Bismarck and Germany

1862-1890

D.G. Williamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317862482
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

Bismarck's role in the unification and consolidation of Germany is central to any understanding of Germany's development as a nation and its consequent role as aggressor in two world wars.

This study provides students with a concise, up-to-date and analytical account of Bismarck's role in modern German history. Williamson guides readers through the complex events leading to the defeats of Austria and France in 1866 and 1870 and the subsequent creation of a united Germany in January 1871. He then explores the domestic and foreign problems Bismarck faced up to 1890 in consolidating unification.

Part 1

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THE SETTING

1

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The Background, 1815–1862

THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION

Holy Roman Empire Original composed of the German and north Italian territories of OTTOI, who was crowned Emperor by the Pope in 962. From 1273 onwards the Empire was increasingly dominated by the Habsburgs.

After the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon in 1806 and the collapse of subsequent French attempts to reorganize central Europe in 1814 when the Napoleonic armies were driven back over the French frontiers, the Great Powers created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the German Confederation. This reorganized German Central Europe into a confederation of 39 states dominated by Austria and Prussia, which was to survive until its destruction at the hands of Bismarck in 1866.

Confederation Union of individual states in which the independence of each state is preserved.

Mittelstaaten The medium-sized states in the German Confederation.

Apart from Austria and Prussia, the most important members of the Confederation were the Mittelstaaten, the medium-sized states of Saxony Bavaria, Hanover, Württemberg and the Grand Duchies of Hessen and Baden. The great majority of states, including the four city states of Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and Frankfurt were small territorial units. Twenty-one of the member states had populations of under 100,000, while Liechenstein had a population of barely 5000.

The prime aim of the German Confederation was to safeguard the internal and external security of each member state. It had only one statutory institution – the Diet – in which each state was represented by its ambassador. This, however only met when there were important matters to discuss, such as constitutional reform or security. Day-to-day business was dealt with in the Engerer Rat, a small standing committee in which 17 votes were distributed amongst the 39 states.

Federation A system of government in which several states or regions form a unity but still manage to remain self-governing in internal affairs.

It soon became clear that the Confederation was an intensely conservative organization. Neither Prince Metternich of Austin nor Frederick William III, King of Prussia, were prepared to see it evolve into an effective federation. This betrayal of the national ideal (see page 6) led to protests by students and intellectuals and to the assassination of August von Kotzebue, a political agent employed by the Russian legation in Mannheim in 1819. Metternich, with Prussian support, seized the chance to announce a series of repressive decrees and at a specially summoned conference at Karlsbad, which he then represented as a fait accompli to the Confederation. Until the revolutions of 1848 the Confederation became what James Sheehan has called ‘a kind of counter revolutionary holding company through which Metternich could coordinate governmental action against his political enemies’ (Sheehan, 1989: 409) [Doc. 1, p. 120].

Until 1848 the Confederation was effectively dominated by the dual hegemony of Austria and Prussia. As long as the two states cooperated and Prussia did not challenge Austria's Presidency of the Diet, their power could not be challenged, but their hegemony rested on the uneasy balance, which was only workable as long as Prussia had no ambition to dominate Germany

Austro-Prussian cooperation tended to mask the fact that Prussia was best placed to seize the leadership of Germany. Brendan Simms goes so far as to claim that in the longer term ‘the new geopolitical configuration of Central Europe after 1815 almost predetermined Prussia's victory in the struggle for mastery in Germany’ (Simms, 1998: 116). Unlike Austria, Prussia had no interests in Italy or the Balkans. The Rhineland territory she acquired at the Congress of Vienna gave her a vital interest in defending western Germany and in creating a customs union which would knit together economically her western and eastern territories. In both these areas Prussian interests converged increasingly not only with the emerging national movement but also with the economic and defensive needs of the Mittelstaaten.

THE ZOLLVEREIN

Tariffs Taxes placed on imported goods to protect the home economy.

Political particularism The principle that each state should have the maximum independence within the German Confederation.

In 1815 German trade was crippled by the lack of free movement. Each state levied its own tariffs. For instance, merchants moving goods from the Swiss frontier to Berlin faced ten sets of tariffs and transit dues. The negotiation of a customs union should have been one of the initial tasks of the Confederation, but political particularism and widely divergent economies of the different states ensured that no progress was made.

Zollverein The German Customs Union formed in 1833 with a membership of eighteen states. By 1853 only the two Mecklenburgs, the Hansa cities and Holstein re-mained outside. The Austrian Empire, however, remained excluded.

The only option at first was for groups of states within the Confederation to negotiate regional customs unions. Prussia with its new western territories separated from its heartlands in the east had a 7500 km customs boundary studded with small enclaves belonging to other states. To remedy this, Prussia introduced in 1818 a law aiming to create an integrated Prussian customs system and to force the small states surrounded by Prussian territory to join. Over the next fifteen years Prussia, through a mixture of threats and concessions, managed to go far towards creating what can be called a ‘separate confederation with regard to customs policy’ (Nipperdey 1996: 316). In 1833 the Zollverein came into being and by 1842 only eleven German states (not counting Austria) were not included in the union.

Metternich viewed these events with alarm, and warned the Emperor that there was being created ‘a smaller rival confederation… which all too quickly will become accustomed to following its own objectives with its own means’ (Wehler, 1996: 131). In 1841 he even urged Austria's entry into the Zollverein, but fear of Prussian economic competition and the divisive effects on the Austrian Empire of excluding her non-German Habsburg territories from entry ensured that nothing came of this initiative.

The Zollverein has ‘long played an almost mythical role in explanations of Prussia's eventual rise to political and economic supremacy in Germany’ (Voth, 2001: 110). The nationalist historian Treitschke saw it as heralding the ultimate conflict between Austria and Prussia, which ended on the field of Königgrätz – a view largely echoed by post–1945 West German historians such as Böhme who saw it as the economic blueprint for a united Germany (Böhme, 1966). The Zollverein certainly increased Prussian influence over the other German states, and isolated Austria economically within the Confederation, but politically it did not forge a united Germany. In 1866 most of the smaller German states joined Austria against Prussia (see page 37), and it was only the Prussian defeat of Austria at the battle of Königgrätz that enabled Bismarck to destroy the Confederation and drive Austria from Germany

THE GROWTH OF GERMAN NATIONALISM

Nationalism In Germany from 1815 until 1890 nationalism took on several different forms varying from a sense of linguistic and cultural identity to the desire for political union. In the 1880s it was increasingly metamorphosing into an aggressive imperialism aimed at making Germany a colonial power.

Volk A people sharing a common ethnic origin, language and culture, but not necessarily belonging to the same state.

At the end of the eighteenth century there was no single concept of German nationalism. Some German intellectuals identified Germany with the old Holy Roman Empire, others like Johann Herder perceived Germany to be primarily a cultural nation defined by its literature and language. It was the defeat of Prussia and Austria and occupation by the French, 1806–13, that gave birth to the German nationalist movement, but even then there was no uniform ‘national’ reaction against the French occupation. Some Germans looked to the Rhineland Confederation, which Napoleon had formed in 1806 as a future nucleus for the ‘German nation’. The more conservative minded patriots, such as Friedrich Gentz, were drawn to Vienna, while others were attracted by appeals for an uprising of the German Volk against the French invader that were persuasively articulated in Berlin by the philosopher, J.G. Fichte. The theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and liberal man of letters, Ernst Arndt, also began to call for the creation of a nation state. The latter, with his call for a single monarchical German state with its own army, laws and parliament anticipated the ideal of the nineteenth-century German liberals.

How much public support was there in reality for these ideas? Much of the German population in the Rhineland Confederation remained loyal to the French, or at least lukewarm towards their liberators in 1813–14. In March 1813 when Prussia declared war on France, attempts were made to harness the new wave of patriotism, but in reality Frederick William was interested primarily in Prussian rather than German patriotism. As Sheehan has pointed out ‘the Volk's role in its own “liberation” was, at best, a minor one. Napoleon was defeated by regular armies, not patriotic poets and quaintly attired gymnasts’ (Sheehan, 1989: 398). In retrospect, however, the War of Liberation of 1813–14 became a powerful myth, which inspired later generations of nationalists.

After the War of Liberation and the disappointments of the Vienna settlement of 1815, the ambitions of the nationalist movement were initially kept alive by the gymnastic societies and the student fraternities (Burschenschaften). The former set out deliberately to encourage a feeling of Germanness and managed to win the loyalty of a whole generation of school and university students. By 1820 there were 150 different gymnastic societies, with 12,000 members. In many ways they were ‘the prototype of a political party’ (Nipperdey 1996: 244), and pioneered the rally and mass public meeting as a new form of public event. The latter, which were formed at the universities to create a new pan-German ethos of friendship and honour, were nationalist and liberal in orientation. [Doc. 1, p. 120]. The young Bismarck himself briefly joined one of these radical fraternities at Göttingen university in 1832.

This first phase of nationalist agitation was brought to an end by the Karlsbad Decrees (see page 4), but Metternich did not succeed in stamping out the nationalist message. German nationalism was part of a powerful pan-European and even American movement. It was thus inspired and so strengthened by both the example of the Greek uprising against the Turks in the 1820s and the Polish revolt of 1830 in Russian Poland. The threat of a French invasion of the Rhineland in 1840 also triggered a large-scale nationalist reaction, the spirit of which was caught by Nikolas Becker's Rhineland song, Der deutsche Rhein, which was sung to over 200 different tunes throughout Germany. Similarly the ongoing threat by the Danish crown to integrate the Duchies of Schleswig into the Danish state (see page 28) caused growing concern amongst the German nationalists. In July 1844 12,000 people flocked to the Schleswig-Holstein singing festival and the ‘battle hymn’ Schleswig-Holstein meerumschlungen’ (Schlewig-Holstein embraced by the sea) became as popular as the Rhineland song. By 1848 about 250,000 Germans were organized in various nationalist organizations. Thanks to the improvement in communications, the press and the increasingly frequent inter-regional festivals their tentacles had spread throughout Germany

THE GROWTH OF LIBERALISM

Liberalism Belief in national self-determination, constitutional government, individual and economic freedom.

Landtag(e) Elected assembly(ies) at the level of the individual German states.

Up to the 1870s, at least, nationalism belonged, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler puts it with Liberalism like a pair together’ (Wehler, 1996: 397). Both Liberalism and Nationalism desired a united self-governing Germany Liberalism was strongest in south Germany, where local Landtage gave Liberal politicians a platform for their views. In the aftermath of the French revolution of 1830 the Liberals in Brunswick, Hesse-Kassel, Saxony and Hanover were able to exploit local disturbances and fear of the mob to persuade the rulers to grant constitutions. In the Palatinate the journalist, Johann Wirth, set up the Presseverein (press union) as a pressure group to campaign for liberal ideals throughout German speaking Europe. By 1832 it had already had five thousand members and over a hundred branches in Bavaria. In May it organized a large-scale ‘political festival’ in the ruins of the old castle near Hambach, which inspired a series of similar meetings throughout Germany Its organizers called for a uni...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Part 1 The Setting
• Part 2 The Defeat of Austria
• Part 3 The North German Confederation
• Part 4 The Economic and Constitutional Context, 1871–1890
• Part 5 Domestic Politics, 1871–1890
• Part 6 German Foreign and Colonial Policy
• Part 7 Assessment
• Part 8 Documents
• Guide to Further Reading
• References
• Index