Germany since 1789

A Nation Forged and Renewed

David G. Williamson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350307261
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

This essential text provides a clear and engaging introduction to the history of modern Germany. The updated and expanded new edition now takes the story back to 1789 and brings it right up to the present day, adopting a controversy-led approach throughout. Visual evidence, maps, documents and key event boxes support the text and aid learning.

Part One

Germany Unified, 1789–1871

1Germany Recast: The French Revolutionary Wars and the Vienna Settlement, 1789–1815

TIMELINE
1789	Start of French Revolution
1792	Prussian defeat at Valmy
1797	Peace of Campo Formio
1798	Congress of Rastatt
1799	Napoleon, First Consul
1801	Treaty of Lunéville
1803	French annexation of left bank of the Rhine
1805	Battle of Austerlitz
1806 July	Rhineland Confederation formed
August	Dissolution of Holy Roman Empire
October	Battles of Jena and Auerstädt
1807	Treaty of Tilsit
	Stein appointed First Minister and embarked on Prussian reform programme
1808	Stein’s dismissal
1809	Austria defeat at Wagram
1810	Hardenberg appointed State Chancellor
1812	French invasion of Russia and subsequent retreat
1813 March	Prussia declared war on France
August	Austria joined war against France
October	French armies defeated at Battle of Leipzig
1814	Napoleon abdicated. Congress of Vienna convened
1815	Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo

Introduction: problems, issues and questions

Like Poland, Germany, to use Norman Davies’ apt description, was also a country ‘on wheels’,¹ which frequently changed its frontiers. What was the real Germany, if such an unhistorical question can be asked? The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the Rhineland Confederation or the Confederation of 1815, or were the two confederations merely transit stages to the Bismarckian Empire? The seismic events of the French Revolution and the establishment of the Napoleonic Empire reshaped Germany. Napoleon is often seen as the midwife of modern Germany. Thomas Nipperdey, for instance, begins his magisterial history of Germany with the words ‘In the beginning was Napoleon’,² but was Napoleon the sole architect of the new German territorial settlement or did the German princes themselves seize the chance to be liberated from the ‘dead hand’ of the Empire? On the other hand it can also be argued that the Empire was far from ‘dead’. Its loose federalism provided a viable structure for the German-speaking peoples of central Europe until it was abolished by Napoleon. Indeed it is arguable that its presence is still missed today by federally and European minded Germans.

Military defeat was the catalyst to the Prussian reform movement, but how accurate is the term ‘defensive modernization’, which is often used to describe the Prussian reforms? Do these reforms, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler argues, mark the point at which Prussia began to diverge from western Europe, as they only partially modernized Prussia by leaving the traditional authorities still in place? Increasingly, as we shall see, historians are rejecting or modifying this somewhat simplistic interpretation of Prussian historical development.³ The French occupation certainly led to the growth of a German political nationalism, particularly in Prussia, but did this in reality amount to much? Had the new nationalists any idea of what sort of Germany they wanted, or was their nationalism essentially a romantic and often blood-curdling backlash against the French? Was the creation of the German Confederation a ‘betrayal’ of German nationalism or, as modern historians argue, was it in fact an institution shaped by the Holy Roman Empire’s legacy of federalism and a product of its times?⁴

Germany on the eve of the French Revolution

On the eve of the French Revolution German Europe consisted of some 687,000 square kilometres and 29 million inhabitants and was potentially the largest political entity in Europe, but it was fractured into 1800 different territories varying in size from the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian German, Bohemian and Moravian territories of the Hapsburg Empire to small territories of barely a few square kilometres. Many of these were further subdivided by internal ecclesiastical, legal and fiscal boundaries. Up to a point these fragmented states found a degree of political expression in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Its aim, as James Sheehan has succinctly put it, was ‘not to clarify and dominate but rather to order and balance fragmented institutions and multiple loyalties’.⁵

The Holy Roman Empire

The origins of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation lay in Charlemagne’s subjugation of the Germanic tribes in the last third of the 8th century. Crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800, Charlemagne’s ambition was to reconstruct the western part of the old Roman Empire. He was to succeed only briefly and some 40 years later the Empire was partitioned, with the western section ultimately becoming France, while the eastern section eventually became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and was to survive until its abolition by Napoleon in 1806. For much of its history the Empire was characterized by its lack of centralization, its diversity and by an elected head of state, the Holy Roman Emperor. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries this very diversity led German and Anglophone historians to dismiss the Empire, at least for its last century and a half, as a sclerotic anachronism preventing the emergence of a German national state. In retrospect the future seemed to belong to Prussia, which possessed the necessary military and economic force to unify Germany and propel her into ‘modernity’. This ‘Borussian’ or Prusso-centric view was epitomized by the works of Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), the nationalist historian, who was appointed Professor of History at Berlin University (see p. 116) and was drummed into generations of German school children. Even defeat in 1945 and the dissolution of Prussia (see p. 295) failed initially to alter the perception of the Empire as a hopelessly failed institution. Indeed historians, seeking to explain the disastrous turn of German history in the first part of the 20th century, blamed the Empire for delaying the emergence of a German unitary state and so causing the catastrophic divergence of its history from its neighbours in western Europe. In other words it was one of the key reasons responsible for its so-called Sonderweg, a term that will frequently be referred to in this work. This view did not go unchallenged. As early as 1967 Karl von Aretin in a seminal study began the process of looking at the Empire on its own terms. He and later historians have shown that it was ‘far from moribund’.⁶ Indeed the development of the European Union has led some historians to see it as a forerunner of European integration. Johannes Burkhardt, for instance, observed that it ‘had already … solved the constitutional issues, which others are beginning to discuss in the twenty-first century’.⁷

Sonderweg: Literally special path. Scholars such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, using Britain and France as models, have argued that industrialization in Germany was not accompanied by social and political ‘modernization’ or democratization. Hence Germany took its ‘special path’. This is disputed, particularly by D. Blackbourn and G. Eley.

In fact comparisons with the EU are exaggerated. Whereas the EU seeks by centralization to establish itself as a major political power, the Empire on the other hand attempted to protect the status quo and the independence of the smaller states. In the words of the Swiss Jurist, Johannes von Müller, it made Germany ‘free through fragmentation’.⁸ To what extent did it in reality achieve this? Was the Empire a viable political organization, which in retrospect could have offered the German peoples an alternative to the state, which Bismarck created? Essentially, an effective state must enjoy credibility in the eyes of its subjects. To retain this it has to be able to defend its inhabitants militarily and, through an effective judicial system, guarantee their freedom to pursue their business free from intimidation and violence. To accomplish this the state must be able to raise the necessary funds through taxation, ensure that sufficient armed forces are raised through conscription and be able to guarantee an independent legal system. In fact as Peter Wilson has emphasized, imperial military and fiscal institutions did offer for much of its history ‘collective security for the entire Reich’. ⁹ The Reichstag allotted to each territory of the Empire a sum of money and men to be raised, which enabled it in 1735, for instance, to mobilize some 85,000 troops. The Reich’s legal system, overseen by the Supreme Court, the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Cameral Court), provided an invaluable framework for solving disputes between the states. Throughout the 18th century it dealt with an average of 230–250 cases a year.

The head of the Empire, the Emperor, was elected by the college of electors (see below). Each new emperor had to sign an ‘electoral capitulation’, an agreement which committed him not to violate the laws and customs of the Reich. The Emperor’s political powers could be divided into two categories: his royal prerogatives, which empowered him to reassign the minor estates (fiefs) when they fell vacant, and to bestow honours on the nobility. More importantly he had the right to appoint a number of judges in the imperial courts and set the order of the agenda in the Reichstag. Although the Emperor’s prerogatives were increasingly limited, he nevertheless retained considerable influence through his powers of patronage and by the fact that as ‘his powers were never listed completely, they remained theoretically unlimited enabling him to derive new rights in response to changed circumstances’.¹⁰

The Reichstag was divided into three colleges or curia to use the Latin term: the College of Electors, which by 1777 consisted of the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne and the rulers of Bohemia, the Palatinate, Saxony, Brandenburg and Hanover, the College of Princes and the College of Cities. Did the Reichstag together with the Kreis assemblies constitute a ‘proto parliamentary’ system in that together they possessed some of the characteristics of representative institutions?¹¹ The Reichstag took few decisions of principle. By the late 18th century its main role was to discuss and legitimate actions taken either singularly or collectively by the princes and to strive for consensus. The ten Kreis assemblies had been established in the 16th century and played an important regional role not only in implementing decisions by the Reichstag and the verdicts of the courts but also in ensuring that the interests of the lesser territories would be taken into account by the larger German states.

Kreis: Literally circle, an administrative subdivision.

Austria and Prussia

There were two rival centres of potential hegemony in the Reich: Austria and Prussia. Neither was a compact nation state and both had territory outside the Empire. Austria was a large disparate empire, the territories of which included the Archduchy of Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, the Bohemian and Hungarian crown lands, as well as the Austrian Netherlands, Lombardy, Mantua and Galicia. By 1720 the territories controlled by the Habsburgs were greater than those of the entire Reich. Inevitably this made the Reich of less importance to Austria, even though the imperial title of Emperor, which remained with the Habsburg dynasty except for a brief interlude from 1742 to 1745, still afforded the dynasty considerable prestige, influence and scope for patronage.

From 1640 to 1786 Prussia was ruled by the Hohenzollern dynasty, which produced three monarchs of exceptional calibre. Thanks to their military, fiscal and administrative policies, Prussia was able to raise and finance a disproportionately large army. Territorially Prussia’s emergence in the 18th century as a great German power occurred in three stages. It acquired a strong central European core during the 17th century and between 1702 and 1745 added further territories, the most important of which was Silesia. To this it added the land gained from the three partitions of Poland in 1772–1795. Its opportunities to expand were also greatly assisted by its closeness to Poland and Sweden, which were p...