The Coming of the Third Reich, page 5
It is regrettable how false is the picture which we ourselves have created of him in the world, as the jackbooted politician of violence, in childish pleasure at the fact that someone finally brought Germany to a position of influence again. In truth, his great gift was for the highest diplomacy and moderation. He understood uniquely how to win the world’s trust, the exact opposite of today.23
The myth of the dictatorial leader was not the expression of an ancient, ingrained aspect of the German character; it was a much more recent creation.
It was fuelled in the early twentieth century by the public memory of Bismarck’s tough stance against those whom he regarded as the internal enemies of the Reich. In the 1870s, reacting against the Pope’s attempts to strengthen his hold over the Catholic community through the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the Declaration of Papal Infallibility (1871), Bismarck inaugurated what liberals dubbed the ‘struggle for culture’, a series of laws and police measures which aimed to bring the Catholic Church under the control of the Prussian state. The Catholic clergy refused to co-operate with laws requiring them to undergo training at state institutions and submit clerical appointments to state approval. Before long, those who contravened the new laws were being hounded by the police, arrested and sent to gaol. By the mid-1870s, 989 parishes were without incumbents, 225 priests were in gaol, all Catholic religious orders apart from those involved in nursing had been suppressed, two archbishops and three bishops had been removed from office and the Bishop of Trier had died shortly after his release from nine months in prison.24 What was even more disturbing was that this massive assault on the civil liberties of some 40 per cent of the population of the Reich was cheered on by Germany’s liberals, who regarded Catholicism as so serious a threat to civilization that it justified extreme measures such as these.
The struggle eventually died down, leaving the Catholic community an embittered enemy of liberalism and modernity and determined to prove its loyalty to the state, not least through the political party it had formed in order, initially, to defend itself against persecution, the so-called Centre Party. But before this process was even complete, Bismarck struck another blow against civil liberties with the Anti-Socialist Law, passed by the Reichstag after two assassination attempts on the aged Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878. In fact, Germany’s fledgling socialist movement had nothing to do with the would-be assassins and was a law-abiding organization, putting its trust in the parliamentary route to power. Once more, however, the liberals were persuaded to abandon their liberal principles in what was presented to them as the national interest. Socialist meetings were banned, socialist newspapers and magazines suppressed, the socialist party outlawed. Capital punishment, previously in abeyance in Prussia and every other major German state, was reintroduced. Mass arrests and the widespread imprisonment of socialists followed.25
The consequences of the Anti-Socialist Law were, if anything, even more far-reaching than those of the struggle with the Catholic Church. It, too, completely failed in its immediate aim of suppressing supposed ‘enemies of the Reich’. The socialists could not legally be banned from standing in parliamentary elections as individuals, and as Germany’s industrialization gathered pace and the industrial working class increased ever more rapidly in numbers, so socialist candidates won an ever-growing share of the vote. After the law was allowed to lapse in 1890, the socialists reorganized themselves in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. By the eve of the First World War the party had over a million members, the largest political organization anywhere in the world. In the 1912 elections, despite an inbuilt bias of the electoral system in favour of conservative rural constituencies, it overtook the Centre Party as the largest single party in the Reichstag. The repression of the Anti-Socialist Law had driven it to the left, and from the beginning of the 1890s onwards it adhered to a rigid Marxist creed according to which the existing institutions of Church, state and society, from the monarchy and the army officer corps to big business and the stock market, would be overthrown in a proletarian revolution that would bring a socialist republic into being. The liberals’ support for the Anti-Socialist Law caused the Social Democrats to distrust all ‘bourgeois’ political parties and to reject any idea of co-operating with the political supporters of capitalism or the exponents of what they regarded as a merely palliative reform of the existing political system.26 Vast, highly disciplined, tolerating no dissent, and seemingly unstoppable in its forward march towards electoral dominance, the Social Democratic movement struck terror into the hearts of the respectable middle and upper classes. A deep gulf opened up between the Social Democrats on the one hand and all the ’bourgeois’ parties on the other. This unbridgeable political divide was to endure well into the 1920s and play a vital role in the crisis that eventually brought the Nazis to power.
