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Volume 4. Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany, 1866-1890

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Volume 4. Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany, 1866-1890 Volume 4. Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany, 1866-1890 When compared with the revolutionary excitement of 1848/49 or the horrors of trench warfare in 1914-18, the Bismarckian era can seem drab, an age of equipoise when conformity and compliance were the first duty of the citizen. Certainly, Bismarck scored stunning military and diplomatic victories between 1866 and 1871, but his later years in office have been characterized as a period of “fortification” – not exactly an exciting interpretive key either. But to look beneath the surface calm of Bismarckian Germany is to see quite a different picture, one shot through with contradictions, conflicts, and crises. Contradictions resulted from attempts both to entrench and to extend the international and constitutional agreements achieved at the time of unification. Conflict was inevitable when the effects of rapid economic, social, cultural, and political change became self-reinforcing and as a younger generation of Germans sought new challenges to match the great deeds of their fathers. Crises arose whenever Bismarck felt his authority in jeopardy. How do we assess the causes, consequences, and historical significance of all this turmoil? A preliminary hypothesis, which readers are encouraged to test against the documents and images included in this volume, is that the German Empire was forged in ways that embedded features of a modernizing economy, society, and culture within the framework of an authoritarian polity. This is not a new proposition. Moreover, it is easy to be too categorical in applying the labels “modern” and “authoritarian,” so that everything before 1866 is deemed un- modern and everything after 1890 hypermodern. Many features of German politics after 1866 were more democratic than those in other European nations at the time. Conversely, traditional elements are easily discernable in social relations, the arts, and certain sectors of the industrial economy. Nevertheless, the anvil of tradition and the hammer of modernity allowed Bismarck and other reformist conservatives to mold German authoritarianism into new and durable forms. As a consequence of decisions made (or skirted) in the founding era [Gründerzeit], Imperial Germany was encumbered by barriers to political reform, and those barriers closed off or constrained opportunities to avoid a German fascism in the twentieth century. Despite the 1 ascendancy of bourgeois codes of conduct and the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism, Socialists, Catholics, Poles, Jews, and other out-groups were subject to social discrimination or overt persecution by the state. Science and technology were harnessed to the interests of military firepower, colonial expansion, and the domination of world markets. Women’s demands for equal rights found little resonance. And one charismatic leader exercised near-dictatorial control over his ministerial colleagues, party leaders, and the entire system of state. If citing all these portents of a calamitous future seems like reading history backwards, then we should attune ourselves to the views of contemporary Germans who did not know how the story would end. The documents and images included in this volume help us do exactly that. In examining these sources, we discover that those Germans who found themselves on the right side of class, confessional, and gender boundaries tended to view life in the 1870s and 1880s as stable and predictable. Their pronouncements on the mood of the times are often self- satisfied, and we see them striking complacent poses in the official iconography of the day. For other Germans, though, life was brutal, rigidly controlled, and patently unfair. They, too, took the pulse of the times – in their diaries, autobiographies, letters, party manifestos, and parliamentary speeches, for example. Their quest for something better can also be seen in the images presented here. How do we differentiate one group from another, and how do we find a place for Germans who do not fit neatly into either group? We could perhaps find answers to these questions by considering Max Weber’s three hierarchies of status, wealth, and power. But comparing the stories told by quantitative and non-quantitative documents in this volume illustrates how difficult it is to match up Germans’ objective place within these three hierarchies with their subjective reactions to movement up or down the ladder. The sources in this volume have therefore been grouped in a different way. Both the documents and images have been divided into seven chapters: Demographic and Economic Development; Society; Culture; Religion, Education, and Social Welfare; Politics I: Forging an Empire; Military and International Relations; and Politics II: Parties and Political Mobilization. Each of these chapters, in turn, is broken down into several component sections that take up individual subjects in greater detail. And within these sections, reference is frequently made to individual documents (D) and images (IM), with a link usually being provided so that readers can jump directly to these primary sources. 2 The organization of these materials into chapters and sections should not prevent the reader from approaching this body of textual and visual sources as a single narrative, the story of Germany’s development from 1866-1890, and from drawing larger conclusions. There are, in fact, several overarching themes that run through this volume like threads through a fabric. Four themes are identified and explained below. The reader is encouraged to consider them at various points in this volume – and, of course, to identify new ones. The first theme considers both preferences for stasis and motives for reforming the existing order. Which economic structures, social relationships, cultural attitudes, and political institutions from 1871 remained in place in 1890 – or, for that matter, in 1918? By parsing these texts and examining the details of these images, we can inquire into Germans’ subjective reactions to stability and change in their personal and public lives. The second theme overlaps with the first one. It concerns the tension between authority and protest. Was the principle of authority on display every September 2nd when Germans celebrated the origins of their empire in the crucible of war? Was revolution the clarion call that inspired a wave of strikes, lockouts, and other labor disputes in the final years of Bismarck’s chancellorship? In the documents, we find that representatives of the authoritarian German state – emboldened by the support of elites and others who feared that the pace of change was getting out of hand – were able to erect many barriers to a more equitable distribution of wealth, privilege, and power. We also encounter a surprising number of Germans who were challenging and seeking to overturn such barriers, questioning fundamental assumptions about how authority should be legitimated and deployed. These Germans devised or resurrected forms of political, social, and cultural protest that we typically associate with earlier or later periods of German history – with the age of Romanticism, for example, with the revolutions of 1848/49, or with Expressionism, Pan-Germanism, and anarchism in the early years of the twentieth century. In this volume, however, we grapple with the paradox that authoritarianism actually fostered and radicalized expressions of protest in Bismarck’s Germany, too. The third theme focuses on Germany in its remarkable regional diversity. This diversity cannot be reduced to a center-periphery polarity. To be sure, we often encounter the skeptical views of Germans who felt distant from and alienated by social, cultural, and political developments in the new imperial capital, Berlin. But we must not neglect the extreme geographical unevenness of industrial development, religious affiliations, and regional political cultures across the federal 3 states and provinces of Germany. Only if we abandon the perspective of political leaders in Berlin and explore the back-roads of German history can we properly apprehend the interconnectedness of local, regional, and national affairs. And only then can we appreciate the diversity of outlooks among taxpayers, churchgoers, conscripts, employees, newspaper readers, and others who saw themselves primarily as Leipzigers, Rhinelanders, or Bavarians and as Germans only secondarily. Fourth and lastly, unexpected trajectories and unanticipated crises remind us that Germans’ hopes and fears for the fate of the new German nation did not diminish between 1871 and 1890. This discovery makes us more mindful that the history of Bismarckian Germany should be read as a book whose ending, because it was unknown, fostered a deep sense of unease among contemporaries. Even though much of this anxiety first became apparent or was radicalized in the Wilhelmine period, when fin de siècle Germans looked back on the previous quarter-century they were right to be astounded by how much the face of German society had changed – and how rapidly. The new urgency of addressing a national electorate in the age of universal male suffrage, the increased tempo of work, travel, and communication, the accelerating pace of artistic experimentation, the sudden appearance of threats on the international horizon: all this contributed to a new sense – one of the hallmarks of modernity – that life was changing at an ever-faster pace and that the future was becoming less predictable with each passing day. A final point not too obvious to mention is that historical
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