than military prowess to boast of. Michael Stürmer writes: "Within the lifetime of one generation Germany was able to become the foremost industrial and trading power in Europe. Bismarck's revolution from above unleashed vast energies through the nation state, not entirely unlike events in France eighty years before. Industrial performance was second to none and was accomplished by the birth of the welfare state and democratic institutions and aspirations; of a socialist subculture and an ambitious liberal bourgeoisie unsure of itself but driven by nervous energy and creative unrest. At the turn of the century the language of the sciences was, in many parts of the world, German. A vast number of Nobel prizes went to German scholars, many of them Jews. German big business and banks were probably organised more efficiently than most competitors except for the United States. German universities became the model for many establishments of higher education from Turkey to North America. If the French Impressionists dominated the art world in the nineteenth century, after the turn of the century German art movements became equally important. In literature it was probably the Germany of Gerhard Hauptmann, Thomas Mann or Theodor Mommsen, all of them Nobel-prize winners, that most sensitively expressed the drama and contradictions of industrial society. A letter which appeared in The Times in August, 1914 under the heading 'Scholars' Protest Against War' summed up a widely held view: 'We regard Germany as a nation leading the way in the arts and sciences, and we have all learnt and are learning from German scholars.'"51
Thus, as Disraeli rightly pointed out in February, 1871, the Franco-German war amounted to "a German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of the last century. I don't say a greater, or as great a social event... The balance of power has been entirely destroyed... Not a single principle on the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. You have a new world..."52
Henry Kissinger comments on Disraeli’s words: “The Westphalian and the Vienna European orders had been based on a divided Central Europe whose competing pressures – between the plethora of German states in the Westphalian settlement, and Austria and Prussia in the Vienna outcome – would balance each other out. What emerged after the unification of Germany was a dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all the continental countries together. The bond of legitimacy had disappeared. Everything now depended on calculations of power.”53
“After 1871,” writes Bobbitt, “a new society of nation-states gradually emerged. Its mood was one of easily inflamed nationalism and ethnic truculence. This reflected the public mood, excited by the press on a scale impossible before the spread of free compulsory public education and vastly increased literacy. Three new ideas vied in the public mind for attention and allegiance: Darwinism, which had been easily admitted into a social credo of competitiveness and national survivalism; Marxism, with its hostility to the capitalist relationships of the industrial age; and bourgeois parliamentarianism, which promoted the rule of law in a national and an international society that was becoming increasingly credulous about the role that law could play. It was thus an age of faith in law even if the bases for legal consensus were at the time being quickly eroded, an age of anxiety in class relationships, an age of ethnomania within states. The contrast with the world it replaced could not have been greater. One can scarcely imagine a leader of a state-nation speaking as Bismarck did in explaining the new spirit of the age: 'Who rules in France or Sardinia is as matter of indifference to me once the government is recognised and only a question of fact, not of right. [F]or me France will remain France, whether it is governed by Napoleon or St. Louis. I know that you will reply that a properly conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you posit antinomies between right and revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say, 'I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.'
"This is the authentic voice of the nation-state. Regimes may come and go, but the nation endures. International law conformed itself to this new society; how a government came to power was of no relevance so long as the fact of its control over a nation could be established. Self-determination - the right of nations to have states of their own - became the only principle recognized in international law that detracted from the axiomatic legality of the government that was in control.
"It was obvious at the time that the nation-state bore certain strategic risks that were inherent in the kind of political society on which such a state depends. In his last public statement, in 1890, Moltke issued an ominous and melancholy warning. With such states, the old warrior said, which depended upon and at the same time inflamed popular passions, future wars could last 'seven and perhaps thirty years’.”54
Bobbitt claims that Germany after 1871 was not only the first nation-state, as opposed to state-nation, but also a proto-fascist state. Bismarck’s victories over Austria and France “allowed him to place at the apex of the German state a radically conservative, militarist class whose only claim to pan-German legitimacy was that it alone was able to realize the ambitions of national unity. German nationalism - a program that held that a state was legitimated by its service to a pre-eminent ethnic nation - was the prototype for fascism, as its expression in the Constitution of 1871 confirms.
"Bismarck did not so much unify as conquer the other German states and then proceed to transform their politics by delivering German unity under a popular doctrine of militarism and ethnic nationalism. This put fascism on the table as a competitor to the parliamentary systems…” 55
After the first flush of pride in the victory over France in 1870, a general feeling of dissatisfaction set in in Germany. Many were unhappy at the triumph of Prussia and its regimented, despotic spirit. Engels had welcomed Bismarck's success in reducing German "particularism", but "the main disadvantage," he said, "and it is a very big one, is the inevitable swamping of Germany by the Prussian spirit". The liberals were unhappy that Germany was not a fully parliamentary state, but was still largely controlled by the king, the army and the Prussian aristocracy. Antisemites like Paul de Lagarde, on the other hand, were unhappy that Germany was becoming too liberal, and that the new unified German state was the "little" one, excluding Austria - whose inclusion, he believed, justified a great war. The Catholics were unhappy with Bismarck's Kulturkampf legislation for obligatory civil marriage and the prohibition of the Jesuit order, resistance to which caused most Prussian bishops and thousands of priests to be thrown into prison.
Over all this was a vaguer feeling that something was rotten in the house of Germany with, in Golo Mann’s words, its "hard-boiled Realpolitik and oppressive piety, ostentatious theatrical poses, self-righteous nationalism combined with internal discord, and finally materialism, overwhelmed by the successes of the natural sciences, but yet prepared suddenly to change into cheap mysticism".56
These problems became more acute when William II came to the throne in 1888. He had had a difficult birth which gave him a withered arm; and he developed a hatred for his English mother and all things English.57 Unbalanced, aggressive, mendacious, provocative and inconsistent to the point of illness (Tsar Nicholas II said he was "raving mad"), William had much to do with dividing Europe into two armed camps and souring the relations between Germany and England, on the one hand, and between Germany and Russia, on the other. 58
William's first major error was to dismiss Bismarck and allow the "reinsurance" treaty with Russia to lapse, thereby introducing a dangerous note of insecurity into German foreign policy. "The monarch," writes W.H. Spellman, was moving Germany "into an aggressive and expansionist posture. In language reminiscent of eighteenth-century divine-right absolutism, he informed the Provincial Diet of Brandenburg in 1891, 'that I regard my whole position and my task as having been imposed on me from heaven, and that I am called to the service of a Higher Being, to Whom I shall have to give a reckoning later.' To Bismarck's successor William confided in 1892 that he was not interested in personal popularity (although his actions belied this), 'for, as the guiding principles of my actions, I have only the dictates of my duty and the responsibility of my clear conscience towards God'. In 1900 William told the future George V of England that as Kaiser he alone 'was master of German policy and my country must follow me wherever I go'. In the judgement of one recent observer the emperor personified the dynastic culture of later eighteenth-century Europe: 'He was a monarch by Divine Right yet always the parvenu; a medieval knight in shining armour and yet the inspiration behind that marvel of modern technology, the battle fleet; a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary yet also - for a time at least - the Socialist Emperor who supported basic accident and retirement insurance for the industrial worker.’”59
Prussian militarism gradually penetrated most of the country. Only the more pacifist and internationalist tendency of the powerful Social Democratic party stood out as a significant exception to the general mood. But in Germany’s fractured political system the Social Democrats were not able to prevent the Kaiser and the Army from taking control of the general direction of German foreign policy.
And these militarists, while nationalist rather than internationalist, had their own global ambitions. Thus in 1894, “radical nationalists set up the Pan-German League. The ambition of the bourgeois nationalist project, and its irritation with the restraint of government policy, was summed up by the rising German sociologist and economist Max Weber. ‘We must realize,’ he announced in his famous Freiburg Lecture of 1895, ‘that the unification of Germany was a youthful prank which the nation played in its dotage, and should have been avoided on account of its cost, if it was to have been the completion rather than the starting point of a bid for German global power.’…”60
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