At the same time, however, the party was determined to do everything it could to remain within the law and not to provide any excuse for the oft-threatened reintroduction of a banning order. Lenin was once said to have remarked, in a rare flash of humour, that the German Social Democrats would never launch a successful revolution in Germany because when they came to storm the railway stations they would line up in an orderly queue to buy platform tickets first. The party acquired the habit of waiting for things to happen, rather than acting to bring them about. Its massively elaborate institutional structure, with its cultural organizations, its newspapers and magazines, its pubs, its bars, its sporting clubs and its educational apparatus, came in time to provide a whole way of life for its members and to constitute a set of vested interests that few in the party were prepared to jeopardize. As a law-abiding institution, the party put its faith in the courts to prevent persecution. Yet remaining within the law was not easy, even after 1890. Petty chicanery by the police was backed up by conservative judges and prosecutors, and by courts that continued to regard the Social Democrats as dangerous revolutionaries. There were few Social Democratic speakers or party newspaper editors who had not by 1914 spent several terms of imprisonment after being convicted of lèse-majesté or insulting state officials; criticizing the monarch or the police or even the civil servants who ran the country could still count as an offence under the law. Combating the Social Democrats became the business of a whole generation of judges, state prosecutors, police chiefs and government officials before 1914. These men, and the majority of their middle- and upper-class supporters, never accepted the Social Democrats as a legitimate political movement. In their eyes, the law’s purpose was to uphold the existing institutions of state and society, not to act as a neutral referee between opposing political groups.27
The liberals were certainly of no help in remedying this situation. They themselves lost heavily in terms of votes and seats in the Reichstag in the course of the 1880s and 1890s, though they managed to retain a good deal of support in Germany’s towns and cities. Not the least of their problems was the fact that they had repeatedly split in the course of the late nineteenth century, and, even after the more left-oriented groups had joined forces again in 1910, this still left two mainstream liberal parties, the National Liberals and the Progressives, whose differences went back to the refusal of the latter to forgive Bismarck for collecting taxes in Prussia without parliamentary authorization in the 1860s. Things were just as divided on the right of the political spectrum, however, where there was not one Conservative Party but two, since those who had supported Bismarck’s merging of Prussian particularism into the institutions of the Reich in 1871—anathema to the die-hard Prussian nobility, the Junkers - maintained a separate identity as the so-called ‘Free Conservatives’. Moreover, these two largely Protestant, north German parties had to contend with an even larger political party of the right, the Centre, whose antimodernism and support for the Reich were tempered by its advocacy of social welfare and its critical attitude towards German colonial rule in Africa. Thus Germany before 1914 had not two mainstream political parties but six - the Social Democrats, the two liberal parties, the two groups of Conservatives, and the Centre Party, reflecting among other things the multiple divisions of German society, by region, religion and social class.28 In a situation where there was a strong executive not directly responsible to the legislature, this weakened the prospect of party-politics being able to play a determining role in the state.
