Imperial Germany 1890 - 1918

Ian Porter, Ian D. Armour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317900856
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The Wilhelmine period is a crucial period of German history and the focus of great historical controversy; greater understanding of this period is also vital to explain the rise of the Third Reich. The authors focus on Germany's role as a major military and imperial power, industrialiastion and the economy, the crucial effects of the war years and the disturbing evidence that Germany's response to Hitler is to be found in the Wilhelmine era.

Part One:
Background

1
The Historiography of Wilhelmine Germany

The Wilhelmine* period in Germany is vital to an understanding of German, and indeed European, history, but it is only in the last quarter-century that this has been properly appreciated, even by historians. Before 1961, when the German historian, Fritz Fischer, brought out his controversial Griff nach der Weltmacht (Bid for World Power) (201), a curious complacency reigned about events between the fall of Bismarck and the outbreak of the First World War. The only subjects which seemed to attract attention were William II (49), and the question of war origins; certainly very little was written on German domestic developments (62). Even on war origins, there was a broad consensus that the subject had been pretty thoroughly researched, and that all the European powers bore a collective responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities. For the most part, this suited German scholars. The thesis of collective responsibility helped shore up German historians’ belief that the Bismarckian state was basically a good thing. Confronted, after 1945, with the need to explain the unquestionable catastrophe of Hitler and the Second World War, German historians were only too glad to draw a veil over the Wilhelmine era — a tendency epitomised in 1955 by the textbook writer who informed his readers that, in the study of the period 1914–18, ‘the historian moves everywhere on firm ground’ (27, p. 2).

Fischer’s book rode rough-shod over these comfortable assumptions, sparking a controversy which has been raging bitterly ever since. In a study of the lost subject of German war aims, Fischer made a number of assertions which his fellow German historians, at least, found hard to accept. For one thing, he claimed that Germany’s expansionist war aims were foreshadowed by equally aggressive and expansionist policies before 1914. War aims, Fischer wrote, were the symptoms of a planned drive for world power in evidence since the 1890s, a Weltpolitik* which would place Germany on an equal footing with the global empires of Britain, France and Russia. Worse, not only did this aggressive policy command a significant level of popular support both before and during the First World War, but it led to the decision of the German government to risk war in July 1914. For the sake of world power, Germany had consciously brought about world war 201

For a German historian to saddle Germany with primary responsibility for the First World War was provocative in itself, and the reaction among the old guard of the German historical profession was one of patriotic indignation. Equally unwelcome, to Germans generally, was the suggestion of a continuity in German history, that the ideas and attitudes which helped produce National Socialism went back well before 1918. To that extent imperial Germany had more in common with the Third Reich than most Germans liked to admit. Fischer also insisted that German foreign policy, which led to the outbreak of war, could only be understood with reference to social, economic and domestic political factors. In asserting this, Fischer was breaking with the traditional German belief in the ‘primacy of foreign policy’, according to which foreign policy could be understood on its own, and determined all other aspects of a state’s history. To claim otherwise was to open up a new perspective in the way Germans looked at their past (201; 26; 159).

In the 1960s a new generation of historians began to reexamine German history with new methods and assumptions. These ‘revisionist’ historians were bent on uncovering the domestic determinants of foreign policy. They produced, for instance, studies of the popular support for Weltpolitik (3; 153); the role of the press in voicing that support (177); the influence of industrial and agrarian interest groups (56; 64); the financial constraints under which the German government was operating by 1914 (81). A great deal was done to illustrate the sheer complexity of Wilhelmine politics and society; no one could complain, by the end of the decade, that the period 1890–1918 was still dominated by old-style diplomatic historians. Ironically, the ultimate preoccupation of all this work on domestic factors was still the explanation of that foreign policy which the domestic factors were assumed to have shaped.

By the mid-1970s, this revisionist ‘primacy of domestic policy’ had become so common as to be dubbed the ‘new orthodoxy’. Hans Ulrich Wehler evolved a theory of imperialism which interpreted colonial expansion as a movement conceived by the German upper and middle classes to distract the working class from socialism (40; 37; 151). Volker Berghahn depicted Wilhelmine naval policy not only as a direct challenge to British sea power, but also as designed to unite Germans behind a new object of patriotic pride. As with the search for colonies, the new fleet was more an instrument of social control than an end in itself (131). Nothing attracted his torians more than the so-called Sammlungspolitik* of the late 1890s, whereby a government-sponsored alliance between big business and big landowners supposedly served to ‘rally’ patriotic elements and limit the appeal of social democracy (73; 67). The importance of the links between domestic and foreign policy, in the eyes of the revisionists, was all the greater in view of the catastrophic results of Germany’s pre-war diplomacy. A principal reason for under standing imperial Germany, Wehler claimed, was the need to understand the origins of fascism (40).