III
Far from causing a general disillusion with politics, the competition of all these rival political parties helped heat up the political atmosphere until it reached positively feverish dimensions by 1914. Universal manhood suffrage in Reichstag elections, backed by a more or less secret ballot and strict rules of electoral propriety, gave voters confidence in the electoral system. Voter participation reached the astonishing figure of 85 per cent of those eligible to cast their ballot in the Reichstag election of 1912.29 All the evidence goes to show that voters took their duty seriously, and thought carefully about how to reconcile their ideological position with the broader political scenario when it came, as it often did, to voting a second time in run-off ballots under the system of proportional representation adopted by the German constitution for elections to the Reichstag. The electoral system, guaranteed by legal provisions and safeguards, opened up a space for democratic debate and convinced millions of Germans of many political hues that politics belonged to the people.30 Moreover, the daily press in Imperial Germany was almost entirely political, with each newspaper explicitly tied to one or other of the various parties and putting its point of view in almost everything it published.31 Politics were not just the staple diet of conversation amongst the elites and the middle classes, but formed a central focus of discussion in working-class pubs and bars and even governed people’s choice of leisure activities.32
Political discussion and debate turned increasingly after the beginning of the twentieth century to the topic of Germany’s place in Europe and the world. Germans were increasingly aware of the fact that Bismarck’s creation of the Reich was incomplete in a number of different ways. To begin with, it included substantial ethnic and cultural minorities, the legacy of previous centuries of state aggrandisement and ethnic conflict. There were Danes in the north, French-speakers in Alsace-Lorraine and a small Slavic group called the Sorbs in central Germany; but above all there were millions of Poles, inhabiting parts of the former Kingdom of Poland annexed by Prussia in the eighteenth century. Already under Bismarck the state increasingly tried to Germanize these minorities, attacking the use of their languages in the schools and actively encouraging settlement by ethnic Germans. By the eve of the First World War, the use of German was mandatory in public meetings throughout the Reich, and land laws were being reformed in such a way as to deprive the Poles of their fundamental economic rights.33 The notion that ethnic minorities were entitled to be treated with the same respect as the majority population was a view held only by a tiny and diminishing minority of Germans. Even the Social Democrats thought of Russia and the Slavic East as lands of backwardness and barbarism by 1914, and had little or no sympathy for the efforts of Polish-speaking workers in Germany to organize in defence of their rights.34
Looking beyond Germany and Europe to the wider world, the Reich Chancellors who came into office after Bismarck saw their country as a second-class nation when compared with Britain and France, both of which had major overseas empires that spanned the globe. A latecomer on the scene, Germany had only been able to pick up the scraps and crumbs left over by European colonial powers that had enjoyed a head start on them. Tanganyika, Namibia, Togoland, Cameroon, New Guinea, assorted Pacific islands and the Chinese treaty port of Jiaozhou were virtually all the territories that made up Germany’s overseas empire on the eve of the First World War. Bismarck had thought them of little importance and lent his assent to their acquisition with great reluctance. But his successors came to take a different view. Germany’s prestige and standing in the world demanded, as Bernhard von Bülow, Foreign Secretary in the late 1890s, then Reich Chancellor until 1909, put it, a ‘place in the sun’. A start was made on the construction of a massive battle fleet, whose long-term aim was to win colonial concessions from the British, lords of the world’s largest overseas empire, by threatening, or even carrying out, the crippling or destruction of the main force of the British Navy in a titanic confrontation in the North Sea.35
These increasingly ambitious dreams of world power were articulated above all by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, a bombastic, self-important and extremely loquacious man who lost few opportunities to express his contempt for democracy and civil rights, his disdain for the opinions of others and his belief in Germany’s greatness. The Kaiser, like many of those who admired him, had grown up after Germany had been united. He had little awareness of the precarious and adventurous route by which Bismarck had achieved unification in 1871. Following the Prussian historians of his day, he thought of the whole process as historically preordained. He knew none of the nervous apprehension about Germany’s future that had led Bismarck to adopt such a cautious foreign policy in the 1870s and 1880s. Admittedly, the Kaiser’s character was too erratic, his personality too mercurial, for him to have any really consistent effect on the conduct of state affairs, and all too often his ministers found themselves working to counter his influence rather than implement his wishes. His constant declarations that he was the great leader that Germany needed merely served to draw attention to his deficiencies in this respect, and played their part, too, in fostering the nostalgic myth of Bismarckian decisiveness and guile. Many Germans came to contrast the ruthlessness of Bismarck’s amoral statesmanship, in which the end justified the means and statesmen could say one thing while doing, or preparing to do, another, with Wilhelm’s impulsive bombast and ill-considered tactlessness.36
Personalities aside, all of these features of the Germany that Bismarck created could be observed to a greater or lesser degree in other countries as well. In Italy the charismatic example of Garibaldi, leader of the popular forces that helped unite the nation in 1859, provided a model for the later dictator Mussolini. In Spain, the army was no less free of political control than it was in Germany, and in Italy, as in Germany, it reported to the sovereign rather than to the legislature. In Austria-Hungary, the civil service was just as strong and parliamentary institutions even more limited in their power. In France, a Church-state conflict raged that was not far behind that of the German ‘struggle for culture’ in its ideological ferocity. In Russia, a concept equivalent to that of the Reich was also applied to domestic politics and Russia’s relations with its nearest neighbours.37 The Tsarist regime in Russia repressed the socialists even more severely than did its German counterpart and did not yield an inch to the German authorities in its drive to assimilate the Poles, millions of whom were also under its sway. Liberalism, however defined, was weak in all the major states of Eastern and Central Europe by 1914, not just in the German Reich. The political scene was still more fragmented in Italy than it was in Germany, and the belief that war was justified to achieve political aims, in particular the creation of a land empire, was common to many European powers, as the outbreak of the First World War was to show with such terrible clarity in August 1914. All over the Continent, the growing forces of democracy threatened the hegemony of conservative elites. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the age of nationalism not just in Germany, but everywhere in Europe, and the ‘nationalization of the masses’ was taking place in many other countries as well.38
Yet in no nation in Europe other than Germany were all these conditions present at the same time and to the same extent. Moreover, Germany was not just any European country. Much has been written by historians about various aspects of Germany’s supposed backwardness at this time, its alleged deficit of civic values, its arguably antiquated social structure, its seemingly craven middle class and its apparently neo-feudal aristocracy. This was not how most contemporaries saw it at the time. Well before the outbreak of the First World War, Germany was the Continent’s wealthiest, most powerful and most advanced economy. In the last years of peace, Germany was producing two-thirds of continental Europe’s output of steel, half its output of coal and lignite and twenty per cent more electrical energy than Britain, France and Italy combined.39 By 1914, with a population of around 67 million, the German Empire commanded far greater resources of manpower than any other continental European power with the exception of Russia. By comparison, the United Kingdom, France and Austria-Hungary each had a population of between 40 and 50 million at this time. Germany was the world leader in the most modern industries, such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals and electricity. In agriculture, the massive use of artificial fertilizers and farm machinery had transformed the efficiency of the landed estates of the north and east by 1914, by which time Germany was, for example, producing a third of the world’s output of potatoes. Living standards had improved by leaps and bounds since the turn of the century if not before. The products of Germany’s great industrial firms, such as Krupps and Thyssen, Siemens and AEG, Hoechst and BASF, were famous for their quality the world over.40
Viewed nostalgically from the perspective of the early interwar years, Germany before 1914 seemed to many to have been a haven of peace, prosperity and social harmony. Yet beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, it was nervous, uncertain and racked by internal tensions. 41 For many, the sheer pace of economic and social change was frightening and bewildering. Old values seemed to be disappearing in a welter of materialism and unbridled ambition. Modernist culture, from abstract painting to atonal music, added to the sense of disorientation in some areas of society.42 The old-established hegemony of the Prussian landed aristocracy, which Bismarck had tried so hard to preserve, was undermined by the headlong rush of German society into the modern age. Bourgeois values, habits and modes of behaviour had triumphed in the upper and middle reaches of society by 1914; yet simultaneously they were themselves being challenged by the growing self-assertion of the industrial working class, organized in the massive Social Democratic labour movement. Germany, unlike any other European country, had become a nation-state not before the industrial revolution, but at its height; and on the basis, not of a single state, but of a federation of many different states whose German citizens were bound together principally by a common language, culture and ethnicity. Stresses and strains created by rapid industrialization interlocked with conflicting ideas about the nature of the German state and nation and their place in the larger context of Europe and the world. German society did not enter nationhood in 1871 in a wholly stable condition. It was riven by rapidly deepening internal conflicts which were increasingly exported into the unresolved tensions of the political system that Bismarck had created.43 These tensions found release in an increasingly vociferous nationalism, mixed in with alarmingly strident doses of racism and antisemitism, which were to leave a baleful legacy for the future.