There has certainly been no lack of historians ready to criticise individual revisionist works, but to date no coherent alternative explanation has emerged. The most severe criticisms have been reserved for the more literal interpretations of documentary evidence (152), or the tendency — a common enough problem in all historical debates — to concentrate only on those documents which support revisionist theories. This applies equally to the ‘primacy of domestic politics’. More than one critic has pointed out the considerable gap which still exists between the elaborate theoretical constructions of many revisionists and the actual results of their often excellent detailed research (185; 33; 145).

One alternative explanation has been the idea of a ‘divided society’ in Germany. German industrialisation produced severe tensions between the new urban masses and a conservative elite entrenched in outmoded and inequitable political institutions. Germany ‘failed’ to produce a parliamentary democracy because its middle classes did not win political rights on their own, but were given them by the state. Wolfgang Mommsen, for instance, attributes the failure of Germany to avoid conflict in 1914 to its antiquated governmental system, which placed the Chancellor at the mercy of the military and conservative elites who favoured war (164; 27). Recent studies reinforce this view of a sort of institutional bankruptcy, of a society in crisis, blundering into war as a direct consequence of its own internal contradictions (13; 160; 184; 20). They also make an understanding of the Empire even more relevant to an understanding of fascism.

Even this approach has its critics. Apart from a new generation of conservative German historians, who reject the idea of continuity in German history, and attempt a return to more traditional explanations of German policy (36; 176; 31), the more recent contributors to the debate on Wilhelmine Germany are perhaps best represented by Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn (24; 23; 46; 15; 16). Concepts like Sammlungspolitik and social imperialism, wrote Eley, ‘seemed to impute too much unity and coherence to the empire’s “ruling elites’” (22, p. 10). Eley and Blackbourn also question whether the stress laid by so many scholars on the ‘peculiarities’ of the Germans, on the supposed ‘failure’ of German society to develop ‘normal’ parliamentary institutions, is entirely historical. Neither denies the element of continuity; but to some extent the strains imposed by industrialisation were to be expected, and would have come regardless of the nature of German political institutions. German history, in other words, is less unique than we are accustomed to think; certainly more work needs to be done comparing it with other societies (16; 22). Even more recently Thomas Nipperdey has also reemphasised the complexity of Wilhelmine society and its more progressive elements. Not only was Germany comparable to other societies, it was segmented along religious, regional and social lines; it was a pluralist society, with many competing social groups; it was reformist, with advanced social legislation; its press was capable of being highly critical; and it was gradually changing, despite the imperfections of the political system (34).

2
The House that Bismarck Built

The German Empire was created in 1871, so it is impossible to understand its development after 1890 without some knowledge of its brief history and institutions. Its very nature gave rise to serious problems. Even Otto von Bismarck, the first imperial Chancellor, had difficulties with the machinery he set up; after his forced departure in 1890 the structural weaknesses of the Empire became increasingly obvious.

Germany’s ‘unification’, strictly speaking, never took place (79; 51). Austria had been excluded from a say in German affairs after 1866, and the war of 1870–71 against France made possible the accession of the south German states to the new Empire. But this realisation of the dream of unity was intentionally limited. It specifically excluded the German-speaking, but Catholic, population of the Austrian Empire. It was also flawed by the inclusion of sizeable non-German or otherwise alienated minorities: Poles in the east (84; 124), Danes in the north (96), the annexed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in the west (121). There had been considerable opposition by some Germans to the idea of submitting to Prussian hegemony, especially among the largely Catholic population of the south German states.

The constitution of 1871 not only reflected this disunity but actually helped perpetuate it. Bismarck’s aim in drafting the constitution was to preserve Prussian dominance, and this meant deliberately limiting the power of the central government. The result was a state which was federal in the true sense of the word: certain very strictly defined powers were reserved to the centre; but all else was left to the twenty-five individual states of the Empire, which retained their own princes, constitutions and governments (20; 34; 25).

At the head of the federal government was the Emperor, who was also the King of Prussia. His position demonstrates that, although Germany was a constitutional state, it was hardly a parliamentary one, because the monarch was in no real sense accountable to an elected assembly. On the contrary, it was stressed that the constitution of 1871 was granted to the German people (28). The Emperor had wide powers. He appointed the head of the imperial government, the Chancellor, who was responsible to him alone. He had the final say in all matters of foreign policy, including the power to declare war and conclude peace. He exercised supreme command in time of war over the armed forces of all states of the Empire, and the war ministry and general staff remained Prussian and were responsible to him, not to the Chancellor, much less parliament (132). Article 68 of the constitution gave the Emperor explicit power to subordinate the civilian authorities to the military in wartime. This was invoked in 1914, and made possible the military dictatorship which ran Germany in the last two years of the First World War (209).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
• Part One: Background
• Part Two: Narration and Analysis
• Part Three: Assessment
• Part Four: Documents
• CHRONOLOGY
• GLOSSARY
• REICHSTAG ELECTION RESULTS, 1890–1918
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX