Taylor argues that the relationship between Prussia and Austria is central to understanding contemporary German history. What is his argument? Do you agree with it?
i
I
I
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
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• THE COURSE- OF .
GERMAN HISTORY
A SURVEY OF
THE DEVELOPMENT OF
GERMANY SINCE
1815
by
A. J. P. TAYLOR
Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford
HAMISH HAMILTON
LONDON
First impression—July 1S45
Second revised impression—September 1945
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY WESTERN PRINTING SERVICES LTD., BRISTOL
3).D
CONTENTS
Preface, p. 1
CHAPTER I
Divided Germany : the Legacy of the Holy Roman Empire, p. 1
CHAPTER II
The Ascendancy of France, 1792-1814, p. 33
CHAPTER III
The German Confederation : the Years of Austro-Prussian
,
Partnership, 1 8 1 5-48, p. 46 —
–
CHAPTER IV
1848 : the Year of German Liberalism,/?. 65 /
CHAPTER V
The Ascendancy of Austria, 1849-60,/?. 89
CHAPTER VI
The Conquest of Germany by Prussia, 1862-71, /?. 99
ItCHAPTER VII ^
Bismarckian Germany: the Ascendancy of Prussia, 1871-90,/?. 11
CHAPTER VIII
The Germany of William II : the Conquest of Prussia
by Germany, 1890-1906,/?. 138
CHAPTER IX
The Crisis of Hohenzollern Germany, 1906-16,/?. 155
CHAPTER X
The Rule of the German Army, 1916-19,/?. 171
CHAPTER XI
Republican Interregnum, 1919-30,/?. 189
CHAPTER XII
Demagogic Dictatorship and the Completion of German
Unity after 1930,/?. 205
Index, p. 225
5
HISTORY
MAPS
drawn by archie harradine
facingpage
Germany in 1 8 1 5. 46
Germany in 1871. 116
Germany in 1919. 190
The German Empire at its
greatest extent. 224
PREFACE
This book is a piece occasion. It is meant to be serious history. All the
same, I should never have written it except for the events of the last five
years and, still more, the need of some historical background to the pohti-
cal problems of the present. I would
of German history, except perhags during gi£ revolut[ons^^^^ and
in some’parts of the reign of William II ; and I have never succeeded in
living niyielf intolEe spirit of German history, as I found it possible to
recapture something of the spirit of nineteenth-century Austria. Now
that this book is written, I find_Gmnan histpry not only^ distas^
but as myster[qus as before: the exglanationsjJm
reason, but^ not my^ feelings. Still, many years of attempting to teach
German history, and especially the experience of lecturing to the most
varied kinds of Service audiences during the war, drove me to the con-
clusion that, failing anyone better qualified, I must shoulder this task.
Not ignorance of the broad outlines of German history, but total miscon-
ception of its sense and meaning, bedevil EngUsh thought about Ger-
many ; this book is an attempt to put the sense right.
There are, of course, already plenty of books in English about German
history. Many of them are written by Germans or by Englishmen edu-
cated in Germany and absorbed into German ways of thought. Even
when they are sincere and honest, as they often are, their mental idiom
is strange to the English reader ; and it occurs to none of them that there
is anything strange in German history. As to English writers on Ger-
many, they have never recovered from the shock of discovering that the,
victory of German nationalism was not accompanied by all the beneficent
results which were expected in the middle of the nineteenth century.
This disappointment is altogether inexplicable on the basis of the doctrines
of Mazzini which, somewhat watered down, still serve English writers
on Europe as a substitute for political thought. The only ones to escape
from complete befuddlement are the Marxists; but, as they too start
from a Germanic mode of thought and accept the master’s assumption
that the victory of Germany and the victory of Socialism are somehow
inextricably intertwined, they too find the development of the story not
at all according to expectations. The reader will find in this book a good
deal about the Junkers and captains of heavy industry, who are now
generally cast as the villains of the piece ; but he will find that the German
working classes, and even Marx himself, have not escaped “Marxist
analysis.”
^
Apart from being an Englishman, not educated in Germany—them-
7
PREFACE
selves rare qualifications in a writer of German history—T can claim to
iiave brought out two aspects of German history which are often oyqi-
looked : the interplay of Kleindeutsch and Grossdeutsch pro^Tammes, and
the conflict between Germans and Slavs. Everyone knows that the Little
German and Greater German policies (an acceptable pnglish echo,
I hope, of the German phrases) clashed in 1848 and in the years before
1866 ; but it is usually assumed that the struggle had then been fought out.
I have tried to show that these two policies never ceased to be alter-
> natives until they were finally amalgamated in the struggle for world
supremacy in 1941, and that the continued rivalry between them alone
makes sense of German history. I have laboured still more to remind
the reader that Germany has two limits, a west and an east, and that the
great fluctuating eastern limit against the Slavs has shaped German
destinies. We in the west see only the formidable bullc and unity of the
seventy or eighty million Germans, and so fail to realize how dwarfed
they will be when the two hundred and fifty million Slavs at last stand
on their own feet, politically and economically. But the Germans have
been in process of realizing this cloud in the east for more than a century
;
this is the fear which underlies their ceaseless plans of aggression and
mastery. The Little German policy was one way of attempting to meet
/the Slav menace, the Greater German policy another. No German of
i / political consequence ever thought of accepting the Slavs as equals and
^ living at peace with them. Of course many Germans, particularly in
western Germany, never thought about the Slavs at all, still less about
the rival means of holding them in subjection. These are the “good”
Germans who obtrude into every discussion of the German question,
their “goodness” being synonymous with ineffectiveness. The historian
cannot deal with the poUtically impotent except in so far as this dead-
weight is thrown into the scales by more agile and positive forces. As
this book deals with what has gone on in Germany, it cannot deal, except
by im.plication, with what has remained passive and even occasionally
disapproving. There were and, I dare say, are many millions of well-
meaning kindly Germans; but what have they added up to?
This book attempts to answer the historian’s question—how did this
. state of things come about? It cannot pretend to answer the politician’s
question—how is this state to be remedied? The historian does not deal
in remedies ; he thinks not of ” solutions,” but of the next stage in a process
of conflict of forces. At best he can record that certain “solutions” have
been tried and have proved either successful or unsuccessful; this is
useful, but not decisive, evidence that they might succeed or fail in the
future. The “German problem” has two distinct sides. How can the
peoples of Europe be secured against repeated bouts of German aggres-
sion? And, how can the German people discover a settled, peaceful form
8
PREFACE
of political existence? The first problem is capable of easy solution and
has often been solved. It was solved by Richelieu and by Metternich,
and the present-day formulation of the solution is presented in the last
sentence of this book. It is, in general terms: unity of Germany’s neigh-
bours, disunity among Germans. If the peoples of western civiiizationj
and the peoples of the Slav world remain united and powerful, and if they
keep Austria separate from the rest of Germany, we shall hear no more
of German aggression ; if they fall out, and if Austria is brought into
Germany, the Germans will once more solve their problems at the expense
of others. The second, the internal, problem is not one to which non-
Germans can contribute much in the way of solution. It may add to
European security to control, or to dismember, the heavy industry of the
Ruhr; and it will be very pleasing to distribute the estates of eastern
Germany particularly to Polish peasants. But anyone who supposes that
the disappearance of Junkers and great capitahsts will lead the Germans
to accept the Slavs as brothers should read the writings of Marx and
Engels on the Czechs, Poles, and Croats. It has taken about four
hundred years to build the Germans into their present frame of mind;
and there is no knowing how long it will need to take the frame down
again.
‘ ‘
,
—
The Germans cannot go back to a traditional settled way of life, as the
French attempted to do, not without success, in 1815. The political
traditions of Germany have been in a state of decay since the time of
Luther; and Germany has been subjected to revolutionary explosions of
increasing severity since the incursion of the spirit and the soldiers of the
French Revolution, until now her political system is as much derelict
rubble as the worst-bombed town of the Ruhr. Were I a German, I
should not hope for some change of heart affecting the entire nation,
but should rather start afresh: go back, that is, to the municipal auto-
nomies and small states which once made up Germany. I do not mean
to imply by this that “separatism” is still aUve as a serious political
force: the separatist republics of 1919, which the Allies so gratuitously
assisted in strangling, were the last splutters of free Germany. But
“particularism,” meaning local pride and local interest, may well revive
with the downfall of the Reich ; and the best future for Germany would
be one modelled on Switzerland and Luxemburg, the two Germanic
states which took the right turning. But I do not believe that such an
outcome could be induced from without. In fact, the less the victorious
powers concern themselves with internal German affairs the better-
quite apart from the fact that none of them has any clear conception of
what it wishes to substitute for the present system of government. If the
Allies remain united, keep Germany disarmed, and avoid any suggestion
of treaty revision, especially of frontiers, it will then be possible to watch
A* 9
PREFACE
the effect on the Germans of offering them the rewards of peaceful industry
and peaceful co-operation. In time the Germans might become fat, lazy,
and even content. But I hope that we shall not, during my lifetime, try
the experiment of relying exclusively on the laziness and the content.
One experiment of relying on German goodwill to save us trouble should
be enough. The effort of remaining powerful and the still greater effort
of remaining on good terms with the Slav peoples will be, in the long
run, not only the safer but the easier course.
The reader may complain that I have tried to put too much into this
book. But; I have left out, or at any rate scamped, two most vital topics:
the internal affairs of the Habsburg monarchy and its succession states,
and the foreign policy of Germany especially in the days of William II.
Austria did not cease to be a part of the German question when she was
excluded from the political system of Germany in 1866. The survival of
the Habsburg monarchy ; the support of the Habsburg monarchy in war
;
the relations of the German and Austrian republics in 1918 ; and, especially,
the efforts both to promote and to resist the Anschluss which was achieved
in 1938; all played a vital part in German political development. It is
lopsided to deal with the German-PoHsh conflict in eastern Prussia and
not in the same detail with the German-Czech conflict in Bohemia;
absurd to discuss the functions and composition of the Reichstag in
Berlin and not to discuss those of the Reichsrat in Vienna. My excuse
is that 1 published a history of the Habsburg monarchy from 1815 to 1918
three years ago ; and that it contains all the matter which 1 have ruthlessly
excluded here.
Foreign relations are omitted with less justification, especially in view
of my theme that German foreign policy is a “function” of Germany’s
internal conflict. Moreover, English knowledge of German foreign policy
is in an even more lamentable state than our knowledge of her domestic
affairs: imperfectly known for the days of Bismarck, perversely known
for the days after Bismarck, apparently unknown for the period of the
Four Years’ War, and the subject of journalistic (not historical) contro-
versy for everything after the Four Years’ War. In fact the almost total
failure of English historians to contribute anything towards the under-
standing of international relations in the last fifty years makes one
ashamed of one’s profession. Economists, psychologists, lawyers, journa-
Hsts, even novelists, have tried their hand at this historical problem
;
only
historians have accepted the German version open-mouthed. If I can ever
snatch leisure from the time-consuming life of a College tutor, I will
try to remedy this deficiency ; and I was indeed some way into an analysis
of European relations between the Congress of Berlin and the meeting at
Paris in 1919 when I turned aside to write this book. If 1 complete it, this
book would then appear more sensible ; but at present I can only apologize
10
PREFACE
to my readers that my cursory references to international affairs should
clash with their preconceived notions.
It will be apparent no doubt, to the reader that I have written this book
by lifting facts from a great many other books and, from a few, even ideas.
The American method, in such cases, is to list all the books that have been
pilfered; I prefer the English method of mentioning none. If the reader
does not accept my credentials, he will not be induced to do so by a display
of the sources from which my plumes are borrowed. But I must name
one book which redeems the dreary waste of English writing on this
theme. From the inexhaustible quarry of The Economic Development of
France and Germany, 1815-1914, I have carried off countless fragments
and hewn them into shapes which, I fear, Sir John Clapham will not
recognize.
. I am grateful to Mr. John Crow, Mr. Nicholas Henderson, Major
W. L. McElwee, and Dr. Hubert Ripka, for improving my manuscript
in various ways.
A. J. P. Taylor
Holywell Ford, Oxford
September 14, 1944
11
” THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
CHAPTER I
DIVIDED GERMANY:
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
The history of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains everything
except moderation, and m the course of a thousand years the Germans
have experienced everything except normahty. They have dominated
Europe, and they have been the helpless victims of the domination of
others
;
they have enjoyed liberties unparalleled in Europe and they have
fallen victim to despotisms equally without parallel; they have produced
the most transcendental philosophers, the most spiritual musicians, and
the most ruthless and unscrupulous pohticians. “German” has meant at
one moment a being so sentimental, so trusting, so pious, as to be too good
for this world; and at another a being so brutal, so unprincipled, so
degraded, as to be not fit to Uve. |Both descriptions are true : both types of
German have existed not only at the same epoch, but in the same person.
Only the nprmal person, not particularly goo^^j^^^^arUcvilarl^^
healthy, sane^modefate—Ke”Kas” never” set his stamp_pQ German history
.
Geographically the people of the centre, the Germans have never found
a middle way of life, either in their thought or least of all in their pohtics.
One looks in vain in their history for a juste milieu, for common sense
—
the two quahties which have distinguished France and England. Nothing
is normal in German history except violent oscillations.
/ Clertajn pern^^ influenced German history,
sraee tSe time when Charlemagne, by establishing the Holy Roman Empife,*^”
advanced German history from the stage of tribal legends. First was their
geographic
g
osition^ The Germans are the peoples of the north European
plain, the people without a defined natural frontier. Without the sharp
limit of mountain ranges, except at the Alps and the Bohemian mountains,j
the great plain is intersected by four great rivers (Rhine, Elbe, Oder,]
Vistula) dividing fines sharp enough to spfit the German people up amon^
themselves, not rigid enough to confine them within settled frontiers.*
There is no determinea”gographic point for Gerrnan expansion, equally i
none for Gerrnan contraction
;
and, in the course of a thousand years,
geographic Germany has gone out and in like a concertina. At times
Germany has been confined within the Rhine and the Elbe; at others it
has blown itself out to the Pyrenees and to the Caucasus. Every German
frontieL.is_an|ficial, therefore impermanent; that is the permanence of
German geography.
“””^ ‘
Enduring too for a thousand years has been their ethnographical 7 ,
13
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
position. Here too the Germans have been the people of the middle;
always they have had two neighbours and have shown two faces. To their
^wesi was the Roman EnTgj^ its ^ieir, French civilization ; to theirjast,
^^’^^I^S:I3BJSIS^^m^^^ Germans pressed
^^^^ therefore the Germans have ‘always appeared as
barbarians, but the most civilized of barbarians, eager to learn, anxious
to imitate
;
and the record of German civilization is a story of sedulous
and exaggerated JniijLatiim^CJja^^^^^^^^ order in the west—an
imitation which began with Charlemagne’s apeing of Caesar and has
ended in Hitler’s apeing of Napoleon. To the Slavs of the east, however,
the Germans have made a very different appearance: ostensibly the
defenders of civilization, they have defended it as barbarians, employing
the technical means of civihzation, but not its spirit. For a thousand years,
again from Charlemagne to Hitler, the Germans have been “converting”‘
^he Slavs from paganism, from Orthodox Christianity, from Bolshevism,
or merely from being Slavs; their weapons have varied, their method has
always been the same—extermination. Most of the peoples of Europe
have, at one time or another, been exterminators. The French exter-
minated the Albigensians in the thirteenth century and the Huguenots in
the seventeenth; the Spaniards exterminated the Moors; the English
exterminated the North-American Indians and attempted in the seventeenth
Century to exterminate the Irish. But no other people has pursued exter-
mination as a permanent policy from generation to generation for a
thousand years
;
and it is foolish to suppose that they have done so without
adding something permanent to their national tradition. No one can
understand the Germans who does not appreciate their anxiety lo learn
from, and to imitate, the West; but equally no one can understand
Germans who does not appreciate their determination to exterminate the
East.
^
It may seem a platitude to count the German people as the third perma^
^1?£HJ?.S^^”^^ ^^^^^^
‘
t>ut it is a |)latitilde which is often over-
rookecT. The GeHfnan ^national state is new; but the consciousness of
German national existence is old, certainly older than the consciousness
of Spanish national consciousness, perhaps older than that of England
or France. The Germans have been, for more than a thousand years,
unmistakably a people; though that does not imply that they have always
been the same sort of people. A political community has a way of life
like a school or a trade union; and the individuals, so far as they are
members of the community, are shaped by that way of life, even while
they are helping to change it. “National character” is the shorthand
which the historian must use in order to express the effect on a com-
munity of geographical, political, and social surroundings. There has
bem. a GermanJ^^ti ^
THE ^a^EGACYlOF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
charactfiL, nat,.stci£teid6ntical^ but reco^izablv the same. By the time
of Charlemagne the Germans had settled down : from then on they were
shaped by unchanging geographical circumstances, and by the political
neighbourhood of the French on the one side and the Slavs on the other.
The area of German settlement has been expanded, but never radically
moved. ^ There was never such a revolution as, in English history, the
change from a small island off the coast of Europe to the centre of a great
world empire. When, late in their history, the Germans talked of world
empire, it was no more than a new version of the empire of Charlemagne.
This routine has given to German history a pattern almost monotonous
;
of them, more truly than of most people, it may be said that there is
nothing new under the sun. If a natural cataclysm had placed a broad
sea between the Germans and the French, the German character would
not have been dominated by militarism. If—a more conceivable possi-
bility—the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbours,
as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the
Indians, the effect woulcl have been what it has been on the Americans:
the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and inter-
national reconciliation{ Constant surroundings shaped a German national
character strong enough- to withstand the increasing changes in social
circumstance which occurred in Germany in modern times.
\For a thousand years also Germany has had a political form. The
Esidi^thQ political expression of the German people, is the oldest political
organization in Europe, older than England, France, Hungary, or Poland
;
and therefore older by far than any other European state. Since the
moment when Charlemagne founded the Reich in 800, there has never
been a time when the Germans were without the framework of a political
organization. For even when the old Reich was dissolved in 1806, its
place was taken first by the Confederation of the Rhine and then by fRe
German Confederation in 1815. The continuity of the Reich is obscured
by a twofold paradox. First, at iio time before 1933 did the^glitical
. energies of the German people find their sole outlet in the Reich ; for
mWfl)rTrrtT!ousand years more political energy went into maintaining
German states independent of the Reich, or even hostile to it, than into
thj£.S.eich^ jtself. Secondly, at-no time did the Reich coincide with the
“^t’^”R^ Av.’g^^p^
f.h,f^ German people ! it has always either carried its
frontiers, far beyond the jQerman national area or failed to include all
Germans within its UmitSy/ A history of the French state would be, by
and large, a political history of the French people ; a history of the EngHsh
state would certainly be a political history of the English people.CBut
a history of the Reich would not coincide with a political history of the
German peopl^ In the early period it would bring too much in ; in the
later period it would shut too much out. Yet, apart from the Reich, the
15
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
Germans have no continuous political history. The historian is pre-
sented with a problem of presentation almost impossible of solution.
The Empire which Charlemagne founded set the tone for German
history from the beginning. It was not intended as a German national
state ; it claimed to be a universal Empire, a revival of the Empire of the
Caesars. The revival did not come from the inhabitants of Rom.e, of
Paris, or of Naples ; it came from barbarians, whose only connection with
the real empire was that their ancestors had helped to destroy it. The
history of the Germans as a civilized people thus began with the delibexate,
planned imitation of an institution which had never been theirs. The
Ernpire claimed’to’be uniyi^saL Here too the Germans strucic the same
note from the beginning.fUnlike other peoples, they did not start from
their own national state and gradually advance claims to domination:
they demanded everything from the beginning Most typical of all, this
Empire—ostensibly the bulwark of Christian civilization and often
accepted as such by the peoples of the West both then and since—inaugur-
ated at once the policy of exterminating the Slav peoples of the East.
niversalism, apeing of foreign traditions, ruthlessness towards the Slav
peoples, these three things were to form the pattern of the Reich for more
than a thousand years, and to compose the “national character” of the
53,Qerman people. There was nothing innate or mysterious in this. The
German character was determined by their geographical position: they
were the barbarians on the edge of a great civilization. Hence their
anxiety both tojnaster jthis_^ imitate it; hence their
barbaricruthlessness towards the peoples who_were pressTngon thern from
behmdTyThey were the j3jgofile„ofJ,he^^^^^ dualism was dictated to
tHem.^
T^harlemagne’s Empire claimed to be universal, and the Reich main-
tained the claim sometimes more and sometimes less resolutely for six
hundred years thereafter. But from the first it was unmistakably a German
institution, and became progressively more so. By the fifteenth century
it had acquired the almost official title of the “Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation”—a contradiction in terms which confesses the
failure to become either universal or a German national state. It both
gave and denied to the Germans a national existence.JJe Reich was the
greatest of, feudal orgajnizations^ and the “German Nation” of its title
included only tHe great feudatories, the secular and ecclesiastical princes
and the Free Cities. The Emperors, in the intervals of pursuing their
universalist ambitions, made spasmodic efforts for centuries to reduce
the great feudatories to obedience ; but their eff”orts never succeeded, and
ycach failure left the feudal magnates a little nearer independence than they
/had been before. In particular, the yniversalist aims of the Emperor^ always brought him up against the Pope, with his more truly universal
16
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
position; and the Pope in self-defence stirred up feudal insubordination
in the Emperor’s rear. The position ofJBmperQrj^nained theoretically
elective, ^though certain great families esta,blished a hereditary series;
and the greatest of these, the Hohensta^^ well have established
a real monarchical power in Germany, had it not been for the distraction
of their Italian adventures and the resultant” “conflicts vAth the Pa£acy.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century the prestige of the Emperors
was at its lowest ebb; and one of a family which had dropped out of the)
Imperial running two hundred years before, the Habsburgs, was elected!
Emperor by the princes almost as a gesture of contempt—he was to be*
the despised holder of an empty title. But the Habsburgs were the greatest
wielders in history of the strange political weapon of marriage; and
within a century their successful marriages surrounded princely Germany
on every side. _CharIe§_Y_who was elected Emperor in 1519, hemmed
Germany in with his family possessions—the Netherlands on the north-
west, the Burgundian lands on the west, Milan on the south, and tbe
reversion to Bohemia and Hungary to the south-east. In addition he was
King of Spain, and so could draw on the wealth of the Indies for the
subduing of the German princes^ The moment for the decisive struggle
against feudalism seemed to have come. Within Germany, everything
called for a national king. The peoples both to the east and west of
Germany, challenged by Imperial claims, had in answer created their own
national states with unrestricted sovereignty : France and England on the
one side, Poland, Hungary, and even Bohemia on the other, proclaimed
the end of the middle ages and so spurred the Germans on to achieve
their unification. In fact the task seemed easier for the Germans than for
any other people. Everywhere the national states which overthrew the
feudal order depended on the support of the urban trading classes
;
where,
as in Poland, the trading classes were weak, the evolution was incomplete.
Germany was at this time the life-line of European commerce, and her
towns towered above all others in prosperity. Indeed the national
monarchies in other countries sprang even more from resistance to the
German commercial supremacy than from resistance to the Emperor.
The trade of all Europe was poured by Venice into the funnel of the
Rhine; and then was poured out from the great cities along the coast
of the Nofth Sea and the Baltic. These cities of the Rhine and of the
Hanseatic League_,wer^’VGemaifyl!.^^
“burghe^ civilization an(ijiidiicy[gdL^^ com-
merceVTriiis Gerrncmy^^pXiaj^^ existence, now
seerne^^ eiger to range jtself behind a natiimal king for the destruction of
feudaliinrand ,tb^e .eslabil^Ltognt of a national state.
Two gl£at upheavalSa..jQne eaonomic^ pne spiritual,^ abruptly ended
jthese highjh<^p^^ - The great geographic discoveries ruined Germany , n THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY almost overnight and destroyed the confidence of the German burghers ; . the Reformation, failing to conquer all Germany, created a lasting religious division. Thejogening of the Cape route to India caused an economic collapse in Germany, ^he effects of which iasted for three hundred" years. From Ibeing the centre of world commerce, Germany became within a generation _an economic backv/ater. Her markets outside Germany passed to others. The lvealth of her great burghers vanished away. Her great trading towns dwindled in size, shrinking ever more meanly within the mediaeval walls which they had formerly out- grown. Every trading community experiences the ups and downs atten- dant on the world market; but no trading community in modern Europe /has ever experienced such a profound and lasting disaster as did the German middle classes just at the moment when their financial power was at its greatest and their national consciousness fully asserted—^just at the moment, indeed, when they might have been expected to become the dominating political force, as they were already the dominating economic I force, in central Europe. ^ermany of the first two decades of the sixteenth century was a Ger- "^^"2J!L§.^^^LY^H^^^"v culture, assertively self-confident, standard- bearer^of the Renaissance, High-water fnS^^ "of Germany's great age was the assertion of a national and reformed religion, expressed in the enthu- siasm for Luther which swept all parts and all classes of Germany in 1519 and 1520. ^his was Jhe. decisiye^^^ German^ history. Napoleon once said that if the Emperor Charles V had put himself at the head of German Protestantism in 1520 he would have created a united German nation and solved the German question."^ But the failure was more than personal: if German development had continued at its previous rate it would have created a united nation even against the Emperor and his universaHst ideas. But the German impulse flagged with disastrous suddenness, and in none more rapidly than in Luther himself. From a resolute and irresistible popular leader, Luther suddenly became a timid mystic repudiating all connection with worldly affairs. The change was forced on Luther by the Peasants' revolt of 1525. Luther had hastily to decide whether by the "German nation" to which he had appealed he meant the German people or merely estabhshed authority, the princes. He decided in favour of the princes and became the wild, unrestrained advocate of a policy of absolutism and of ruthless repression. Here, as in all that he did, Luther reflected the spirit of the German people : he showed the lack of confidence in them which they felt them- selves. The Luther who howled against the peasants spoke for a Germany ^ose markets had crumbled away. No man has ever been so representative of the German spirit, and no man has had such a deep and lasting effect on German history. German)^ 18 • ~ THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE is the Germany of Lulher to this da^. He was a man of great intellectual and of supreme literary ability, with a readiness to maintain his convictions to the death. But he turned with repugnance from all the values of Western civilization. He owed his breach with Catholicism to a visit to Rome, when he had seen, and rejected, the greatest glories of the Renais- sance. He hated art, culture, intellect, and sought an escape into an >•imagined Germany of the past, romantic, irrational, non-European. In
I Luther was inaplidt thajen^ of the Rornantic^movei^nt, the
1 German nationalist sense_o£Jb^^ all the elevation^f
!
feeling over thinking which is characteristic of modern Germany. In
Luther, German sentiment first asserted itself,’and_it asserted itself against
reason, against civilization, against the West. ^In the rest of Europe,
religious reform implied going forward ; with Luther it meant going baclh
repudiating everything which was carrying civilized life beyond barbarism.
As once the German conquerors of Rome had prided themselves on being
simpler, purer, than the heirs of Cicero and Virgil, so now Luther set
himself up against Michael Angelo and Raphael, Even the technical
occasion of his breach with Rome was symbolic : he objected to the sale
of indulgences in order to raise money for the building of St. Peter’s—if it
had been for the purpose of massacring German peasants, Luther might
never have become a Protestant. ^
In nothing was Luther more typical than in his attitude to the princes.
Here, more than in any other aspect, did he represent the despair in
themselves which had overcome the German middle classes. When, in
1521, Luther went to the Diet at Worms to defend his doctrines, he went
under the protection of and as the spokesman of a united and enthusiastic
people; never has there been a more tumultuous journey through Ger-
many. The enthusiasm vanished overnight, and Luther crept under the
wing of the princes of northern Germany, who became Protestant not as
the most advanced, but as the most backward, section of German society
—for them Lutheranism was merely a weapon against the political inter-
ference either of the Emperor or of the trading classes. Lutheranism, at
first a movement of Reform, became, and remained, the most conservative
of religions ;
though it preached the absolute supremacy of the individual
conscience within, it preached an equally absolute supremacy forthe
territorial power without. fLuther gave to Germany a consciousness o
national existence and, through his translation of the Bible, a national
tongue ; but he also gave to Germany the Divine Right of Kings, or rather
the Divine Right of any estabUshed authority. Obedience was the first,
and last, duty of the Christian man. The State can do no wrong;) there-
fore, whatever the State orders, that the Christian man can do without
danger to his conscience, and, indeed, the more devout the individual, the
more eager he will be to carry out the most violent and unscrupulous
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
orders of 4he prince, God’s mouthpiece. In the general decline which
was overcoming Germany, the princes represented the one point of
stabiHty and order, and the German middle classes, speaking through
Luther, surrendered to the princes without reserve. The movement
against Rome which Luther personified had sprung from a national
resentment against the Papacy, which, by its co-operation with the great
feudatories against the Emperor, had prevented national unity. Lutheran-
ism certainly destroyed Papal influence in north Germany, but, lacking
confidence in itself, fell into the arms of the princes and thus actually
strengthened, indeed made triumphant, the particularism which it had
begun by attacking, the first great expression of the German national
spirit repudiated the universalism of the middle ages, only to fall into a
particularism which made German unification impossible for centurie^.
Not only in its, deyotionjQ;: the authorities did Lutheranism increase
y/’ German disunity.^t failed to become the national reh|lmT]DfairGermaSs
;
in fact it carried with it little more than hW the’ German peoper| Most of
fhe; nations of Europe vv^ere left, as a TestilT’of the Reforrnation, with
dissenting minorities, whether of Roman Catholics or Protestants;
but in every case, except that of Germany, they were unmistakable
minorities, excluded from political life and in some cases eliminated later
altogether. In Germany the division was permanent, and another element
was added to the existing categories of German duaHsm. The backward,
impoverished princes of the north-east and the trading cities of the North
Sea and Baltic, devastated by the economic catastrophe, became Lutheran
;
the wealthier, more civilized princes of the south-west and even to some
extent the inland cities of the Rhine, which had still some Continental
trade to keep them ahve, remained Roman Catholic. Both developments
were a retreat from the flourishing days of the Renaissance, which had
embraced all Germany: but while -Lutheranism was the outcome of total
surrender and coUapse, Roman Catholicism represented the defence and
maintenance of a real though limited prosperity. ^Hence the paradox pf
the ensuing centuries that, though Xjitheramsm was SfigmaUy :^
,4ion,jQf U^M national feeling, Lutheran Gerniany was both
/ rigidly absolutist and utterly non-national; while Roman Catholicism,”*^
1/ the enemy of nationalism, produced in Germany a genuinely German;
culture and even a genuinely German policy. \ Roman Catholic Germany i
produced the great works of Baroque art and developed the musical
tradition which culminated in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven ; Lutheran
Germany, barren in all else, had also its musical tradition, the quietist
withdrawal from the world, which came to a dead end with Bach—after
Bach, Lutheran Germany had no cultural existence. In the world of
affairs, the Roman Catholic Emperors, despite their universalist inheri-
: tance, struggled, however ineffectively, to defend Germany against foreign ,
20
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
invasion; the Lutheran princes, concerned solely with their own ex-
istence, allied themselves with every invader of Germany who presented
himself. ,
———————— — — —“^
Such was the strange work of Luther. He made Germany a nation,^
but a nation divided against itself. He gave the Germans a spiritual
individualism and destroyed for centuries their political independence.
He broke with the mediaeval dream of universalism, only to lead Germany
into the nightmare of particularism. He taught the Germans to believe/
in liberty, but he taught them also that liberty is to be found only in the
service of the prince. He created the German language, and he used his^
creation for attacking reason, for expressing hysteria. Like the Germans y
of a thousand years before and of four hundred years after, Luther wa^^^
the barbarian who looks over the Rhine, at once the most profoij/id
expression and the most decisive creator of German dualism.
«-«*-«*^
^he first..,^.rs ofOiaJClesJ^
once lost, eternity will neyerjaxsJsack. The moment^fb^fflato a national
mid’^3ass^Qgimany_>^^ ever, certainly for
centuries. By 1 525 it was evident That the period oTnatTonal awakening
had passed, and there began from that moment a^teadj adjvajn^^
lutism m±jajj^
two hundred and fiftv.. years. There could be no further question of
national unification; the orJy^^uestio^j^ wh^^
succeed in unifying Germany, without popular support, solely by means of
military conquest Thus at the very beginning^rmoSn history Germ”ariy
waT offered the chance of unity, not on the ba^sjof comrnnn f.ffortj
but only after a common experience of defeat. For thirty years Charles V
struggled to establish Imperial authority over the German princes,
not in alliance with any German feeling, but solely with non-German
military resources
;
Germany was to be conquered, not united . Charles V
failed. As his attempt liad’ been purely military, the reasoiis for his
iaSure were purely military too : he had to fight too many enemies at once
;
he was distracted by the Turkish attacks on the south-east and of France
in the west ; above all, the communications and organization of the day
made it impossible either to create, or, if created, to maintain a Spanish
army large enough to hold down all Germany. In 1555 came the com-
promise: Germany was to be divided permanentlym religion according
“to ine~^im of each prince; the Emperor was to remain as the most
powerful prince in Germany ; but the less powerful princes were to remain
as princes too, each prince absolute and untrammelled, however modest
his resources
;
only the people of Germany _were not pgypiitted to have.
^^ypo}^^^c^_^^^^i^^S’^s settlement of the Xreaty_pf Augsbiirg is
sbmetime’s^presente^^s a triumph of liberty and tolerance : a triumph
indeed for the liberty of the princes, but in religion intolerance run mad,
21
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
for henceforth even the Roman Catholic princes asserted that Roman
Catholicism was true only if the territorial ruler maintained it.
The Treaty of Augsburg was the end of a long story: the end of the
universal empire, the end even of the Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation. But as there was nothing new to ta¥e its place, the old Empire,
itself the ghost of Rome, continued, ever more ghostlike, to haunt Ger-
many for another two hundred years. In the early seventeenth century
there was even an epilogue, a posthumous effort to assert the power of the
Emperor in central Europe. After the abdication of Charles V in 1555,
the Habsburg princes, titular Emperors, followed the example of the other
princes and concentrated their attention on their hereditary lands, sapping
the privileges of the estates and striving to establish the normal princely
absolutism. In 1618, conflict with the most powerful of these estates, the
Diet of Bohemia, became so grave that the Habsburg dynasty was
threatened with destruction. But the Emperor managed to rally and, in
the effort of rallying, not only established his absolute rule in Bohemia,
but within ten years overran all Germany. For, though Imperial power
had been declining ever since the Peace of Augsburg, the power of the
princes, which had been just strong enough to defeat Charles V, had been
declining even more ; until by now no German prince was strong enough
to withstand an Emperor who, a few years before, had been almost chased
out of his capital by a few rebellious Bohemian gentry. In the first decade
of the Thirty Years’ War an utterly feeble Emperor was able to carry
Imperial arms to the shores of the Baltic and to enforce Imperial decrees
to an extent unknown for centuries. In 1629 was achieved a sort of
Gejpian unity, a unity of exhaustion and reaction,
^ut while Germany had stood still, or rather slipped back, her neigh-
bobips had grown in strength, and the new military monarchs of France
and Sweden would not tolerate a Germany subordinated to the Emperor.
Hence the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany in 1 629 ; hence the
interventions of both France and Sweden which continued for over
twenty years.^This long, confused period of conflict, the Thirty Years’ War,
in fact contained two distinct themes : first, the Imperial conquest of the
German princes, and, then, the defeat of the Emperor by Sweden and
France. The outcome was the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 , a peace which
regulated the political life of Germany for the ensumg hundred and fifty
years. Westphalia was the charter of German liberties—that is, of the
liberties of the German princ^. ^These princes, who had been unable to
defend themselves and who car^d nothing for Germany, were secured in
their independence by the arms of France and Sweden. The project of
uniting Germany by means of a Habsburg conquest, never very likely,
was made impossible. The Reich was artificially stabilized at a mediaeval
level of confusion and weakness. Within the framework of Westphalia,
22
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
the Emperor could never become more than a titulary dignitary. On the
other hand, the Peace of Westphalia marked a great victory for the house
of Habsburg in their family possessions : the Emperor was recognized as a
great European power, not in virtue of his overlordship in Gerrnany, but
as ruler of the Austrian lands, of Bohemia, and of Hungary^pW^estphali^
was the first international act to admit that the Habsburgs ha^omethingl
great, apart from their high title : in other words, it recognized the existence
j
(though not the name) of
”
Austria” as something distinct from Germany
|
and so added a new elemefi? to tlie ‘ tangler Of the German problem.^
^
The Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia, its outcome, was no.daulltJ;he
lo^Q^j^mLDLQsmm^d^ Still, it was not quite what
it has been subsequently painted. It was not the cause of German decUne
and weakness, but rather the result. The impoverishment, the dwindling
of the cities, the decay of cultural and material standards, all these had
been proceeding for a century before the Thirty Years’ War broke out.
By 1618, German life had reached such a low ebb that any sort of violence
and upheaval became tolerable ; had it not been for the utter feebleness of
the Germans, neither the victories of the Emperor nor tjje later victories
of the Swedes and French would have been possible. ‘^J^he Thirty Years’
War was not fought by the German people, least of all was it fought for
religious reasons. It was fought by and against the German princesS.
The defenders of princely hberties, the majority of whom were Rom^
Catholic, called themselves Protestant; the protagonists of Imperial
authority called themselves Roman Catholics, although Wallenstein, the
greatest of them, was an unbeliever. In every age rulers, fighting for their
survival or for the extension of then- power, have to talk the claptrap of
the time : in the seventeenth century the claptrap happened to be religious.
Westphalia was imposed on Germany by foreign powers ; but without
the intervention of these foreign powe][sJJie s^^^^^ of Germany would have
beeiTsHIT^worse.^ Habsb^ strength could never have maintained the
position ot l629. New rivals would have arisen, and the wars between the
princes would have continued until Germany was utterly destroyed.
Sweden and France imposed peace on Germany, by no means a glorious
peace, but a peace which gave Germany long years of modest quiet. The
only alternative in 1648 was not less foreign interference, but more—the
conHnuance of the”^ar until most of Germany was actually partitioned
between Sweden, France, and the Habsburgs. Jor that outcome uojie.,QL
the combatants was powerful enough: therefore they compfoBaiSfedi ^
peace ‘whicfTpreserved in Germany a system of fiile^^inces^v^
(^^itojnca^Moj^ji^y ^Westphalia was the
result of the Habsburg-Bourbon balance of power; and the only German
contribution was negative—the inability to look after itself. ) The princes
were not only weak; they were artificial. German territories had been
23
\
THE’ COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
ceaselessly shuffled around for a century and more; and now there was
hardly a dynasty with deep historical roots in the lands over which it
happened to rule.
•^he outcome of the Westphalia system was therefore strange indeed. The
I German princes owed their existence to an artificial international order, not
\ at all to the support of their peoples—not even to the support of the aristo-
\ cratic section of their peoples, and they had no serious historical recollec-
{
tions to confine their course. Therefore, though altogether negligible in
1
international affairs, they were less restrained in internal affairs than the
I
greatest princes of Europe^Even Louis XIV had to consider the feelings
of the great French nobles and was bound by the historical and legal
differences between the provinces. But the most contemptible Margrave
was limited by nothing: he had no sympathy with the local patriotism of
his subjects and no patience with the antiquated rights of the estates.
In fact, in the course of the hundred years after Westphalia the German
princes attained without eff”ort to the unchecked absolutism which in
J France needed a great revolution for its accompHshment. Westphalia
I
was conservative only in the sense that it preserved the rule of the princes
;
j
it did not protect the rights or privileges of any other section of the com-
munity. So far as there were political traditions in Germany, Westphalia
helped to destroy them and substituted complete subjection to dynasties
without roots or substance. In the great age of reform at the end of the
fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, the German people
had secured liberty in large measure. The Free Cities, which were sub-
ordinate only to the Emperor, had become almost sovereign states ; but as
well the towns within the secular principaUties had established their
iautonomy. In the country, the peasants, never so completely reduced to
{servitude as in England and France, had still further reduced the burdens
fof feudalism, so that German Uberties had for a while OMl&tripped-all
I
Europe. This development endedaK-uptly with the faiiure^lXjJtteanism
I
as ^popuEFmoveme^^^^^ the current ran relentlessly
I in the opposife directionr\ Serfdom was reintroduced, often introduced
f mto^”Bistnc!Fwhere it had not previously existed. It had now no longer
a scrap of social justification; there was no pretence that the lord, in
return for the peasant’s services, gave protection—it was a system of
naked exploitation, the rule of the strong over the weak. Similarly, the
towns lost their self-government and were forced into the feudal mould
^jdVthQ countrysid^ Authority {die Ohrigkeit), deified by Luther, indeed
took on the divine character of omnipotence ; and the German princes,
impotent in the greats world of states, found consolation in con^ering
tKHr own subjects. By the end of the eightSth cehttTfy, a harsh ines-
capa ble fen^Lnsmlield most of Germany in its grasp : the people exploited
by and subjected to the lords, the lords gratefully subservient to the abso-
24
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
lute prince. This feudalism was decked out with a medieval appearance
and rigmarole; in fact it was of recent application and therefore all the
more crushing and systematic. The rationalism of the enlightenment,
elsev/here humane and progressive, was used in Germany to screw up the
efficiency of a sham-traditional system of exploitation ; and once again the
greatest achievements of the human mind were perverted to the improve-
ment of methods of barbarism.
Exceptions to this neo-feudalism, however, still fQ^^ffed in eighteenth-
century Germany. The rule of -the., princes did not cover all Germany.
The compromise which had been made by the Treaty of Augsburg and
then perpetuated at Westphalia had established a balance between the
Emperor and the princes. Imperial Germany, the tantalizing fragment,
as it were, of the Germany which might have been, was the Germany of
the ecclesiastical states and of the Free Cities. The ecclesiastical states,
under the impact of eighteenth-century enlightenment, had lost most of
their spiritual character, and became almost indistinguishable from the
secular states except in the method of appointing the princes. Still, even at
their worst the prince-bishops had a certain culture and a certain awareness
of the great world
;
they could hardly escape knowing that the systematic
robbing of his people did not exliaust the duties of a ruler. But only the
Free Cities in their decline kept alive a feeble German culture and even a
feeble consciousness of German unity. An inhabitant of Bavaria or of
Hanover might wonder (if he were allowed to think at all) whether he
was anything besides a Bavarian or a Hanoverian; an inhabitant of
Frankfort or of Hamburg could never be in doubt that, as well as being a
“burgher,” he was a German. German nationalism survived in the Free
Cities, but with curious results. The German “burgher” owed his
nationalism to his being free from princely rule ; therefore he identified
his national sense not with some authority, but with absence of authority
—particularism and patriotism seemed synonymous, and, so far as there
was any rlational tradition in Germany, it was a tradition which favoured
German weakness and disunion. This was the political balance.o£lheV
eighteenth century : authority, so far as it existed, had no sympathy with
national sentiment; national sentiment, so far as it existed, was opposed
tQ_authority. Germany, it was clear, could not find within herself the
impulse to overthrow the artificial structure; its destruction could come
only from outside, from some decisive change in the factors whose balance
had brought the elaborate compromise of Westphalia into bein^
^.^.^li*-
These factors were three : the princes, the Emperor, and France (SSweden,
the other intervening foreign state, having now fallen out of the ranks of
great powers). First, the princes had imposed upon the Emperor the
compromise of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555; and when the princes
could maintain themselves no longer, France had perpetuated the com-
25
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
promise in 1648. Though the system of Westphalia lasted a hundred and
fifty years, there was never a moment when each party to the compromise
was not seeking to increase his power in order to alter the bargain in his
favour. The German princes^^jle^^
consumed with land hunger^nd most of the leo^ding princes atternpted
atl^e time or another to transform themselves into^reafp^^ The
niost obvious way would have been for the greater princes to eat up their
lesser neighbours inside Germany; but this way was barred—neither the
Emperor nor France nor the other princes would tolerate it. This doomed
the ambitions of the Elector of Bavaria, who was surrounded either by
German or by Habsburg lands and could acquire neither. In 1742 the
Elector managed to win election as Emperor, the Habsburgs ousted from
the Imperial dignity for the only time in modern history. But it was a
barren success, due only to French intrigue and Habsburg weakness;
and, on the death of the Bavarian Emperor Charles VII in 1745, the house
of Bavaria was glad to sink back into obscurity.
^This Bavarian episode pointed a clear moral—that a German prince,
to become powerful, must seek sour^ power outside^Tjirmanyr’^T^^^
idea°mffuBHSe3^e Elector of Hanover when he agreed to become King
of England in 1714; but the results were disappointing.^ English jealousy
of Continental entanglements and the British constitutional system made
it altogether impossible for the Electors of Hanover to conquer Germany
with British aid./ The British connection made Hanover more important
as a German state than it deserved to be, nothing mord The same idea
guided the Elector of Saxony when he sought election as King of Poland
;
but here again results were disappointing. Far from being a source of
strength, aristocratic, faction-ridden Poland was a source of weakness;
and Poland in decline pulled Saxony down along with her, so that in the
final disaster Saxony too almost vanished.
jThe Electors of Saxony and Bavaria had been among the greatest of
the German princes ; Dresden and Munich, their capitals, had long been
centres of art and culture! Politically both failed! the most backward
and despised of the Electors succeeded. Brandenburg, a frontier state in
the sandy wastes of north-eastern Germany, its capital, Berlin, an over-
grown military camp—till the eighteenth century not even overgrown—had
little place in German history; remote and obscure, it hardly seemed to
belong to Germany at all. Lying east of the Elbe on lands reconquered
from the Slavs since the eleventh century, its people were mainly con-
verted Slavs, and even the names of the great nobles often betrayed a Slav
origin. The dynasty, the Hohenzollerns, had nothing great in their past,
and no long-standing connection with the Electorate they had acquired
;
they were ruthless, unprincipled military adventurers.
[
Towards the close
of the fifteenth century, a Hohenzollern had been elected also as Grand
26
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Master of the Teutonic Knights, a crusading order, which by conversion
or extermination—usually the latter—thad pressed back the Slav peoples ^
along the Baltic coast and carved out for itself a feudal domain) The
Hohenzollern Grand Master secularized the Order, appropriated it, and
amalgamated it with the Electorate, thus adding to the Hohenzollern
possessions a great stretch of territory beyond the frontier of the Reich,|^
the texntory_^f^a£t_Pry§^, This was true “colonial” land, where the
lords could practise unrestrained exploitation of the PoHsh peasants and
would accept in return an equally unrestrained absolutism of the prince.
Being outside the Empire^t was not affected by the Imperial law which
forbade any royal title except that of the Emperor- and in n03__the, /
Elector-ofLBjiandpnburg became “King.in.J?.rus;i)ia “^-J-a title which was
”
an intrinsic part of his power and not a mere personal union like the
King of Poland or the King of England.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Prussia, though not a great
power, was strong enough to be a useful member of the Grand AUiance
against France and strong enough to give her ambitious rulers a vision of
what being a great power would involve. The resources of Prussia were ^
contemplLbJ^L^all : no industrial areas, no important citieSj^no^outM^ to
the ^ea. the land barren and unyielding, the nobihty pooyL-and-iffflorant
cultural life virtually non-existent. Prussia was, in fact, true march land,
excelling in nothing but savagery and conquest. Fortunately for civilized
communities, the wild keepers of the borders are usually too barbarous
to organize their strength; but occasionally the marcher lord is a bar- ^
barian of genius, with incalculable results. Frederick 11, King^ of Prussia
from 1740 to 1786, was a sport of this type, utterly savage in his aims and
methods^^cidiized to the highest degree in his capacity for organization
and for concentrating his resources on a given object.’ FrederickTinrp
was to force Prussia into the ranks the
,
great powers , to screw Prussia f
up, m fact, far above her true levelA This was no “growth of Prussia,
”
for it sprang from nothing inside Prussia except the ^^’^g’^^ wjlh’it was”a
planned “making of Prussia,” as artificial as the making of a canal.
Prussia represented no popular force, stood for no idea, hardly ev^
belonged to GertTiany either geogra’pEfcaily. i^^ Her only asset
was the ruthlessness learnt in long years of oppression of the Slav peoples.
Prussia was itself a conquered land; all the more suited therefore to^J
become now the conqueror of others. y
Frederick II was not, of course, alone in unscrupulousness among the
statesmen of the eighteenth century. Vindeed they first set him the example
and then sought to emulate hint> But in every other country there was
^ Technically not King of Prussia until West Prussia was acquired in the
partitions of Poland; but the incorrect title was generally used from quite early
in the eighteenth century.
27
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
some lirnit QLtsadi^guQr-some distraction of cultural life; Frederidc II
alone j^oiujj cQflcentrate””o^ j^”^- Therefore he achieved it. He
‘^jockeyed Prussia up into the ranks of the great powers. His success
defended partly on territorial gains: the seizure of Silesia from the
;
Habsburg Maria Theresa in 1740 first gave Prussia an industrial region,
; and the share in the first partition of Poland in 1772 hnked up Branden-
|,
burg with East Prussia and brought more Polish peasants to be exploited.
/ But his success depended still more on gplicy^ on the cunning and adap-
i / I tability of his diplomacy ; on the harsh discipline of his army ; on his own
^
i skill as a general ; and on the oppressive efficiency of the administration.
^For all practical purposes, the army was the State; nothing else existed:
the system of civil administration was a sub-department of the military
organization, and practically all the resources of the State (five-sixths in
1740; three-quarters in 1786; five-sevenths in 1806) went on the upkeep
of the armyl Everythin^Jn Prussia was tense^ strained^^J^Sj^ teethe
limit^and often beyond jt^j:,ji^ o£^Ql^^
beyond all beari^. Hence the violence, the extremism, the hysteria,
which came to distinguish the Prussian governing class even in the
eighteenth century, and of which Bismarck’s screams and tears and break-
ing of jugs are a later example. Prussia was set a task almost beyond her
strength ; therefore she was always on the verge of a breakdown. Frederick
-i^^^he Great started Prassia on a path from which there was no turnmg
back: she had to becomTeyerTgreatp^
/^The making of Prussia was the work of tlie iToEenzbllern rulers, almost
i of oneTlqE^olIern ruler. ^tilT if cOTlld^of “have been accomplished
I
without the existence of a unique landed class, the Junkers of eastern
^1
Germany. No factor is more important in the history^of modern Ger-
\many, and no factoi^” Is less~un^^ The Junkers were kndoj^ers,
lords of great estates. But they..hM-IlfitMjag^^t the
French nobles or the Whig aristocrats, the landowners of western Europe.
The FrMcK and^nglish nobles were a leisured clSs^ the FreiicH^pending,
on feudal dues, the English on rents from their tenants. Both spent most
of their time away from their estates, the French at court, the English in
London. The one produced the French civilization of the eighteenth
century, the other the British constitution, the greatest political work of
man. The Junkers, however , were not_a^ Idsuredjgla^ drawing tribute
from others. Jhey were^ for the most part, without tenants anj worked
their estates themselves, for they were the Qwners of colonianands. The
lando^erToF^^Stem Europe,were part of_a settled community, in which
even serfs and copy-holders had some legal existence, but the Junkers
hadlQo”obligations to the conquered Slav^eoplesj^vho^^ ;
these peoples had been utterly expropriated and had been degraded not
even into tied serfs, but iiito landless labourers. The Junker estates were
28
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
never feudal ; -the^jyere^^^^^^^^
the great capitalist farms of the American prairie—also ihe. xesiik._of a
colonial expropriation of the American Indians. The Junkers were hard-
working estate managers, thinking of their estates solely in terms of profits%/
and efficiency, neither mqre^norJess_thaQ_^t^li^^
yxhis economic’characteristic had a unique political result. Everywhere
in Europe the Crown was striving to make the organization of the State
more efficient; therefore, despite the king’s personal preference for the
manners and culture of the nobility, he had to turn for political backing
to the capitaUst middle classes, who alone possessed the virtues of
efficiency and hard work. But these were the very virtues possessed by
the Junkers and not possessed to the same degree by the German burghers
of the eighteenth century.^The German trading classes had abandoned all
attempt to keep up with the capitalist triumphs of England, Holland, or
even France. Instead they prided themselves on their civic liberties and
“”
on the high level of their culture as citizens of the world.Xxhese were not
assets likely to appeal to Frederick ltf{ But the Hoheij^Uerns had long
ago stamped out the last flickers of aristocratic liberties ; and the Junkers
had neither the leisure nor the ability to develop a taste for culture—to go
to Berlin was merely to leave the threshing floor for the barrack-room.
Thus in Prussia alone in Europe, a reforming Crown could carry out its
reforms through the agency of great landowners; and the greater the
efficiency of the Prussian State, the more it needed the services of the
Prussian Junkers, It was no paradox, but an inevitable development,
that Frederick, the most efficient of the Hohenzollerns, first made absolute
the Junker monopoly of civilian and military office. The State created by
Frederick II combined two qualities which were elsewhere opposites. It
had, on the one hand, the unscrupulous authoritarianism, the disregard
both of humanity and of principle, everywhere characteristic of rule by a
privileged upper class ; on the other hand, a striving after efficiency and
1 The term “Prussian Junker” has been often misunderstood, even in Ger-
many. They were “Prussian” as subjects of the King of Prussia, not especially
as inhabitants of East or West Prussia, the provinces from which the King took
his name. The confusion would not have arisen if the law of the Holy Roman
Empire had allowed the Hohenzollern ruler to take his true title of “King of
Brandenburg.” Junker estates predominated in all the Prussian provinces east
of the Elbe, in fact predominated more in Brandenburg, Silesia, and Pomerania
than in East Prussia. For in East Prussia the pagan “Prussian” inhabitants
were exterminated by the Teutonic Knights, and their land given to free Ger-
man colonists, who remained independent farmers ; in the Brandenburg lands
there was less extermination and the inhabitants were transformed into serfs.
This explains the apparent paradox that, in the nineteenth century, the most
strenuous liberal opposition to Junker methods of government came from the
representatives of East Prussia, who had all the colonial farmer’s dislike of
aristocrats. The rural districts of East Prussia were the backbone of Prussian
liberalism until the desire for agrarian protection brought great estate owners
and small farmers together in the eighteen-eighties.
29
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
improvement, a rigid devotion to the balancing of accounts, elsewhere
associated with the rule of a reforming middle class. The Prussian Junkers,
one might say, were politically in the Stone Age; economically and
administratively they looked forward to the age of steel and electricity.
They were barbarians who had learnt to handle a rifle and, still more,
bookkeeping by double entry. Ruthless exploiters of conquered land,
they were untouched by European civilization and yet could master eveiy
technical improvement which Europe produced. Of course their achieve-
ment was not perfect or unbroken. Just as an individual Junker might
neglect his estate for culture, or from laziness, and so paid the penalty
in bankruptcy, so the Junker governing class sometimes failed to keep
up with the times in organization, in military equipment, or even in
political pretence. The great disasters of 1807, of 1848, and of 1918,
warned them that the anachronism of their survival could be preserved
only by ceaseless efficiency; and in each case the lesson was learnt. If
the Junkers had owned fat acres instead of sand, if^Prusgia.Jiad. ever
enjoyed a lon”^yf^^ofjecure repose in Europe, th^„habits„^fJmsure
and’ inefficiency would have been too strongjo overcome, andeygntually
at^bme crisis both Prussian Junkers and Prussian state^ould have
coirapse37″BSbqth lived ed^ofLdan^er^and bankruptcy
;
this’bound them together ^id^£re^^sdJiLem?\
Sederick li lorceJ’Russia intoJh^ran^.s:rfi]3LaG^ So far
as Germany was concerned, his work produced little change in the estab-
lished order. Even at his most ambitious, he never thought of uniting
Germany under Prussia nor even of conquering any
l
af^^part ot German
t^^^TTle made Prussia a European power and so asserted his equality
with the Emperor. But this was the height of his ambition. When he
talked, as he did at the end of his life, of “defending the liberties of
Germany,” he meant only the liberties of the German princes ; in other
words, the continuance of the balance of Westphalia under Prussian
guarantee. He neyer^Msjtated tp ally himself with foreign powers against
the Emperor, never admitted a common German cause, never rgfiogaized
the existence of a German people. IndeedTTjefman territory conquered
by PruSsiaTwaTvuTua^^ nation and condemned to
slavery for the sake of the Prussian army. The top-heavy increase of
jPrussian power was ro have extraordinary results in the following century
;
^ut, in the time of Frederick II, those few who were conscious of a common
)German loyalty regarded the victories of Prussia as a disaster. The great-
f ness of Prussia was a still further assurance of German disunity.
[ Thf real effort to revive Germany in the eighteenth century still came
from the Imperial side. After the settlement of Westphalia, the Habsburgs
had despaired of the Reich and had turned more and more exclusively to
their hereditary lands. By the end of the seventeenth century, the greatest
30
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
of these possessions, Hungary, had been reconquered from the Turks;
and the Habsburgs even dreamt of becoming the heirs of the Ottoman
Sultans in the Balkans. This visionary project remained a dream: the
Habsburg frontier was never permanently carried beyond the limits of
the Kingdom of Hungary. Maria Theresa, who succeeded to the Habsburg
lands in 1740, was hard pressed to defend her inheritance and had no
sympathy with dreams and visions. Besides, being a woman, she could
not be Emperor ; she secured the election of her husband to the empty
dignity merely to console him for his lack of real power. In her reign, the
Habsburg lands were given a unified organization and character, which
spared only Hungary: “Austria” and even “Austria-Hungary” had come
into existence. Joseph 11, elected Emperor in succession to his father in
1765 and succeeding Maria Theresa as ruler of the Habsburg lands in
1780, was impatient with his mother’s caution and good sense. Intoxi-
cated with the hmitless rationalism of the Enlightenment, he returned to
the ambitions which had distracted his ancestors, seeking both Balkan
gains and the revival of Imperial power in Germany. Like Frederick II,
whom he admired and attempted to imitate, Joseph II was a reformer on
the throne : but, unhke Frederick II, Joseph could not carry out reforms
through the agency of the landed nobility. The territorial magnates of
the Habsburg lands were no Junkers, but aristocrats in the Western style
—cultured, spendthrift, incompetent. Joseph needed middle-class agents
to operate his reforms and, owing to the peculiar relationship between
economics and nationaUsm in eastern Europe, he could attract middle-
class support only by reasserting the Habsburg connection with the
German Reich.
The GgrBian thnisjUiLthe east against the Slayjpeoples, which was in
continuous operation from the eleventh cenlury, had two distinct char-
acters. One was the way of milit̂ ag^^onqii^jyhich createdBrandmburg-
prnggjpi • fhf^ glavs were conqueredTandjn^ their place came not thej3erman
people, but Junker oppressors, with .na national sentmient, with indeed as
great a contempt ^’or German burghers as for their own Slav labourers.
The other which was far more widespread was the way of economic
penetration by mean ^ ^.^^^ ^’^^^j^J^
trading class. In the great days of
German prosperity, German traders from the Rhine had easily dominated
the markets of all eastern Europe^ when those great days we|:e42ast, the
markets of eastern Europe alone v/ere safe from English and I),utch
rivalry F.ar beyond the area of German settlement on the land, the
towns in eastern EumpS==dK£ag.U£*>^JSud^es^^
Comtantinople—had an almost exclusively dprrini^n r^^xader] and whf^.re
the Germans did nofpenetrate directly»^ their influence was carried by the
jjews, refugees ffoni th^RKiheland who continued to speak’ Yiddish, a
nieHiaeval Rhenish dialect. These German colonists were of cour se^
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
“subjects” of the territorial prince, as, for that matter, they would have
beeirsix5jec!r”SfTrm had they remained on the Rhine;
but never for one moment did they regard themselves as sharing the
destinies of the people in the surrounding countryside. In Budapest they
were not Hungarians; in Riga they were not Russians; in Danzig they
were not Poles. Everywhere they were consciously Germans
; anj^^ more-
over anyone from tBF’siirrounding country who entered the tovv’n and
set up as a merchanF or shopkeeper auTomatically^Eecame ” German
akfiL^In eastern Europe, it is not too much to say, German was an
economic term, meaning anyone who lived by trade, by handicraft,
by shopkeeping or by small industry. These people had no concrete
“national home” and little expected one; but they were unmistakably
German.
It was to German sentiment and to German culture that Joseph II
appealed when he attempted to make the Habsburg lands a centralized
absolutist state. Joseph spoke of himself as “Emperor of the German
Reich” and assumed that his Habsburg empire would possess a unified
German character. But he appreciated that this German-dominated
“Austria” had, in Vienna and the neighbouring Alpine provinces, too
slender a basis; to be really German Emperor, Joseph needed a larger
nucleus of German subjects. This was the motive for his long-pursued
plan of acquiring Bavaria in exchange for the distant and non-German-
Austrian Netherlands. Had this plan succeeded, the whole future of
;
Germany would have been different : the majority of Habsburg subjects
would have been Germans, and the majority of Germans would have
been Habsburg subjects. Habsburg power would speedily have extended
to the Main, and Prussia would have been fortunate to survive even in
north Germany. But Joseph’s plan, though it looked forward to the days
of public opinion and of national sentiment, was executed in the old way,
by secret bargaining with the Elector of Bavaria and by attempts to juggle
^he Balance of Power. It was also opposed in the old way by Frederick II,
I first by an inconclusive war in 1778, then by a coalition of German princes
\dn 1786. The plan was defeated and the artificial structure of Westphalia
preserved, defended now not only by the Prussian army but by a new
guarantor—in 1778 Russia was a party to the Peace of Teschen which
ended the Austro-Prussian War and so became one of the guardians of
German disunity, flfhus Germany stagnated under the absolute rule of
her petty princes, and the two real powers in Germany maintained against
each other an uneasy balance. German sentiment was confined to the
^
worlds of philosophy and literature ; it had no political outlet. The existing
:
order in Germany was too firm to be overthrown by diplomatic intrigues
and by the movements of professional armies. It needed an earthquake
to overthrow it, an earthquake which the German people were altogether
32
r
i
THE LEGACY OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
incapable of producing. Once more the fate of Germany was determined
by events outside Germany ; once more the Germans were passive victims
and passive beneficiaries. For the great upheaval which ended the old
Reich and prepared the way for the new occurred beyond the Rhine;
it was the upheaval of the French Revolution.
CHAPTER II
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 1 792-1 8 14
/The French Revolution altered Germany only less profoundly than it
alSe^TWfic^ : the old political order and in some parts of Germany the
oWT social order were changed beyond recognition. But these great
changes were brought about in fundamentally different ways. In France
the revolution was the work of the French people : their suflferings and
their efforts taught them the basic lesson of politics, the lesson of power.
Not the moral or intellectual superiority of its ideas, but the levee en masse
and the organizing genius of the Jacobins, caused the revolution to
triumph ; above all the need for mass support compelled the middle-class
liberals to form with the peasants and town workers a united radical
front, never thereafter totally dissolved. In Germany those who desired
liberal reforms did nothing to promote their own cause; they waited
passively, though querulously, to be liberated by the French, and the
force which gave Germany the career open to the talents was not the force
of the German peasants, but the force of the French peasants in its
organized form of the French Army. The German liberals had no
j
a^arian pro,^^mmeand no sympathy with the^^propertyless masses^
whom they^jespised as^^oBlcumhtist aiTd”reactionary ; nor had they any
feeling*”that liberal institutjon^ needed to be foughLibr ^nd defended
—
they expected them to be bestowed from above. In the twenty years
between 1794 and 1314, the years of French victory, most of western
Germany received the benefits of the French Revolution—freedom of
enterprise, equality before the law, security of property and of the indi-
vidual, cheap efficient administration. But the Germans received these
benefits without any exertion of their own; and every Uberal institution
actually increased their dependence upon “authority.”
These great reforms were liberal, but they were French. A startling
consequeiig^-. foIjnwgd^_Frenc^ interference in Germany stirred into
patriotism the naturarresentmgTTt agajnst’The’ interference.
N^ost educated Germans (themselves a tiny class) welcomed
ly stirred mto /
;a.Q£-^trangers.i /
led the benefits
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
imposed by the French ; a few, however, began to parade a German
nsititmn^ism; tftc’ solc^ hostility to French rule. But
French rule was synonymous with liberal reform. Therefore German
nationalism took on from Fhe start an anti-Uberal character. To desire
ithe^feer open to the’TaTents or a rational and ordered system of govern-
ment was to be pro-French and therefore unpatriotic. All the evils of the
‘old order, the drill sergeant and the Junker, came to be regarded as
essentially German. The Jacobins of Mainz who, in 1792, opened the
gates of the city to the French soldiers were held up to Germany for a
hundred years as the stock example of traitors; and German patriotism
expressed itself in the defence of Prussia and Austria, the two^despotic
and half-Slav states, to whose existence Gerrhany owed’ in tact heTjatk
botlTorimhy””^^ freedom.
, JJausr-^ a^tQnjshin^ parad ox^ the
French Revoluli(Hi^^y”^stroyin!g the old order in Germaiiy, not merely
cleared the way-‘fa””B^BW-ft imifigation^^ but actually ensured that unifi-
cation would take place for the benefit of the HohenzoUern dynasty and
lof the greai IMHowners east ,Qf ,t^^^^^
influence of the French Revolution in Germany was of two distinct
i: kinds : by increasing the military power of France it upset the balance of
i Westphalia, and by increasing the political influence of France it promoted
\m Germany great social and political changes. The French revolutionaries,,
in their early Utopian days, had nothing which could be called a foreign,
still less a German, policy. They thought that wars were caused by the
wickedness of kings and that the peoples everyv/here were strong enough
to restrain, if not to overtlirow, their rulers. If France therefore made a
solemn renunciation of wars of conquest and reduced her armed forces,
war would automatically cease, and France would establish a hegemony
in Europe based on moral superiority alone. This ideahstic view did not
survive the counter-revolutionary intervention launched against France
by the Emperor and the King of Prussia in 1792; and as soon as the
invading armies had been driven out, the French sought for some war
aim more concrete than the universal propagation of the Rights of Man.
They found this aim in the plausible doctrine of the natural frontiers : the
Rhine was decreed to France by natural reason. The left bank of the
Rhine was incorporated into France, and the main aim of French policy
became for twenty years the maintenance of the “France of the hundred
departments.” French success gave the death-blow lo .the system of the
Treaty of Westphalia. Instead of a balance between France, the Emperor
. and the princes, France was now the predominant power in Germany,
] flushed with revolutionary strength and determined to destroy any hostile
^combination. The Directors and, subsequently, Napoleoawere ready to
arrange a temporary partition of Germany with Prussia and Austria ; but
ultimately they intended to destroy the independent existence of Prussia
34
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 1792-1 8 1 4
and Austria as well. Thus France, the principal architect of Westphalia,
gave the signal for its end.
Prussia was the first^to abandonJhe defence of Gern^ against the
French. The King of Prussia joined but feebly in the original intervention
of 1792, and withdrew his armies almost before serious fighting began;
acquisition of territory at the second and third partitions of Poland was
his real concern. In 1795 he made peace with the French republic on the
sole condition of being left undisturbed to digest his Polish gains—so
little did Prussia earn her later reputation as the national champion.
The Emperor took longer to convince. But a long series of French
victories, beginning with Bonaparte’s Italian campaign of 1796-7 and
culminating in Marengo and Hohenlinden (1800) reinforced the lesson of
Joseph IPs failure to restore Habsburg power in Germany ; and first
hesitatingly in 1797 and then more decisively in 1801, the Emperor
Francis II gave up the Imperial, German cause and decided to concentrate
on the extension of his family lands. The princes of Germany, still less
,
the people of Germaay^jwer^-^jot-ccmsulted : and tigjrinc were lucky
to b£allowed to survive.. If NapQkQa.had decreed their disappearance?
they would Imve^isapj^aredxlb^^
own, still less anyToyalty in the hearts of their subjects. Their very
artificiality saved them^ Napoleon needed agents in Germany who would i
be’lIepehdent^gl^^^M^^^^ in their helplessness,
j
satisfied this need. The larger princes of Germany were
NapolebrT^a^order the more effectively to subordinate Germany to
himself.
The princes, with then- doctrines of State absolutism and their efficient
enlightened administration, fitted easily into the Napoleonic system; for
the French Revolution and Napoleon had only carried further what the
enlightened despots had begun. But the ecclesiastical states and the Free
Cities couJd not be squared with the rationalism of the revolution. They
were the survivors of a mediaeval order, traditional, mystical, privileged
—
the one looking back to the days of priestly power, the other to the days
of feudal “Hberties.” Napoleon and his agents did what Joseph II had
failed to do: they “rationalized” Germany. A glorified estate office was
set up in Paris .under the control of Talleyrand, and by its means all the
ecclesiastical states and Free Cities, with a few exceptions, were distributed -j
among the secular princes in the course of 1803, This was the great
|
reduction from three hundred states to thirty so often wrongly ascribed
tojhe Congress of Vienna. It was Napoleon, not the Allies, who ended
mediaeval Germany. The ecSfegf^stical princes and the Free Cities had
“beeires”seiifraTTo^the survival of the Holy Roman Empire : they had been
the sole balance against the secular princes, the outposts of a feeble
Imperial power. When they vanished, the Empire was bound to vanish
35
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
too. In 1806, after a further war with the Emperor, Napoleon decreed
its end: the. Emperor Francis II became Emperor Francis I of Austria,
a secular prince like any other, and tHe leading German princes were
created kings by the grace of the French Revolution. A slender thread of
family tradition linked the HaFsburg KUef with the old idea of a German
Reich and with the still older idea, inherited from Charlemagne, of a
Reich which should dominate all Europe. Apart from this. Napoleon’s
actions ended the political traditions of Germany as abruptly and as
decisively as the execution of Louis XVI ended the political traditions of
France. The position of the German rulers was as revolutionary in its
origin as the position of Napoleon himself; the subjection of all Germany
to princely absolutism, suspended since 1648, was now completed; and
the Germans received the career open to the talents and the freeing of the
peasants from feudal dues as they had once received the reformed religion
—l>y order of “authority.”
“^There had long been two distinct Germanies—the Germany of the two
rea^powers, Austria and Prussia, and the Germany of the unreal princes.
This distinction was ilow underlined. Alf Germany outside Prussia and
Austria was organized into the Confederation of the Rhine under the
presidency of Napoleon and, like the rest of Napoleon’s empire, had
imposed upon it a common social and political pattern. Each^state
received, by ord^ ofNapoleon, a formal^nst^^^^^ modelled upon that
\ of Imperial France ; each state adopLted, or_ imitated^ the French code of
\ laws. The jprivileges of the landed aristocracy were ended, the lands of
the Church confiscated. The Jews were emancipated ; the restrictions on
^ enterprise Vv^ere removed. The civil liberties which the revolution had given
to France, Napoleon gave to Germany; all that was lacking was the
inspiration which in France made the revolution greater than its greatest
achievements. The German middle classes received their new freedom
without enthusiasm, certainly without gratitude. There was no reason
v/hy they should be grateful to a ruler who was merely carrying out the
orders of Napoleon. The professional and commercial bourgeoisie were
drawn mainly from the former Free Cities and ecclesiastical territories;
they did not care in the slightest whether they were subjects of the King
of Bavaria or of the King of Wurtemberg so long as their king gave them
efficient Napoleonic government. After all, a citizen of Augsburg or of
Nuremberg was not likely, after long centuries of proud existence, to call
himself a “Bavarian” and so put himself on a level with the ignorant
backward peasants of the surrounding countryside. The Napoleonic
reorganization of Germany increased the territory of the secular princes,
but it did not increase their power : loyalty to the prince, where it existed
at all, became a purely rural sentiment, on a level with local fertility
superstitions or a harvest festival. ^
TI^E ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 1792- 1 8 1 4
The Free ^ Cities were thick on the ground throughout all western
Germany and set the tone_for middle-class thoujht even in the towns
which had never enjoyed “liberties.” There^ngered round them a_faint
recollection of their great past, but they were now decayed, of no economic
iniportonce and… Af tFe “Beginning of the nineteenth”
century the total population of all the Free Cities and university tov/ns in ,
Germany was less than the population of Paris. These towns and cities
contained all the Hteratej^Jhiny the Gerrnan p^^Fe^’ Their
inhabitants were remote from real life, dependent,” fbr”their existence, on
state employment or on a university chair. Their politics were intense
but abstract, more like the politics of a college common-room than of a
popular movement. They talked a great deal about Germany, but they
meant by that only a few thousands like themselves; and though they
kept alive the “German” idea, they thought of it as an idea quite divorced
from power. They hadja^sincere ^pjS^f^^;,^}^3^i^^M^jCi^Q start
that their faith must be .inefe^tiyej_ in fact they soon made the further
assumption, that power waSy by its,yery nature.^llii_beral.,^and..UJDiprogressive.
To_ i^cMem4iow,er,_fQJiJJi£msel¥es–ii^^ their calculations
;
a^.dHm–\4ewnjfthe^conoimcjb of_the^jerman^bourgeoisie
this omission was na.!-dx>ijbt…ky^dtable. But they wished to see their
ideas succeed and so arrived at the comforting conclusion that, in time,
Hberal ideas would triumph not by acquiring power, but merely by their
innate virtue. The belief in the victory of ideas, without the foundation
of an effective political organization or of a coherent class backing, was
to be the ultimate ruin of German liberaUsm; and, though it had many
sources, its most important origin lay in the days of Napoleonic rule,
when the men of liberal ideas saw their ideas established in Germany
without any effort of their own. Napoleon is often accused of having
enslaved the Germans. His real fault lay in emancipating them. He did
for the German liberals’-what they were never afterwards able to do for
themselves.
/The Napoleonic revolution not only created in Germany the basis for
derman liberalism.! It cleared the way for another force, which was
afterwards to play an even more decisive role in German politics, the
force of German clericalism. So long as the ecclesiastical states existed,
Roman ‘C^^©[smco33l)e no more than a factor in the manoeuvres of
the princes. It was impossible to feel enthusiasm, still less devotion, for
a prince-bishop of Salzburg or of Mainz. But the moment the ecclesiastical
principalities were destroyed, the bishops became once more religious
leaders; and Roman Catholics were no longer subjects of a particular
sort of prince, but adherents of a particular religion. Many of the former
subjects of prince-bishops became now the subjects of Protestant princes
;
but whether the secular prince was Protestant or Roman Catholic it was
37
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
possible, and often necessary, to assert Roman Catholic teaching and
‘ practice against him in a way that had been altogether impossible, even
when necessary, against an ecclesiastical ruler. Just as the burghers of the
Free Cities did not transfer their loyalty to their new rulers, but became
instead vaguely devoted to the “German” idea, so the inhabitants of the
ecclesiastical states, too, cared nothing for their new rulers and gradually
became associated in a common “German” cause—the defence of
German Roman Catholicism. This is perhaps, the strangest of all the
many paradoxical outcomes of Napoleon’s interference in Germany : by
applying without Hmit the rationalist principle of secular sovereignty, he
made possible the growth of a strong political party the only purpose of
which was resistance to rationalism and to the limitless sovereignty of
the State.
Directly, in the Germany under his rule, Napoleon produced German
liberaUsm and German clericalism; indirectly, in the Germany beyond
the frontiers of his Empire, he produced their opposite, German national-
ism. Within Napoleonic Germany, there was little resentment against
French rule : the articulate classes, the professional and commercial middle
class, were in far better circumstances than they had ever been. The only
complaints against French rule came from the classes who had lost by the
destruction of feudalism—the feudal landowners, especially the Imperial
knights who had held directly of the Emperor—and from the utterly
feckless who would never benefit from any change of system; and these
classes could not hope for support within the area of Napoleonic rule.
But the Napoleonic order did not extend to all Germany; instead it added
/Ifo the existing dualisms—the Germany that had been under Rome and
the Germany that had not, Protestant Germany and Roman Catholic
Germany, HohenzoUern Germany and Habsburg German)^—a new
dualism—Napoleonic Germany and the Germany of the two independent
dynasties. Austria and Prussia both suffered defeat at the hands of
Napoleon, but both continued to exist, though the Prussian state after
Jena was only on the margin of existence. In both, the ruling classes added
to the normal “feudal” dislike of revolution resentment at defeat. But
the defeat of Austria was not crushing and the resentment at it therefore
limited; the defeat of Prussia was complete and Prussian resentment
therefore beyond all bounds. Both^(^na^ie§„^esired the defeat of
Napoleon; but the HohenzoUerns,’ having nothing more~to lose, were
ready to bid va banque—the Habsburgs were not. Neither, however,
thought in terms of “liberating” Germany: their only object was their
0Wn preservation and recovery.
Of the two, Francis I, the Habsburg Emperor, represented the more
“German” cause. So far as any sentiment for the Reich existed, it centred
still on the last Holy Roman Emperor ; and those political writers, such as
38
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 1792-18 14
Gentz, who cared for the “German way of life” with its old order of
ecclesiastical states and Free Cities, looked to Francis I to emancipate
Germany from French rule and French innovations. Despite the popular
myth to the contrary, far more German patriots from outside either of the
two monarchies entered the service of Austria than of Prussia during the
years of Napoleonic domination; but they suffered a fate common in
|
history—having chosen the losing side even their existence was denied. I
The Habsburg cause was, too, the only cause in Germany to receive some
j
popular_support in theliteral sense oTs^^^S^Jh rather thaiT” I
of sup£o^rt by _journalists _ and academic lecturers. The rising^f the |
German peasants of Tyrol under Andreas Hofer in favour of, Habsburg I
rule was the only genuinely _popular movement in Germany in^
Napoleonic period. Prussian history can show nothing of that kind.
The supporters of the Habsburg cause desired to preserve, or to revive,
the old, pre
^
revolutionary^^ order ; but that was not reallY. the wish of the
HaBsbur^s themselves . Francis I was the successor of Joseph II aFwell
as the heir of Habsburg traditionalism; his policy was absolutist, rather ^
than reactionary, and he expected his followers to show a devotion which
‘
he did nothing to merit. His mediaevalism was limited to the building of a
sham mediaeval castle at Laxenburg (for the embeUishing of which he
characteristically pillaged all the great Austrian monasteries) ; in real life,
he was a plain autocrat, not an enlightened one, and he was quite as
shocked as Napoleon at the rising of the Tyrolese peasants—even though
the rising v/as in his favour. Experience seemed to confirm the scepticism
of Francis I in his own cause. In 1809 he was persuaded by the romantic
nationalism of his advisers to launch a crusade for the emancipation of
Germany. The attempt failed
;
Napoleon was once more victorious. But
even in i809 the Austrian Empire, though diminished, was still a consider-
able state : the Emperor was still an important, though hardly an indepen-
dent ruler, and the territorial magnates of Austria had hardly felt the /
impact of Napoleonic rule at all—they were not discredited, and certainly
not impoverished by defeat. Thus the victories of Napoleon were just
enough to prevent Austria’s reviving her claim to the leadership of
Germany, not great enough to drive Austria to desperate courses.
With Prussia it was different. Great Prussia had been no slow, natural
growth, but the artificial creation of Frederick 11. Its existence was pre-
carious, and without logic. The Prussian motives for withdrawing from
the war with France in 1795 were typical of the contradictions of Prussian
history : fears for the collapse of the Prussian state mingled with projects
of ever greater Polish gains. Frederick William III, narrow-minded,
commonplace, autocratic, was incompetent to maintain Prussia’s great-
ness, but too obstinate to abandon it. Pie refused to join the coalitions
against Napoleon which offered a chance of success, yet, in 1806, engaged
39
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
alone against the French Empire. The Prussian state collapsed almost
before the first blow ; the Prussian armies melted away in a disintegration
unparalleled in the history of modern Europe. Great Prussia ceased to
exist ; and Napoleon intended that Prussia should cease to exist entirely.
Only the sentimental devotion of the Tsar Alexander I to a brother
monarch saved Prussia from obliteration. At the meeting at Tilsit in 1807,
Napoleon and Alexander partitioned Europe, but each encroached a little
on the other’s sphere. Napoleon made the Grand Duchy of Warsaw,
pale shadow of old Poland, out of Prussia’s Polish lands ; in retaliation
Alexander insisted on the survival of a scrap of Prussia as an independent
state. Great Prussia had been built on the spoils of Poland
;
yet, by a
strange paradox, the restoration of a fragment of Poland saved Prussia
from extinction. But it was a Prussia reduced almost beyond recognition:
only five million left of her former ten million subjects, a heavy indemnity
imposed, and the army limited to 42,000 men.
Frederick William himself was quite incapable of seeing any way out
of the disaster ; but his ear was caught by those who argued that the only
‘ way to defeat France was to imitate hel^ He had no faith in these advisers
;
but his kingdom was in such utter confusion that it v/as not worth opposing
their advice. Curiously enough, the most thoroughgoing of the reformers,
Stein, who subsequently became the first hero of anti-French German
nationalists, was actually imposed upon Frederick William by Napoleon,
in furtherance of his usual policy of extending French power by extending
French institutions. Stein was not a Prussian subject, but an Imperial
Icnight from the Rhineland, whose stock-in-trade was hatred of the
French who had dispossessed him. “I hate the French,” he said, “as
much as it is allowed to a Christian to hate”—and he did not trouble
much about the limitation. His hatred was an intellectual, class hatred,
consciously formed, though he himself always wrot61fcr’Hls wiTBin”French
and spoke French for choice. Only resentment at his loss made him go
to the people, to become “German”; German nationalist feeling was to
^N»be raised against the French in a jacquerie organized from above. Stein
‘ had no sympathy with the Hohenzollern dynasty and hated the selfish,
^ un-German Prussian state; but Frederick William III was the only
German prince who might be resentful enough to follow an extreme course.
I* Sigia planned to turn the Prussian state from a Junker state into a state of
”^
all the people : the peasants were to be won by agrarian reform which would
arouse their enthusiasm as the Jacobins had aroused the enthusiasm of
the peasants in France, and the urban middle classes were to be stirred
from their long lethargy by local self-government. These projects would
not save the Prussian state. They would capture the Prussian state for
\
Germany, and Prussia would become the starting-point of a free Germany,
) in which it would William alone of the German
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 1792-18 14
princes surviving as a constitutional king. Prussianism was invited to
revenge its humiliation at the hands of Napoleon by committing suicide.
Even in utter defeat neither the dynasty nor the Junkers could accept
Stein’s programme ; and Frederick William from the moment ofappointing
him thought only of how to shake him off again. Stein lasted a little over
a year. Then he was denounced to Napoleon as an enemy of France and
dismissed on Napoleon’s orders. He fled to Russia, where he found in
Alexander I a more sincere liberal and a more effective liberator of
Germany. In Prussia the work which he had begun was arrested and
remained unaccomplished. But the Junkers learnt from this alarming
episode. They resolved to use Stein’s weapons, the reforms of the French
Revolution, not to strengthen Germany, but to strengthen themselves
:
they would remain Junkers, but now Jacobins as well. The peasants were
still to be emancipated, but they were to be freed not only from feudal
burdens, but freed altogether from the land. In the hands of these Junker
reformers, emancipation was no longer a means of creating a free national
peasantry, but a “clearance” {Bauernlegen—laying the peasants flat—was
the German term), comparable to the clearing of the Scottish Highlands
or to the English enclosures of the eighteenth century.^ Emancipation
benefited only the highest class of peasants, who were already rich inde-
pendent farmers. All below them lost their remaining scraps of security
:
they were compelled to surrender some of their land to their lords and
to sell more, and, in the absence of industrial towns to which they could
escape, they remained dependent on their lords, impoverished, helpless
agricultural labourers. All that remained of Stein’s programme was fine
words, to mislead not the peasants of the time, but tl^e historians of
future generations. ^ I
Stein’s constitutional policy was jettisoned altogether.-‘ Nothing more
was heard of local autonomy : the towns continued to be ruled by the
agents of the central government, and the countryside by the Junkers’
manorial courts. Hardenberg, who had been an associate of Stein’s and
became the leading minister on Stein’s dismissal, was also a reformer,
but not of a dangerous character!^ Administrative efficiency was his sole
conce^. His reforms produced a stronger government machine, therefore
made the Crown more powerful than before. Hardenberg was quite
willing to work with and through the Junkers if they would act as efficient
instruments; and this condition the Junkers could fulfil. Jena had put
them on their mettle. As so often in their history, the threat of destruction
taught them how to avoid destruction and warned them that they must
be laborious and competent servants of the State if they were to survive
at all. Thus Prussia ca.ine out of the
”
yearsjofjneform^ freer than
before, but with a government harsEerTmore extensive, and more absoIute^
than ever. ^ “””” “””” ~”
B* ^ 41
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
Hardenberg’s plans were not complete, however, with administrative
reform. Ultimately he too, though for an opposite reason from Stein*s,
V desired a Prussian parliament, a “constitution.” Stein had looked
forward to a united Germany
;
^ardenberg wished to preserve the efficient
Prussian state and feared German national sentiment, particularly at the
moment of liberation from Napoleon.) He had no desire to see Prussia
swept away into a liberal, national Germany. Therefore he urged on the
King the establishment of a Prussian parliament, which, without diminish-
ing the powers of the Crown, would assert Prussian unity and mark it off
from the rest of Germany. Sham constitutionalism would be a barrier
against German unification. The idea was too daring for Frederick
William and his Junker circle. Hardenberg’s constitution was never
drafted, still less issued. Only at the moment of greatest excitement, in
1814, the year of liberation, Frederick William stirred a little. He pro-
mised that he would grant his people a constitution at some time in the
future. That was the sole reward which the subjects of the King of
Prussia received for their efforts and sacrifices in the great war. Harden-
berg’s idea was set aside. But it rem.ained latent in the minds of the
/ Junkers; and in 1848, at the hour of their greatest danger, a Prussian
i parliament was at last set up—to save Prussia from national Germany.
> The greatest ”reform” of the years of reform did not originate as part
of a thought-out plan. It followed inevitably from the rigid limit which
Napoleon had imposed on the size of the Prussian army. A great army
v^l could be built up only by the rapid training of reserves. Scharnliorst and
||
Gneisenau, the Prussian military organizers, had to abandon willy-nilly
| the accepted idea of a professional army distinct from the people and to
organize instead a system of general military service on a short-term basis.
This was a revolutionary measure, and its authors, not surprisingly, talked
of it in the democratic phrases they had learnt from Stein. Instead of an
army there was now “the people in arms”; instead of professional
officers, leaders, not necessarily of aristocratic birth, chosen by the
localities. In reality the new system was evidence not of the liberalism
of the army chiefs, but of the subservience of the Prussian subjects : they
could be relied on to answer to the sergeant’s bark from the first day.
\ The admission of a few middle-class officers did not mean that professional
^*
efficiency became more valued than social rank ; it meant only that even
the middle classes valued high rank as much as its possessors themselves,
j In other countries the revolution gave the people universal suffi-age; in
Prussia it gave them universal military service. In the original scheme
there was one genuinely popular element. As the male population could
\ only be gradually passed through the training of the regular army, the
rest of the men were brought together in a Home Guard, the Landsturm,
\ unequipped and ill-trained, which was supposed to rise in popular fury
i 42 ‘
i
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 1792-18 14
at the moment of Uberation. In 1813, when the time came, the Landsturm,
in the few places where it was tried, was an utter failure ; unconditional
obedience and democratic initiative could not flourish side by side. After
1815 the Landsturm was pushed aside and, later, abolished altogether.
It was an alien conception from a strange world.
” The military system of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau rested not on y
liberalizing the Prussian state, but on militarizing the Prussian people.<4
From it there followed a consequence of the first magnitude, perhaps the
greatest single factor in shaping the destinies of modern Germany. The
militarism of the Prussian people could not be left to chance ; it had to be
formed as deliberately as supplies were accumulated in the arsenals. ^\
Therefore the Prussian state had to busy itself in the education of its \ \
subjects: the schoolmaster had to make up for the time missed on the
barrack square. Prussian education, first for the middle classes, later for
the masses, was the wonder of nineteenth-century Europe ; but few outside -y/
Germany understood its purpose. The elementary schoolteacher, the
secondary schoolmaster, the university professor, were all servants of the
Prussian state, performing with enthusiasm a task only second in impor-
tance to that of the army chiefs. In performing this task they were given
a wide freedom, just as Prussian generals were given a wide freedom in
the field. But it was "academic freedom" to achieve a purpose, the most
flagrant example of the German adaptation of the weapons of civilization
for uncivilized ends. Prussian, and later German, education was a
gigantic engine of conquest, the more effective in that it was conducted
by volunteers.
The great Prussian reforms of 1807-12 were thus not merely imposed
from above, as even Stein had planned
;
they were all designed to strengthen
authority and to make the subjects of the King of Prussia more subject
than ever. But the reforms were accompanied by a cloud, or a smoke
,
screen, of liberating, if not liberal, phrases and ideas. For the first time.
German national enthusiasm began to focus on Prussia as well as on the /
Emperor; and it was an enthusiasm of a different kind. ProrHahsburg/i
and pro-Prussianj3erman_n^^ both sprang from resentment at
^
French supremacy in Germany; buF t^y_followe4^^
Those who looke^W FrngrsJ^ toTT^ate GerniaLPy-from the FrencE and
to'estat)1isF the l^eich anew had a wider sentiment than merely hatred of
j
the FrenchT^hey had ^^a^ conception, romantic indeedfand rnuodled, of
/j
the~oldGermanVwith its flourishing Free Cities, with its "liberties" and/
with Its ncF?iversitv, the Germany which had withered in the time of '
Ltrther and the Peasants' Revott. They were seeking to follow and to
restore German tradition, and to redeem Germany not merely
^
horn
foreign dnminaHn~hnt fjpm thp c\n^t^\r^^\lQJl c^lJc^r^^ \(^e^R ThoUgh
their starting-point was nationalist, they were soon transformed into
43
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
conservatives and pushed their nationalism into the romantic back-
ground, so that by 1815 the German political writers who looked to
Vienna disliked German nationalism almost as much as they disliked
Napoleon.
The German nationali
^
):s who found their spiritual home in BerUn
took the opposite course. Their very choice revealed a harsher, more
realistic, attitude ot mind' No orie"'i5ufside i'russia'' '(ancrihey were all
nc^7Tra5StelTS)~ccnfflS^be devoted to the King of Prussia as any German
might be devoted to the Emperor of Austria, heir of the old Reich. But
the King of Prussia,^ being more humiliated, was more likely to favour
war to the death against the French ; therefore these German nationaUsts
preferred him—Prussia was merely the instrument of German liberation,
not a cause in itself. Prussia could not claim any share of the German
tradition. For whatever might be disputed about mediaeval Germany,
one thing was certain: in the middle ages Prussia did not exist. Even
the most conservative Prussian, even the Hohenzollem dynasty, had to
be in some sort revolutionary. German nationalism as preached at Berlin
could not appeal to history or to traditjon ; i^ could'^l^^reTy upon an
unre^omng ass%tion of :fIi£^peiiority of everything German^ After
allTTTwas difficuf to think of any reason why Germans should prefer to
be7uleTl)y FreHenc^^ William III instead of by Napoleon, except that
Frederick William was German and Napoleon was nof. 'Kq argument
soon went further : if Frederick WilHam was superior to Napoleon merely
by being German, there was no reason why his rule should be limited
to Germans—it was also desirable that he should rule over the French
and, indeed, over all the other peoples of Europe.
|
Fichte , the greatest
exponent of this doctrine, arrived_£uite early at thiT'condusio'nT the
GermgHrXoTcbursellTRier Pru^^^ were "to serve Europe"
by bringing it under their rule . Fichte, like the other theorists"ot Prussian
freedom, was in origin an admirer of the French Revolution and a perfect
representative of the trend of German liberalism. These middle-class
liberals, academic and remote, were without political force of then* own.
First they had expected to be liberated by the French ; and now, disliking
the French rule which was the price of Uberation, they not only asked to
be "liberated" by the King of Prussia, but hoped to console themselves
by thrusting the same "liberation" on the other peoples of Europe.
Fichte was the great figure at the newly^ founded University of Berlin
in these years ; and his teaching is often regarded as'evidence^oFtEe'nsing
self^onHdfence of the Gerrnan people . ~Tn fact his every word was an
expTfi^OToreonM in the Prussian army. Fichte's mission of
'
liberation was not to the taste either of the King or of the Prussian
generals; but his lectures were a harmless gesture against the French,
and French officers, connoisseurs of rhetoric, often formed the most
44
THE ASCENDANCY OF FRANCE, 179Z-1814
admiring part of his audience. Fichte inspired not a German uprising
against Napoleon, for there was noneTIBuTa'^ffijFpio^^
for tEefuture : themyth that German liberty and Prussian self-preservation
were the same and that liberation was^to be found not in social and political
chan^Twithin G^Tnany7Fut iifunion with the most backward elements
in Germany^ against the ioreigner. bervice'in theP^ussian^army was the
German version oT service in the cause (STTiB^y, and the defeat of the
French at the battle of Leipzig the German suBstitute for the fall of the
Bastille. Where the French youth of 1789 had founded the great political
clubs and so prepared the way for the triumph of the Jacobins, the
patriotic Germans of 1813 organized gymnastic societies under the
bruiser-poet Jahn and displayed their enthusiasm not in rhetoric, but in
Swedish drill.
On the outbreak of war in 1813, Fichte dramatically suspended his
lectures "until the liberation of the fatherland." But his only contribution
to this Uberation was to retire to his study, there to experience sensations
of enthusiasm ; and the only contribution of German nationalism was to
give the battle of Leipzig the romantic name of the "battle of the nations."
In fact, no nations fought at Leipzig, only the professional armies of the
old order on one side and the polyglot conscripts of the French Emperor
on the other. The RussiarL and Austrian armies were composed of drill-
hardened peasants, not a man of whom had an inkling of any national
cause. In the Prussian army of 300,000 men there were 10,000 volun-
teers
;
these, and two solitary battalions from the rest of Germany, were
the sum total of the national movement. This handful of volunteers came
from the academic middle class. Of any movement of the masses against
the French there was no trace at aU. The French were never troubled in
Germany, as they had been in Spain and in Russia, by guerrillas. French
couriers travelled across Germany without escort, and Napoleon received
his regular post from Paris even on the day of the battle of Leipzig. French
civil officials were unquestioningly obeyed until the moment when they
handed over their authority to the agents of the advancing Allies. The
absence of any popular movement is not surprising. Men will rise to
defend old and cherished institutions or to further new and inspiring
Videas. In Germany there was neither one nor the other. In the three
hundred years since the time of Luther, the German princes had deprived
Germany of all her traditions; there was nothing left to call forth a
stubborn conservative rejection of foreign ways such as roused the Spanish
peasants. Germany had been levelled too much to produce a Vendee.
But the levelling had come from above. Germany was not stirred by the
ideas of liberty which had evoked the levee en masse in 1792. In the world
of politics, the Germans knew nothing but authority, die Obrigkeit; and the
war of liberation could only remove one authority and substitute another.
45
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
The myth of the national uprising against Napoleon was later fostered
by the German intellectuals who had been present at Leipzig in the same
sense as George IV was present at Waterloo. But the originator of the
I myth was none other than Napoleon himself, ashamed to admit that he
/ owed his defeat to his own blunders and to the strength of the three
eastern powers whom he had despised and humiliated. To be defeated
by an elemental upheaval of the peoples of Europe was less disgraceful,
indeed almost noble. In fact, Germany turned against Napoleon only
in the sense that the German princes sensed the coming storm and changed
, sides. The King of Prussia, too timid to break with Napoleon even after
I
the Moscow campaign, was driven into war, but not by the Prussian
j
people. War was thrust upon him by General Yorck, most reactionary
of Prussian officers, who made a miUtar5ri*greemer^^ orders with
. the Tsar. This was a strange "revolutionary war," imposed on the King
\ by soldiers whose only concern was to redeem their professional reputa-
tion, tarnished in 1806. The other German princes were not even driven
over to the Allied side by patriotic officers. They admired and regretted
Napoleon, who had increased their territories and enhanced their titles,
and they adopted the cause of "liberation" from diplomatic calculation
and only just in time. The Bavarian army, for example, set out to fight
for Napoleon, but was "converted" by the preHminaries of the battle of
^/
Leipzig, news of which fortunately reached it on the way. Only the King
I
of Saxony jumped too late,and arrived at the Allied camp as a prisoner,
^Xo the embarrassment of his jailers all of whom had been dependants of
^Napoleon a few days or weeks before. Thus Germany passively endured
the war of liberation, just as previously it had endured conquest by the
"V French and before that the balance of the system of Westphalia. The
Allies defeated the French, but they could not undo the effects of French
rule ; and they had to devise a new system for Germany which would serve
1
1 the interests of Europe, as previously the Napoleonic system had served
'
I
the interests of France. The people of Germany were not consulted.
They could not be consulted. As a political force they did not exist.
CHAPTER III
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION:
THE YEARS OF AUSTRO-PRUS SIAN
PARTNERSHIP, 1815-48
In 1815 the victorious Allies, meeting at the Congress of Vienna, gave
r Germany a new political form: but they could not treat Germany as a
clean slate. The war against Napoleon had been fought in the name of the
46
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48
independence of the European states ; and the princes of Germany had as
much right to exist as any other. They were, no doubt, the creation of
Napoleon, but they had been accepted as allies, and their existence was
an accomplished fact. There was little territorial shuffling within Germany
'Vin 1815; the great remodelling had been done in 1803. The King
of Saxony lost nearly half his kingdom, as a penalty for having de-
layed too long his change of sides; and the kingdom of Westphalia,
a Napoleonic appanage, was broken up—some of it restored to the
King of Hanover (who was also King of England), the rest allotted to
Prussia.
The one serious territorial problem was that of the lands on the left^
bank of the Rhine which had been part of France for the preceding
twenty years and, before that, a tangle of ecclesiastical states. A secular
ruler had now to be found for them. They were not a tempting propo-
sition: strategically exposed to French invasion, they were aggrieved at
being separated from France and hankered after French rule. They were
almost entirely Roman Catholic and, if they were to have a German ruler,
hoped for the Etrifc'-'tf of Austria. But Francis I, and still more the
Aistv^-Ms i^M^^. r^u&ed to resume the traditional role of defender of
Ger^Jtn^^^ idiiidi had caused the Habsburgs so much barren effort. By a
strange clianec these lands found themselves in Prussia, an outcome
'
most undesired |>oth by themselves and by Frederick William III. Prussia
was entitled to territorial gains enough to restore her to the extent of
1805. But the Tsar Alexander dreamt of a liberal kingdom of Poland
under his sovereignty and therefore denied to Prussia the greater part of
the Polish lands of which Napoleon had deprived her to compose the
Grand Duchy of Warsaw. All that Prussia recovered was the “Grand
Duchy of Posen,” a strip of tenitory connecting West Prussia and Silesia.
The Prussians then proposed as compensation to annex Saxony, but this
was denied them by Austria and England. As a last resort they were
fobbed off with the left bank of the Rhine, which became Rhenish Prussia,
geographically and spiritually without connection with the rest o? tlie
kingdom. Prussia had imposed on her the task of defending the Rhine
‘
^against the French and shouldered it most unv/illingly; it was, as it were,
*
a practical joke played by the Great Powers on the weakest of their
numbers. Prussia lost, or rather failed to recover, three million Poles,
and acquired three million Germans. The Prussian governing class
thought nothing of this : they knew only that they had lost three million
amenable serfs and had acquired three million free peasants and burghers, V
all influenced by Roman Catholicism or by French Uberalism. They
lamented the empty acres of the Vistula; neither they nor anyone else
had an inkling that they had acquired what was to be within a century
the greatest industrial region in the world. The same Polish factors
47
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
which had kept Prussia in existence in 1807 compelled Prussia in 1814 to
become the leading Germanic power.
More difficult than these territorial questions was that of the German
order. The Confederation of the Rhine had been a dependency of
Napoleon ; the new Confederation had to be a dependency of the Allies,
but with a different aim. Napoleon sought to mobilize the resources of
Germany for his further plans of conquest ; the Allies wished merely to
prevent a new French aggression. The German Confederation which
,/ they created was a negative organization, seeking to keep the lesser
German states out of the way while the tvv^o Great Powers resisted
France—Prussia on the Rhine and Austria on the Po. It was a new
version of the system of Westphalia, with some pretence of making the
German states assist in their own survival. The Great Powers who deter-
mined the constitution of the German Confederation tried to combine
two contradictory ideas : on the one hand they wished to respect and to
consolidate the independence of the German states; on the other to
promote in Germany, by voluntary agreement, the measures of united
action which Napoleon had imposed by force. The Federal Act, therefore,
not only provided for a federal organization of defence; it declared,in
favour of constitutions in the member states and authorized the Federal
Diet to promote a common systemj^f weights and measures, a common
code of law, and—most f,&,r-reaching of all—a German customs union.
But the Federal Diet had no power to compe? co-operation ; each state
retained its complete sovereignty, and a single state could wreck any
proposal by its refusal.
The German Confederation anticipated, on a smaller scale, the attempt
f of the League of Nations to square the circle of common action and
^ absolute sovereignty, and, hke the League of Nations, was doomed to a
hopeless task. Just as the League of Nations rested, in fact, on the
strength of two Great Powers, England and France, so the German
/Confederation was, in fact, protected by Austria and Prussia* and the
lesser states of Germany, like the members of the League of Nations,
played at being sovereign states without making any exertions to preserve
their existence. The analogy is a Httle unfair to the League, in that a few
of its smaller members would have made sacrifices for the cause of
collective security if they had been given any encouragement to do so,
whereas no German state ever bestirred itself. The German rulers pre-
ferred to devote their revenues to their own pleasures or, at best, to the
promotion of culture (just as the peoples of the democratic countries
preferred to devote their resources to the improvement of social con-
ditions). Only a strong public opinion could have driven the German
princes into fulfilling their duties, and this public opinion did not exist.
Such public opinion as there was in the states of v>/estern Germany
48
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48
demanded constitutional liberties, not a more national policy
;
and the
greater the degree of liberalism, the less willingness to risk this liberalism
for the national cause.
the German Confederation v/as assigned, without much reflection,
the boundary of the old Reich. But the old Reich had been the remnants I
of a universal Empire, with a national element added almost as an after-
thought; the Confed^ation^^aas^. by definition, a naUonaLassociation.
Taking over the old frontiers created two problems for the future. On
the one hand, it excluded East Prussia and the territories acquired by
Prussia in the parlitfons of Pcdan^^ Prussia, that is, and the Duchy
of Posen; East Prussia was mainly, and the PoHsh lands partly, inhabited
by Germans, and the extension of German predominance was a burning
issue both during the revolution of 1848 and in the politics of Bismarckian
Germany. On the other hand, the Confederation irxqly^ed Bohemia. In the .
old Reich, Bohemia had occupied an anomalous position. The King of
Bohemia liad been an “elector,” but he had never been obliged to follow
the Emperor in war and, alone of the princes, had enjoyed the title of
King of an Imperial land. He was, in fact, rather a sovereign associate of
the Reich than a feudal dependant. Since 1526, when the crown of
Bohemia passed to the head of the house of Habsburg, these questions
of feudal law had lost their practical importance ; but Bohemia remained
in a distinct position, rather more like the independent Kingdom of
Hungary (which also had the Habsburg ruler as king) than a full member
of the Reich. In 1815 this decayed feudal tradition was ignored. The
Czech people, who made up the majority of the inhabitants of Bohemia,
had been for two hundred years without a national culture or a territorial
upper class ;
they were a people lost to history, and it was easy to assume
that the German inhabitants of Prague or Briinn made up Bohemia. The
Czechs had once been willing to be part of a universal Reich ;
but they
could never consent to be members of a national Confederation, and
conflict was inevitable as soon as they recovered their national con-
sciousness. Thus, embedded in the federal act, there lay concealed the^^^
Czech question and the Polish c|ue
.
s^n^..ih^^tM^^.^afei^^^
the limits of Ge|
The scheme devised by the Great Powers at Vienna was criticized from^,
two sides. On the one hand, some conservatives, swayed^ by the enthusi-
asm for tradition which, was so marked an aspect of the romantic move-
ment, desired to revive the old Reich and to restore the glories of the
medieval Empire, Twenty-one German princes urged Francis I to resume
the Imperial crowh. Sentimentalism, not reality, inspired this offer. The
abolition of the ecclesiastical states and of the Free Cities had destroyed
the balance of the old order, and no secular prince was willing to disgorge
the spoils which he had received from Napoleon. In any case, no one
49
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
could seriously wish to revive the Reich as it had existed in 1792, on the
outbreak of the wars with France ; and to put back the clock of history
a thousand years was beyond even a German conservative. Francis
would not accept an empty dignity and saw that it could be made effective
only by appealing to revolutionary nationalism against the princes. He
replied to the offer: “Only a Jacobin could accept this crown.” The
Austrian representative was to preside at the meetings of the Federal
4^ Diet ; that was the last relic of the old Reich.
Conservative criticism was vain nostalgia rather than the offer of an
\ alternative. The criticism from the other side offered an alternative, but
one which did not yet exist. The exponents of German nationalism who
had applauded the victory of the Allies from the wings nov^^alled on the
Allies to create a German national state\They expected the (jreat Powers
j to dethrone not only the German princes, but two of their own number,
the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria, as well. Some national
I Enthusiasts even supported the offer of the Imperial crown to Francis I
\ in the hope that he might turn out to be a Jacobin after all. Stein, the
most ruthless and impatient of them, looked instead to the Tsar. Stein
had acted as administrator for the German lands which the Russians
had taken over from the French during their advance; and he proposed
that these territories should remain under an Imperial commissioner as
the starting-point of national Germany. Stein’s scheme was decked out
with an impressive national phraseology; its practical sense was that
^ ^ Germany should be made national by grace of Alexander I, just as it had
been made liberal (to Stein’s indignation) by grace of Napoleon. Alex-
ander was visionary enough to listen to Stein’s advocacy; but even he
could not contemplate taking over, indeed surpassing, Napoleon’s per-
formance. Stein’s speciality was to allot himself impossible tasks. First,
he had set out to turn Frederick William III into a German liberal ; and
now he tried to lure Alexander I into becoming a German nationalist.
,His plans were impracticable, but they revealed, in the last resort, his
/ soundness of judgment : he never thought of employing the efforts of the
‘ Germans themselves. A national Germany established by Alexander
^ was absurd but not impossible; a national Germany established in 1815
\ by the Germans was never contemplated by anyone,
“•y The handful of German nationalists were active and vocal after 1815.
it What they expressed was not a determination to succeed but regret and
^ resentment at their impotence. The patriotic associations of students,
which had played no part against Napoleon, now wished to acquire,
by boasting, a sort of posthumous importance. Jahn’s gymnastic societies
paraded round the university towns with all the airs of the conquerors of
Napoleon; and romantic secret societies, the Burschenschaften (associ-
ations of hobbledehoys) sprang up to prepare for the coming radical
50
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48
Germany. The excitement and turmoil of a great war had made the
5.
students reluctant to return to their hbraries and lecture rooms. They
wanted the excitement and turmoil to continue; and as the real enemy,
Napoleon, had disappeared, they had to create some imaginary foe, a
turnip ghost, who would justify their sham uniforms, their displays of
violence, their anti-Semitism, and their verbal pugnaciousness. Germany
after 1815 was distracted by their staged radicalism, of which the most
striking was a symbolical “burning of the books” in 1817. Why books
should be burnt or what it symbolized these “students” never explained
—for students to burn books was somehow a gesture of the great new^
era of romantic freedom which ought to have been created by the fall of \
/^Napoleon. These undergraduate follies were not evidence of a nationalist
‘ movement in Germany. They were stud’ent “BTsturbances, which could
become significant only in a country without serious political life. If they
had been ignored, they would have faded away with the fading of the
excitement of the great war; for student generations are short. But the
nerves of the ruling classes too were on edge. Strained and exhausted
after the great struggle, they treated the student agitation as a real political
affair and so gave it an undeserved place in history.
No one could foresee in 1815 that the Hundred Days marked the end
for ever of the French plans of European dominion. For more than a |.
f-generation, the policies of the Great Powers were shaped by the apprehea-
sion of a new Napoleonic war ; and their precautions became meaningless
only when this apprehension lost its force. Italy and western Germany,
disunited, without strength of their own, sentimentally attracted towards
France, were the weak spots of this system of security ; and the responsi-
bility for both fell on Austria. Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, was
doubtful of Austria’s resources and weighed down by the size of his
task. Hence he reacted v/ith exaggerated alarm to every breath of dis-
ruptive radicalism ot of pro-French feeling. He, too, was an eighteenth-
century rationalist with no faith in the traditions which he defended ; he
regarded the victory of the “revolution” as inevitable and himself doomed
to the defence of a losing cause. With all his acuteness of personal
judgment and mastery of diplomatic technique, he lacked any real political
P
sense ; he flattered the German students by taking them seriously and set
all Europe astir to control a few dozen undergraduate societies.
The corner-stone of Metternich’s German policy was co-operation
with Prussia. There was nothing far-fetched or Machiavellian in this. ^
^
Prussia, too, was a conservative military monarchy, without national
unity or constitutional life. Frederick William III had experienced at
the hands of Napoleon defeat and humiliation; therefore he was even
(jnore apprehensive than Metternich of any whisper of liberalism or of
pro-French feeling and indeed looked pathetically to Metternich for
51
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
/|guidance and protection. Moreover the principles of German nationalism
seemed to menace Hohenzoliern, far more than Habsburg, existence.
Many nationalists had imagined the Habsburg Emperor as head of a new
Germany
;
hardly any supposed that the King of Prussia would survive
^ in a national Germany, let alone lead i\. It was well known, too, that
the Kingdom of Prussia included over a million Poles; therefore the
establishment of the national principle would involve, at the very least,
the disruption of the Prussian Kingdom. No one, on the other hand,
had the slightest appreciation that Boheirda was not German and even
the Habsburgs themselves treated Hungary as a separate unit, so that
the Habsburg lands could be incorporated in a national Germany almost
in their existing form. The Austrian statesmen disliked the radical nature
of the nationalist agitation and feared for their social position
;
still, they
expected, in the last resort, to bargain with German nationalism, as they
had bargained with so many dangers in the past. But, for a whole genera-
tion after 1815, no compromise seemed possible between German national-
ism and a great independent Kingdom of Prussia. The conflict between
Prussia and the national principle appeared irremediable, far deeper than
Austria’s conflict. This would be so obvious as to require no labouring
had not tlie history of Germany between the Congress of Vienna and the
revolutions of 1848 been obscured and perverted by the genius of a great
historian. Treitsckke, a Saxon liberal of Czech origin, became after 1866
a convert to the cause of Prussian domination in Germany. Not only
did he persuade himself that in embracing this cause he had not aban-
doned his earlier liberal principles ; he set out to prove that Prussia had
always been the nucleus of national Germany and that Prussia had aimed
at the unification of Germany ever since 1815. This proof needed five
long volumes, German History in the Nineteenth Century, a work of the
greatest literary power, which has naturally bewitched every subsequent
writer on this period. Treitschke was faced at the outset with a complete
contradiction of his theory: the fact that Frederick William III was
utterly dependent on Metternich and sought his protection from the
nationalist agitation in Germany. His explanation was puerile : Frederick
William, innocent, indeed simple-minded, was entangled, or rather
hypnotized, by the subtleties of Metternich’s argument. Once abandon
Treitschke’s hypothesis and all the difficulties disappear. Frederick
William III had never recovered from the experiences of 1806. The
student buffooneries in Germany after 1815 drove his anxiety beyond all
bounds; and he importuned Metternich for some firm action, some
counter-demonstration of the “forces of order.” Metternich, though not
so anpous, was apprehensive too. Just as the statesmen of Europe after
1919|3ersomfied in “the Bolshevik peril” all the problems created by the
Four Years’ War and by their own incapacity, so the rulers of Prussia
52
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48
and Austria, conscious of mounting difficulties, saw them incorporated
in “the radical movement.” The event which in 1 8 19„ touched otf their
fears into action was the murder by a romantic student of Kotzebue, a
minor dramatist who added to his income by writing a news-letter to the
Tsar. It was a fitting symbol of the academic nature of the radical move-
I
ment that a futile journalist should be its only victim.
Prussia and Austria took action on a grand scale. Metternich met
Hardenberg, the Prussian Chancellor, secretly in Bohemia; drafted a
series of decrees providing for federal inquiry into the universities and for
federal standards of political censorship ; and forced these decrees on the
other German states at a meeting at Karlsbad almost as conspiratorial
as the meetings of the Burschenschaft. This was Austro-Prussian dualism
in action, and for a repressive purpose. The Karlsbad decrees were the
only positive activity of the Federal Diet
;
they became the great example
of Mettemich’s repressive policy ; and the Confederation was discredited
once and for all by its police task.lThe Karlsbad decrees were blamed for
the disappearance of the radi(;al movement which followed at once ; in
fact they merely gave a halo of martyrdom to a movement which was
already practically extinct. JThe League of Nations might easily have
been led, in the first year or two of its existence, into promoting measures
against Bolshevism (and was indeed so accused by the Comintern); in
that case the decay of the Communist movements after 1923 would have
been wrongly attributed to the “Geneva decrees.” The radical move-
ment in Germany needed no decrees to bring it to an end. It was a move-
ment of university students, and the life of a student generation is four
years. By 1819 the young men who had defeated Napoleon by proxy
were taking their degrees and looking round for bureaucratic positions in
the lesser states; their successors never developed the same craving for
excitement and wearied of Swedish drill with “Father Jahn.” The com-
mission of inquiry into the universities set up by the Karlsbad decrees
sat for interminable years and ultimately produced a wordy, high-sounding
report on the misdeeds of students who had long ceased to be students
and on professors long since dead. But in its eight years of activity it
managed to identify only 107 subversive individuals in the whole of
Germany; these 107 alone experienced any practical effect of the Karlsbad
decrees.
There was a more serious reason for the fading of the liberal movement
‘in Germany after 1820. The wars against Napoleon were followed not
merely by political excitement, but by material prosperity as well. Austria
and Prussia had received large English su5si3Tes7’some of the lesser states
smaller ones. The Germans, as it were, exported their man-power to the
battlefield and obtained English gold in return ; but man-power was theirJ
sole article of export. After 1815 the English gold passed into circulation^
53 ^
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
and there was a brief period of heady misleading activity. By 1820 the
gold had been exhausted, used up in buying English manufactured goods
land colonial products. All over central Europe prices collapsed, the
artificial briskness ended, and German life fell back into a duller, humbler
air. For thk Germany of 1815 was almost entirely an agricultural countr^
without flourishing industries or an independent prosperous merchant or
manufacturing class. Only a quarter of the population lived in the towns,
though any place with more than 2,000 inhabitants was dignified with
that name ; the entire town population of Germany was only half as much
again as the population of Paris ; and most towns had, if anything, dwindled
since the sixteenth centyry. Germany had no industries in the modem
sense of the term : no serious coal production, no steam engines, no large
factories. She had old-established handicrafts: the weaving of Silesia,
the cutlery of Solingen, the making of clocks and toys in the Black Forest.
These industries employed the leisure hours of peasants
; they could not
be the foundation of a middle class. The intellectual life of Germany
was remote, suspended from reality. The vv’riters wrote for each other
or sought the patronage of some prince. There was no German “public”
iand therefore there were no poHticaL movements, only the disputes of
academic politicians. Goethe was the greatest of all German writers,
but he could not live by the sale of his books ; he had to become first
manager of the Cojjrt theatre and then general administrator in the petty
state of Weimar.<^Thus there began in 1820 what German historians call the "quiet years/Xthe dead period when the Napoleonic storm had blown over and when the new forces which were to disrapt Germany had not established themselves, the long calm which lasted until the war crisis which coincided with the accession of Frederick William IV of Prussia in 1840 and until the new outburst of the romantic movement both in >^ literature and politics which was the prelude to the revolutions of 1848.^^
W The “quiet years” silenced liberalism without benefiting conservatism.
The precarious balance was indefinitely prolonged. The conservative
theorists, Gentz at their head, wished to bring Germany back to her
traditions; to transform the parliaments of the lesser states into feudal
Estates; and to breathe new life into the decaying provinces of the two
Great Powers. Even Metternich, in his cynical, abstract fashion, was
caught for this romantic programme and lectured the German princes on
the merits of consulting their Estates. But the Western states had not
undergone the levelling of their absolutist rulers and of the French revo-
lution for nothing. There was no elaborate system of rank, no assortment
of privileges, to provide the variety which Estates needed. There was not
even a returned emigre nobility such as gave France for a few years a
misleading air of feudal fashions. iThe l^ss^r German states were all
indisputably “liberal.” That is, tliey had a socMand politicaruniformity
:
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48
no class privileges, a middle-class bureaucracy, and representative
Cfiambers with legislative powers, but unable to do more than criticiz^
the administration in a carping, negative way. These German consti-
tutions followed the lines of the Charter which the French bourgeoisie had
imposed upon Louis XVHI in 1814; and in the same way gave the
administrative middle class a public voice but no power. The^Chambers
were representative of the “people” only in the sense that they ^repre-
sented wealth and education; rigidly^ based on limited suffragej)the last
thing they desired’was to represent the uninstructed masses. The Con-
servative programme of transforming the unhistorical Chambers into
pseudo-historical Estates (for no real tradition of Estates existed) would
have substituted for the monopoly of middle-class bureaucracy a partner-
ship of landed nobility and loyal peasants—a programme unwelcome not
only to the middle-class bureaucrats but just as much to the lesser princes
who had no desire to revive the power of their landed nobles. Advocacy
of Estates was the only attempt made by the Confederation to put into
effect the constitutional promises of 1815 ; and it made the liberal bureau-
crats more distrustful of the Confederation than ever. They refused to
admit that there was anything positive in conservative ideas and so
identified both Metternich and the Confederation, his instrument, with
barren repression. In theory they were mistaken; in practice things
worked out much as they imagined, for Metternich’s dry rationahsm made
him sceptical and ineffective even in regard to his own plans.
^The “quiet years” were therefore the heyday of constitutionalism in the
separate states, though they stifled liberahsm as a German movement.
This ^constitutionalism was strangely abstract, doctrinaire. The creed
almost exclusively of bureaucrats, it thought solely in terms of legal
procedure; precision and rule, not freedom or achievement, were its aims.
In the absence of an independent capitalistic middle class, constitutional
life was a game played by the servants of the state among themselves.
Only the officials and the professional men, themselves dependent on
court patronage for their fivelihood, had votes; and even the leaders of
the opposition in the various Chambers were civil servants on leave.
On one thing all agreed : fear of the central power and a conviction that a
national Germany would be the doom of their precious “liberal” exis-
tence; united distrust therefore of the masses, through whom national
sentiment could alone becom^dangerous and united resolution to exclude
the masses from political life^Thus was completed the trend by which
j
German constitutionafism associated itself both with particularism and
,
^with an attitude of hostility to democracy. The German princes, without
real existence, became the patrons of a constitutional liberalism which
was also without roots or popular support; strange alliance of two
artificial entities, brought together by a common helplessnes^ Both
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
denounced the Vienna settlement
;
yet both could survive only so long as
the balance created in Vienna continued to operate. \
‘
The Vienna balance shook a little as a result of the French Revolution
/of 1830. Liberal excitement spread, for a moment, beyond bureaucratic
circles ; and the possibihty of French intervention in Belgium raised the
danger of a European war. ‘ The war scare lasted just long enough to
reveal the complete disorder and unpreparedness of the Federal machinery
of defence, but not long enough to promote a demand for reform./ There
was hberal bustle in most of the petty states ; and some of the princes,
such as the Duke of Brunswick, who exceeded the normal princely level
in eccentric violence or plain lunacy, were chased off their thrones. But
there were no serious constitutional changes and little hint of any new
national feeUng. However, radical students and journalists finally managed
to screw themselves up to the point of a monster rally at Hambach in the
Bavarian Palatinate in 1832, the first feast of nationalist oratory on a large
scale since the days of the burning of the books and other feats of emanci-
pation in 1817. Two years later, fifty students of a more practical turn of
mind attempted to seize the Town Hall in Frankfort and proclaim the
German republic. They were dispersed by the Town Guard.
Metternich, though without much conviction, staged a new radical
peril; and in 1834 persuaded the German states to revive the machinery
of the Karlsbad decrees. His real anxiety was the ineffectiveness of the
Confederation ; and he hoped by means of the radical bogy to induce
the German princes to surrender some of their sovereignty to the central
authority. In a curiously detached despairing way Metternich actually
wanted a Confederation with some powers; but he would not compel
agreement and his bogy was not frightening. Sole outcome of the dis-
cussions at Vienna was a Federal Court to arbitrate between the states;
and the Court never met. Metternich, all through his life, flattered himself
that his diplomacy, rather than the superior strength of the Allies, had
defeated Napoleon; and he could never rid himself of the delusion, so
closely echoed at Geneva a century later, that the ineffective Confederation
could be made effective by some additional article, some unobserved
constitutional twist. But the defect of the Confederation was inherent in
its composition. The lesser states, with’^thSlr artfficiaTsovereignty, feared
the two great members of the Confederation more than they feared France
;
and therefore even those princes, such as the King of Bavaria and the
King of Hanover, who had respectable armies of some size, planned to
^ keep them out of a French war so as to preserve their independence
thereafter. Austria and Prussia could be counted on to resist France for
the sake of their position as Great Powers; and the lesser princes could
\ safely devote all their ingenuity to avoiding the burden of federal obli-
‘ gations.
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48 \
The Confederation was as a result an empty farce. The federal army \ V
was not organized; the federal fortresses were not garrisoned; even the
federal dues were not paid and throughout its fifty years of life the Federal
Diet conducted its business on stationery borrowed from the Austrian
Chancellery. In 1840 there was a new war scare, an alarm that France,
baulked in the Near East, might renew the programme of the natural
frontiers. There was a rather febrile revival of the “spirit of 1813,” with
rather better poems and even less practical results. The full failure of
the Confederation was now obvious : Austria had her hands full in Italy,
and only the Prussian army garrisoned the Rhine. Prussia had become
unwittingly the defender of Germany, and the associations between
Prussia and German nationalism were renewed for the first time since ^
1813. The alarm blew over; and after it there was much mutual reproach
and high talk. Most of the states actually paid their federal contributions.
But it was impossible to agree what use should be made of these sub-
scriptions, and the fund remained intact in the hands of the Rothschilds
atPrankfort.
j
^ iThe story of the German federal organization v/as thus one of unbroken ‘P
failure. Failure in the military sphere, failure in the constitutional sphere.l^
Failure, too, in the other tasks envisaged by the Final Act. Nothing was ^rP^f .
..^
done to promote a uniform code of law or a uniform standard of weights r\ >^ ^
and measures
;
nothing was done through the Confederation to lower the 4 / ^.
tariff barriers within Germany. It is usual to blame the two Great Powers ^JL^^ ,
for this failure ; but in at any rate some spheres they would have welcomed ^ j-^ ^
federal achievement and were defeated by the veto of the small states.
/>’^fi>^
Both, for instance, desired a federal system of defence ; both made pro- ®
^
posals for a German code of law; and Austria at least would have
welcomed tariff co-operation. But only force would lead the petty princes
‘Tto abate a scrap of their absolute sovereignty. The subjects of the petty
princes had no force, and Austria and Prussia were debarred by their
monarchical principles from using any. From 1815 to 1848, a political
generation, no advance was made, and the stagnation which had followed
V
Westphalia seemed to be renewed. But in that generation great changes
took place, changes in the economic and spiritual life of Germany, changes
above all in the balance of the two German powersN
In 1815 Austria was indisputably the greater ofH^ two Powers, Prussia
still shattered and exhausted by the disasters of 1806. In the following
thirty years Austria’s lead was greatly lessened, though it probably still
remained at the end. For Austria this was the “Metternich era,” the
period when all attempt at a constructive policy was abandoned, when
“administration took the place of government” and when even adminis-
tration was mainly concerned with the exclusion of liberalism. The
experiences “of the eighteenth centurv had shown that reforms could not
57
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
be carried through merely by Imperial will, but must rest on a reforming
class. In the Austrian Empire there was no. competent reforming class,
and, in the reign of Francis 1, not even a reforming Imperial will. Each
year the finances grew worse and the bureaucratic confusion more inex-
tricable ; the equipment, the organization, and the effective strength of the
army steadily declined. Moreover, from the point of view of German
standing, the most constructive part of Metternich’s policy had a weaken-
ing result. In 1815 the impression made by the Germanizing policy of
Joseph II still remained, ^and it was generally supposed, in a vague way,
that the Austrian Empire was a German state. Metternich set himself
*’/ to remove this impression. He feared the development of German
/ nationalism as part of the hberal danger ; he feared that German national-
\ ;
_
ism would look sympathetically on the claims of national Italy and so
\ help to deprive the Habsburgs of their rich Italian possessions; and,
\\ further, his trumped-up devotion to tradition made him seek to revive
the consciousness of the historic states and provinces into which the
Austrian Empire was divided. In Hungary, Metternich gave up Joseph II’s
policy of co-operating with the German trading classes and, instead,
breathed new life into the aristocratic constitution. His intention was to
I make aristocratic Hungary a barrier against bourgeois German national-
1 ism; instead, the Hungarian nobles allied themselves with Magyar
nationahsm and transformed old Hungary into a Hberal-national state.
In Bohemia too, Metternich stirred the decayed Diet into a feeble revival
and sought to promote a Czech national consciousness, though only in the
cultural sphere. Even in the German lands of the house of Habsburg,
Metternich gave the Estates a sham existence, in order to substitute
^ provincial sentiment for a common German character, a policy which
had little success except in Tyrol.^Metternich’s patronage of Hungarian,
Czech, and Slovene sentiment perhaps served “the strength which comes
J of diversity” in his favourite phrase ; but it undoubtedly made the German
inhabitants of the Austrian Empire conscious, as they had not been in
(;v 1815, both of their^ German nationality and of their minority position
v/ithin the Empire. Metternich’s cynical policy aimed at making the
victory of Germa^” nationalisni ,within the Austri^^^^ Empire impossible;
^but his policy simulated, in the minds of both Austrian and non-Austrian
Germans, the idea oF the Austrian Empire as a half-German or even a
non-German state. In 1815 no one could have imagined a Germany
without Austria) by 1848 the position of Austria in Germany had become
a problem without obvious or agreed solution.
The history of Prussia in these thirty-three years was the exact opposite
:
the efficiency of her government increased and its German character
became more pronounced. The idea of a Prussian leadership of Germany^,
when consciously formulated in 1848, still came with a shock of surprise;
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48
\
but the way for it had been unwittingly prepared throughout the pre-
ceding generation. In 1815 the policy of Prussia was neither German nor
liberal. Frederick William III had rashly promised a constitution to his
subjects, but he was determined not to implement his promise; the last
relic of the days of liberation was a further promise, given in 1820, that
the state debt should not be increased without the consent of the Estates
of the Kingdom. But for more than twenty years the King did not need
to borrow, and Prussia remained therefore despotically ruled by the
King’s ministers and by the governors of the eight provinces into which
the Kingdom was divided. Provincial Estates existed, but, lacking financial
authority, they lacked all sense and provided merely an opportunity for
meagre display and even more meagre speeches. The Prussian ministers,
energetic men without interest in historic institutions, regarded the pro-
vincial Estates with contempt and distrust, and systematically reduced
their importance\While Metternich was deliberately reviving the Austrian
provinces, the Prussians were rather less deliberately reducing theirs,
though both had the same hostility to liberalism and the popular will^y^
^One Prussian province possessed a distinct character and v/as, for some
time, given privileged treatment. ‘ This was Posen, the Polish territory
recovered at the Congress of Vienna\ Alexander I had conceived the
romantic ambition of establishing a liberal-national Poland under his
own sovereignty ; and he had regretted having to restore to Prussia even
a fraction of her former Polish territory. The Prussian rulers feared the
attractive power of Alexander’s Kingdom of Poland with its ostensibly
Uberal constitution and its national character. “Congress Poland”
aimed at winning the support of the Polish aristocracy; Prussian policy
in reply aimed at winning over the lo¥/er ranks of the national classes.
The Poles were told that their national character would be respected and
preserved; the province was given, in a modified form, the Polish coat-
of-arms and the high-sounding title of a Grand Duchy ; most striking of
all, Prussian agrarian policy, which elsewhere benefited the lord at the
expense of the peasant, was here reversed in order to. benefit the Polish
peasant at the cost of the”Polish lord. The Grand Duchy of Posen was
for some^^ars tHeTreest and most Polish part of the partitioned lands, the
centre of national feeling and the starting-point of the movements for
Uberation. But this strange situation did not last. There were continual
complaints from the other Prussian provinces with Polish subjects,
especially West Prussia ; and the widening breach between the Tsar and
Polish feeling lessened the need for a pro-Polish policy in Posen. In
1830 the conflict between the Tsar and the Poles broke into an open
„
Polish revolt; and, when this had been crushed in 1831, Congress Poland
was ruled by Russian military force. In Posen too the period of Polish
^
freedom ended. Prussian policy ceased to protect the Polish peasants
59
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
and began instead an educational campaign for the spread of German.
Much to their surprise the conservative Prussian bureaucrats found
themselves, not for the last time, serving the revolutionary cause ofGerman
nationalism, which they disliked and feared.
This strange and unwelcome alliance was forced on Prussia also in
another connection both in Posen and on the Rhine. The two great
acquisitions of the Congress of Vienna, remote in everything else, had
the one common characteristic of Roman Catholicism ; and the possession
of more than six million Roman Catholic subjects forced on the Prussian
state for the first time the problem of its relations with an independent
ecclesiastical authority. The Prussian state had always been, in religious
matters, both totaHtarian and tolerant : it cared nothing for behef so long
as it exacted obedience. Now it would have cared nothing for the Roman
Catholics if they had confined their religion to private Ufe./But the Roman
Catholic Church, could not be accommodated in the Prussian system
:
itself intolerant,^ it would not be reduced to the authority of another.
The challenge existed from the beginning and, after 1830, broke out into
open conflict. The occasion was a dispute over mixed marriages: the
Roman Catholic bishops attempting to forbid them except on prescribed
conditions, the Prussian state resisting this interference with the secular
law. But the real issue was whether the Prussian state must accept any
limits other than its own will. By 1840 the Archbishop of Cologne was
in prison, the Bishop of Treves forbidden to enter his see, and, on the
other hand, the Archbishop of Posen, who had refused to take up the
fight, forced to resign by Papal pressure. Poles and Roman Catholics
were joined in an “un-German” cause; and the agents of the Prussian
government were applauded by Protestant German nationalists.
The religious conflict provided almost the only event in the long dreary
years of the reign of Frederick William III. The real significance of
these- years could only be observed thereafter : the new efficiency learnt in
the years of disaster was maintained in the years of peace. The Prussian
monarchy and the Prussian ruling class never forgot their lesson and so
outstripped their Austrian partners. Without a scrap of the culture
-.which made the Austrian aristocracy patrons of music and the arts, the
Prussian Junkers and officials excelled in the drab spheres of tax-collecting,
the balancing of accounts, and the making of roads. Metternich tried
to resist liberalism by manufacturing conservative ideas—the ideas of
historic institutions, provincial diversity, religious obedience. The ideas
of the Prussian landed and bureaucratic classes were little more than a
feeble echo of Metternich’s; jtheir real answer to hberalism was the weapon
of their administrative efficiency> The Prussian Junkers were too poor to
afford the aristocratic luxury of unbalanced accounts ; and they brought
to the affairs of state the same competence as was demanded on their own
60
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION 1815-48
estates. Of all the hereditary governing classes of Europe, the Prussians
alone maintained their monopoly of political power into the twentieth
century; and it was their application at the office desk which kept them
afloat.
The “quiet years” modified the character of Prussia in two separat
spheres. The philosophy of Hegel first made of the advance of Prussia
something inevitable ; the Zollverein first made Prussia appear essential’
^to Germany./ The University of Berlin, founded in the days of humiliation
after 1806, nad been from the beginning an instrument of state policy;
but the teaching of Fichte and his followers, though inspiring, had been
more German than Prussian. Hegel, who succeeded Fichte in 1814,
performed for the state, and especially for the Prussian state, the same
service in political theory which centuries before Luther had performed
in terms of theology. NHe argued that true freedom was to be found in
working in line with the trend of history ; that the Prussian state was the
culmination of the historic process ; and that therefore submission to the
Prussian state should be the choice of every free msLUX This squaring of
the circle was welcome gospel to all those who had found it hard to
reconcile their German pride and the circumstances of everyday subjec-
tion; now they understood that in accepting subjection they v/ere really
free. Hegel remained the “German philosopher” par excellence, even
when his fashions of thought were a little outmoded. None could escape
from the spell of his teaching. The extreme radicals, of whom Marx
and Engels were the most outstanding, and who hated the Prussian
monarchy, could only argue that the “forces of history” were going else-
where—in the direction of a radical republic—and so confessed that they
understood human freedom as little as their master.
The Zollverein fitted in well with the doctrine of both Hegel and Marx.
The Prussian territoriesjQfJLB 15 straggled across northern Germany from
Aachen to Konigsberg, held together neither by geography nor by a
common past, a haphazard collection of separate provinces each with its
distinct scale of tariffs and prohibitions. Prussia could not wait for the
general German tariff* which had been promised in the Federal Act. In
18,18 there appeared a uniform Prussian tariff* system, the first tariff” system
in all Europe conceived in a spirit of moderate protection and carried out
to a conscious plan. Far from considering German needs, the tariff” was
typical of Prussian selfishness, disregarding the interests of other German
states and making the Federal establishment of a common tariff” system
impossible. [The prospect of Germany economically united by consent
was killed by Prussian policy almost before it was born. Instead, the
Prussian economic administrators conceived the plan of attacking the
small neighbouring states piecemeal and forcing them one by one into
the Prussian tariff” systenn a plan of economic conquest which they
‘THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
pursued for ten years with limited success. The states entirely surrounded
by Prussian territory succumbed to Prussian pressure, but these states
* were few, and by 1828 the original Prussian plan was worn out. Then
came the great and unexpected development. The lesser princes objected
any general German tariff union as a diminution of their sovereignty.
On the other hand they were beginning to fear that the capitalist middle
class which was at last developing in western Germany would regard the
internal tariffs of the German states as an intolerable imposition and would
turn in irritation and despair to the radical programme of a single German
repubUc./ The princes, in other words, reversed their position and actually
favoured tariff unions as the sole means of winning the middle classes
back from Jacobinism, and these unions, far from envisaging a united
Germany, were created with the deliberate purpose of making a united
^Germany unnecessary^ Two tariff unions came into being almost simul-
taneously in J 828; a Prussian agreement with Hesse-Darmstadt and a
union between Bavaria and Wurtemberg. ^^There followed six years of
economic threats and bargaining until in 1834 the various groups came
together in a singlejmioti, the Zoilveroin, which embraced almost all the
German states except Austria and a few economic dependencies of
England, such as Hanover and Hamburg^
The ZoUverein was almost the only serious event in the “quiet years,”
and for this reason has come in for more than its due of interest.% was
not a step towards the unification of Germany, but a device for making
the unification of Germany less necessary^t was the price which the
German princes, including the King of Prussia, paid for continuing to
exist^ Moreover it was an achievement of the princes, not of the peoples.
The concessions which it involved were violently opposed in the Chambers
of the lesser states ; and if Prussia, who made the greatest financial con-
cessions, had possessed a parliament, the Zollverein would never have
been established. The Zollverein became, in time, a powerful instrument
in Prussia’s control of Germany. But the Prussian statesmen who made
the Zollverein had not the slightest idea of its political consequences;
they saw only the rambling, unworkable frontiers and desired to save
money on their customs officers. Metternich, indeed, feared the political
advantages which it would bring to Prussia; but in his usual despairing
way he feared without bein^ able to prevent. The Habsburgs had a more
pressing problem—to remove the tariff barriers within their own terri-
tories; and even that they were unable to accomplish until after the
revolution of 1848. To suppose that the entire Habsburg Empire could
be economically united with non-Habsburg Germany was beyond the
range of Metternich’s hopeless spirit; for this would be to revive the
conception of a central Europe dominated from Vienna which had been
defeated in the Thirty Years’ War. “Thus the Zollverein presented to the
62
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION, 1815-48
German lands of Austria the alternative of going with the rest of Ger-
many or with the other Habsburg lands—a choice between national
sentiment and economic advantage, which was never fully made.. On
the other hand, while the lesser states certainly drifted away from Austria
economically, they had no intention of subordinating themselves to
Prussia ; and all the members of the ZoUverein, except those hemmed in
^
fbv Prussian forces, fought against Prussia in 1866.
\rhQ Zollverein was in large part the result of Prussian determination,
but like so many Prussian achievements it was a tour de force with un-
foreseen results. Its aim, so far as it expressed a deliberate policy, was to’ ^^s
prevent
,
ecpiiomic,„,uni.Qn. through the German Confederation, a pro-
tectionist union which woufd have been dominated by Austria and
would have found its centre of gravity in the Danube valley to the political
and economic ruin of Prussia. The Prussian Zollverein, in contrast,
looked across the North Sea to the world market. Based upon the low \
Prussian tariff, it promoted German prosperity not by excluding foreign /
goods but by making trade between Germany and foreign countries >
easier. It was in origin essentially a consumer’s spheme, catering for
German industrial development only by accident^) But the ZoUvereiiiN
despite its anti-national origin, could not be maintained without an
|
increasing appeal to national sentiment; and that sentiment moved in
terms of conflict, not in terms of prosperity. Within a decade of the
founding of the Zollverein, the great publicist. List, was arguing that the
)
purpose of unity in economic, as in other, matters was to make Germany /
stronger for war—stronger, in the first place, for economic v/ar, stronger*/
ultimately for war pure and simple. The sensible Fj:ee Trade bureaucrats
of Prussia who designed the Zollverein and at first controlled its workings
loathed List’s doctrines, but in the long run they lost and List won. They
would have been appalled to know that the Zollverem, instead of pro-
moting the exchange of goods between Prussia and the outer world, would
ultimately prepare the way for a imified and exclusive central Europe;
and that instead of drawing German trade down the Elbe and Rhine to ^
the North Sea it would end by committing Prussia’s military resources
to the support of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. \
Travailler pour le roi de Prusse had been a favourite saying of the \
eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century the Prussian governing
class, conscious of its weakness, worked for causes which it hated and
feared. Every success injured the traditional Prussian order, yet drove it
further on its course, until the time when the Prussian rulers, aristocratic,
particularist, Umited in their aims, became the instruments of a demagogic
German nationalism which recognized no^bolmds. At the beginning of
the century the Prussian rulers had found Stein’s programme of defeating
the French by adopting the most extreme courses of the French revolution ,
63
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
too wild for them. With the Zollverein they began to follow the same line
of policy towards the danger of German nationalism.(^_The Zollverein
was not evidence that the Prussian rulers aimed at the leade^hip of united
Germany. It was rather witness to the sacrifices they would make to
\ prevent a united Germany. ?*But one step led on to another. The Zollverein
was an “ersatz,” an economic substitute for national unification; as the
danger grew greater, the Prussian rulers were driven to offer in the
Bismarckian Reich a political “ersatz” as well.^ The Zollverein of the
eighteen-thirties and ‘forties was not very important economically: the
railways and the application of science to industry would have come even
f
without the Zollverein, and would have initiated the great industrial
change. It was certainly not important poUtically, for it neither created
in Prussia a habit of leading nor in the other states a habit of being led.
But it was very important as a symbol of the resourcefulness of the
Prussian governing classes, of their readiness to appease and to exploit
the new political forces. The classes that ruled Prussia would dig thpk
{ own graves provided that they retained a monopoly of wielding the spad^
/ \ ‘^[When, a generation later, most of Germany had been united under
[
Prussian rule, German writers, and others too, accepted the Hegelian
, doctrine that the “forces of history” had been working towards this end
‘ in the thirty-three years which followed the Congress of Vienna. In
/ reality/Germany, protected from the domination of a single Great Power
cj^ by the mutual jealousy of three Great Powers, tended during these years
to break up, not to come together, and was less united in 1848 than in 181
5^
Then the intellectual classes, and to some extent the military classes as
well, had been brought together by the emotions of the war of “libera-
tion” ; in peace they fell apart. The lesser princes were fearful of Austria
and Prussia ; Prussia and Austria, no longer fearing France, were jealous
of each other. The middle-class liberals of the western and southern
states boasted of their constitutional Ufe, and, though they desired a
united Germany, it was a Germany in which the Prussian and Austrian
— monarchies should play no part. The Austrian liberals wanted both to
liberalize Austria and to draw closer the links with the rest of Germany
;
the Prussian liberals wanted to liberalize Prussia, but not to be brought
\within Austria’s sphere. The Austrian governing classes wanted to keep
things exactly as they were; the Prussian governing classes wished to
improve Prussia’s position, but not at the price of surrendering to liberal-
ism. And while middle-class reformers wanted a Germany which would
resemble the France of the July monarchy, the radicals aspired to imitate
the France of 1793. The explosion of 1848 occurred in the name of unity,
but it had nothing of unity except the name. The rulers, the reformers,
and the revolutionaries were divided both from each other and among
themselves.X
64
1 848: THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
CHAPTER IV
1 848: THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
The statesmen of the Congress of Vienna had hoped to give Germany a
stable existence. But their settlement v/as mechanical, an arbitrary
arrangement without any anchorage of devotion or enthusiasm. It did
not inspire the conservatives ; it was hated by the liberals ; it was passively
accepted by the masses. The Confederation had been intended as a
defensive association against France; but in the two alarms of 1830 and
1840 it had proved altogether ineffective. All that remained was the
authority of Prussian and Austrian armed strength, negative and uncon-
structive. But this partnership was breaking up, losing both its moral
conviction and its actual power. ^ After the death of Francis I in 1835,
the Austrian Empire was under the nominal rule of an imbecile, Ferdinand,
^actually administered by a jealous, despairing triumvirate—Metternich,
Kolowrat, his rival, and the Archduke Lewis, youngest and feebles
brother of Francis 1. Austria’s policy became ever more hopeless, her
finances ever more disordered, her armies ever weaker. The moral
authority which Austria had once enjoyed existed no more; even the
most conservative lost all faith in this “European China.”
Prussia remained well administered, her finances in good order, her \
. commercial policy enlightened and successful. But her ruling classes V
were drifting away from the narrow conservatism of the Holy Alliance.
|
In the war crisis of 1840 Prussia had stood out alone as the defender of ; j
Germany, and nationalist enthusiasm had centred on Prussia for the first
j
‘
time since 1813. Before 1840 the rulers of Prussia had assumed that the|
unification of Germany would destroy Prussia; 1840 gave them the first)
gHmpse of the idea that Prussia might exploit nationalist sentiment toi
conquer Germany. The more immediate cause of the change in Prussian
j
policy was the character of Frederick William IV, who became King
in 1840. German royal houses ran easily to eccentrics and lunatics.
Ceaseless inbreeding, power territorially circumscribed but within these
Limits limitless, produced mad princes as a normal event. The mad King \
of Bavaria, the mad Duke of Brunswick, the mad Elector of Hesse, the f
imbecile Emperor—these phrases are the commonplace of German f
history ; and of the utterly petty princes hardly one was sane. The house^
of Hohenzollern had been unique in its unbroken succession of sensible^
uninspired rulers (the exception was a genius, not a madman). Fredericlc
William IV broke the long run. He was always eccentric, and he ended
mad. Impulsive and romantic, his mind chock-a-block with contradictory
ideas, he turned Prussian policy away from moderation and entangled
G 65
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
Prussia so deeply in German affairs that she could never be disentangled
again. The union of Junker Prussia and national Germany, this wedding
of opposites, was perhaps inevitable ; but it needed a madman to accom-
plish it.
Frederick William IV was not a liberal. His ideas, when he could sort
them out, were mediaeval-revivalist, the Prussian political counterpart of
the Oxford Movement. Hating hberal constitutions as much as his father
had done, he yet dreamt of some rigmarole of feudal Estates. Hating
revolutionary nationalism and devoted (in theory) to the traditional
headship of the House of Habsburg, he yet dreamt of some resurrection
of the old Reich, in which the Emperor should have the nominal superi-
ority, but the King of Prussia the real power. These ideas were not
confined to the secrecy of the closet. Frederick William was a great orator
and poured out his intentions on every occasion. He was the first master
of what became a speciality of German politics—the meaningless but
inspiring phrase, the high-sounding roll of words in which that extra-
ordinary language can turn dirty water into wine. Almost his first act was
to call off” the conflict with the Roman Catholic Church which was dis-
rupting the Rhineland and to project a vague scheme of Christian reunion.
Nothing came of his scheme, but the conflict was not renewed ; the deep-
seated antagonism between the Prussian state and any rival authority
was obscured, and there remained a vague impression that Prussia
included without strain both Protestant and Roman Catholic Germans
and so was more truly “national” than Roman Catholic Austria.
Frederick William’s visionary Estates were not so easy to translate into
practice. The Junker landowners were willing to give themselves the airs
of a feudal aristocracy, simulating a mediaeval reverence for a king who
was divesting himself of his powers for their benefit. But a States General
needs a third estate, unprivileged, humble, and dependent on the royal
grace ; and no such estate existed. In Prussia, as elsewhere in Germany,
the third estate would be composed of liberal lawyers and bureaucrats,
their itdnds set on a written constitution and on a parliament elected by a
uniform suffrage. For, although the Kingdom of Prussia took its name
from the land of Junker estates, in fact more than half its provinces lay
west of the Elbe and were as much affected by the legacy of Napoleon as
any of the lesser states.
As a result the constitutional projects of Frederick William III remained
‘ empty phrases. Sole outcome was a meeting of committees of the pro-
vincial Diets in 1843; but the “United Committees” too failed to devise
a constitution which should have no meaning.l,Where impulsive roman-
ticism failed, iron rails succeeded^ In 1835 there had been opened in
Bavaria the first railway in Germany, the five-mile line from Nuremberg
to Fiirth. By 1840 railways were working in Prussia, and soon railway
66
1 848 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
construction was proceeding in all directions. Or rather, in all directions
but one. No line ran east from Berlin to the “colonial” lands of East
and West Prussia, and it seemed as if the railways would pull Berlin, as it
*
were, away from the Junker east over to the liberal and industrialist west. ,
The Eastern Railway {Ostbahn) was essential for the Junker land-
owners. It was essential politically if they were to retain their connection
with Berlin, and so their monopoly of political power ; it was essential
economically if the cornlands of eastern Germany were to establish a
hold over the increasingly populous west. But private enterprise would
not build the Ostbahn, even when offered a guarantee of interest by the
Prussian state. Therefore the Ostbahn would have to be undertaken by \
the state itself. The political consequences were paradoxical. In the first
place, the Junkers identified state enterprise and their own interest more
than ever, so that—even before 1848—Junker writers talked a socialistic
claptrap; some, to disguise theu’ particular interest in the Ostbahn^
advocating the state ov/nership of all railways. Secondly, some idealistic
cover had to be devised to cloak the reality that the wealthy western pro-
vinces were being asked to subsidize for the benefit of the eastern pro-
vinces railways which would not pay their way. The solution was simple
:
the Ostbahn was represented as the standard-bearer of German culture in
Polish lands, the greatest German thrust into eastern Europe since the
Teutonic Knights ; it would free East and West Prussia from the north-south
Une of the Vistula and-gitach it to the east-west line of Prussia from
Konigsberg to Aachen.VThe private benefit of the Prussian landowners/ .
was concealed in the promotion of the German national cause^’ /
In the third place, the Ostbahn made the landowners advocates of a
constitution. They had supported the King in his resistance to liberalism ,
so long as a constitution was demanded on grounds of principle. But I
Frederick William III had promised, in 1820, that the Prussian state would
not increase the state debt without the consent of a representative body^
Only the daring and ruthless Junker, Bismarck, argued that, if the state
built an efficient railway, the promise need not be kept ; Bismarck was as
yet unknown and the Junkers were for the most part honourable and
unenterprising. Frederick William IV was thus deserted by the very class
on whom Prussian absolutism rested: ,the Ostbahn drove the Junkers and
the Junkers drove the King forward into constitutionalism. But the
representative body was to be as unrepresentative as possible, merely a
general assembly of the provincial Diets with a fine-sounding name, the
“United Diet.” The evil principle of direct suffrage was still excluded
from Prussian soil. But the United Diet, when it met in April 1847,
behaved as though it were a liberal parliament. It made the classical A
liberal dem.ands: regular periodical m.eetings and no additional taxes
‘
without its consent. Its demands were rejected, and the Diet in return
67
\ ‘i THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
, refused to sanction the loan for the Ostbahn. Opposition came, naturally
enough, from the Rhinelanders ; but the first and most determined in
condemning the railway were the members of the third estate from East
Prussia, both in town and country, whose long experience enabled them
to recognize Junker self-interest under its disguise of service of the
German cause. In June 1847 the United Diet broke up after an empty
session. But not a vain one. The meeting of the United Diet and thje
debates which followed sapped the confidence of Prussian absolutism
and, still more, its prestige. Frederick William could not undo what had
happened, and prepared, during the following winter, to make the con-
cessions which he had refused in June. The Junkers, on their side, could
not nerve themselves to follow Bismarck’s wild promptings; they suc-
cumbed morally to liberalism. The old Prussian order, like the old order
in Austria, seemed in German eyes to be in dissolution. The two pillars
prof authority in Germany were undermined and it needed only a breath
r ^from outside to overthrow them. The way was clear for the year of
revolutions.
J 1848 was the decisive year of German, and so of European, history: it
\ recapitulated Germany’s past and anticipated Germany’s future. Echoes
*^of the Holy Roman Empire merged into a prelude of the Nazi “New
Order” ; the doctrines of Rousseau and the doctrines of Marx, the shade
of Luther ^d the shadow of Hitler, jostled each other in bevv^ildering
succession. ? Never has there been a revolution so inspired by a limitless
faith in the power of ideas ^ never has a revolution so discredited the
power of ideas in its result. The success of the revolution discredited
conservative ideas ; the failure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas.
After it, nothing remained but the idea oLgorce, and this idea stood at the
helm of German history from then onj For the first time since 1521, the
German people stepped on to the centre of the German stage only to miss,
their cues once more. German history reached i|s turning-point and
failed to turn. This was the fateful essence of 1848,;
-X The Germany of 1848 was still, for all practical purposes, the Germany
which had experienced the Napoleonic wars, still, that is to say, a pre-
dominantly rural community. Since 1815 there had been a great and
^continuous rise in population: from twenty-four and a half million in
3^ 1816 to thirty-four million in 1846 (or if the Austrian lands in the Con-
^
federation are included from thirty-three to forty-five irdllion).^ But the
proportions of town and country had remained unchanged: in Prussia
\ 73″5 per cent of the population was classed as rural in 1816 and 72 per cent
‘ in 1846. The towns were still small, still dominated by the professional
1 These were not all Germans. There were two million, rising to three
million, Slavs (Poles) in Prussia, and four and a half million, rising to six
million, Slavs (Czechs and Slovenes) in Austria.
68
1 848: THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
and intellectual middle classes. Industrial capitalists, still less industrial
workers, did not exist as a serious political force. Even the material basis
for modern industrialization had hardly been laid: in 1846 London alone
consumed more coal than all Prussia raised. The revolution of 1848
was not the explosion of new forces, but the belated triumph of the
Burschenschaft, the students of the war of liberation who were now men
in their fifties. Arndt, the writer of patriotic poems against Napoleon,
and even “gymnastic father” Jahn were as much the symbols of 1848
as they had been of 1813 ; but now their voices quavered as they sang of
their youthful energy and their muscles creaked as they displayed their
youthful energy in Swedish drill.
j^The liberals who occupied the forefront of 1848 were the men of 1813, V
now sobered by the long empty years. They had learnt to be cautious, to
be moderate, learnt, as they thought, worldly wisdom. They had sat in
the parliaments of the lesser states and had come to believe that every-
thing could be achieved by discussion and by peaceful persuasion. Them-
selves dependent on the princes for their salaries or pensions as civil
servants,! they put belief in the good ^ith of princes as the first article •
of their policy,|and genuinely supposed that they could achieve their aims
by converting their rulers. iBehind them were the radicals, men of un-
known names and without experience : members of the same intellectual
middle class, but of a younger generation—the product of the Romantic
Movement, the contemporaries of Liszt, of Paganini, and of Floffmann.
These radicals were not interested in practical results. ‘ For them revolution
was an end in itself, and violence the only method of politics .V Yet,
though they appealed constantly to force, they possessed none. The
radical attempts of 1 848—Flecker’s proclamation of the German republic
in April and Struve’s rising in September—were not even damp squibs,
merely bad theatre. The radicals appealed constantly to the people, and
demanded universal suffrage and a People’s Republic. But they had no
connection with the people of Germany, no mass support, no contact
with the masses, no understanding of their needs. Thus the revolution
|
was played out on a carefully restricted stage : on the one side the ruling 1
princes, on the other the educated middle class in its two aspects, liberal
!
and radical. In the end the peasant masses cleared the st^e; but these
peasants were disciplined conscripts in the Prussian army. ^> >
Yet the unpropertied uneducated masses were discontentraand restless
>^both in. town and country; and there w^&,in,1848 an unconscious mass
revolution as well as a conscious liberal one. The inexorable increase of
population made the peasants of eastern Germany land-hungry and drove
the peasants of Vv’estern Germany into the grip of the moneylender.
The intellectual talk of revolution filtered dov/n to the peasants, just as
the intellectual ferment of the Reformation had filtered dovm to them
69
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
in the sixteentH century. In the early nionths of 1848 central Europe
experienced a sporadic peasant stirring, pale image of the Peasants’
Revolt of 1525. llyi the east peasants refused their services, even at-
tacked castles, proclaimed their freedom by appearing with clean-shaven
chins ; in the west they expected the community of goods and assembled
in the village market places to await the general division of all property.
This universal movement was altogether ignored by the middle-class
liberals, and even the most extreme radicals averted their eyes. The
^jjpeasants were left leaderless and unorganized. Often they turned back
i to their “natural leaders,” the landowners. Elsewhere they accepted the
directions of “authority.” But everyv/here the revolutionary impulse
4 was lost. The revolution of 1848 had no agrarian programme.
The revolutionary leaders lived in the towns and therefore could not
1 ignore so completely the movement of the urban masses. But they had
, \nq social programme, or, at best, one produced shamefacedly and ad hoc.
The handicraft workers were being ruined by the competition of cheap
mass-produced English goods; and in the winter of 1847 to 1848 the first
general economic crisis devastated the larger German towns. The revo-
lution of March 13th in Vienna and the revolution of March 18th in
Berlin, which together cleared the way for the German revolution, were
both glorified unemployed riots. Yet there was n,o connection between
the political leaders and this movement of the unemployed. The town
workers were given soup kitchens and relief on task work but not as part
of a deliberate social policy. The liberals yielded against their economic
principles in order to still the social disorder; the radicals seconded the
demands of the masses not from conviction but in order to capture the
masses for what they regarded as the real revolutionary aims—universal
suffrage, trial by jury, election of army officers, cancelling of pensions to
state officials and so on. The Hberals used the mass unrest to extract
concessions from the princes. The National Guard, that universal liberal
expedient, for instance, was everywhere advocated as the defender of
social order. The radicals, miore daring, whipped up the masses in order
to frighten the princes still more. But not even the few extreme radicals
such as Marx, who called themselves Socialists, had any real concern for
the masses or any contact with them. In their eyes the masses were the
cannon fodder of the revolution ; and they had no words too harsh for
^ the masses when they wearied of filling this role. Nothing could exceed
Marx’s horror and disgust when his friend Engels actually took an Irish
factory girl as his mistress; and Marx’s attitude was symbolical of the
^
Gerjnan revolutionaries.
/
f
This divorce between the revolutionaries and the people determined the
\ happenings of 1848. The revolution had officers but no rank and file:
A The old forces, on which the system of 1815 rested, succumbed to their
^ 70
1 848: THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
own weakness and confusion; but no new forces took their place. There ,
followed instead the rule of ideas, and this rule ended as soon as the old
Jipforces recovered their nerve. The German Confederation of 1815 had
depended not on its own strength, but on the triangular balance of
France, Austria, and Prussia. In the early months of 1848 . this balance
was overthrown by the revolutions in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. The
,
citizens of Germany—quite literally the established inhabitants of the
towns—suddenly found themselves free without effort of their own.
The prison walls fell, the gaolers disappeared. The Germany of intel-
lectual conception suddenly became the Germany of established fact.
For this transformation the three revolutions on the circumference were
all essential. Had a single centre of power remained the German revo-
lution would never have taken place. To consider the causes of the failure I
of the German revolution is thus a barren speculation. The successful^
revolutions were in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. There was no successful
devolution in Germany ; and therefore nothing to fail Jhere was rnerely J
a vacuum in which the liberals postured until the vacuum was filled..
The revolution of February 24th in Paris, which overthrew Louis
Philippe, evoked in all western Germany the sort of response which had
been evoked by the events of the great revolution of 1789, but this time
on a wider scale. In almost every state there were long-standing disputes
between ruler and people—some strictly constitutional, others purely
personal, most a mixture of legal grievances and private misdemeanours on
the part of the prince. Typical was the conflict in Bavaria where the King
had become infatuated, (to the shocked indignation of his people), with a
Scotch music-hall dancer who called herself Lola Montez (the same whom
Sv/inburne immortalized as Dolores, Our Lady of Pain). Such absur-
dities do not cause revolutiops ; but they can become the critical incidents
in a revolutionary situation. So, after the Paris revolution all the petty
disputes v/bich had been running on for years came to a head and were
decided. In every state the existing ministers were jettisoned and more
liberal ministers appointed; in every state the suffrage was extended; in
some the ruler was changed, as in Bavaria where both Lola Montez and \
her royal admirer were driven into exile o Nowhere was there a real shifting
of power; for there v/as no real power to shift. In 1791 and again in
1830 similar echoes of the French revolution had been stilled by the
armed force of Austria and Prussia. In the early days of March 1848,
Austro-Prussian interference was being again prepared; but before it
could operate the power of the two military monarchies was itself shaken
by the revolutions of Vienna and Berlin.
v-The revolution of March 13th in \^nna was a real revohition?^ The^
Metternich system was ^feeble without and rotten within. The adminis-
tration, the finances, the army were in decay ; the court was torn bv dis-
71
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
pi’tes and faction, and the fev/ energetic members of the Imperial family
actually desired Mettemich’s fall. The movement of March 13th was a
^
movement of^^ill classes of the community. It ended old Austria for good
and shattered the prestige of conservatism throughout Europe. A govern-
ment of bev/ildered officials was hastily botched together and constantly
changed under the impulse of new street demonstrations. For more than
two months there was in Austria no real authority, and in Germany
Austrian power vanished to nothing. Still, Austrian power had been
only a secondary influence in Germany since 1815: the Austrian armies
had always been centred in Italy, and Austria owed her position in Ger-
A-many more to tradition and political skill than to actual strength. The
i really decisive event of 1848 was the revolution in Berlin; this alone made
U possible the brief career of German liberalism, and the ending of the
Prussian revolution brought this career to a close.
Old Austria fell from deep-seated ineradicable causes which made the
revolution inevitable. But the Prussian monarchy had none of the
diseases which it needs a revolution to cure. Its administration was
efficient, its finances in good order, the discipline of its army firm and
the self-confidence of the army officers unshaken. The atmosphere of
1848 was certain to produce riots in Berlin! But according to all reason-
able expectation the Prussian army was strong enough to restore order
and to maintain absolutism. And so it did when the riots flared up into
street fighting on March 18th. The rioters were pressed back, the streets
cleared, the army was within sight of controlling all Berlin. The abnormal
factor was the character of Frederick WilHam IV. Loving war display,
but without the practical militarism of his house, bewildered and depressed
by the failure of his romantic ideas during the meeting of the United Diet,
\^ he could not go through with the conquest of his capital. Even on March
18th he had coupled force with exhortations. On the next day he lost his
nerve altogether : promised first to withdraw the troops if the barricades
were removed, and at length ordered the troops to withdraw uncon-
ditionally. By March 21st Berlin was, outwardly, in the hands of the
revolution. A burgher guard patrolled the streets; the King drove
through the streets wearing the revolutionary colours of national Ger-
many; and ostensibly he embraced the revolutionary cause in the most
.
fepious of all his many phrases
—
“Prussia merges into Germany.”
^Trhe victory of the Berlin revolution determined the course of events
in Germany. Where the Prussian army had failed no prince could hope
to succeed. The way was open for the liberal middle classes to put into
practice their programme of a Germany united by consent. Radicalism,
even if it had possessed more driving power, seemed unnecessary. ^ After
all, no one would choose the way of the barricades* if the meeting of
committees could achieve the same result. But the Berhn victory was
72
1 848: THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
illusory—hence all the disasters of the future. The Prussian army was not
defeated: it was resentful, humiliated, but still confident. The army
^
leaders were determined somehow to win back the King and to renew
the struggle broken off on March 19th. Nor was Frederick William IV 4-
a convert to the liberal cause. His nerve had failed. ‘ He complained to
Bismarck that he had been unable to sleep for worry. Bismarck replied
roughly: “A king must be able to sleep.” Short of going out of his
mind (which did not happen until 1858) Frederick William would have a
good night sooner or later; and thereupon Prussian policy would begin
to recover its strength. Moreover Frederick William at his most dis-
traught had all the cunning of the mentally unstable. Forced to agree
to the meeting of a Prussian parliament, he tried to turn his surrender to
advantage by suggesting that all Germany should send representatives
to the Prussian parliament and so achieve German unification ipso facto.
His readiness to sink Prussia in Germany was fraudulent, and the Ger-‘
mans were asked to entrust themselves to Frederick WilUam’s ecratic
impulses.
{Frederick WiUiam’s sham conversion was not withoux effect. It
obscured at the decisive moment the essential ineradicable conflict
between middle-class ideaHstic Germany and landowning conservative
Prussia. If the Prussian army had emerged from the March struggles
victorious, as it deserved to do, it might have gone on to conquer all
Germany for the cause of order ; but this development might well have
provoked in Germany a real revolutionary effort and, in any case, would
have estranged Prussia from national Germany for ever. As it was,
Prussia slipped, almost unperceived, on to the liberal side; and when in !
the following year the hberal cause began to fail, the memory of the
March days enabled the liberal leaders to delude themselves into taking
j
Frederick Wilham as their protector. In March 1848 Frederick William
seemed to capitulate to the revolution; in the sequel the revolution
capitulated to Frederick WilUam in April 1849. At the time Frederick
William’s capitulation came a week too late. With the fall of Metternich
on March 13th German liberalism felt able to do without a protector;
and the military resistance in Berlin made Prussia appear, as was in fact
the case, less liberal than Austria. No part of Germany responded to
Frederick Wilb’am’s invitation. Indeed the German liberals opposed the
meeting of a Prussian parliament at all. They would have preferred to
limit Prussia to the separate provincial Diets, so as to prevent any rival
to the German national parliament. The judgements of the German
hberals were the judgements of lawyers. They recognized that the existence
of Prussia was a menace to German unity ; but they saw that existence
incorporated in the Prussian constitution, not in the Prussian army. They
supposed that Prussian militarism had been beaten for good and all,
G* 73
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
beaten so decisively that they could actually assist Frederick William
without risk against his own parliament. Consistent in their legalistic
outlook they had to pretend that the surrender of Frederick William on
March 19th had been voluntary; had they once admitted that the barri-
cades and bloodshed of Berlin had played a part in the birth of the German
revolution their political philosophy would have been destroyed—much
as the advocates of the League of Nations had to conceal the reality that
its basis was the defeat of Germany in war.
“^Thws, the revolutions of Vienna and Berlin allowed the Germans to
“determine their own destinies for the first time in their history.
^ The
expression of this freedom was the National j\ssembly at Frankfort,
concentration of the spirit of 1848. Its origin was “symbolic. Not a
seizure of power by revolutionaries, not a dictation of new principles from
below, but a co-operation between intellectuals, self-appointed spokesmen
of Germany, and the Federal Diet, still posturing as the mouthpiece of
the princes, brought it into being. The learned world was, characteris-
tically enough, caught unawares by the revolutionary situation. Fifty-one
learned men were gathered at Heidelberg reading papers to each other,
as learned men do, when the March storm broke. Suddenly and to their
surprise their claims came true: they had to speak for Germany. They
spoke with all the responsible solemnity peculiar to academic politicians,
and conformed to the spirit of a non-existent constitution. Dissolving
themselves as the fifty-one, they re-created themselves and their learned
friends as the pre-parliament, academic ideal of a parliament by invitation.
This strange nominated body conducted itself on the best parliamentary
principles: held debates, passed resolutions, finally even made laws. It
summoned a German^ Constituent Assembly, laid down the rules by
which this should be elected, and then dispersed leaving a committee of
fifty as the provisional government of Germany. Meanwhile the Federal
Diet, abandoned by the protecting great powers, was trying to maintain
its legal rights if only by giving them away. It invited the states to send
new, and more liberal, representatives—the seventeen^—and these seven-
teen also devised a plan for a National Assembly, which was then amal-
gamated with the plan of the pre-parliament. Thus the National Assembly
which met on May 18th began its career with a background of respecta-
bility and legality. J
The elections fox the National Assembly were variously conducted.
In those states which already possessed constitutions it was elected on
the existing suffrage; in the states without constitutions, which included
1 The total membership of the Confederation was over thirty (thirty-nine
in 1817, dwindling to thirty-three by amalgamation by 1866), but the smaller
states were grouped in “circles” to give an effective membsrship of seventeen.
The plenum was to meet only to consider proposals for constitutional changes
—and none was ever made.
74
1 848 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
^i>oth Prussia and Austria, by universal suffrage. But these variations did
not matter. In the limited constitutional states of western Germany, still
more in unconstitutional Austria and Prussia, only the wealthy and the
educated, the lawyers and the civil servants, were known; and only the
known can attract votes. The result therefore was an assembly of
notables,” as strictly confined to the upper middle class as if the voters
had been the pays legal of the July monarchy. There was not a single
working-m.an and only one peasant (a Pole from Silesia). Fifteen, mainly
J^ostmasters and customs officers (a way of getting known), ranked as
lower middle class. All the rest were the well-to-do products of university
education: 49 university professors; 57 high-school teachers; 157 magis-
trates; 66 lawyers; 20 mayors; 118 higher civil servants; 18 doctors;
43 writers; 16 Protestant pastors, 1 German Catholic and 16 Roman
Catholic priests. One hundred and sixteen admitted to no profession,
and among these were the few nobles; but even of the 116 far more were
wealthy bourgeoisie—a few industrialists, rather more bankers and
merchants. There were only sixteen army officers, and these from the
liberal western states. Germany of the idea had taken on corporate life.
None of the members had experience of national politics (except a few
who had sat in the Federal Diet); but most had been members of their
state Iphambers and all knew the technicalities of political procedure.
Indeed Frankfort suffered from too much experience rather than too little’:
too much calculation, too much foresight, too many elaborate combina-
tions, too much statesmanship. JJardly a vote was taken^or its own –
sake, always for the sake of some remote consequencei^^iie members
of the Assembly wanted to give Germany a constitutior^ but they also
wanted to show that a liberal German government could defend social
order at home and the interests of Germany abroad. Almost their first
act was^ create a Central Gerrn^n Power to exercise authority in its
name.’^ut a real shifting of power was beyond their imagination, and
their utmost ambition was to convert the princes to liberalism, not to
overthrow the^K Therefore the Central Power had to be entrusted to a
prince, though’^sprince of reliable liberal character; and he was found
in the Austrmi Arck^uke John, brother of the late Emperor and with
genuine liberal sympathies>^UiL the choice was hardly determined by his
personal qualifications: it sprang mainly from the calculation that in
June 1848, Austria was more submerged by the revolution than was
Prussia and would therefore be more obedie|it to the directions of Frank-
fort. Still, there was a deeper element-^ survival of the traditional .;
idea of the headship of the house of Hab^urg and a belief that only f
under the Habsburgs could an all-embracing Germany be achieved. Tn«
June 1848, no one proposed the King of Prussia as head of Germany^
To do so would have been a confession of weakness, a willingness to
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
accept something less than complete unification. Prussia, it was assumed,
would accept the overlordship of a Habsburg ; but no one could suppose
that the Habsburgs, even in defeat, would subordinate themselves to the
King of Prussia.
The election of Archduke John was thus an expression both of the
romantic Right and the radical Left ; it revived the traditions of the Holy
Roman Empire and at the same time asserted the democratic idea of
Greater Germany. In June 1848 the confidence of German nationalism
was still unbounded, and there seemed no limits, historical or geographic,
to what it could achieve. John came to Frankfort, established himself as
Administrator of the Reich, appointed a full set of ministers. The Federal
Diet abdicated into his hands. In fact the Central P^weE-had all the
qualities of a gpverniTient except power. The Minister of Foreign Affairs
was not recognized by any foreign state except revolutionary Hungary
—
which was recognized by nobody else ; the Minister of War had no sol-
diers; the Minister of the Interior had no means of ensuring that the
orders which he issued to the governments of the German states would
be obeyed. The salaries of the ministers and of Archduke John were
paid out of the funds collected in 1840 for federal defence, which had
remained on deposit with the Rothschilds. No national taxes were levied.
The only takings of the Central Power were the voluntary subscriptions
raised thi-oughout Germany for the creation of a German fleet ; and the
Minister of the Navy was um’que in actually having money to spend. The
German Navy—a couple of discarded ships bought as a job lot in Hamburg
—was the most absurd and yet the most complete expression of the spirit
of 1848, of the idea of achieving power by persuasion. Unable to con-
template the real task of challenging the armed forces of Austria and
Prussia, the German Hberals found a substitute for the struggle for power
in buying a navy by street corner collections; and the two decaying
ships at their Hamburg moorings alone obeyed the Central Power of
the German nation.
I
The essence of Frankfort was the idea of unity by persuasion. The
Central Power had to show, by example, that it was fit to govern Germany
and to be Germany in the eyes of foreign powers. Like a manager on
trial, the Central Power produced samples of its governing capacity and,
by means of orders to the princes, conducted a campaign against the
unrest and disturbances in Germany. These orders the princes, grati-
fyingly enough, obeyed. But in achieving this success the Frankfort
liberals were sawing off” the branch on which they sat : only the menace
of new outbreaks kept the princes obedient to Frankfort, yet Frankfort
v/as doing its best to bring these outbreaks to an end. The members of
the Assembly could not but look forward with apprehension to the time
when the princes felt secure once more and they devised a highly liberal
76
1 848 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
solution: the princes were to retain their armies (of which only a real
+- revolution would deprive them), but the soldiers were to take an oath of
loyalty to the German constitution. Thus the liberals confessed by
implication that they could not rely on the word of the princes—the only
guarantee of Frankfort’s position—but their alternative was to trust the
word of illiterate peasants. The device of the constitutional oath was not
a success. The soldiers of the lesser states took the oath and later dis-
regarded it; Frederick William refused to allow it to be given to the
Prussian army, and the Assembly, itself meeting under the protection of
Prussian soldiers, averted its eyes. The Frankfort liberals were not
actuated, as is sometimes supposed, by class interest. They were not
capitaHsts or property owners; they were lawyers and professors. Dis-
order and revolution offended their principles and threatened their high
ideal of creating a united Germany by consent. Nothing good, they
beheved, could come of the intrusion of the masses into politics ; and they /
regarded the repressive activities of the armed forces as essential to the /
secupty of the liberal cause.
^^he refusal of Frankfort to go with the masses, the failure to offer a-~^
\ social programme, was a decisive element in the failure of the German
V liberals. This refusal and this failure are the theme of Germany: Revolution
and Counter-Revolution, the pamphlet which Engels wrote for Marx
and which is still the best analysis of the events of 1848. But there was-
another, and even more important cause of failure, a disastrous mistake
which Marx, Engels, and most German radicals shared. The National
Assembly had come into being v/hen the armed pov/er of Austria and
Prussia collapsed ; and its prestige waned as Austrian and Prussian armed
^ power revived. These armies won new confidence, no doubt, in the
repression of internal disorder. But the prime purpose of armies is
foreign war, and it was in foreign war of a sort that A^ustrian and Prussian
absolutism were reborn. Not the social conflict, but the conflict on the 1
national frontiers—in Bohemia, in Poland, and in Slesvig and Holstein
—
determined the fate of German liberalism. In the struggle against the
Czechs, against the Poles, against the Danes, the German liberals unhesi- ^
^. tatingly supported the cause of the Prussian and Austrian armies and
were then surprised when these weapons were toned against themselves.
LiberaUsm was sacrife to the national cause. /
The conflict with Czech nationalism in Bohemia had been entirely
unexpected. The well-meaning German professors had assumed that
Bohemia, with its educated German minority, was part of national
Germany : after all, they did not count the German peasants as members
of the national community, so that still less did they count peasants of
any other race. The committee of fifty actually invited Palacky, in-
tellectual pioneer of the Czech rebirth, to swell their number; and the
77
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
German liberals were shocked and astonished at his famous reply of
April 11th, in which he declared himself a Czech and put forward the
Austrian Empire as the protector of the Slavs against either Tsarist or
German rule. Palacky’s letter was the most fateful document in the
history of modern Germany, it asked the Germans to renounce the vast
^expanse of eastern Europe where they had long held cultural and economic
^ supremacy and to accept as national Germany only tho^e territories where
the majority of the population was genuinely German. This demand was
ridiculed by Germans of all shades of national opinion. To accept the
national frontier would actually imply accepting something less than the
frontier of the despised German Confederation; and the possession of < Bohemia made all the difference between being a great and the greatest European Power. Without Bohemia Germany had but a tenuous link with the valley of the Danube and south-eastern Europe, especially before the coming of the railways ; and moreover Bohemia was already one of the j^utstanding industrial areas of central Europe, all the more outstanding in that the industrial development of the Ruhr and Rhineland had hardly begun. But the German attitude was not determined solely by these selfish • material considerations. The German nationalists of 1848 were inspired by a belief, none the less genuine for appearing to French or English judgement absurd, in the superiority ofGerman civilization. They thought of themselves as missionaries of a great cultural cause and regarded any withdrawal in eastern Europe as a betrayal of the values of civilization. The most clear-sighted radicals, Marx and Engels above all, held rightly that industrialization and the growth of towns were the essential pre- liminary to political freedom, and they identified industrialization, as it had been identified historically, with German influence. In the pro- gramme of Palacky, still more in the Slav Congress v/hich he organized at Prague in answer to the Frankfort Assembly, the German liberals and radicals saw only a movement of peasants, attempting to preserve a reactionary feudal order. The Czech claim to Bohemia threatened all the highest ambitions of German nationalism. Without Bohemia, Germany might be a respectable national state, but neither a new Empire of Charlemagne nor the Greater Germany of radical idealism. The Slav Congress, ineffective and tentative as it was, went still further: by asserting, however feebly, the rights of Slav peasants against German traders and artisans, it challenged German hegemony throughout eastern Europe. The Frankfort Assembly inevitably supported the "national" cause. But it .had no weapons of defence. As always it had to proceed by political devices and to bless the weapons of others. The only material weapon in Bohemia was the Habsburg army; and within three months of the Habsburg defeat in Vienna, to which the Frankfort Assembly owed its existence, the liberals of Frankfort were 1 848 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM calling for a Habsburg victory in Prague. They got their way. The Imperial court, dominated by fear of the Vienna revolution, at first wel- comed and encouraged the Czech movement, but this soon became too democratic for their Uking. On June 12th a Czech radical demonstration in Prague turned into a revolt with no clearly defined aim; and this gave Windischgratz, the Austrian general, the opportunity to subdue Prague by mihtary force—the first victory of the counter-revolution in central Europe. This was a victory for Habsburg mihtarism and therefore a step towards the defeat of German nationalism. Yet the German liberals, blinded by hatred and fear of the Czechs, put them- selves on the Habsburg side and welcomed the victory of Windischgratz as if it had been their own. They had always recognized the national claims of the Magyars, a people with a continuous history and a flourishing culture; and they believed that the victory of Windischgratz had estab- lished the German character of the non-Hungarian provinces of the Austrian Empire. The German and Magyar nationaUsts both assumed that the Habsburg lands would be henceforward held together only by a personal link, and that Magyar-dominated Hungary and the Greater Germany into which the rest of the Austrian Empire would be incor- porated would be united in a common anti-Slav policy. The German liberals were confident that the Habsburg power was, as it were, ''cap- tured" for German nationalism, so confident that, instead of resisting the meeting of a central Austrian parliament at Vienna as the expression of the unity of the Habsburg lands, they welcomed and aided it, believing —quite wrongly—that it v/ould be a further instrument for their national and liberal ends. Events in Bohemia brought the Germans on to the side of the Habsburgs. Still they couM plead that the Habsburg Empire now had a liberal par- Uament. Events in Prussian Poland, however, not merely brought the German liberals on to the side of the Hohenzollerns, but even led them to support the King of Prussia against the Prussian parliament. The Polish situation differed fundamentally from the Czech, in that the Poles were a historic nation whose existence could be neither disputed nor ignored. Polish hberty was an essential element in the radical creed. The extreme radicals believed that they could achieve their programme only by means of a revolutionary war; and they proposed to provoke a war with Russian Tsardom by fulfilling in the Grand Duchy of Posen the promises of constitutional freedom made both for RosQn and the Russian Kingdom of Poland in the Treaty of Vienna/^By a stroke of amateur Machiavellianism the German radicals who nad denounced the "Vienna system" for thirty years were now designing to conduct a war against Russia in its name. War with Russia, not love for the Poles, was the motive of their policy; they intended to renew German 79 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY claims in Poland, once Russia was defeated. , West Prussia was mainly inhabited by Poles, yet was excluded from the promises of 1815, since it had not been torn from the Kingdom of Prussia by Napoleon and so did not need to be restored by the Treaty of Vienna ; as a result the radicals did not trouble themselves with the claims of the West Prussian Poles. On the other hand, the Grand Duchy of Posen, though indisputably part of the old Kingdom of Poland, had a considerable German minority; so that the radicals were proposing to establish Polish national rights in districts sometimes with but few Polish inhabitants. In the first distracted days after the March rising the weak Prussian Government of well-meaning liberals was swept along by the radical current and admitted in the Grand Duchy the autonomy promised in 1815. The Prussian army was withdrawn to barracks, a Polish force was brought into being, and the administration was put into the hands of the Poles. This produced a conflict of a character quite unexpected by the radical strategists. Tsar Nicholas I, wiser than the counter-revolutionaries of 1792, accepted the opinion of his Chancellor, Nesselrode, that the German revolution would disintegrate if left to itself, and decided against intervention. The Germans in Posen, refusing to be the victims of a political manoeuvre, resisted the Polish authorities and appealed to their fellow-Germans for support. This was the opportunity for the Prussian army chiefs. At the end of April the Prussian general in Posen dis- regarded the civil government, defeated the Polish forces, and expel- led the Polish administrators. The Grand Duchy was to be split up: the larger part was declared to be German, and even in the fragment left to the Poles the Germans were to be especially privileged. No element of national equality remained. The radicals of Berlin, baulked of their war with Tsardom, and the Poles of Posen, denied their freedom, appealed to the National Assembly at Frankfort to act on its pro-Polish phrases and to compel the Prussian Government to keep its word. It was an awkward demand for the Frankfort liberals. They wished to appear all-powerful in Germany, yet knew that they were impotent to compel the Prussian Government or any other. They wished to defend German rights; yet they dared not do so on the basis of nationality statistics (which justified some of the German claims), for these statistics ^ would justify the claims of the Czechs in Bohemia. William Jordan, one of the most respected liberal leaders, solved the dilemma : the right of ythe stronger, he said, must decide, and "healthy national egoism" ^smanded that the Grand Duchy of Posen should become German. In /these phrases, welcomed by the liberal majority, the Frankfort hberals ' delivered themselves to the Prussian army and, by an inevitable logic, delivered German liberalism first to Bismarck and later to Hitler. The \ right of the stronger which they evoked would then be turned against 80 1 848 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM them, and "healthy national egoism" would be translated into "blood and iron." On July 27th the Frankfort Assembly rejected the radical complaints and bestowed its blessing on the Prussian army in Posen as it had already blessed the Austrian army in Bohemia. There was a strange result. The Prussian parliament had been elected on the same day and with the same franchise as the National Assembly, but it was very differently composed. The wealthy, respectable candidate went to Frankfort; the poorer, more impatient candidate made the shorter journey to Berhn. The Prussian parliament was dominated by radicals from East Prussia, who had learnt political reality in bitter struggles with the neighbouring Junkers. These radicals cared no more for Polish rights than did the Frankfort liberals, but they were eager to force a breach between the Junkers and the Tsar, the Junkers' protector. In September the Prussian parliam.ent rejected the partition of the Grand Duchy of Posen, and, a month later, demanded the execution of the promises of 1815. The Prussian radicals, hostile to the Tsar and jealous of Frankfort, dreamt even of transforming the Prussian state into a Polish-German federation, aloof from national Germany. The estrangement between Frankfort and Berlin was complete. The Prussian parliament was offen- sive in itself to German nationalism, for it implied the existence of a Prussia distinct from Germany; but it became doubly offensive when it renounced the claims of "healthy national egoism" in Posen. The Frank- fort liberals, Vv^ho had applauded the victory of the Prussian army in Posen, were thus led on to desire a victory of the Prussian army in Berhn —despite the fact that the defeat of the Prussian army in Berlin had been the essentia] preUminary to the Frankfort parhament. In the autumn of 1848 there were yet more immediate reasons for Frankfort's dependence on the Prussian army. The third and most deeply felt frpntier issue of 1 848 was the question of Slesvig and Hol- stein, two duchies which had long been under the sovereignty of the King of Denmark ; Holstein inhabited entirely by Germans and a member of the German Confederation, Slesvig inhabited partly by Germans, partly by Danes, and outside the Confederation. The legal tangle—the relation of the Duchies with each other, with the German Confederation, with the King of Denmark, with Denmark, their position in the treaty structure of Europe, their laws of succession—provided endless material for controversy and confusion ; but the essential question was clear. x)id the principle of German national unity override treaty rights and inter- national law? number of Germans involved was not great—half a million at most—, the theoretical challenge all the more marked. The problem of the two Duchies was the breaking- point of the traditional idea of personal sovereignty, for neither the Danes nor the Germans v^ere prepared to leave the Duchies in their former position. In 1848 81 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY Denmark too hadjts^constitut^^ revolution; and the Danish liberals were determined to incorporate Slesvig in the Danish constitutional state. Once Denmark abandoned personal union, there was something to be said for the German case, much more than for the German case in Bohemia or in Poland. All the more unexpected to the German liberals was the reaction of foreign opinion. These hberals were educated men of high culture, who attached great importance to the judgment of liberals in the western countries. Hitherto they had won foreign approval. German nationalists of all shades of opinion had recognized the claims of Hungary ; foreign observers knew nothing of the Czech case in Bohemia and unanimously accepted the German version of a reactionary con- spiracy; and the Frankfort hostility to Polish claims was altogether dwarfed by the Tsarist repression in Russian Poland. But inJhe^uestion of Slesvig and_IloJ^leiiL.ib^^ of a small nation by a^great^ne; EngUsh^JErcnch^ Italian liberals united to condemn Germany. The German liberals were not shaken by this con- deinnation. They were too convinced of the rightness of their cause. Rather they concluded that there was a deliberate conspiracy against Germany; if western liberalism condemned German nationalism in Slesvig and Holstein, so much the worse for western liberalism. In fact, the question of Slesvig and Holstein made the firsts not very marked, but yet dedsr^^^brgaeh^Jhetween^ the German nationalist movement and the liberals of western Europe, a breach in which the western liberals, ironically enough, were on the side of the "Vienna settlement." The dispute between Denmark and the Duchies broke into open con- flict as early as March 1848; and the pre-parliament had already set on foot a federal war against the Danes. But when it came to the point national Germany, so sensitive in its honour, so vast in its claims, had no forces with which to conduct a war even against Denmark. The only agent of national Germany was the Prussian army ; the liberal ministry in Prussia responded to the appeal 'from Frankfort, and the Prussian generals, still humiliated by the March days, obeyed the orders of the civilian ministers. During the early summer the Prussian army made easy headway against the Danes. But it soon became clear that Prussia ^'ould have to face more formidable opponents. Both England and Russia were resolved to uphold the settlement of 1815 and to keep the control of the entrance to the Baltic securely in harmless Danish hands. A European war threatened. Enthusiastic liberals from south Germany clamoured for "sanctions"—federal execution was the current term — against Denmark, whatever the risk ; but the risk would have to be borne ^ by conservative Prussian officers. Prussia was faced with a war from which she could not possibly gain : she would probably be defeated, but 82 1 848: THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM even if she won, the advantage would go to the German liberals, who would thus be all the stronger to destroy Prussia's independence. There- fore at the end of August Prussia concluded an armistice with Denmark ^and left the national cause to fend for itself. Prussia had thus openly defied the authority of the National Assembly ( and the Central Power. The German liberals were at last inescapably faced with the problem of power. Powerless to coerce Denmark, they yet had to coerce Prussia into renewing the war against Denmark or else to confess the impotence of the national idea on the strength of which they had based their pohtical philosophy. The ministers of the Central Power reahzed that their orders carried no weight with the Prussian army ; but a motley majority of the Assembly—national idealists, radical extremists, pro-Austrians eager to humiliate Prussia—broke away from their leader- ship and refused to acknowledge the armistice. The ministry resigned. But no new ministry, ready to take on an open conflict with Prussia, could be formed. iThe coalition of idealists and impossibiUsts dissolved. The Assembly wa^ compelled to eat its own words and to approve the armistice which a week before it had rejected. Ajnijiistry openly favour- able to the two Great Powers came into existence;*^ This betrayal of the German cause was too much for the radicals who had been growing increasingly impatient with the moderation and statesmanship of the liberal majority. There were radical riots in many western German towns and, finally, on September 26th, in Frankfort itself. The National Assembly, with no forces of its own, had to appeal to the King of Prussia, whom only a fortnight before it had solemnly condemned. Prussian troops restored order; and from the end of September the National Assembly and Central Power met under the protection of Prussian bayonets. In March 1848 national Germany had condescendingly toler- , ated the Prussian state. In October the Prussian state allowed national ^Germany to prolong its existence. National Germany owed its temporary success to the defeat ofthe two military monarchies in March; yet, in order to defend the "national" cause in Bohemia and in Posen, it had welcomed the reassertion of Austrian and Prussian military power. In the autumn of 1848 the reviving monarchies took up the struggle with their own capitals; but so far as national opinion was concerned with opposite results. Habsburg victory over the October revolution in Vienna made Austria unpopular, Hohen- zollern victory over the abortive November revolution in Berlin made Prussia popular in Germany. The conflict in Vienna was a conflict over the character of the Austrian Empire. Was it, as the Germans of Frank- fort and Vienna and the Magyars alike held, a union of two states, one German, the other Magyar? Or was it, as the Habsburg ministers, the Austrian aristocracy, and the Czechs and Croats alike held, a single 83 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY Empire in which no single nationality held a preponderant or privileged position? The Habsburg Court had recovered from the utter confusion and hopelessness of the spring. There was jppw an effective ministry, its outstanding personality. Bach, a pre-March radical, won over to the cause >v/of a centrahzed and retormed Austrian Empire. This ministry, sup-
ported by a majority of the Austrian parliament—a majority partly non-
German, but also composed of Germans who subordinated their national- *
ity to the maintenance of the Empire—was determined to undo the
concessions made to Hungary in the days of collapse and to reduce
>.^Hungary from an independent state to a province of the Empire. The
success of their plan would be as much a defeat for German as for ^
Hungarian nationalism; for no one imagined that national Hungary
could be incorporated in the German national state, and the entire
Austrian Empire would therefore stand alooi from Germany. Early in
October the radicals of Vienna tried to prevent the sending of troops to
Hungary ; and on October 6th Vienna broke into revolution.
^ The October revolution was a revoiutioii in favour of an independent
;
Hungary and a national Germany; but neither came to its assistance.
Hungary had an organized and equipped army, but failed to use it, partly
from constitutional scmples against crossing the Austrian frontier, more
from a reluctance to make sacrifices in what seemed to the Hungarians
I
a foreign cause. National Germany had no forces and therefore fell back
I
on the most disastrous of idealist weapons—it displayed moral sympathy.
\ On October 27th, while the civil war in Austria was still being fought,
the Frankfort Assembly resolved that, where German and non-German
lands were under the same ruler, they should be united only by a personal >
tie. Thus the Assembly committed itself to the programme of .the’ partition
of the Austrian Empire at the very moment v/hen that programme was
being shot to pieces on the Vienna barricades. Early in November the
Austrian army conquered Vienna and so ended all hope of a Greater
I Germany. The imbecile Emperor Ferdinand was replaced by his young
energetic nephew Francis” Joseph; a ^ew ministry was formed under
Felix Schwarzenberg, ruthless, cynical advocate of the policy of military
power. The first act of the new ministry was to execute Robert Blum, a
radical member of the Frankfort Assembly who had fought on the side
of the Vienna revolution ; its second to denounce the Frankfort resolution
in favour of the partition of Austria. The Austrian parliament, now
/ purged of its German radicals, was left temporarily in being, occupying
itself in futile constitution-making until its dissolution in the following
t
March. But in liberal German eyes Austria reverted to despotism in
November 1848, and to a despotism flagrantly anti-German. The dreamers
j
‘ and radicals still hoped for a miracle which would restore Austria to
\ liberalism and to Germany ; the moderates and realists abandoned Austria
84
1 848 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
and consoled themselves by pretending that the inclusion of Austria in
Germany had never been part of their national programme. –
In Prussia too, mihtarism was victorious in the autumn of 1848, but
|
victorious without violence and without a breach with Frankfort. Here |
the struggle between King and Parliament was not national, but strictly
‘
constitutional. The Prussian parliament wished to enforce an oath of
constitutional loyalty on the Prussian army. This demand did not interest
Frankfort, which—having failed with its own constitutional oath—was
jealous that the Berlin parliament should not succeed. In fact, many
Frankfort liberals, regarding the Berlin parliament as a rival and more
radical body, desired its defeat. Having backed the loser in Austria, they
were the more eager to be on the winning side in Prussia and, by olfering
the king their moral support (threadbare as this was), to create the im-^
pression that they had contributed to his success. As one of the liberal
leaders said: “It is in the interests of the National Assembly that the
Prussian Crown should be victorious over its parliament, but that it
should achieve this victory with the help of the National Assembly.”
Frederick William and his generals did not need this help, though Frank-
fort tried to claim credit for offering it. In Noveniber, Frederick William
appointed an openly reactionary ministry and broke with his parliament.
It was first moved to a provincial town, and then dissolved; and the
king issued a restricted constitution by decree. The parhamentary radicalsy
attempted to resist. They refused to leave Berlin, held meetings of parlia-
ment in various halls and finally in cafes and beer cellars, they appealed
to the inhabitants of Prussia to refuse to pay taxes. Nothing happened
:
taxes were paid, the radical deputies were chased home. There had been
no real victory of the revolution in Berlin in March ; therefore no real
counter-revolution was necessary in November.! The Prussian army and
the Prussian governing class moved back into positions from which the
king’s erratic feebleness, not the strength of the revolution, had ejected
them.
By the end of 1848 the power of the two’ Germ.an powers was restored,
j
“hhe Central Power therefore became utterly meaningless. The Frankfort 1
Assem^bly still debated. The idealists who had hoped to disregard both
Great Powers and to build Germany on ideas were discredited. It was
the turn of the moderate men—professors determined as professors so
often are to demonstrate that they were men of the world, pohticians from
the petty states who wished to show their practical wisdom. |rhe two
German powers existed; therefore Germany should hitch herself to one
of them, should, by her superior political cunning, “capture” one of
them for the German cause. It was futile to try to capture Austria : her
November victory had been too emphatic, her anti-national policy too
blatant. But it was possible to interpret the defeat of the Prussian parlia-
85
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
ment as a defeat for particularism, possible to believe that Frederick
William still held to his romantic vision of a Prussia merged into Germany.
Thus there came into being the party of Little Germany, the sensible
lj
men who would be content with something jess than complete unification.
Greater Germany was a creed, a conviction fxittle Germany an expedient,
a temporizing with realit)!. No national principle could underlie the pro-
gramme of giving only isome Germans national unity; and in fact all
Little Germans were Greater Germans at heart—only they were prepared
to postpone the realization of the full programme. No one at Frankfort
ever argued that Little Germany was better than Greater Germany. The
i^ittle Germans argued that Little Germany could be secured now and
that it could be secured peacefully, without revolution. They were
opposed by the idealists who would accept nothing less than the whole
;
by the radicals who were Greater Germans simply because this needed a
revolution; by the Roman Catholics who feared Prussian rule; and by
the friends and dependants of Austria. The Little German liberals devised
a moderate monarchist constitution with limited suffrage and the King
of Prussia as Emperor ; but they could not carry this against the coalition
of democrats, clericals, and pro-Austrians. To win over the democratic
vote, they jettisoned all their Hberal restrictions and moderation except
*^ the one item of the Emperor. An astonishing compromise resulted. On
the one hand the Frankfort Assembly excluded Austria from Germany
and offered the Imperial Crown to Frederick Wililam IV—the Little
German programme. On the other hand it established in this Little
\ Germany a centralized democratic constitution based on universal
suffrage, which was only compatible with the victory of Greater German
ideas. Thus even at the moment of its abject failure the Frariffort
Assembly postulated the ultimate destiny of Germany and of Prussia:
Prussia could dominate Germany, but only on condition of serving the
national German cause.
In April 1849, a deputation went from Frankfort to offer the Imperial
v’Crown to Frederick William IV. The offer had been expected in Berlin,
‘and there had been long discussion between the king and his reactionary
ministers. The Prussian ministers and generals would have nothing to do
with national Germany. They were ready to use the opportunity of the
confusion in Germany for some land-grabbing in the old Prussian style
;
but apart from this they wished to renew the conservative partnership with
Austria. Frederick William, on the other hand, could not altogether
resist the romantic prospect of the Imperial Crown if only it could be
freed from its democratic associations. He would have liked to accept
the Crown on condition that it was offered to him by the princes. Urgent
and desperate promptings from his advisers only induced him to give this
acceptance a negative form: he would not “pick up a Crown from the
86
1 848 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISM
A-gutter,” would not accept the Crown unless it was offered to him by the
princes. This answer he gave to the Frankfort deputation on April 3rd.
They heard only the refusal, for they knew by now that the princes would
not voluntarily surrender their sovereignty. Prussia would not, Frankfort
could not, force the princes into unity. The liberal revolution had reached
its term.
With the failure of the mission to Berlin the history of the Frankfort
Assembly was over. The moderate men, the men who shrank from
violence, went home. Only the^ radical minority remained. Late in the
day, with the revolutionary flood ebbing away to nothing, they tried to
put into practice the revolutionary programme and to evoke a real revo-
lution in Germany. They proclaimed that the German constitution had
come into force, called for radical revolutions in the German state, andi^
decreed the elections for the German parliament for July 15th. The
elections never took place. Rhetoric could not change the practical fact
that the only force in Germany was the Prussian army; and this army
easily subdued the radical risings in Dresden, the Bavarian Palatinate,
and Baden, which the Frankfort appeal had provoked. The Assembly,
or rather its radical rump, was chased by the Prussian army from Frank-
fort to Stuttgart in Wurtemberg, and from Stuttgart it was chased out of
existence. Sole remnant of national Germany was the Archduke John, /
still clinging to a theoretical Central Power in order to prevent a Prussian?
domination of Germany. In DecembeiiJie^ surrendered his title iatQ,_the
joint hands of Austria and Prussia. The German revolution was defeated^
and liberal Germany never to be renewed. f
Q As is usual after failure, every man drew the conclusion that the move-
ment would have succeeded if his advice had been followed, and most
despaired of the stupidity of their fellows} A few extreme radicals re-
mained faithful to the revolutionary cause and hoped for a more violent
revolution in the future. Next time, they believed, the masses must be
drawn in ; the cause of national union must be adorned with the attractions
of Socialism. This was the programme of Marx and Engels to which they
devoteSThe rest of their life, until their national starting-point was almost
^ forgotten.^ They advocated Socialism so as to cause a revolution; only
much later did their followers suppose that they had advocated revolution
in order to accomplish Socialism.X The radicals who did not despair of
Germany were few. Far more atcomplishecl^ their own revolution by
emigrating to the freedom of the United States. / German emigration had
already begun on a big scale, more than a hundred thousand a year, in the
^ early ‘forties. It dwindled to fifty thousand in 1848, when it seemed that
Germany might be at last a place worth living in. After 1848 it soared
once more, running at a steady average of more than a quarter of a
million a year throughout the eighteen-fifties. These emigrants were the
87
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
best of their race—the adventurous, the independent, the men who might
have made Germany a free and civilized country. They brought to the
United States a contribution of inestimable value, but they were lost to
Germany. They, the best Germans, showed their opinion of Germany by
leaving it for ever.
.Like the radical emigrants, most liberals too were disillusioned by
/neir experience of practical politics. Many withdrew to academic studies
or served Germany by applying science to practical needs. Some turned
from politics to industry and finance. So Hansemann, most liberal of the
Prussian ministers of 1848, founded the Discontogesellschaft, one of the
greatest ofGerman banks. The liberal politicians who remained politicians
resolved to be more moderate and practical than ever. Their faith in the
strength of their idea was destroyed ; therefore they”believed that liberal
– Germany must be achieved by subtlety and guile. But it would be wrong
to suppose that the liberals of Germany vanished or that liberal
convictions counted for nothing in Germany after 1848. The professors,
the lawyers, the civil servants of the lesser states, remained predominantly
liberal : they were still Hberal in 1890 and even, for the most part, in 1930.
But in 1848 they were a serious and respected political force. After 1848
, 4hey counted for less and less and, at last, for nothing at all.
\ The real significance of the revolution of 1848 was not so much its
£!^lure at the time, but the effect of its failure in the future. After 1850
j
there began in Germany a period of industrial development, after 1871
I
an industrial revolution. Economic power passed within a generation
into the hands of industrial capitalists. Industrial capitalists, it is com-
monly held, are in politics Hberal ; but this view is an abbreviation of the
real course of events. Industrial capitalists, like all business men, judge
everything by the standard of success. A good business man is one who
succeeds; a bad business man is one who “fails.” When industrial
capitalists enter politics they apply the same standard and adopt as their
own the party and outlook which prevails. In England and the United
States the struggle between hberaUsm and arbitrary power had long been
fought out. The execution of Charles 1, the overthrow of the army, and
the Glorious Revolution in England, the defeat of the redcoats and royal
government in America, established the great principles of constitutional
freedom and the rule of law. The English and American capitahsts found
the civiHan pohticians and lawyers in control. Therefore they too
became liberals, advocates of individual freedom and upholders of con-
stitutional government. In France, despite the great revolution, the verdict
of success was less clear : therefore the industrial capitalists were confused
I”
—some became republicans, some Bonapartists, some corrupt and unprin-
cipled. But in Germany there could be no doubt where success lay. The
German capitalists became dependants of Prussian militarism and
88
1 8 48 : THE YEAR OF GERMAN LIBERALISN^y
advocates of arbitrary power as naturally and as inevitably as English or
American capitalists became liberals and advocates of constitutional
authority. Where Anglo-Saxon capitalists demanded laissez-faire, German
capitalists sought for state leadership; where Anglo-Saxon capitalists
accepted democracy, however grudgingly, German capitalists grudgingly
accepted dictatorship. This was the fateful legacy of 1848. ,•
4′
CHAPTER V
THE ASCENDANCY OF AUSTRIA, 1 849-60
The German liberal movement had failed; but the old stability of the’
Vienna system was not to be restored. The temptation to reorder Ger-
-•Cinany was too much for both the German powers, and 1849 began not a
new period of co-operation, but a long conflict. In the early part of 1849
all the advantages seemed on the side of Prussia, but she could make
nothing of her opportunity, and, within a little more than a year, the
j^dvantage passed to the side of Austria, only to be lost in its turn. The
military power of both Austria and Prussia had been restored by the end
of 1848, but they were not equally free. In Austria the air of military
success which had accompanied the new Emperor and the new ministry
proved premature. In the spring of 1849 the Austrian army in Italy was
engaged in renewed war with Piedmont; and, a more serious setback,
the attempted reconquest of Hungary ended in failure. Piedmont was
decisively defeated, but peace was not made until July, 1849 ; and Hungary
was not conquered until the end of August with Russian help. Even
then large armies of occupation were needed both in Hungary and in
northern Italy; and the programme of reorganizing the entire Austrian
Empire as a centralized unit absorbed all the administrative energies
of the Schv/arzenberg-Bach government. Thus, Austria had neither
force nor policy to spare for the affairs of Germany. She stood aside,
asserting her rights, but not defending them, intending to reconquerV
her position in Germany when her internal strength had been consoli-
dated.
Prussia’s opportunity was thus thrust upon her. She became, not through^
her own efforts, but as the result of events in Hungary and Italy, th§jsole
‘^ower in G_^many. The Prussian army had no distractions. It did not
need to divert fbrces to Posen; and its bloodless Noven>ber victory in
Berlin had been so complete that it did not need even to leave a large
garrison in the capital. It was free to send forces to the assistance of any
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
German prince menaced by disorder—to Dresden, to Cassel, to Frankfort,
• to Baden. In fact, by the summer of 1849, the Prussian army dominated
yGermany as completely as the French army had dominated Germany in
y the great days of Napoleon. The German princes owed their continued
existence to its support. What should Prussia do with the position she had
so easily won? The generals and the conservative ministers wished merely
to defeat the nationalist movement and to defend the social order, to
restore the princes and to maintain the traditional disunion of Germany,
3f at most to improve Prussia’s military position by alliance with the princes
and the acquisition of military rights of way. But Frederick William IV
was not a Junker king. Indifferent to Prussia’s military position, he held
his romantic vision of Germany and still hankered after the Imperial
Crown which in April 1849 he had grudgingly refused. His advisers had
objected to the Crown as German ; he had objected to it only as democratic,
and his aim now was to extract from the princes the offer which he had
-/postulated as essential/’^He was totally at odds with his Prussian ministers
and took a private araviser, Radowitz, not a true Prussian, but a Roman
Catholic nobleman from western Germany. The policy of Radowitz
was not Prussian, but German; conservative, indeed, or rather anti-
liberal, but pursuing the aim of German union. Frederick William IV
harked back to his saying of March, 1848 : “Prussia merges in Germany.’*
He had objected to the liberalism, not the nationalism, of Frankfort,
and hoped now to square the circle—to unite Germany and yet preserve
•^the conservative order.
Outcome of Radowitz’s policy was thdErfurtJJnion, a defensive associ-
ation of the princes under Prussia’s proiBcfion. ^he old Confederation,
^it was argued, had been dissolved by the events of 1848; the Federal Act
had lapsed, and new and more limited unions could be established. The
German princes had no choice. They ov/ed their independence to the
balance between Austria and Prussia, and v/ith Austria engaged in
Hungary and Italy this balance no longer existed. Therefore the German
princes had to acquiesce in Radowitz’s schemes, to accept the idea of a
/ close political union, and to agree to the pooling of their military resources,
j Frederick William IV imagined that he had accomplished a great German
work, but in fact he had made the same mistake as the liberals of Frank-
y fort : he thought the princes converted, when they were m.erely frightened,
/ /irightened of their own radicals, still more frightened of the Prussian
||^4i*my. The real basis of the Erfurt Union was the withdrawal of Austria
^ from Gerrnan affairs; and it could only endure if this withdrawal was
permanent.
Quite the reverse happened/ The achievements of the Austrian army
in Italy and in Hungary gave to Austrian policy a confidence and assertive-
K ness ^even more exaggerated than Metternich’s hopeless gloom before
90
sj.
THE ASCENDANCY OF AUSTRIA, 1 849-60
1848. In fact Austrian policy had not been so confident since the days of
Prince Eugene. Schwarzenberg was a relentless enemy of liberalism, but
just as violent against Metternich’s conservatism or the romanticism of
Frederick William IV. He held, quite simply, to the rule of the sword and
believed that the Austrian sword could rule Germany. The Schwarzenberg
ministry made the Austrian Empire a united state for the first time in
history. The traditional differences between Hungary and the rest of the
Empire were obliterated; the customs barrier between Hungary and the
rest of the Empire abolished ; the entire Empire subjected to a single code
of law, to a single fiscal system, and to the rule of an Imperial bureaucracy.
Schwarzenberg had no ideas of his own, but he was quick to pick them up
from others ; and having picked up the idea of a unified Empire from one
renegade German liberal. Bach, he went on to pick up from another, Bruck,
the even more grandiose project of a unified central Europe—Mittel-
europa, to give it its later name. Bruck, the Minister of Commerce, was a
German merchant on a grand scale. Himself the founder of the com-
mercial greatness of Trieste, he believed that Germany’s destiny lay not
westwards across the oceans, but south-eastwards to the Balkans and
beyond into Asia Minor. Bruck wished to save the German communities
of eastern and south-eastern Europe for national Germany, but he had
no illusions about national Germany’s strength. Only the Habsburg
monarchy, he held, could protect the German cause; and in return for
this protection he was prepared to subordinate national Germany to the
Habsburg monarchy./The essence of Bruck’s plan, which Schwarzenberg
adopted, was that the German – Confederation should first be revived and
that the entire Austrian Empire should then be incorporated in it. No
more conservative Austro-Prussian partnership, but instead Germany
dominated by the Austrian Empire and the Austrian Empire run by
Germans.
The first stage was the defeat^ixf Prussia and the dissolution of the
Erfurt Union. In this stage Austria had every advantageT The German
prmces hated subordination to Prussia and began to break away from
the Union, as soon as they saw a chance of Austrian protection. The
Prussian ministers were jealous of Radowitz and were delighted to see
his plans go awry. The Prussian generals were resolved not to risk their
army in a German cause and, in any case, beUeved both Austrian army
and Austrian leadership superior to their own. The Junkers demanded
a breach with German sentiment and a return to Austro-Prussian
partnership. In addition Schwarzenberg enlisted Russian support against
Prussia in 1850 as he had against Hungary in 1849. Tsar Nicholas did
not much care whether schemes for German unification were liberal or
monarchist. He was opposed to German unification of any kind. There-
fore he threw his weight on the Austrian side. In the autumn of J 850 the
91
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
rivalry approached open conflict. The Elector of Hesse-Cassel, a member
of the Erfurt Union, v/as at odds with his subjects. Prussia prepared to
intervene. But Schwarzenberg declared the Confederation revived and
induced the Federal Diet—a packed rump—to entrust intervention to
Bavaria. Prussian and Bavarian troops met in Hesse. The Austrian
/foYCQS were moved into Bohemia, and the great Radetzky, victor of two^ Italian wars, came north to take command. Schwarzenberg would pro-
bably have preferred war : he would have liked to settle with Prussia once
and for all. He failed to get his way. Francis Joseph was reluctant to
fight a fellow monarch; the Prussian ministers were eager to give way;
above all, the Tsar forbade war—he no more favoured an Austrian than
a Prussian domination of Germany. The result was the agreement of
Olmiitz (November 29th, 1850), by which Prussia renounced the Erfurt
Union and accepted the revival of the German Confederation.
Olmiitz was a total defeat for the plans of Radowitz and Frederick
William, and to a lesser degree a defeat for Prussian power. But it was
not a complete victory for Austria, certainly not a victory for Bruck
^ and Schwarzenberg. Early in 1851 Schwarzenberg called a conference of
the German princes at Dresden and proposed the incorporation of the
“^entire Austrian Empire in the German Confederation and in the Zollverein.
His proposals were defeated. The German princes saw in them another
version of the Erfurt Union and supported the negative of Prussia as
enthusiastically as they had supported Austria’s negative in 1850.
Nicholas I backed up the German princes. In fact, after Olmiitz Germany
was kept disunited by Russian decree. Besides, the constructive energy
^ of the Schwarzenberg ministry was waning. The Austrian Empire had
not really been regenerated by the events of 1848. There had been a sort
of electric shock which had burnt up some of the old v/ood, but there was
no new growth. Francis Joseph, despite his youth and energy, was at
heart obscurantist, without a flicker of sympathy with constructive ideas.
The constitution devised by the Austrian Constituent Assembly had been
torn up in March, 1849, and replaced by a dictated constitution, liberal but
unitary; but this constitution was never put into operation and was in
. ^ turn torn up in December, 1851. Austria then formally reverted to the
irresponsible erratic absolutism which in practice she had never left. The
^Jr landed aristocracy, frivolous and discredited, began once more to pre-
dominate in Imperial counsels; and the middle-class German ministers
who had brought/ to the Empire a new life and vigour withdrew in
disgust. Bruck, the Minister of Commerce, and Schmerling, who had
defended the Austrian cause in the Frankfort Assembly and then become
Minister of Justice, retired to private life. Schwarzenberg himself died
early in 1852 and was succeeded as Foreign Minister by an ignorant,
arrogant fool, Buol. No nev/ Prime Minister took his place; Francis
92
THE ASCENDANCY OF AUSTRIA, 1849-^0
Joseph himself took over the supreme direction of affairs. Of the great
reforming ministers Bach remained alone and isolated, still giving to
internal administration a certain grandeur, but quite unable to change
the spirit of the system; and in 1855 Bach, to retain his position, had to
swallow the Concordat with the Papacy, which gave to the Roman
Church in Austria privileges and power unparalleled since the worst days
of the Counter-Reformation. The Concordat did not merely make
reform impossible in Austria ; its obscurantism alienated from Austria all
German Protestants and even the German Roman Catholics of the liberal
western states.
Thus Austria, despite her apparent triumph of 1850, achieved nothing
*
in Germany and had nothing to offer Germany. The finances wer6 in
disorder, the debt mounting every year. The army, despite its victories
of 1848 and 1849, was inadequate to its tasks. Its equipment was neglected
and outmoded, the generals chosen for their family connections and their
standing at court. Both northern Italy and Hungary were held down by
military force and would explode into insurrection if the armies of occupa-
”
tion were reduced. Metternich’s Austria had had every defect of adminis-
tration, but had been redeemed by a skilful and vigilant diplomacy. The
diplomacy of the new Austria was the most inept part of its government.
The Habsburg monarchy owed its preservation to Russian support; yet
when the Eastern Question reached a new crisis in the early ‘fifties Austria
committed every conceivable blunder. Greedy for territory at the mouth
of the Danube, Austria estranged Russia and yet failed to get on good
terms with England and France, the allies of the Crimean War. Every
opportunity was lost; and Austria emerged from the Crimean War
isolated, and disliked by all the Great Powers. In such circumstances the
only wise course would have been at least co-operation with Prussia;
but here too, Austrian policy seemed deliberately to aim at estrangement.
The Austrian diplomats had failed to carry through their German plans
;
but instead of making the best of things they harboured an impotent
resentment and took a futile revenge in humiliating Prussia at the Federal
Diet. Instead of the former Austro-Prussian co-operation, by which the
two Great Powers agreed on a common Federal policy and together
made proposals at the Diet, Austria now combined with the lesser states
to put Prussia in a ceaseless minority. The lesser states would not have
followed a constructive Austrian lead, but they enjoyed baiting Prussia
and flattered themselves that they at last counted for something in German
affairs. Austria accomphshed nothing at the Diet except to implant in
the mind of the greatest of all Prussians a determination to reassert
Prussia’s greatness and independence.
In 1850 Prussian policy had seemed to end in complete failure. Within
a decade Prussia was on the threshold of complete success. The humilia-
^
93
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
tion of Olmiitz had been evidence of diplomatic error and of confusion
of counsels between Frederick William IV and his ministers; it had not
been evidence of deep-seated weakness. The Prussian monarchy had not
succumbed completely to the revolution in 1 848 ; for that very reason the
counter-revolution was less complete in the following years. The revo-
lutionary parliament had been dissolved in November, 1 848, but its place
was taken by a more moderate body, and in 1850 the king issued a definitive
constitution, which in fact remained unchanged until 1918. This con-
stitution was by no means radical. The king retained most of his power
and it was not even clear that the ministers must conform to the will
of the majority of the Lower House. The restricted electorate was
divided into three classes—high taxpayers, medium taxpayers, and small
taxpayers—and each of these classes exercised an equal franchise. Still,
\ in comj)arison to cpnditions in -Austria, Prussia appeared liberal. Her
I
administration remained first-rate, and many of the reformers of 1848
j^found an outlet in administrative reform. Her finances were well con-
^^iucted. The army leaders drew a lesson from the failure of 1850 and
began a long period of army reorganization. Above all, Germany after
1850 began to imitate in earnest the British industrial system; and this
strengthened Prussia in more than one direction. The greatest coalfields
on the Continent were in Rhenish Prussia in the Ruhr valley ; and these
now cam^e seriously into production. On them was founded an iron and
>’^teel industry which soon rivalled and at length surpassed the old-estab-
/ lished industry of Bohemia. Prussia became, for the first time in her
history, an industrial power. Not yet a great industrial power, towering
above all the Continent and ultimately challenging even Great Britain;
\but still no longer an exclusively rural state. By 1871 the town-dwellers
of Prussia had risen from one-quarter to a third of her population ; not
as great as the proportion in England, but already slightly greater than the
population in France, 33 per cent against 31 per cent, and considerably
greater than the proportion in Austria.
The industrial development made railway building faster and easier
than it had been before 1848. New railways, even the Ostbahn, were
built by private capital. But they did not escape the control of the army
leaders. The Prussian generals had never been inventive, never pioneers
in the art of war, but they had always been quick to adapFinventions to
their own purpose. The Austrian general staff opposed the building of
railways as an interference with their strategic plans and allowed the
railways of northern Italy to be sold to a French company, at the very
moment when they were preparing for a war in Italy against France. The
French general staff did not bring railways into their calculation even at
the time of the war of 1 870. The Prussian general staff designed a plan
for strategic railways, and the Prussian state gave its consent only to the
94
THE ASCENDANCY OF AUSTRIA, 1849-60
railways which conformed to this plan. These railways were first used for
the mobilization of 1859, and the lessons of 1859 were the essential prelude
to the achievements of 1866 and 1870 which left contemporaries breathless.
Nature and history had made Prussia geographically formless, rambling,
and disconnected; the railways gave her unity and backbone. In this
too, Prussia was a “made” state, a triumph of art over nature.
Prussia’s German policy seemed to stagnate during the eighteen-fifties.
The Prussian governing class had dislilced Frederick Williams’s romantic
policy and had desired a reconcilation with Austria. Still, they resented
their apparent humiliation in 1850; and after Olmiitz only a very few
advocated a frank return to a conservative co-operation with Austria.
One of these few was the “mad Junker” Bismarck, and it was as the
friend of Austria that BismarcK ‘ Became Prussian representative to thl-
Federal Diet, a strange beginning to his public career. Bismarck’s mission
to Frankfort opened an epoch in German and in European history, the
epoch in which we still live. For no man has had so profound an effect
on Germany and none a more profound effect on Europe. Bismarck
was the greatest of all political Germans and assembled in his own person
all the contradictions of German Dualism. Outwardly harsh, resolute,
and fearless, he was in reality highly strung and hysterical. He bullied
his way over obstacles, yet serious opposition reduced him to impotent
frenzy and high-pitched abusive rage, and the criticism which any British
minister takes in his stride in the House of Commons would have sent him
sheer out of his mind. Himself always plotting combinations against
others, he was convinced that all the world was plotting combinations
against him and lived in a half-mad imaginary world in which every
statesman was as subtle and calculating, as ruthless and assiduous as he
was himself.
Bismarck always talked of himself as a Junker and gave himself Junker
airs—dressed like a Junker, affected a Junker brutality of speech, became
absorbed in agricultural pursuits. In fact he was only half-Junker by birth
and hardly at all by upbringing. His mother came of a middle-class
bureaucratic family in Berlin, and he received a middle-class urban
education, knowing nothing of farming until, as a grown man, he took
over and rescued the derelict family estates. He was the highly educated
sophisticated son of a highly educated sophisticated mother, masquerading
as his slow-witted rural father and living down his middle-class origin by
an exaggerated emphasis on the privileges of his class. He said to one of
the liberals of 1848 : “I am a Junker and mean to benefit by it.” Junker-
dom was an anachronism in the nineteenth century, politically barren,
economically bankrupt. Without Bismarck the Junkers would not long
have kept up the fight against liberalism and could have resisted industrial
capitalism not at all. Bismarck saved them. A convert to Junkerdom,
95
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
he outdid the Junkers in determination to defend their social and political
position ; but his superb intelUgence told him that this position could no
longer be defended by a policy of resistance. The prevailing forces of the
/day must be dominated and perverted, as Stein had planned to pervert
/ the ideas of the French revolution. So, at one time or another, Bismarck
\
made or planned alliances with every power in Europe—with England,
JjFrance, Russia, Austria, and most of the smaller fry. So, at one time or
another, Bismarck worked or planned to work with every social and
/political force within Germany—with the great industiialists, with the
/ Roman CathoHcs, with the anti-Catholics, even with the Socialists. He
;
I
despised the Germans and loathed democracy. Yet he brought national
^
ijGermany into existence and gave the Germans universal suffrage.
* Completely flexible in his means, Bismarck had one permanent aim, the
preservation of his class, and one permanent enemy, all those who sought
V \ to substitute ideas and reason for force as the decisive factors in poUtics.
The advocates of a liberal Germany, the exponents of a Concert of Europe,
threatened the basis of Bismarck’s political philosophy. The Junkers were
predatory, rnihtaristic landowners, conquering their lands by fdfce^and
/ ‘^ holding them by force ; and force was all that Prussia had to offer Ger-
many or the world. Bismarck was right to despise the academic scheming
Uberals of 1848. He was wrong to suppose that they were the best which
hberaUsm could offer or that Hberal ideas necessarily went with impotence.
Bismarck once shook off the warnings of a British diplomat about
^European disapproval with the words : “What is Europe?” The English-
I
man replied :
” Many great nations.” In the long run the men of Uberal
^ ideas and the many great nations were to have more force than the
successors of Bismarck ; but it was too long a run to be pleasant. Still,
it would be unfair to blame Bismarck for ail the events of the last seventy
years. He had to deal with Germans, to deal, that is, with a nation which
^ had learnt from long centuries of bitterness and disappointment to admire
only force and to follow only authority. Bismarck was a representative
German, exceprtha1rire-^«d–pcrlitical sense and perhaps even political
wisdom. He had the typical German reUgion: rather exaggeratedly
emotional, probably genuine, but unrelated to his secular Ufe. He was
perhaps genuinely loyal to the Hohenzollerns, though only so long as
V they were the obedient instruments of Junker power. At bottom he was a
A, barbarian of genius, mastering in the highest degree the mechanical and
intellectual side of civiUzation, altogether untouched by its spirit. But
his genius gave him a sense of moderation, and this acted often as a
substitute for idealisn/ As a result, though his ultimate legacy to Germany
was boundless tyranny and to Europe boundless war, his immediate
achievement was to give Germany a long period of prosperity and legal
government and Europe a long period of peace. /
THE ASCENDANCY OF AUSTRIA, 1849-60
In 1851, after Olmiitz, Bismarck still held to the simple recipe of pre-
serving Junker Prussia by co-operation with Austria. His aim was to
return to the Holy Alliance. A few weeks in Frankfort convinced him
that the friendship between Austria and Prussia v/as dead, and a visit to
Vienna convinced him that the friendship between Austria and Russia
was dead also. Feebly arrogant, Austria humihated Prussia at the Diet
and challenged Russia in the Near East. The Holy Alliance was beyond
revival. Bismarck gave the first sign of his political genius when he
abandoned his accepted beliefs overnight and began to search round for
alternatives. If the partnership of the three absolute monarchies was
dissolved, then Prussia could not hope to hold her own alone either against \
France or against the national movement in Germany ; she must seek for
new alUes. Bismarck was fertile in expedients. He insisted that Prussia
must not be dragged in the wake of Austria’s anti-Russian policy, but
must hold aloof in the Near East. He responded insolently to the
Austrian assumption of leadership at the Diet, and urged the Prussian
ministers to form an anti-Austrian alliance with the revolutionary Emperor
of the French, Napoleon III. These wild proposals shocked the reactionary
ministers of Frederick William. IV. Against Bismarck’s realism they still
opposed an outworn legitimism and hoped that somehow the Holy
Alliance would be restored. They drifted into a defensive alliance with
Austria, but escaped from it when, at the beginning of the Crimean War,
it threatened to draw Prussia into war with Russia.
^.The Crimean War gave the death-blow to the European order which had
been created by the Congress of Vienna, and so in particular to the
balance of the German Confederation. Both German powers were dis-
credited and threatened. Austria who had tried to profit from the war
earned the hatred of the Tsar and, though she became formally a member
of the “Crimean coalition,” of England and France as well. Prtissia had
evaded all commitments and was merely despised by all parties, so much
so that tt^e Great Powers akriost forgot to invite her to the Congress
of Paris. ^Both France and Russia had made the maintenance of Ger-
man disunity the cardinal principle of their policjy^France since the
time of RicheUeu, Russia since the Peace of Teschen in 1778 and as
recently as the agreement of Olmiitz. Now both abandoned this principle
and followed a policy of adventure. In France Napoleon III was be-
witched by the idea that his uncle had been ruined by opposing German
and Itahan nationaUsm; and he wished to dazzle French opinion by a
drastic overthrow of the system of the Congress of Vienna. The Tsar was
obsessed by the humiliating peace terms which forbade Russian armament
on the Black Sea ; and for fifteen years Russian policy, blind to all else,
pursued the single object of tearing up these clauses of the Treaty of Paris.
V With every extension of education German national sentiment was growing
D 97
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
deeper and stronger; with the development of industry Germany was
growing more powerful. Yet this was the moment chosen by both France
i^and Russia to abandon the precautions against a great Germany which
they had applied for centuries/
Such is the force of even the most outworn institutions that the Austro-
Prussian balance lasted, to outward appearance, until the end of the
v_ ‘fifties. The first obvious blow to it was the disappearance of Frederick ‘
William IV, mad in 1858, dead in 1861. His brother William, who suc-
ceeded him, was by no means a liberal. Indeed he had had to be smuggled
^out of Prussia to England during the revolution of 1848. But he was hard-
headed, imrhune to romantic ideas, and therefore influenced by day-to-
/
day events. In theory he believed, as Frederick William had done, in the
I wickedness of liberalism and in the traditional superiority of the house of
i Habsburg. In practice he resented being under Habsburg orders and
was ready to play for hberal support in Germany. His coming to power
began in Prussia the brief ” new era,” when liberal ministers were appointed
y and Prussian policy took on an avowedly German tone. The Prussian
governing classes were not converted to liberalism. But they could no
^
longer live in a dream-world of the Congress of Vienna. They were con-
scious of the threat from Austria and, appreciating the anarchy which
had overtaken the relations of the Powers, they could think of no other
ally than German liberalism..^The moderate hberals, still disheartened by
the events of 1849, responded eagerly to this approach and revived, in the
National Union, the programme of Prussian leadership in Germany. Only
Bismarck protested against this alliance with liberalism, and early in 1859
he was sent out of the way—”put on ice,” as he said—as Prussian Minister
at St. Petersburg.
\ In 1859 Napoleon III put into operation the first part of his programme
by engaging in war with Austria for the liberation of Italy. The Franco-
Austrian war brought the dilemma of Prussian policy to a head. A few
daring radicals, and Bismarck as well, wanted Prussia to exploit Austria’s
danger or even to go to war on the Italian side. The liberals wanted to
defend the national cause, and the conservatives the cause of monarchy,
by an alliance with Austria. Prussia made half-hearted promises to
Austria, mobilized, talked of defending the Rhine, and in the end did
nothing. She was once more discredited in the eyes of Uberal Germany.
^^ustria lost Lombardy and, what was more important, her absolutist
system was shaken beyond survival. The defeat of 1859 began in Austria
the long search for a more stable basis of government which lasted until
1867. The first experiment was reaction: back from the levelling abso-
lutism of Bach to the traditional muddle of the days of Metternich ; back
from bureaucratic centralization to provincial autonomy. This aristo-
cratic revival was hostile to German nationalsm and, in a fraudulent way,
98
THE ASCENDANCY OF AUSTRIA, 1 849-60
sympathetic to the nationalism of the subject peoples. It ofifended in
Germany both liberals and nationalists, strengthened the arguments of
the Little Germans, and ihus, in a negative way, improved Prussia’s stand-
ing. But the aristocratic programme v^as tried in Austria only to be
abandoned. In February 1861 the course of Austrian policy was once
more reversed. Schmerling, the leader of the Austrian party at Frankfort
in 1848, became the chief minister; a parliament for the entire empire was
set up at Vienna, with the constituencies and the franchise so arranged
as to give the Germans a sure majority ; and the Schmerling ministry began
to press for a reform of the German Confederation. Austria had recovered
her primacy in the eyes of Germany, and it seemed impossible for Prussia
to hold her own against her without a surrender to middle-class liberahsm
which would cut the roots of Junker power. Such were the circumstances
which led the Junkers and the King to play Bismarck, their last, despairing
card. They were engaged in a mad act—to preserve Junker Prussia into
the twentieth century—and it needed a mad Junker to succeed. But
Bismarck was mad in ways that his fellows never appreciated and he was
to lead them, into paths beyond their imagining.
CHAPTER VI
THE CONQUEST OF GERMANY BY PRUSSIA,
1862-71
The issue which brought Bismarck to power was not the survival ofI
Prussia in Germany, but the survival in Prussia of the military monarchy!
and the military caste. William I was by upbringing and taste a soldier,
‘
anxious to redeem the army from the failure of 1850 and to repair the
defects shown by the mobilization of 1859. In particular, he wished to
provide for the increase in the size of the annual classes of conscripts. V
Since 1815 the population of Prussia had increased from ten and a half
to eighteen million, the yearly intake of the army not at all, so that one
out of every three Prussians escaped military service. Roon, the Minister
of War, therefore planned to increase the military establishment by
creating new regiments and providing new barracks. But he had a further
object. The only conservative in the liberal ministry, he was determined
to make the army at least a stronghold of conservatism. Therefore he
planned also to remove from the army the few scraps of liberalism remain-
ing from the days of Stein and Scharnhorst and the war of Liberation.
The serving army was not only to be increased; it was to become the
only army. The reserve, with its middle-class officers and its connections
99
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
with civilian life, was to be reduced and later eliminated. Roon had the
typical barrack-room mentality. Far from valuing the “citizen soldier,”
he envied the professional armies of France and Austria and, if he had
had longer to operate his plans, he would have made impossible the great
mobiHzations of reservists which secured the victories of 1866 and 1870.
Surrounded by liberal ministers, Roon actually feared the liberaUsm of the
reservists—a compliment, though an undeserved one, to the Prussian
people.
The Prussian parliament was by no means the revolutionary parliament
of 1848. Elected on the three-class franchise, it was composed not of
radicals, but like the Frankfort Assembly, of “notables,” lawyers and
^^civil servants, anxious to establish constitutional principles and to prevent
a military monopoly of the Junkers, but in a strictly legal manner. They
carried on their conflict with the King by means of resolutions and pro-
tests without attempting to appeal to the Prussian masses, and unani-
I
mously rejected a radical suggestion that they should refuse to meet in
I order to expose the fraud of Prussian constitutionalism. They put their
I
faith still, as they had done at Frankfort, in principles without power, and
l”^ would have been ashamed of a hberty that had been fought for. The
liberal majority did not oppose the increase in the size of the army.
This was a myth subsequently invented by Bismarck^s following of syco-
phantic historians. On the contrary, inspired by the legend of 1813, they
believed universal military service to be a liberal institution. Their aim
was to preserve in the army some liberal middle-class element. They agreed
to the increase in the annual intake of conscripts, but proposed to balance
it by reducing the period of service from three to two years, so that the
\ size of the standing army would remain the same and the reserve, there-
fore, would still be an essential part of the military organization. Most
of the military experts would have accepted this proposal. In fact those
of them who kept ahve the traditions of Scharnhorst thought the parlia-
mentary scheme an improvement. Roon resisted the proposal not on
mihtary, but on class grounds : he was more concerned to abolish the
,
^ middle-class reservist officers than to increase the fighting strength of
the army.
In 1861 the Prussian parliament agreed to the increased army expendi-
ture for a single year, on the assumption that Roon’s far-reaching changes
would be postponed.f Roon, however, set on foot his reactionary reforms
;
and in 1862 therefore the parliament refused to make the increased grant.
William I believed that he was faced not merely with a constitutional, but
with a real poUtical crisis, and could see no way out but abdication) Roon
persuaded him to try Bismarck as a last expedient. On October 8th, 1J862,
.
^Bismarck becani^ of Prussia and the Junkers’ saviour.
He formulated his policy in the famous phrase: “The great questions of
100
THE CONQUEST OF GERMANY BY PRUSSIA, 1 862-7 1
the day will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes—that was the
mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.” The
parliament was allowed to remain in being, but Bismarck ignored its ^
resolves. The army reforms were carried tlirough and the increased taxes,
which had not been voted, collected. Bismarck even invented a theory
that there was a “hole” in the constitution, which laid down that the
agreement of King and parliament was necessary for legislation, but did
J
not say what was to happen when they disagreed. Therefore the King
must fill this “hole,” until a constitutional agreement was reached, i
Bismarck did not believe in his own theory and admitted in the sequel
that he had been acting illegally ; but at the time it was ^ good talking \
point, which kept the parliamentary lawyers occupied^) The liberal
|
majority were helpless. Short of appealing to the people, they had no
|
weapon and were eager, long before 1866, to compromise with the King.
|
Most of the Junkers, on their side, disliked the openly illegal position into
j
which they had drifted, and even Roon offered a compromise acceptable |
to the parliament. Bismarck for his own purposes kept the conflict going
i
and -whipped the parliament up to new outbursts whenever it showed j-
signs of conciliation. William I feared his daring, and his fellow Junkers f
resented his frank contempt for them. King and Junkers alike clung to
j
Bismarck only so long as they felt threatened by a political revolution, ^/ i
and Bismarck therefore had to keep this imaginary threat in being. The ,
j
opposition of the Prussian liberals was invaluable to him. Without it he I
would have achieved nothing at all. I
Bismarck cared nothing for the constitutional struggle in Prussia, except
as a means of staying in office. He knew perfectly well that it was without
real significance. His real anxiety was to preserve Prussia as a great power
and therefore above all to reorder Prussia’s relations with Austria and
with Germany. Bismarck always liked to show that he had intended to do
whatever he actually did ; in fact that he made events. In later Ufe he gave /
out that he had always intended to fight Austria and to unify Germany ; /
and this version was generally accepted by his admirers and by most J
historians^ In reality, Bismarck’s greatness lay not in mastering events,
but in going with events so as to seem to master them. Ije had no rigidly^
‘
defined^rogra^mejv^^
preseryin^g’^thOun^
taste, he~wouicJ’have ‘pirefta’retf^ to the conservative order of the
days of Metternich : Austria and Prussia^£Qj-j3iperatin§-taj:gsis^^
within Germany; Austria, l^russia, and Russia co-operating to resist
Uberali^itrtn’lEnSi^e^ But this Holy Alliance had broken down. Austria
and Russia were hopelessly estranged in the Near East ; and if Austria f^’
persisted in Schwarzenberg’s policy of degrading Prussia to the level of
the lesser states, still more if Austria pursued wholeheartedly Schmerling’s
101
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
aim of winning the leadership of liberal Germany, then conflict with
Austria was inevitable. xBismarck did not follow a single aim, but rather
two contradictory aims : the policy which he liked but did not expect to
succeed, of winning Austria back to the conservative alliance—with its
centre moved, of course, from Vienna to Berlin—and simultaneously
the policy which he disliked but strove to make as harmless as possible
of seizing the leadership of Germany and bringing Austria to her senses,
by defeatS
One airb Bismarck never pursued: that of uniting all Germans in a
single national state. Greater Germany would mean the end of Junker
Prussia. The Junkers had neither the numbers nor the capacity to run all
central Europe ; instead German radicalism would run Prussia. A Prussian
diplomat once said to Bismarck: *’Our power must find its limits when
the supply of Junker officers gives out.” Bismarcjk replied : “I cannot say
that in public, but it is the basis of my plans.” ^Greater Germany, too,
would be predominantly Roman Catholic: in 1855 52 per cent of the
population of the German Confederation was Roman Catholic, as against
35 per cent if the Austrian lands were excludedi Above all. Greater
Germany would mean a Greater German foreign policy, protection, that
is, of the German communities in eastern and south-eastern Europe,
conflict therefore with Russia to the ruin of the Junkers. /F^^o-operation
between Russia and Prussia was vital for the subjugation of PoTancT’^d
soTbrlKe’lecuiT^”^^
winritr’pro^amme^^ under German authority,
implied conflict not only with Russia, but with all the world; a conflict
which Bismarck knew the Junkers were not powerful enough to sustain.
Bismarck was ceaselessly active and his mind endlessly fertile in expedi-
ents, but in the last resort his policy was, like Metternich’s, negative : to
bar the way to Greater Germany. Metternich and Bismarck both
despaired of the old order for which alone they cared. Metternich defended
the old order without hoping for success. Bismarck went with the new
forces in order to draw their sting. He conjured up the phantom of uni-
fication in order to avoid the reality.
f – Bismarck’s first achievement in foreign policy was the consolidation
of Russo-Prussian friendship over the body of Poland. Prussia’s aloofness
during the Crimean War had akeady won the Tsar’s favour, but it needed
the Polish revolt of 1863 to make things certain. In 1846 and 1848
Prussia had coquetted with the Poles, and Austria appeared the principal
oppressor. In 1863, Austria, estranged from Russia and aspiring to
liberalism, supported the Poles, though ineffectively
;
Bismarck, breaking
finally with the programme of Prussian radicalism, supported Tsarist
conquest. (The anti-Polish agreement between Prussia and Russia (the
Alvenslebeh convention) was a symbol, not an expression of practical
THE CONQUEST OF GERMANY BY PRUSSIA, 1862-71
need. There were no Polish disturbances in Prussian territory, and the
risings in Russian Poland were far from the Prussian frontier. Indeed,
Gorchakov, the Russian Chancellor, opposed the convention as humih-
ating and unnecessary ; and it was pressed on by the Tsar in the name of
monarchical soHdarity. The Alvensleben convention determined the
character of future Germany. Bismarck and the radicals both held that
Germany .could be^unit^d only by means of foreign war; and the experi-
ence of the great French revolution showed that they were right. But the
radicals hoped for a revolutionary war against Russia which by liberating
Poland and overthrowing Tsardom would also destroy Junker Prussia.
The Alvensleben convention determined that the coming war would be a
war against France, against the liberal west, a war therefore which would
actually strengthen Junker Prussia and cut off liberal Germany at the roojs.,^
Secure in Russia’s favour, Bismarck turned next to the conflict with
^
Austria, the conflict which within three years was to change the face ojh
Europe. In 1863 Austria still seemed in the ascendant and could still take
the initiative. Bismarck’s rupture with parliament discredited Prussia in
the eyes of all liberal Germans. Even the cautious Protestants of Northern
Germany who had made the National Union despaired of Prussian leader-
ship. In Austria, on the other hand, the liberal parliament with its
German majority set up in 1861 enjoyed a growing prestige; and all the
forces which had supported Habsburg leadership in Germany in 1848
revived after long years of discouragement. Radicals who desired a
Greater Germany; traditionalists who wished to see again the mythical
glories of the Holy Roman Empire ; the princes who feared the tyranny
of the King of Prussia but who would accept the primacy of the Habsburg
Emperor ; the Roman Catholics of western Germany ; all those who hoped
for a Germany somehow united by peaceful agreement; in fact almost
every body of opinion in Germany except the Prussian officer corps looked
to Vienna for leadership. High-water mark of this leadership was the
meeting of the princes which Francis Joseph summoned to Frankfort on
August 16th, 1863, thejast and most grandiose; attempt to unite Germany
“^y consent: Austria proposed a strengthening of the federal authority,
the estabHshment of a federal assembly composed of delegates from the
parliaments of the separate states, and the voluntary surrender by the
princes of part of their sovereignty. This sovereignty was fictitious, and
the princes would have given in to Austria, as they gave into Prussia at
the Erfurt Union in 1849, if Austria had been alone in Germany. But
Austria was not alone. Prussia existed, and the princes made their agree-
ment conditional on the agreement of Prussia.
The invitation of William I to the meeting at Frankfort provoked the
decisive and most serious crisis of Bismarck’s career. Wilh’am I was King
of Prussia, but he was a prince and a German, and he was reluctant to
103
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
Stand aloof when the princes were proposing to unite Germany by con-
sent. This seemed like a squaring of the circle: German national senti-
ment would be satisfied, yet the rights of the princes would be preserved.
Bismarck forbade William to accept the invitation and after a struggle
got his way. For Bismarck held the trump card. If he resigned, William
would have to give way to the demands of his parliament. Constitutional
monarchy in Prussia was too high a price to pay even for the friendship
of the German princes. ^As with the Prussian parliament so with the
meeting of the princes Bismarck refused to accept the conventional rules,
and appealed to the Prussian army as the true basis of Prussian existence.
He would not be bound by the clauses of a constitution which was a legal
fiction, not the outcome of a conquest of power by the middle class ; and
he would not acknowledge obligations to German princes, who were also
unreal. Bismarck’s challenge could not be met by argument ; it could only
be answered by force. The Uberals of the Prussian parliament would
not contemplate a revolution; the princes of Frankfort would not
contemplate war. The only, real force at the Frankfort meeting was
the Habsburg Emperor, but his presence there did not make sense and
nothing came of it. Francis Joseph was a narrow-minded autocrat, head
of the most obscurantist dynasty in all Europe. His alliance with the
liberals of German Austria, even more his appeal to German liberalism,
was fraudulent, the mere accident of policy without meaning or signifi-
cance. Francis Joseph was certainly jealous of Prussia and willing to
wage against Prussia an old-fashioned dynastic war ; but the traditions of
his house, centuries old, prevented his fighting this war as the leader of
revolutionary German nationalism. Th£ judgement passed by Francis I
>^ in 1815 remained,lrue
;
Qnly ^ Jacobm could accopt’^^’cfownT^
/^/^TlrriSlu^^ the Frankfort meetmg’enHe^^ a Germany
/ achieved by negotiation and so broke the last frail link of historic con-
^ tinuity. The ghost of the Holy Roman Empire, the ghost of a civilized
1^
stable Germany, the ghost of the Free Cities and of German liberalism,
\ all these were laid at Frankfort in August 1863. Defeated too was the
SchmerUng policy of a liberal Austria under German leadership. If the
conduct of Austrian affairs had followed rational lines, if Francis Joseph
had ever been able to adopt a single policy without reservations, Austria
in 1863 would have reverted to Metternich’s conservatism and would have
revived the reactionary partnership with Prussia. But the supreme govern-
ment of Austria was in chaos, Francis Joseph inclining first to one side,
then to the other, too autocratic to go with the liberals, too ambitious to
be satisfied with a negative conservatism. Bismarck tried, perhaps without
conviction but certainly with persistence, to restore the co-operation of
‘ the Holy Alliance ; but Francis Joseph and his ministers would not return
openly to the days of Metternich. It would be a distraction, relevant only
104
THE CONQUEST OF GERMANY BY PRUSSIA, 1 862-7 1
to the personal history of Bismarck, to attempt to decide when he gave up
the hope of winning the alliance of Austria without war or to estimate V
how the genuine offers of friendship gradually merged into subterfuges
designed to provoke a conflict. Bismarck certainly sought Austrian friend-
ship for longer than he later made out or than appears in the versions of
Bismarckian historians; but he was not so long-suffering or so sincere
as some conservative German historians have recently argued. Yet
however hostile in method his essential object was the restoration of the
Austro-Prussian alliance, a monarchical union against liberalism, and still
more an insuperable barrier (as it had been in Metternich’s time) against
a complete German unification and Greater Germany.
The means by which Bismarck asserted his ascendancy in Europe and ^
set the stage for adjusting relations with Austria was the question of
Slesvig and Holstein, the great romantic issue of 1848 now revived in
a new form. The conflict of 1848 had been postponed, not settled, by a
treaty of peace, signed in London in 1852: the two Duchies had remained I/-‘
\ under the sovereignty of the King of Denmark, the national claims of both
‘Denmark and Germany ignored. Late in 1863 the last King of Denmark
of the male line died, and the problem of the Duchies was opened once
more. But the circumstances were very different. In 1848 a humiliated
Prussia obeyed the summons of a self-confident National Assembly and
sought to liberate the Duchies for national Germany.^ In 1864 German
nationalism, still discouraged, trailed after the Prussian army and cheered /
on the conquest of the Duchies by the Prussian monarchy—strange victory
of Uberalism which substituted autocratic Prussian ryle for the wide
autonomy which the Duchies had formerly possessed/ Denmark con-
trolled the entrance to the Baltic, and the two Duchies were as much the
4-key to the security of the Sound as was, say, Gallipoli to the security of
the straits. But England and Russia did not repeat their negative of 1848.
Russia was blinded by the defeats of the Crimean War and bewitched by
the monarchical solidarity of the Alvensleben convention. England relied
only on the prestige of her sea-power, this time without effect. She had
no Continental ally, for Napoleon III was determined not to oppose
German national feehng and so set his foot on the path which led to the
destruction of French power in Europe. Austria acted most foolishly of
all. She was too conservative to follow the Uberal course of hberating
the Duchies for Germany ; but she would not altogether estrange national
sentiment in Germany by following the conservative course of upholding
the treaty settlement of 1852. Therefore she followed the worst course
of all : she helped to conquer the Duchies for Prussia, and so offended
both German nationalism and foreign powers. In October 1864 Den-
mark, isolated and defeated, made peace and surrendered the Duchies
into the joint hands of Austria and Prussia.
D* 105
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
to beheve the record of German brutality or, at the most, expected the
Germans to improve when they had had more experience of the ways of
conquest. The Germans, it was argued, were merely conquering France,
as seventy years before Napoleon had conquered Germany. But Na^^o-
leon’s armies marched under the banner of an idea, the German army
under none. Prussia for the sake of Prussia
;
Germany for the sake of
Germany; ultimately, Vv^orld power for the sake of world power: such was
the creed of the new Crusaders, a creed which could never win converts.
The war of 1870 made G
.
rehgion and became the Centre, the party of Roman Catholics; the \’
radicals, seeking mass support, became Social Democrats, followers of.)
Karl Marx. The Centre objected to the rule of Protestant Junkers andi
secularist liberals, the Social Democrats to the rule of landowners and\ /
industriahsts. The Centre objected to the Junker treatment of Catholic^
Poles, the Social Democrats to the Junker exploitation of PoHsh peasants.
The Centre repudiated the materialist values, the Social Democrats resisted
the exploitation, of the factory owners. Both rejected Bismarck’s partition,
the frontier erected between Germany and Austria in 1866: the Centre
would not be severed from their fellow Roman Catholics, the Social
Democrats from their fellow workers. Neither party was opposed in
principle to the .strong authority of a central state: the Social Democrats .
believed” theoretically in dictatorship for themselves, and Roman Catholics K
have never opposed absolute power, so long as it is safely in Roman
Catholic hands. But Greater Germans, /Eoman Catholics and Radicals
alike, had been the defeated party in the struggle of the ‘sixties. In the
struggle for power they had lost. Therefore both came out as opponents
of the central power, the Centre as the defenders of federaUsm, the SocialV
‘^
Democrats as defenders of individual liberty. They could not hope to
capture the German P^eich ; but they might hope to control municipalities
or even separate states. Thus, their rejection on Greater German grounds
of Bismarck’s Reich, when translated into practice, became particularism
;
121
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
and Bismarck’s struggle against the Greater German policy of limitless
epcpansion was expressed in the attempt to enforce the authority of the
Reich on recalcitrant classes and creeds. This seems an absurd conclusion,
but it v^as an inevitable consequence of Bismarck’s initial paradox of
carrying through a partial unification of Germany in order to make a
complete unification of Germany impossible. The groups of the Bis-
marckian coalition arrogated to themselves the national label, yet each
was in fact a sectional party : the National Conservatives served the inter-
ests of the Prussian landowners, the National Liberals the interests of the
great industrialists. The Centre, on the other hand, united German Roman
Catholics without consideration of class ; the Social Depioyats ^u^ited
German workers without consideration of state or provmce^^Tiie pairties
against whom Bismarck evoked national feeling were in reaUty more
national than the parties which supported Bismarck. This contradiction
conditioned not only the politics of Bismarck, but determined the develop-
ment of the Reich until the present day. Bismarck’s line of policy was
not, of course, clear cut from the beginning. In fact many of his projects
were abandoned or modified within the first decade. He had formed his
ideas in the age of Metternich and the Holy AUiance ; and he achieved his
greatest successes in a Germany that was still two-thirds agricultural and
rural. He imagined in 1871 that the period of upheaval in Germany was
over and thaj,, after the adjustments he had made, Germany would enter
a new period of social and economic stability. Only at the end of the
‘seventies did he appreciate that his political changes, far from ending the
German revolution, had released forces almost unmanageable; and in
1879 he was driven to begin a new, and ultimately unsuccessful, process
of balance and manoeuvre. Thus, the classical Bismarckian system only
lasted eight years, from 1871 to 1879 ; after that came a series of ever more
,
d,aring and impossible expedients until the system crashed in 1 890.
lL The Bismarckian order of 1871 had a simple pattern: Junker Prussia
[
and middle-class Germany, the coalition which sprang from the victories
\of 1866. Bismarck did not make much effort to reconcile the Junkers to
National Germany : like most aristocratic statesmen of ability, he despised
his fellow nobles, and he did not put himself out to make them realize
that everything he had done was for their good. All his effort, in these
first years, went into reconciling the liberals to the continuance of Junker
rule.f Between 1867 and 1879 the German liberals achieved every liberal
demand except power ; and in Germanv the demand for •povv’er had never
bulked large in the Hberal programmeTllNever have Hberal reforms been
crowded into so short a period: the E^lish “age of reform” (say, from
1820 to 1870) was in comparison hesitant and lethargic. The speed was
even more breakneck, in that most of the greatest reforms were carried
through at once—in 1867 for northern Germany, in 1871 south of the
122
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1871-90
Main, a more rapid change than even France experienced during the
great revolution. Germany was given at a stroke uniform legal procedure,
uniform coinage, uniformity of administration ; all restrictions on freedom
of enterprise and freedom of movement were removed, limited companies
and trade combinations allowed. It is not surprising that in face of sucKT
a revolution the liberals did not challenge Bismarck’s possession of power :
*
he was carrying out their programme far more rapidly than they could
e-^r execute it themselves.
/xhe policy of appeasing the liberalsLbrQiight Bismarck into conflict
with the Roman CatholicsJthe conflict so ambitiously named “the conflict
of civilizations” {Kulturkampf). The conflict began with the attempt to
break the clerical control of education, but in time developed into a
general attack on the independence of the Roman Catholic Church—
a
renewal, in fact, of the indecisive dispute between the Church and’ the
Prussian state which had been broken olf in 1840. Bismarck always held
that the best foundation for an alliance was to have a common enemy;
and he pushed the conflict with the Roman Catholics to extremes largely
in order to give the Hberals a target for their hostility. The conflict served
too the needs of his foreign policy. It v^on the sympathy of the Tsarist
government, itself in conflict with the Roman Catholic Poles; of national
Italy, in fierce dispute with the Pope ; of the liberal anti-clericalist govern-
ment in Austria ; and even of the French radicals and English Protestants,
so that the last public act of Earl (Lord John) Russell was to hail Bismarck
as a fellow soldier of liberty. It v/as a stroke against the aristocratic
clericals of the Habsburg court and against the monarchist clericals of
France—the two parties who still longed to reverse the verdicts of 1866
and 1 870. But most of all, it was a conflict against the enemies of Prussia-
Germany inside the Reich—against the traditionalists of westejn Ger-
many who were at once particularist and Greater German, \rhough
religious in form, the conflict was, in essence, political Hanoverian
Protestants who opposed Prussian rule supported the Roman Catholics
;
Roman Catholic capitalists on the Pvhine or in Bavaria supported Bis-
marck. The conflict of civilizations brought into being a Roman Catholic
political party—the Centre—a party uniting men of all classes in defence
of the Church. The Centre was from the first without rigid political prin-
ciples : it would support any political line and co-operate with any political
party so long as the rights of the Roman Catholic Church were secured.
It was prepared to be German or anti-German, hberal or anti-liberal,
free trade or protectionist, pacific or bellicose ; a party of expediency as
unscrupulous as Bismarck himself. The Centre had no parallel in any other
European country ; it was born of the unique religious balance of the
sixteenth century which had left Germany strongly, but not predomi-
nantly, Roman Catholic. If the Reformation had succeeded, the few
123
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
remaining Roman Catholics would, in the nineteenth century, have
secured religious equality; if the Reformation had failed, the Roman
Catholics would have had to take responsibility for Germany. As it was,
the Roman Catholic Centre could never be strong enough to govern
Germany, but was always strong enough to hamper its government by
anyone else.
The conflict with the Roman Catholics, instead of consolidating
Bismarck’s position of balance, threatened to overthrow it and to force
him entirely into the hands of the liberals. The Junkers, despite their
Protestantism, could not stomach liberal anti-clericalism and sympathized,
absurdly enough, with the particularism of the Centre^Bismarck had to
treat the National Liberals as though they were the official government
party, and in 1877 invited Bennigsen, the National Liberal leader in the
Reichstag, to become a Prussian minister. The liberals thought that their
hour had come and that, just as they had achieved without effort the pro-
gramme of hberal reform, so now they were without a struggle actually to
achieve power. They expected Bismarck to abdicate in their favour and
demanded that the Prussian ministry should be transformed into a parlia-
mentary government, with the liberals in a majority. This would have
ruined Bismarck’s system^or it would have been the prelude to an open
conflict with the Junkers.^ The alternative was to compromise with the
Junkers and with the Centre, neither of whom disputed the authoritarian-
ism of Bismarck’s rule, but only a particular application of it. In any case
economic developments were forcing Bismarck away from the liberals.
Until the eighteen-seventies the growth of population kept German (like
English) agriculture prosperous despite Free Trade. Then the railways of
Russia and of the American continent made possible the ruinous com-
^ petition of cheap grain. Economic forces, if left unchecked, would destroy
German, as they destroyed English, agriculture, and would transform
Germany, as they transformed England, into a purely industrial country.
This Bismarck would not allow : a flourishing agriculture was essential to
self-sufficiency in war, and, a more profound reason, a powerful rural
community was, he believed, essential for the preservation of the conser-
vative values to which Bismarck just as much as any other Junker was
V devoted. Agricultural Prptectipji c^^^ a breach with the^cademic
middle-classlEBefais.
“Xy’Tutlt was not only to agricultural protection that Bismarck was con-
verted in 1879. Before 1871 the industrialization of Germany had been
proceeding at a rate which seemed rapid to contemporaries, but which
was nothing much above the English average. The spiritual exhilaration
of unification ; the diversion of middle-class talent from politics ; and the
more material stimulation of the French indemnity produced an industrial
expansion unparalleled in history. German industry was “forced” as
124
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1871-90
vegetables and rhubarb are forced : exposed for centuries to the frost of
disunity and absolutist rule, it was brought suddenly into the hothouse of
the new Reich and shot up in luxuriant unnatural growth. Germany had
few natural claims to be a great industrial country. Her resources of raw /
materials (except potash) were small, her iron ore of inferior quality, and
her true coal so limited that she had to supplement it from the beginning
with “brown coal” or lignite—a substitute which an English miner would
refuse to handle. Many of her industrial centres lay far from the sea, and
the few great rivers were no real substitute for the sea-borne traffic which
contributed so much to British prosperity. The roots of Germany’s
industrial revolution were psychological, not material—a sudden inspira- ^
tion of confidence and of unlimited possibilities, in fact a typical ” bubble ”
period like the period of speculation in England which preceded the crises
of 1826 and 1847. Germany had a similar crash in 1873, a crash whiclK
completed the ruin of old-fashioned liberalism both in Germany and in -^.^
German Austria.
The financial crash of 1873 was a normal event of the age of capitalism
;
not normal was its sequel, a sequel which began the destruction of free
capitalism in Europe. In England when the speculative bubble burst,
those who had blown it took the consequences—speculative industries
were closed down, speculators were ruined, and more sensible forms of
industrial activity found. But the German industrialists had not the long ^
tradition of self-help which made British capitalists fend for themselves^
until long into the twentieth century. Besides, they had made an implicit
bargain with Bismarck : they had renounced political power in return for
economic wealth, and now they expected Bismarck to keep his bargain.
Bismarck distrusted and feared industrial development which made the
balance of his system increasingly unworkable. But if he had refused to ^^’^
give industry protection, the result would not have been the arrest of
industriaUzation. As had happened in England, each crisis would have
made industry raise its standards and would have bound Germany more
deeply to the world market. Without protection, Germany would have
had a less grandiose production “of iron and steel, would have imported
more, and would have concentrated instead on the more profitable
,
finishing industries. Nshe would have had a higher standard of life, a better
^’
and more fully developed system of transport, and every step in her
economic advance would have promoted the prosperity and peacefulness
both of Germany and of other countries. In fact Germany would have ‘s
been so deeply bound to the world market as to be incapable of war.
j
This was the vital consideration which made Rism^rck’? ^^^Y^rrsi^n tQ
ProtectioTi ififvitahlp, Germany must produce both the raw materials
of war and the weapons of war herself. Therefore her heavy industries,
far from being restrained or cut down by the working of economic forces,
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
must be speeded up and driven on. The price was paid by the mass of
German people who did not reap the full benefit of the great industrial
advance; but as not even Protection could prevent some benefit to the
mass of consumers this was not realized for many years—and then the
tariffs were condemned as being too low. With each dose of Protection
German industry became ever more top-heavy and the need for new
outlets ever more pressing. In Bismarck’s time few thought of finding
V these outlets by war. The method of the ‘eighties was economic conflict
;
fast on the heels of the tariff came the Kartells, the great trade associations
^ which fixed prices—high for the home market, artificially low for export
—and which went on from price-fixing to the regulation of production.
The last of the old duties, inlierited from the early days of the Zoll-
verein, ended in 1877 ; new duties Vv’ere imposed in 1879. Thus, except for
two years, Germany missed the era of Free Trade which gave to England
her three most prosperous generations, and passed virtually without a
break from the age of Colbert to the age of Dr. Schacht. Judged by the
standards of a later generation, the duties of 1879 v/ere so moderate as to
be almost imperceptible—just as German brutality in the war of 1870
was gentle and humane in comparison with their conduct in later wars.
But they were the decisive step which led logically and inevitably to
autarchy and the “New Order,” to the doctrine of “guns before butter,”
and which made the survival of Germany conditional on the conquest of
Europe. The tariff of 1879 was not created to protect new struggling
industries from estabUshed British competition—the colonial tariff
pattern. Nor was it invoked, as in France, to save leisurely old-fashioned
industries from the challenge of the up-to-date. German industry was the
most modern and best established in Europe. The tariffs gave protection
in the way that bombing aeroplanes give defence. They were a weapon
of war: to destroy competitors by dumping and, ultimately, to enroll
i consumers by compulsion. Thus was completed the severance of Ger-
many from the western world: political breach by Bismarck’s victory
( over the Prussian constitution in 1866; international breach by the war
of 1870; economic breach by the tariff of 1879. As in other spheres,
Bismarck tried—not without success—to resist the consequences of his
own policy and certainly obscured these consequences during his period
of rule ; but in the long run they were inescapable. Protection was a further
A step towards the Greater Germany which it was Bismarck’s life-work
to resist.
I The new economic policy changed both the spirit and the structure of
I the Bismarckian balance. The balance of the eighteen-seventies had been
a balance of ideas—Junker conservatism^nd middle-class liberalism.
The Junkers disUked national Germany
;
^e National Liberals disliked
Prussia. Both therefore accepted Bismarck as a pis aller: the Junkers
126
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1871-90
preferred him to a government of liberals, and the liberals preferred him
to an out-and-out Junker. But neither party dropped its dislike “of the
other. The balance of the eighteen-eighties became a balance of interests
—Junker agrarianism and capitaUst industrialism. Until 1879 the con-
servatives were a party of great landowners, and the prosperous middle
peasants were as liberal as the prosperous middle classes of the towns
—
indeed, the most resolute opponents of Bismarck in the Prussian parlia-
ment between 1862 and 1866 came from the rural constituencies of East
Prussia. After 1879 the conservatives became agrarians pure and simple,
and both rural liberalism and true conservatism vanished. Henceforth
the “national” cause was essential for Junker prosperity. The Germans
had to pay more for their bread in order to preserve the allegedly best
element in German society and to keep up the supply of officers for the
German army; and the Junkers in return had to take seriously their
national role. At heart they still hated national Germany, but their
prejudices had to be rigorously concealed, and, with infinite distaste, they
began to wear the appearance of German enthusiasts. In 1879 Bismarck’
regarded agrarian protection as primary, and industrial protection as
part of the regrettable price to be paid for it. But once the two causes were
knit together the Prussian landowners were committed to every further
step which was necessary to advance German industry—at first steps to
higher tariffs, but ultimately steps to the conquest of Europe. Thus the
Junkers, enemies of Greater Germany, could only preserve their anoina-
lous social position and the prosperity of their over-capitalized estates
by becoming the agents of a Greater German programme of unhmited
expansion.
^
V Equally profound was the effect of Protection on the National Liberals,
frhe Hberals of the ‘seventies were still a party of principle. They had
given up the struggle to achieve a strictly constitutional state, but they
worked with Bismarck in order to infuse a liberal spirit into the laws and
administration of the Reich. Their Cobdenite training made them oppose
Protection in general, and the Imperial constitution made opposition
imperative, for tariffs, permanently imposed, would give the Reich a
steady and automatically increasing income and so would place it beyond
all p^amentary control. These liberals would go with Bismarck no
longe^But they refused to go over to the irreconcilables of 1866, the
Progressives led by Bichter, who kept up a ceaseless flow of destructive
impotent criticism.{niie majority of liberals washed their hands of public
affairs and withdre^Rnto a hberalism of the spirit, as Luther had done
three hundred years before. These were the men who in the following
fifty years convinced so many foreign observers that Germany was liberal
“at heart.” Their hberalism was indeed buried deep in their hearts: with
principles of the deepest Uberal purity, none ever raised his voice against
127
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
the cours^ of German policy, and all silently acquiesced in its conse-
quencesXln the Reichstag there was still a National Liberal remnant, but
fit
retained little of liberalism beyond the name ; it was a straight interest-
group, promoting tariffs and extoUing power. Th!4S_the liberal surrender
which had taken place in Prussia in 1866 was completed In Germany in
1879.””Germany’s liberal period had lasted eight yea^
The new economic policy changed also the character of the Centre.
*^ ”Bismarck had no reason to continue the conflict with the Roman Catholic
Church and every reason to bring it to an end. He had broken with the
Afliberals and needed Junker conservative support in Germany as well as
in Prussia. The conflict had outlived too its international purpose.
In France the republic, anti-clerical and pacific, was firmly established,
the clerical-monarchist policy of revenge defeated. In Austria the fall of
the liberal government in 1879 had not prevented the making of the
Austro-German alliance. The aristocratic clericals of the Habsburg
monarchy, Bismarck’s former enemies, had at last come to realize that
alliance with Bismarck was their best defence against German radicalism
inside Austria and the strongest security for Austria-Hungary’s inter-
national position ; it would make things easier for them to end the attack
on the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. The Centre on their side
were ready to compromise. They had resisted the Reich so long as it
had seemed to be based on Uberal principle, but themselves an interest-
group (though the interest was spiritual) they were quite at home in the
new era of agrarian and capitalist bargaining. Where the others bar-
gained for tariffs, they bargained for Roman Catholic schools ; and in any
case they owed their votes to the very classes who benefited by pro-
tection—Roman Catholic peasants and Roman Catholic industrialists
who desired to reconcile their economic and spuitual needs. The Centre
had no fixed poUtical principles : they, had been Greater German and
federalist in the interest of the Roman Catholic Church; they became
Little Germans, protectionist, and ultimately advocates of German
conquest for the same reason. Each side carried its point: Bismarck
^ dropped the anti-Catholic laws; the Centre accepted Bismarck’s Reich
^ and instead of his enemy became his critic. If Bismarck had allowed it
—and had paid a sufficient price in the shape of more privileges for the
Roman Catholic Church—it would have become his supporter. Only
his old-fashioned Protestant prejudices stood in his way. Cynical and
realist as he was, he could not rival the freedom from the principles and
scruples of this world which is given by devotion to a supernatural cause.
With all other parties he could safely apply his maxim, d corsaire corsaire
et demi; with the Centre he knew that it would be applied to him. Thus
throughout the ‘eighties Bismarck pursued a course of policy satisfactory
to the Centre and yet treated them as a party of opposition. And the
128
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1871-90
Centre made the best of both worlds : they obtained from Bismarck con-
cessions spiritual and economic, and yet continued to win votes as the
defenders of democracy and the enemies of militarism. In fact, so long
as there was a secure conservative-ISfational Liberal majority for Bismarck
in the Reichstag, it paid the Centre better to harass Bismarck in co-
operation with the Progressives. If ever the Centre held the balance in
the Reichstag, they would have to decide between authoritarianism and
democracy ; but until the critical moment they deferred their decision.
The new Bismarckian balance needed to be sustained by a new fighting
cry, if there was not to be a tariff auction every year. The Social Demo- *
crats were the predestined whipping-boy to take the place of the Centre.
Probably Bismarck genuinely believed in the turnip-ghost which he con-
jured up. He was, after all, a pupil of Metternich and, like Metternich,
committed to the hopeless defence of a moribund order. The Uberal
peril had implied for Metternich all the social and national tensions within
the Habsburg empire which it was impossible for him to overcome ; and
so the socialist peril meant for Bismarck all the mounting tensions which
made the permanence of his Reick impossible. The Social Democrats
had sprung from a coaHtion of the followers of Marx and of Lassalle in
1 875, and they talked in Marxist revolutionary terms. In fact their
rejection of the Reich was neither Marxist nor revolutionary: it was
democratic and particularist, the reluctance of the artisans of Baden and
other south German states to be forced into an authoritarian industrial
Reich. Marx had no patience with this attitude and attacked Bebel and
Liebknecht, the leaders of the Marxists inside Germany, for their opposi-
tion to the war of 1870; in his view the Social Democrats should welcome
German unification and any concentration of power which broke down
the traditional defences of the old order. On the other hand, Marx
certainly intended his followers to oppose Bismarck and the new Reich
until it actually passed into their hands. Lassalle, who died in 1864,
had gone a stage further. Accepting the Marxist view of the class
struggle between capitalists and workers, he proposed an alliance between
Bismarck and the working-class” movement, an alliance to defeat political
Uberalism and economic laissez-faire. Ostensibly Lassalle’s view was
rejected by the combined Social Democratic party after 1875; in fact its
victory was only deferred. Thus Marx’s revolutionary authoritarianism
was strong enough to remove the democratic outlook of his followers,
but it was itself threatened by a social opportunism inherited from Lassalle.
Lacking the firm basis of democratic principle, the Social Democrats ^
were ultimately, like the Centre, a party with whom a bargain could be
struck.
There was no bargain in Bismarck’s time. As in his dealings with the
Centre, Bismarck treated the Social Democrats in a curiously old-
E 129
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
fashioned, high-principled way. Mqu are bound to their generation, and
Bismarck, despite his Realpolitik, had much more resemblance to Glad-
stone than to Hitler or even to the Social Democratic and Centre tacti-
cians of the nineteen-twenties. Boasting of his freedom from principle,
he yet took seriously both his own principles and those of his opponents.
He took the Marxist challenge to society at its face value and believed
that there was no poUtical weapon against it but persecution. Hence the
anti-Socialist laws enacted in 1878 and renewed until 1890: the Social
Democratic party was made illegal and its press forbidden. Yet this
persecution bore the unmistakable stamp of the Hberal era : Social Demo-
crats were still allowed to be candidates at elections and to sit in the
Reichstag; the number of members of the party increased steadily; and
in all about 1,500 persons were imprisoned (an average of a little over a
hundred a year). The anti-Socialist laws were little less futile than the
Karlsbad decrees, and their only practical effect was to prolong the illusion
of the revolutionary character of the movement. Like the Karlsbad
decrees, the anti-Socialist laws were primarily for pohtical effeqt: the
-V decrees to scare the German princes into subservience to Metternich,
the laws to scare the electors into subservience to Bismarck.
/ Bismarck had a more positive method of combating Socialism, the
/system of social insurance sometimes absurdly called Bismarckian
/ Socialism. Between 1883 and 1889 Bismarck estabhshed compulsory
\ insurance for workers against sickness, accident, incapacity, and old age,
/ contributory schemes organized, but not subsidized, by the state. Liberty
and Security, the two basic Rights of Man, are no doubt conflicting
[
principles ; and refusal of the one has often implied compensation in the
other. Bismarck’s method was pecuhariy ingenious: he consoled the
German workers for their absence of liberty partly by providing security
at the expense of the employer, more by making them provide security
for themselves out of their own pockets. Social security did not achieve
its immediate aim ; it did not arrest the growth of the Social Democratic
party. In a more profound sense it was successful ; it made the German
\ workers value security more than liberty and look to the state rather than
to their own resources for any improvement in their condition. The
German workers came to feel that they too were’ receiving Protection
and that the Reich was, in some sort, doing their work for them—the very
_^feeling that had been earlier the ruin of German liberalism. If social
^ security had been won by pohtical struggle, it would have strengthened
the confidence of the working-class movement to make political claims
;
as it was, the workers seemed to have received social security as the price
of poUtical subservience, and they drew the moral that greater subser-
vience Vv/ould earn a yet greater reward. In this sphere too Bismarck
followed an old-fashioned line: he used social security as a weapon
130
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1871-90
against the Social Democrats, his successors as a means of collaborating
with them.
The general election of 1878, the prelude to Bismarck’s change of
system, was won on the cry.£ifthe^Qciaj Peril. It gave Bismarck a reliable
majority with which to introduce Protection, repeal the anti-Catholic
laws, and begin the campaign against the Social Democrats. In the
general stir the first septennial renewal of the army grant passed almost
unnoticed. But the Social Peril was an emergency weapon, too clumsy
for everyday use. In the ‘seventies Bismarck had controlled the Reichstag
by the prospect of liberal measures ; in the ‘eighties he had to invoke the
“national” cause, most dangerous of political expedients. To every
country there come rare moments of real crisis, when “the country in
danger” demands real national unity—so in France in 1792, so in
England in 1940. But when the cry is raised in time of profound peace,
it is (as in England in 1931) a confession of the failure of statesmanship. L_
In the ‘eighties Germany was’hot ‘threatened from abroad but by internal
disunion ; and the foreign peril was the only common cause. In sounding
this alarm Bismarck condemned and doomed his own work. He had
fought three wars to give Germany security; what had been achieved if
Germany was now more menaced than ever? The Germans could not be
allowed to conclude that Bismarck’s work was wrong; they had to con-
clude that it was inadequate. The Greater German programme was
revived, and security sought in new wars and wider conquest. Bismarck
fabricated perils in order to keep himself in power, just as he had arti-
ficially prolonged the constitutional peril in the ‘sixties in order to keep
the support of WiUiam I. His unrivalled political genius enabled him to
avoid the dangers which he conjured up; but every step he took spelt
doom for the modest conservative Reich which it had been his object to
establish.
To maintain his hold over the German people, Bismarck had to present
|
himselfas the champion of the ” national
‘
‘ cause, but by no means ofall that v
the “national” cause had implied in 1848. The change of direction is re-j
vealed even by the appearance of Bismarck’s Reich on the map. ” National”
Germany included East and West Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Posen,
which had never been within the German borders before, and the Reichs-
land of Alsace and Lorraine which had not been German for two hundred
years. It excluded Bohemia, the German and Slovene provinces of
Austria, and Trieste, which had been within the Reich from time imme-
memorial. The crusade to promote the German cause in the Polish
lands substituted Junker interests for the interests of the Germans
in central Europe, The destruction of Polish nationahsm became an
essential condition of German unity. In the first days of the Reich
the struggle with the Poles was cultural—persecution of the Roman
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
Catholic Church, promotion of German schools, denial to Posen of the
local autonomy established elsewhere throughout Germany in 1872.
With the ending of the Kulturkampf, Bismarck had to find nev/ methods,
and in 1886 he embarked on economic war, buying out Polish landowners
and seeking to promote German colonization, a campaign waged steadily
but with no success for the following twenty years. The Poles organized
counter-buying in self-defence and more than held their own. This battle
over landownership was a dramatic struggle, but it served to conceal that
the great landlords of eastern Germany were the real agents of the Polish
advance, importing cheap Polish labour to work their great estates at an
increased profit. This was overlooked, and German nationalism once
more swallowed the Junkers as national heroes.
The struggle in the Reichsland was more directly political, a ceaseless
campaign against separatism waged by a semi-military government. Both
struggles served the same purpose. In eastern Germany it enabled liberal
peasants to vote conservative and yet retain their national self-respect ; in
western Germany it estranged the liberals and radicals from France, and
the reaction from Alsatian separatism developed in them an enthusiasm
for the Prussian Reich. Alsace and Lorraine played an essential part in
Bismarck’s internal policy ; and the need for them made his alleged regret
at their annexation a meaningless hypocrisy. When he sought to win
France for his international combinations he occasionaUy relaxed the
rigours of military rule; but these diversions were rare. Anti-Polish
policy never clashed with his international schemes. It was the basis of
his friendship with Tsarist Russia, and, as the disputes between Germany
and Russia on other issues increased, became in time the essential Unk
between them. Liberal Germany, if it had ever existed, would have been
friendly to France and hostile to Russia. Bismarck’s “national” policy
enabled him to win the support even of liberals for a policy friendly to
Russia and hostile to France—the logical consequence of the reactionary
revolution which he had carried through.
The deeper “national” cause lay in central and south-eastern Europe,
but with this Bismarck would have nothing to do. Never since a German
Reich existed were the Germans in the lands of the Danube so deserted
by the Reich as in the days of Bismarck. Bismarck repudiated the Near
East, and so all schemes for Mitteleuropa, in the revealing phrase—they
were “not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier.” And indeed what
concern had Pomerania with the Balkans? But for centuries south-eastern
Europe had been judged worth the bones of Tyrolese and Styrians, still
more the bones of Germans from the Banat or from Transylvania, just
as good Germans as the Junker landowners of West Prussia and Posen,
and often better. But Bismarck washed his hands of them all. Not
merely did he refuse to promote German expansion in the Balkans. He
132
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1871-90
/Welcomed the Habsburg compromise with Hungary in 1867, by which
“h^ungary became a Magyar national state and the Germans of Hungary
an abandoned minority as much subjected to Magyarization as Rouman-
iansor Slovaks. In 1880 the city council of Budapest, hitherto the organ of
German traders, at last gave up German and took to Magyar, a conse-
quence of Bismarck’s policy which would have shocked Bach or even
Metternich. Even in the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy the
Germans received from Bismarck neither protection nor encouragement.
He made no attempt to prevent the setting up of the clerical Taaffe
government in 1879, despite its concessions to the Czechs and Slovenes;
and was always stonily severe towards the German nationalist agitation
which sprang up in Austria during the eighteen -eighties. He was the
irreconcilable enemy of Greater Germanism ; but he had been the enemy
of the Habsburg dynasty only so long as it refused to accept the Hohen-
zoUerns as equals. Conservative aristocratic Austria was the guarantee
against Greater Germanism; Magyar domination in Hungary and the
recollection of the defeat of 1866 the guarantee against the renewal of
dynastic ambitions in Germany.
Bismarck gave the Habsburg monarchy a generation of peace and
security, but he had robbed it of all purpose. Lacking German support,
it could no longer be the missionary of German enterprise in south-eastern
Europe; subordinate to Germany, it could not be the protector of the
Slavs against German expansion. It could not balance indefinitely between
the master and the subject peoples,; yet Bismarck prevented it from taking
sides. Bismarck never appreciated that the Slavs of south-eastern
^
Europe were an altogether different problem from the Poles of Polish
Prussia. He thought that the problem could be eliminated in the same
way—by partition between Austria-Hungary and Prussia. But the Poles
were estranged from Russia ; the Slavs of Bohemia and the Balkans were
not. Therefore nothing short of national hberation from the Magyars
and Germans and the break-up of the great estates would reconcile them
to the Habsburg monarchy. Bismarck made either reconciliation or
subjection impossible. He could not allow an aggressively German policy
which might have kept the Slavs in check, since any such policy would
have made it impossible to exclude Austria from German affairs. But
equally he could not allow the overthrow of the Magyar supremacy in
Hungary, which alone curbed dynastic ambitions, still less could he risk
an Austrian policy openly anti-German. He repeatedly advised the
Austrian statesmen to assert the strength of the dynasty in the Balkans;
yet he feared an assertion of strength which would enable the dynasty
to escape from his control. In fact, he desired the political and national
balance in Austria-Hungary to remain permanently crystallized in the
position of 1867; as in Germany, he was committed to perpetuating the
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
accidental compromise of a moment. His devices and counter-devices
—
support of the Magyars on the one side, refusal to promote the German
cause on the other—were meant to preserve the Habsburg monarchy and
I so to bar the way to a Greater German Mitteleuropa ; in the result they
I
made any free development of the Habsburg monarchy impossible and so
I inevitably imposed upon Bismarck’s Reich a Greater German programme.
The conservative clerical dynasty was, for the Prussian Junkers, preferable
to Greater Germany; but Greater Germany was preferable to a / com-
munity of free Slav peoples. For the idea of freedom is catching ; and once
encircled by free peoples, even the Germans might not always remain
immune. German supremacy or German withdrawal in the lands of the
Danube valley was the greatest question in Germany’s future; in this, as
in all else, Bismarck’s genius lay in postponing the answer.
The last and most casual of Bismarck’s “national” appeals was his
•Apparent surrender to the agitation for colonies overseas. A strange
contradiction : Bismarck abandoned the old-standing German colonies in
south-eastern Europe, yet risked a quarrel with England for the sake of
colonial territory with no German inhabitants and often with no inhabi-
tants at all. The contradiction is not so flagrant as it appears. Bismarck,
/it is true, always spoke contemptuously of colonies and insisted that
Germany was a Continental power. He v^ould have preferred to follow
» a foreign policy strictly static and unacquisitive. Junker Germany was
‘Ajt^ulyj/^satiated” power, and any increase of tcrri^Q^^ffljTd maill^Sfe^r
predomijiance^r^i’ 3iffial!tr^ national feeling deiri.ari^ed
oMct^, colonial ambitionswere its leastharmnin lor
colonies, like thelateF”3enS3″fOT”a’m German demand,
originating in the Hanseatic towns of north Germany and easily recon-
cilable with a conservative policy in Europe. Colonial agitation was a red
herring to distract German ambitions from eastern and south-eastern
Europe, their natural outlet. It was not an effective enough red herring
to be worth much trouble, and Bismarck would never have taken up
colonial schemes, if they had not in 1884 and 1885 fitted in with his attempt
at a Franco-German entente directed against England. Colonial disputes
with England gave Bismarck an easy popularity with national feeling in
the Reichstag and in Germany; but he dropped them as soon as they
ceased to accord with the general current of his foreign policy, in this
I
accidental way Bismarck acquired for Germany great colonial areas in
1
Africa—with the exception of a military post in China, the full extent of
the German colonial empire—colonies which in 1914 contained in all
5,000 permanent German inhabitants and which cost the German tax-
payers in subsidies six times what the German merchants and investors
inade out of them in profits.
The German colonies were of no economic or social importance, and of
134
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1 87 1-90
military use only in the unlikely event of war with England. They were
a profound and revealing symptom of the dilemma of Bismarckian
Germany. After the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which came at the end
of thirty years of European conflict, all the Great Powers shrank from any
new attempt to re-order the balance of Europe. They all accepted the
broad lines of the European order which had been established by Bismarck
and aspired only to small modifications. Each wished to increase its
strength imperceptibly and without fuss, to make gains on the cheap.
This was the mxaning of the “age of Irn2e|isJisni*.t^-^¥ide!^
^^^.had,JxcoJiillmmpi^^^ inch of it was^so jijip.^
taBJLas«aeH:(!r’brTri^^ war.TaclfnfeaTPower found
at its back door a zone of expansion wEerelT^ not immediately run up
against determined opposition—France across the Mediterranean in
North Africa (until it ran up against England in Egypt), Russia across
Asia (until it encountered British opposition in Persia and Japanese
opposition in Korea), Austria-Hungary in the Balkans, England in that
universal back door to all the world which was given by sea-power. But
Germany was surrounded by established powers and had no back door,
no zone of easy expansion. To expand into south-eastern Europe, she
must absorb Austria-Hungary and ruin the Junker Reich ; to acquire new
wheat-growing areas, she must conquer the Ukraine from Russia; to
acquire new sources of industrial raw materials, she must conquer north-
eastern France; to escape from Europe and draw her resources from
overseas she must depend on the goodwill of England or else conquer
from her the mastery of the seas. For Germany it was all or nothing
:
either to maintain static and unchanged the Reich created by Bismarck
in 1871, or to overthrow the European order in a bid for European domi-
nation. Germany could not advance imperceptibly, could not make small
gains. The acquisition of colonies cloaked, but did not alter, this dilemma.
They were certainly won on the cheap, but they were not gains
;
they added
nothing to Germany’s strength. Their only purpose was emotional, an
inadequate safety valve for the growing desire that united Germany, as a
Great Power, should display all the characteristics of greatness shown by
others. Bismarck’s Reich was a “made” state, without tradition of its
own. It aped the traditions of others, and “made” its colonial ambitions,
as it had “made” its constitution, its industrial system, and its mode
of thought. „
Certainly Bismarck never intended the Reich to “advance beyon3me^
frontiers which he had laid down. In colonial affairs what mattered to
him was the dispute, not the reward; and he was both astonished and
annoyed at British acquiescence in his demands, which at once deprived
him of his quarrel and saddled him with unwanted colonies. Still, a
quarrel was somehow squeezed out of colonial affairs during the latter
135
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
half of 1884 and the early months of 1885. As well as serving his designs
fin
foreign affairs, these colonial quarrels gave Bismarck a useful fighting
cry during the Reichstag election of 1884. The Social Peril alone was not
enough to keep the electors in alarm at succeeding elections ; and grievances
against England were a welcome “national” substitute. But not a very
, effective one. Both Centre and Progressives held their own in the general
election, and the Social Democrats increased their vote. This was the more
! serious in that the time for a new septennate was approaching. The army
grant was due for renewal in 1888 ; but with the breakneck increase of the
population, the army chiefs wished both to increase the size of the army
and to put the increase into force in 1887. The majority in the Reichstag
were ready to agree to the increased grant, but attempted to secure in
return increased parliamentary control—to make the grant triennial,
instead of septennial ; a last echo of the similar demand in Prussia which
had brought Bismarck to power in 1862. In 1886 Bismarck used his
familiar weapons and befogged the constitutional issue with the “national”
cry. “The Fatherland in danger” served to conceal the fact that the
demands of the Reichstag majority affected not the size of the army, but
the autocratic powers of the Emperor and Chancellor; it was the old
trick of 1862.
But there was also a profound difference. In 1862 Prussia had really
been endangered by the German ambitions of Austria and the ineffective
Utopianism of Napoleon III: and Bismarck had passed without regret
from alarms of war to war itself. Germany was not seriously endangered
]
\ in 1886, and the sole aim of Bismarck’s foreign poHcy remained peace.
European relations, indeed, were somewhat strained—an incipient crisis
between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans, and a nationalist
revival led by Boulanger in France. But Bismarck never intended to
‘ strike first, and his alarms were largely spurious: his guns were being
loaded to preserve the balance of his political system in Germany, not to
be fired. The real danger, if it was real, lay in the conflict between Russia
and Austria-Hungary; and the German military plans at this time en-
visaged an invasion of Russia and a purely defensive war in the west.
But Bismarck was too good a Junker, his policy too sharply focused on
Poland, ever to project a genuine breach with Russia. In April, 1887, at the
height of the supposed “war crisis,” he inaugurated negotiations with
^^ussia for a neutrality agreement, the Re-insurance Treaty; and had it
xome to a real crisis, he probably intended (as he contemplated in 1889)
to partition Austria-Hungary with Russia, taking as little as possible for
Germany and leaving all the Slav areas, perhaps even Bohemia, to Russia,
^
anything rather than to be ,caught up in the Greater German plans for
—V’German domination in central Europe. Such a policy would have doomed
his work, for only open military dictatorship could have forced it on the
136
BISMARCKIAN GERMANY, 1871-90
German people ; and this dictatorship was the proposal to which he was
logically led in 1890. In 1886 and 1887 he stiil tried to bridge the gap
:
between Junker interests and national sentiment by presenting France,
|
not Russia, as the common enemy. With France profoundly pacific and
despairing, the risk of a real crisis was remote ; and Bismarck had to take
the risk. His manoeuvre was successful. In January 1887, the Reichstag
rejected the new army bill and was dissolved. Bismarck fought the
election with the cry of “the Fatherland in danger” and won a majority
for his coalition of agrarian and industrialist supporters. The reconsti-
tuted National Liberals, the party of capitaUst interest, were for the last
time the largest party in the Reichstag.
The army bill was passed without difficulty in March 1887. It was the
^
last triumph of the Bismarckian tow de force. With the staggering pro-” < gress of industrialization and with the increase of the political conscioijg*- ness of the masses, Germany became ever more unmanageable. How could the German people be persuaded to accept indefinitely the political monopoly of the Junkers and the economic monopoly of the great land- owners and capitalists? The way of social and pohtical concession was, by definition, ruled out. Bismarck, after a lifetime of expedients, gave up the problem in despair: he proposed in 1890 to scrap the constitution, t6\ break with German feeling, and to re-establish a reactionary alliance | with Tsardom, as ii had existed in the days of Frederick William ni.| This was to invite the fate of Metternich. The capitalist liberals would I be driven on to the side of the masses, and, in any case, capitalists and \ landowners together could not stand against a widespread revolutionary \ movement. Old Prussia had rested on an army composed of dumb / obedient peasants; but the German army was, in large part, the Social I Democrats and the Centre in arms. There remained only the "national" \ cause, obscuring the conflict of classes in a general hostility to the \ foreigner. At the beginning of the century, the demand for hberty had been diverted into the War of Liberation against the French; in the / middle of the century, the danger of liberalism was overcome by the programm.e of liberating Germany from Austrian and French inter- ference; by the end of the century, it was becoming necessary to liberate all Europe for German ambitions. Bismarck had fought Greater Ger-j manism in order to preserve the pohtical and social order in Prussia ; yet; now, as the logical conclusion of his work, only a Greater German pro»- gramme could enable this social and pohtical order to survive. In the election campaign of 1887 Bismarck played the great card of fear—fear of France, fear of Russia, fear, even, of England. Fear was to make , the Germans cower under the protection of their established leaders. There was an inescapable conclusion: Germany should end these fears by conquering those who threatened her. Too late Bismarck tried in 1888 E* 137 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY to undo the effect of his alarms with the last of his perorations: "We Germans fear God and nothing else in the world"—strange ending to a campaign for increased armaments. Bismarck could not efface his own work. He had taught the Germans that conquest was the only cure for danger; and he had whipped up the dangers in order to maintain his order. In the long run, the Germans would break the bounds which he Jiad imposed and would seek to conquer all Europe—and God too. The Bismarckian system aimed at security and peace ; but it left the ruling classes of Germany no alternative—to preserve themselves they had to enter on a path of conquest which would be their ruin. Bismarck, the greatest of pohtical Germans, was for Germany the greatest of disasters. THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II: THE CONQUEST OF PRUSSIA BY GERMANY, Bismarck had been a Napoleon in the German political structure: in true Bonapartist fashion he played off against each other conflicting social forces and maintained himself above them at the point of rest. He could not be overthrown either by the Prussian parliament or by the Reichstag, by the militarists or by the liberals, still less by the discontent of the industrial workers. His impregnable position had a single weak spot : he must be regarded by the Emperor as indispensable. In 1890 this weak spot brought him down. The old Emperor, William I, remained un- shakably faithful until his death in 1888: often dizzy at Bismarck's manoeuvres and reluctant to accept Bismarck's expedients, he Hved always in the memory of the liberal menace which had sent him into exile in "•1848 and almost driven him to abdication in 1862, and clung to Bismarck as the saviour of the Prussian monarchy. Frederick, his son and suc- cessor, was bound to Bismarck by the memory of the achievements of 1870. Liberal in phrases, he was at best "national liberal," prototype of all the worthy Germans for whom unification cloaked a multitude of sins ; and if he had lived, the Bismarckian system, with a slightly more liberal colouring, mJght have run on a little longer. But he died within a few months of his accession ; and as soon as WiUiam II came to the tlirone the elaborate Bismarckian structure began to tumble down. William IL still under thirty, was a product, and a characteristic one, of the Germany which Bismarck had made. He had experienced none of the dangers of the 'sixties, knew nothing of the risks which had been run CHAPTER VIII 1890-1906 138 THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1 906 nor of the narrow margin by which success had been achieved. He had been formed in the shadow of Germany's expanding and seemingly'7\ limitless might. His character reinforced the effect of his environment. He had none of the modest caution and modest cunning of the usual Hohenzollern, of Frederick WiUiam III or of WiUiam I; he was of the same mould as his great-uncle, Frederick William IV, hysterical, grandi- loquent, craving popularity, pursuing limitless dream-projects and aban- doning them unfinished—in short the perfect representative of the Ger- many of the eighteen-nineties. William II repudiated the precautions which were the essence of Bismarck's system : he thought that the Hohen- zollern monarchy was strong enough to stand in Germany, and Germany strong enough to stand in the world, without the support of checks and balances. When Bismarck left office William II announced: "The ship's course remains the same. 'Full steam ahead' is the order"—the first sentence blatantly untrue, the. second the profound motto of his reign. The nagging dispute between Bismarck and William II which dragged on from November 1888 to March 1890 was much more than a clash of two personahties : it was the decisive struggle between precautions and "Full steam ahead." WilUam II and Bismarck disputed on almost everything, but their most profound disagreement was over domestic politics. For Bismarck there were only two "national" parties—the agrarians and the industrialists..^ With the Roman Catholic Centre he was on terms of armed neutrality;^ with the radicals in political conflict; with the Social Democrats in open legal war. William 11 desired an absurdity—to be Emperor of all Ger-v; mans; just as he desired an absurdity in Europe—for Germany to be loved by all the Powers. The dispute was brought to a head by the Reichstag elections of February, 1890. Bismarck had not been able to engineer a new European crisis, nor even to run a new colonial campaign. The Reich was manifestly not "in danger," and the "national" parties had no rallying cry. The Bismarckian coalition, principally from National Liberal losses, fell from 220 to 135; the Progressives, the Centre, and the . Social Democrats—by no means a coalition, but all opposed to Bismarck/ \ —rose from 141 to 207. Bismarck's magical touch had failed: success, the basic condition of his pov/er, had abandoned him. Bismarck himself confessed failure and proposed to scrap his own Vv'ork: to tear up the constitution, limit the Suffrage, estabUsh open voting, and drive the Social Democratic party completely out of existence, to return in fact to the days of Metternich. But ever since the struggle of 1862, indeed ever since his experiences at Frankfort in the eighteen-fifties, Bismarck had held that the conservative order could be preserved only by increased doses of dema- gogy and that naked conservatism would be the prelude to revolution. His own past condemned him. William 11, dismissing Bismarck and seek- 139 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY ing to conciliate the German masses, was merely going further along the path which Bismarck had marked out ; not less demagogy but more was the inevitable outcome of the collapse of the Bismarckian balance. Bismarck and William II were not divided on any question of principle ; both were determined to preserve the authoritarian monarchy with its V? military foundation. Their difference was over tactics. Bismarck held r^xat the Roman Catholics and the Socialist workers were, by the principles / of their existence, enemies of the Prussian-German Reich, enemies both I of its social conservatism and of its static foreign policy. In a curiously f old-fashioned way he took the principles of bis opponents seriously. I William II, rejecting Bismarck's policy of restraint, believed that Roman \ Catholics and Social Democrats could both be won over if the Reich Vbllowed resolutely enough the path of greatness. No doubt in 1890 he underrated the difficulties of this line of policy and thought, like Frederick William IV, that a few rhetorical expressions of Imperial grace would cause opposition to melt away. Still, in the long run, William's calculation proved correct. The worship of power, the acceptance of "authority," the identifying of Germany with the Prussian army, did not stop short at the Protestant middle class. At a high price, far higher indeed than anyone anticipated in 1890, the two parties of the masses Vi/ere trans- formed, as the liberals had been, into agents of the Reich, and the reign of William II ended in 1918 in a situation in which the Centre and the Social Dem.ocrats became the political mouthpiece of the army, the defen- ders of the great estates and of great industry, and the upholders of the 41 "national" cause. Once Bismarck quarrelled with William 11 he had nothing to sustain him ; for he was not the leader of a party or the spokesman of a social interest. The parties of the Left were ready to oppose the Emperor but would not support Bismarck; the parties of the Right supported Bismarck but would not oppose the Emperor. The Progressives, the Centre, and the Social Democrats had no illusions about Bismarck; they knew that he was their implacable enemy, and they were implacable in their turn — five years later, in 1895, these parties in the Reichstag defeated a proposal to greet Bismarck on his eightieth birthday. Nor did the "national" parties care much for Bismarck except as a stick with which to beat their opponents. The Junkers had forgotten the perils from which Bismarck had rescued them in the eighteen-sixties and resented the concessions to Liberalism and still more to German nationalism which Bismarck had forced them to make. The industrialists had forgotten their impotent liberal efforts to unite Germany and resented the restrictions which Bismarck imposed on their plans for economic expansion. Only the few who knew the frail foundations of German greatness regretted Bismarck ; all the rest of all parties v/ere glad to see him eo. In any case it v^^ould 140 THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1906 have helped Bismarck not at all even if the entire Reichstag had been on his side. William il could still have dismissed him without the least trouble. Bismarck indeed recognized this, and his later attempts to whip up political opposition to the Emperor were outbursts of resentful spite, not a serious effort to return to power. In the culminating dispute of March 1890, Bismarck tried to engineer, not a Reichstag majority, but a strike of Prussian ministers ; but it was futile to suppose that professional administrators, with a high standard of duty,' would sacrifice these stan- dards and their career for a chief who had always treated them with relentless contempt. There was a more decisive factor. Bismarck con- trolled the civil side of the German authoritarian state; the army was entirely independent of him, and Waldersee, who had succeeded Moltke as Chief of the General Staff, was a general of political tastes, who believed that a more demagogic policy would strengthen the army and so enable Germany to take a more forceful line in foreign affairs. Thus Bismarck was dismissed with the approval, and indeed partly at the prompting, of the army, the institution on which the Reicb really rested. With the fall of Bisma|.;p,k ^'n Mriri^ll there began in Germany the four years oif the "JN"e\y Course." the short period when a few politicians of indisputable goodwill, but no understanding, tried to follow a more demQcratic line without changing either the social or economic founda- tions—an attempt as hopeless as the "Nev/ Era" which lasted in Prussia fromi 1858 to 1862 or as the projects of Turgot to reform the ancien regime , in France. Caprivi, who succeeded Bismarck as chancellor, was a general no military gifts and little political experience ; a military administrator with not a scrap of Bismarck's political understanding, he cared nothing for the Junkers and dreamt emptily of a "People's Army," seeking to win the support of the masses by social concessions. His first act was to refuse ^, to renew the Re-insurance Treaty with Russia, the expression which Bismarck had given in 1887 to the anti-Polish partnership of Russian Tsardom and Prussian Junkers. Instead he sought reconciliation with France and alliance with England—a liberal foreign policy, favoured even by the Social Democrats, so far as they had vievv's on foreign policy at all. In fact the prospect of war with Russia, the old radical programme of 1848, dehghted the Social Democrats and led them to welcome the increase in German mihtary power. Engels, the surviving high priest of Marxism, wrote in 1891 : "Rise, therefore, if Russia begins a war—rise against Prussia and her allies, whoever they may be!" and Bebel, the Social Democratic leader, said in the Reichstag in 1892: "Present-day Social Democracy is a sort of preparatory school of mihtarism." Moreover, once German foreign policy ceased to conform to Junker needs, Bis- marck's repudiation of the German cause in south-eastern Europe, too, could be abandoned—the more so as the Bismarckian substitute of 141 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY colonial exp-ansion led to conflict with England. Caprivi defended the German cause in the internal affairs of Austria, especially in Bohemia, and this change of German attitude helped on the fall of the clericalist Taaffe ministry in 1893. At the same time he encouraged Habsburg ambitions in the Balkans and, breaking Bismarck's most cardinal prin- ciple, pledged German support to Austria-Hungary in case of a Balkan dispute with Russia. In short the "New Course," so far as it had any sense, was none other than the old course of Greater Germany, against Caprivi's attitude in home affairs was of a piece. He negotiated a series of commercial treaties to the injury of agrarian interests, arguing that Germany was destined to become a great industrial state drawing cheap food from overseas (under the protection of the British navy). He refused to renew the anti-Socialist laws and looked on undismayed at the increase of the Social Democratic and Centre vote. In 1892, as a logical conse- quence of his attitude, he ceased to be Prime Minister of Prussia; and Prussia, with a separate Prime Minister, became merely a "sectional" interest of no more importance in the affairs of the Reich than Bavaria or Saxony. But though his tactics were different from Bismarck's, he had the same political concern—to win the consent of the Reichstag to a further increase in the size of the army. A new bait was added, a con- cession made safe by the discipline and militarism of the German people : the period of service was reduced from three years to two. Caprivi's demands were too great for the majority of the Reichstag when they were first presented in May 1 892 ; and Caprivi was driven to Bismarck's usual resort of a dissolution with the slogan, "the Reich in danger." But the slogan could not this time work in favour of the "national" parties of the Right. As Caprivi was trying to win English friendship, the Reich had to be in danger from Russia. Therefore it could not be saved by voting for the parties of the Right, which were friendly to Russia; and the absence of any colonial campaign against England made it even more difficult to gain votes for the anti-democratic parties. The parties which had defeated the Army Law came back little weaker than before. Caprivi escaped from his difficulty by a new burst of demagogy: more social concessions to please the Social Democrats ; further lowering of the food tariffs to please the Radicals; reduction of the period of army grant from seven years to five, to please all the parties of the Left ; ^ and, most striking of all, a ^ The democratic parties had long ceased to hope to make the army grant annual. In Bismarck's time their demand had been for a triennial grant, so that each Reichstag should vote on the army once in its three years of life. Caprivi's arrangement was a compromise : the grant was reduced to five years, and the constitutional limit on the life of each Reichstag at the same time extended to five years, so that the democratic demand was in fact met. The quinquennial grants never caused a serious political crisis; they were over- lich Bismarck had always fought. 142 THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1906 pro-Polish administration in the eastern provinces of Prussia, an open challenge both to Tsardom and the Prussian Junkers. This demagogic window-dressing brought its reward : both Centre and Progressives split, and a minority of each voted for the Army Law; so did all the Polish deputies ; and though the Social Democrats still voted against it, they did so mildly and with open regret. The trick was turned and the Army Law passed in August 1893. . ^ Caprivi had manoeuvred well, as smart a trick in its way as Bismarck's canying of the previous Army Law in 1887. But in supplementing his majority with Poles, Roman Catholics and Progressives, he was ignoring reality : he was behaving as though there had taken place the transference of power which Bismarck had prevented. In fact nothing had changed in Germany except the personality of the Chancellor. Bismarck had managed to combine the Junker-industrialist partnership with universal suffrage, despite the fact that the majority of Germans opposed this partnership—a tour de force, but a possible one, since the fraud was in universal suflFrage, not in the reality of power. Capiivi, however, tried to follow a social and political line agreeable to the masses, despite the fact that economic and political power remained in the hands of the old|; order, an attempt without meaning. With the non-political simplicity of a professional soldier, he imagined that the "national" parties would carry their patriotism so far as to remain loyal, the Junkers to a govern- ment which injured the great estates, and the National Liberals to a government which neglected heavy industry. But patriotism is a luxury which only those without private interests can afford ; and Caprivi's policy provoked a resistance so extreme as to lead some of the agrarian leaders even to favour an alliance with the Social Democrats against him. In 1894 he ran into headlong conflict with the Prime Minister of Prussia, who was demanding a renewal of the anti-socialist laws, and discovered, despite his slighting of Prussia, that in the Bismarckian constitution the Reich could not be governed against Prussian opposition. The deadlock could have been broken only by the scrapping of the three-class franchise in Prussia, and ihe transformation of Prussia into a democratic state, a tardy revolution against Bismarck's greatest success. Caprivi, a Prussian general and the agent of ihe Hohenzollern monarchy, would have had to become the leader of a Roman Cathohc-Marxist coalition and conduct shadowed by other events. The grant of 1899 was carried almost unnoticed in the backwash of the navy agitation; the grants of 1905 and 1911 benefited from the atmosphere of international tension, and on both occasions as well from the renewed navy agitation which prepared the way for the fleet increases of 1906 and 1912. It was, in fact, a general complaint of German militarists that "the new navy" was favoured at the expense of "the old army." There were supplementary army grants in 1912 and 1913, the second of which certainly needed a prelude of political agitation. 143 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY civil war in Germany, v/hen his purpose had been not to overthrov/ the existing order but merely to reconcile the masses to it by a few gestures. '^Late in 1894 Caprivi disappeared from office, never an important figure nor even a significant one; merely a reminder that Germany could not become a democratic stale by a little goodwill. No doubt a ''good German" of the best intentions, he succeeded only in displaying the impotence 'of intentions to alter the character of the German political structure. ^ William H had started out with the high resolve of governing without the conservatism and harshness of Bismarck, just as his ancestor George III of England had intended in 1760 to do things better than the corrupt Whigs. And just as George III, having outdone the old gang in corruption, . was within five years imploring them to return, so ^Yilliam 11 in 1894 tried to resurrect Bismarck^s system, though without Bismarck's over- ^f^whelmmg" personality. Hohenlohe, the new Chancellor, had only the qualification of being old and conservative, a more or less living memory of the great days of 1870 and 1871. The Reich v/as once more trying to run on its previous reputation. No more attempts at demagogy; instead verbal violence (the only weapon in which Wiiliam li excelled) against the Social Democrats. No more encouragement of the Germans in Austria; instead support for the Austrian aristocrats and welcome for an authori- tarian and even anti-German government in Vienna in 1896. No more support for the Habsburgs in the Balkans or patronage of the Poles ; instead a demonstrative reconciliation with the young Tsar Nicholas 11 and a revival of Bismarck's land laws against the Poles. No more conciliatory gestures towards England; instead a renewal of colonial ambitions and, at the end of 1895, an opefi quarrel v/ith England over the Boer republics —the Kruger telegram repeating in a characteristically exaggerated and hysterical form Bismarck's colonial campaign of 1884 and 1885, the Reich rather feebly once more in danger. To credit Hohenlohe with a policy would be to do him too much kindness ; in a rather haphazard way he was merely attempting to put things back into the established arrange- ment as he could rather vaguely remember it before Caprivi embarked on his speculative experiment. Equally William II, who had helped to create the confusion, was now trying to behave as he imagined that his grandfather and Bismarck behaved in some half-legendary past. But this brief period of archaic Bismarckianism, with the Kruger telegram as , an absurd parody of the Ems telegram of 1870, was altogether too chaotic and formless to deserve the name of a system.. There vyas one new depar- ture. Hohenlohe, a great Bavarian nobleman and—in a long-distant past—Bavarian Prime Minister, had none of Bismarck's Lutheran reluc- tance to deal with the Centre. He recognized that they were just as much ' i an interest-group as the agrarians or the industrialists—in fact even more so in that the Junkers cared at least for Prussia and the industrialists 144 THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1906 a little for Germany, whereas the Roman Catholic Centre were quite indifferent as between German confederation or German Reich, between Habsburg rule, Hohenzollern rule, or even French rule, so long as the influence and privileges of the Roman Catholic Church were safeguarded. Therefore, almost without thinking, Hohenlohe began to treat the Centre as a government party, giving them the religious concessions they desired and receiving their support for his general measures ; the beginning of a change quite as great as Bismarck's bargain with the liberals thirty years before. For if the Centre had remained, as it had claimed to be, resolutely federalist and democratic, the Bismarckian Reich could never have been refurbished and kept running. The violent reaction which Bismarck him- self had proposed in 1890 would have been inescapable, and the authori- tarian state with mass support impossible. Germany and all Europe paid a heavy price for this party of sectarian, but no poHtical, principle. Still, more was needed than merely to bring the Centre within the limits of Bismarckian mancKuvring. It was the fatal essence of Bismarck's juggling that each party to the bargain was perpetually increasing its demands, that each arm of the multiple see-saw was being incessantly drawn out, so that the postures of the figure balancing in the middle had to become ever m.ore intricate. The agrarians were not content with the undoing of Caprivi's commercial treaties; eastern Germany was so unsuited to intensive agriculture that food tariffs at the Bismarckian level v/ere not enough to stave off the competition of the American prairies and the Russian plains. Besides, the Junkers were no longer the modest, hardworking farmers of the early nineteenth century : they had developed aristocratic tastes, sought the expensive life of Potsdam, now at last a real court, and tried to hold their own against the nobility of Austria or England. Their estates had never yielded high profits; now they were oppressed with mortgages, the interest on which had to be provided by the German consumers. Not merely higher tariffs, but preferential rail- way rates, relief from taxation, and finally direct subsidies were essential in the "national" interest to preserve the ramshackle estates of eastern Germany. The industrialists, too, demanded from the Reich much more than vague approval of the workings of the Kartells. During the eighteen- nineties heavy industry, stimulated into unhealthy life by the tariffs of 1879, reached monstrous proportions; and by 1900 German production of iron and steel surpassed British. The industriahsts, alarmed at their own success, called on the Reich to find an outlet for their mounting production. No outlet could be found vdthin Germany without a social revolution; therefore the Reich had to conquer outlets abroad—extract concessions, acquire colonies, use German power to force German goods on foreigners at unfavourable terms. But it would be wrong to ascribe this tumultuous demand for "World 145 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY Power" merely to the calculations of the leaders of heavy industry. The new generation of every class, but the intellectuals—journaUsts, writers, university professors—above all, demanded of the Reich a taste of the success which had intoxicated their fathers in the days of Sadowa and Sedan. Memories were not enough; they must themselves experience the emotion for which they had sacrificed their conscience, and political liberty. Hence the flowering of the dithyrambic associations which extolled various aspects of Germ^an power—the Colonial Society, the Navy League, the Pan-German League—associations partly propa- gandistic, but still more sensational—to experience the feeling of German strength. None of these bodies received government support. Indeed their activities were embarrassing and irritating to the Prussian-German bureaucrats who were half-consciously trying to keep Germany within the modest Bismarckian limits; but on the other hand the government r did nothing against them and allowed itself to be pushed into temptation without much protest. The Prussianized Reich flirted with Pan-German- ism, somewhat ashamed of doing so and willing to repudiate these mad enthusiasts temporarily for the sake of policy ; but willing also to accept the popularity and rewards of a Pan-German attitude if the risk was not too great. A Jekyll and Hyde policy, the bureaucrat Jekylls confident until too late that they could always shake off" the Pan-German Hyde at their convenience.^ Yet these associations were an essential part of the pattern of German political fife: an oflficial Germany striving to remain -j^onservative, an ever more violent undercurrent pulling towards limitless expansion. German energies could not be confined within a rigid frame, already old-fashioned when it was made in 1871. The work of Bismarck ' had made it impossible for these energies to find an outlet in social and political change within Germany ; therefore they had to be loosed outwards i into "World Policy," and the rest of the world had to pay the penalty for I the poHtical incompetence and timidity of the German middle class. The ^ failure of the "good Germans," not the ranting of the "bad" ones, was the real crime of Germany against European civihzation. 1 This policy was. at any rate, successful enough to take in foreign observers. Thus, the English liberal historian. Dr. G. P. Gooch, in his essay on Franco- German Relations, 1871-1914 (reprinted without change in 1942 in Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft) dwells at length on the activities of the French League of Patriots, refers repeatedly to French "chauvinism," and catalogues meticulously the French nationalist writers. Deroulede is called "the most popular man in France." German writers are mentioned only by implication : "The German cause could boast ofno champions to counterwork the emotional appeal of Bazin and Barres." No German nationalist association is even named. Yet Deroulede was persecuted and driven into exile; the League of Patriots was made illegal and broken up ; the Pan-German League had more than a million members; it was constantly consulted, and sometimes stimu- lated, by the German Chancellor and Secretary of State; and the leading Pan-German writers were favoured generals and university professors. 146 THE^ GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1906 Bismarck, visiting Hamburg in 1896, saw the vast harbour crowded with ships, heard the deep murmur of German power, sensed the ruin of his system, and turned away in fear; "It is a new world, a new age." An age altogether beyond the capacity of the elderly Hohenlohe or of any of the industrious Prussian officials ; and altogether beyond the control of the hysterical gestures of William II. The Imperial authority was responsible, all-powerful, and yet helpless. It could no longer ride above the storm, as in the days of Bismarck, but, at the best, ride with it. In 1897, after the Caprivi attempt to go forward and the Hohenlohe attempt to go back, both rigid, both dogmatic, began a more flexible period of German pohtics, a period of manoeuvring without principle other than the principle of survival, a period of twelve years (until 1909) which was the true "age of William II." No single man laid down the pattern of this age as Bismarck consciously devised the balance of his system ; all the same, it sprang logically from the deadlock and disputes against which Hohenlohe could make no headway and which threatened to end in a despairing attempt at open autocracy. The man who turned William 11 from dictatorship and won him for a new effort at popularity was his personal friend, Eulenburg, no statesman indeed, but highly intelligent and himself craving for popularity in private life. The instrument of Eulenburg's policy was Biilow, who became Secretary of State in 1 897 and Chancellor in 1901. Policy is, perhaps, too high a word. Eulenburg' himself defined it: "to satisfy Germany without injuring the Emperor." A renewed demagogy, in fact, but without toppling over, as Caprivi had done, into democracy. William II said to Biilow: "Biilow, be my Bis- marck" ; and in Billow's task there was a Bismarckian echo—the monarchy and the old social order were to be made popular, to be "sold," to the German masses. But the method was very different. Bismarck proceeded by profound calculation and by acts which, however unscrupulous, were acts of statecraft ; Biilow had nothing beyond a talent for manoeuvre and intrigue. Kiderlen, a far abler man, christened him perfectly: "The Eel"; and he characterized himself almost as well by his favourite word —pomadig, like hair oil. Resourceful, self-confident, incapable of any general principle, Biilow v/as called on to sHp and slither through all the mounting difficulties of home and foreign affairs, never solving or achieving anything, except to postpone the explosion. He could "give" almost without limit and so was pulled in all directions both by the political parties and still more by the fundamental divergence between the Bis- marckian doctrine of satiety and the chaotic promptings of Fan-German expansion, an india-rubber man who could perform feats of compromise and adaptation quite beyond the capacity of the Iron Chancellor. The new fine, the underlying theme, of Biilow's plausible speeches was, of course, " World Policy." German energies were turned outwards I 147 THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY against foreign powers. Every German gain, every advance of German exports, was transformed into a grievance that it was not more; and the stupendous, unparalleled development of German industry served to demonstrate the denial of Germany's "place in the sun." Like a rich parvenu, Germany, lacking nothing but self-possession, cried out for the possessions of others ; convinced that if she could but ruin and destroy her neighbours she would be at last stable and contented. Biilow could clothe these limitless ambitions in fine phrases—or rather fine phrases were spun for him in his Press Bureau, for he lacked even the capacity for original phrase-making and carried with him to the Reichstag a sheaf of carefully prepared variants for his celebrated impromptus. But Billow and his technical advisers had no discrimination or concrete plan. They would pick up first one schemie and then another, dropping them when they seemed to threaten a serious conflict with foreign powers and then inevitably picking them up again. World policy on the cheap, world policy without a war or major crisis, wat- their Utopian, contradictory aim ; and the German Foreign Office labo ired patiently to maintain the standards of Bismarck's non-aggressive policy in an age when German demands were offending every Great Power in turn. So the Reich renewed fin 1898 its colonial ambitions in Africa and then, fearing to break with ^ England, half dropped them; so it seized in 1897 a concession in China, offensive both to England and Russia, and then feared to play a serious part as a Far Eastern Power ; so—most contradictory of all—it prompted and supported in 1899 the project for a German railway across Turkey- in-Asia, yet shrank from the breach with Russia or the support of Turkey that this railway implied. There was no attempt to discriminate: all these projects were sprung on the German Foreign Office from v/ithout, and the imperial bureaucrats, inexperienced in the ways of capitalism, had no means of judging between them. For example, the railway in Asia Minor, with its grandiose title of the "Baghdad Railway," was enthusiastically welcomed as a manifestation of German power ; but little German capital was forthcoming for its construction, and the Germans counted it a bitter grievance against England and France that they would not supply the capital to build a railway to the greater glory of Germany. Had the political power in Germany passed into the hands of the great industrialists who controlled her economic strength, German policy would, no doubt, still have been ruthless and grasping ; but it would have grasped with some sense and plan. As it v/as, the German rulers, still guided, so far as they had any idea at all, by the traditions of agrarian Junker Prussia, held out a motley collection of peace-olTerings to heavy industry without understanding in the least what they were doing or which achievements were worth the effort. Two other men shared with Biilow the responsibility for "World ^ 148 THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1906 Policy" and gave it a more practical setting : Miquel, the Prussian Minister of Finance since 1891 and Vice-President of the Prussian Ministry in 1898, and Tirpitz, who became Secretary of State for the Navy in 1897, Miquel was a former radical, once a friend and associate of Karl Marx, now intent on renewing the co-operation between Junker agrarianism and Pan-German industrialism which had been broken in the days of Caprivi. All through the eighteen-nineties the Prussian conservatives had threatened to "bolt," as they did in 1894 when they brought down Caprivi—to intervene, that is, in the affairs of the Reich and so display too openly the artificial Prussian domination of the Reich which Bismarck had so skilfully draped with national enthusiasm. Miquel's aim was to buy the Junkers for the Reich : not metaphorically, as Bismarck had tried to win them by high considerations of social survival, but, quite literally, to buy them by inflated tariffs on grain and by fiscal favouritism. Both aspects of his policy were given a "national" excuse: agrarian protection was to make the Reich self-sufficient in time of war; and easy credit for the landowners, tax rebates, and the refusal to extend direct taxation enabled the Junkers to defend the "national" cause against the advancing Poles —oblivious of the fact that these same Junkers promoted the seasonal immigration into Germany of hundreds of thousands of Polish labourers, with their lower standard of life and hence of v/ages. Miquel's financial policy, culminating in the high and rigid tariff of 1902, won the conser- vatives anew for the Reich. The Junker gentry might still attempt to maintain their narrow Prussian standards and might still look with con- tempt and fear at industry and its programme of limitless expansion; but the mortgages which weighed on every big estate east of the Elbe drove them to compound with sin and to become, half-heartedly, and with distaste, Pan-Germans in their turn. Tirpitz provided the bait to content heavy industry, the other half of the partnership ; the bait of a colossal German navy. This project, aired throughout the early 'nineties, given a first modest formulation in 1898, and then openly proclaimed in the second Navy Law of 1900, was the>^
sharpest and most perfect expression of the spirit which made up the
Germany of William II and Billow, the Germany of limitless ambition
and internal contradiction. The great navy, with its battle fleet, had no
defensive purpose. For that Germany needed coastal forts and vessels,
which were not built. It was not designed to defend Germany’s (worthless)
colonial empire ; for though some colonial gains (Kiao-chau and Samoa)
were made so as to justify a demand for a navy to defend them, the
German battleships, built for speed, had a cruising range which confined
”
them to tne North Sea. The navy was therefore purely a weapon of
offence; and it is not surprising that the British drev/ the conclusion that
the oftence could be directed only against them. Yet the conclusion was
149
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
not well founded
;
or, to put it another way, the offensive against England
was not consciously intended. Tirpitz, indeed, produced a series of
political combinations, each of which proved the need for a great navy;
but these schemes, contradictory and ill-balanced as they were, were
rationalizations, attempts to provide a reasonable excuse for the great
navy which was fundamental. One looks in vain through the ceaseless
outpouring of propaganda which preceded the first Navy Bill for any^ sensible justification of the great building programme. Its advocates,
Tirpitz above all, fell back constantly on the argument that a great
navy was an essential possession of a Great Power. Tirpitz himself said
that a great navy was necessary to show that Germany was ebenburtig,
as “well born” (the parvenu note) as England; and Bethmann Hollweg
declared that the navy was necessary “for the general purposes of imperial
greatness.” Nothing could better express the roaring spluttering energy
of Germany, Hke a ship’s propeller out of water, than this vast naval force,
absorbing great quantities of economic power, engendering disastrous
international friction, destined never to be used to any decisive purpose
in war, but to perform a role in history only as the match which began
the explosion and collapse of the Hohenzollern Reich.
^ The great navy was primarily a triumph of demagogy : with its implied
challenge to England, a grotesque substitute for Bismarck’s challenges
* to Austria and to France. Moreover, unlike the army, the navy was a
/ popular, almost a democratic cause. None of the German states, not
j
even Prussia, had possessed a navy. The navy was essentially German, an
\ affair of the Reich. It revived memories of the first German navy of 1848,
distant symbol of German radicalism. The great naval programme was
carried through at the prompting of the Navy League (itself subsidized
by heavy industry and secretly guided by Tirpitz and the Navy Depart-
ment) and carried through against the will both of the Foreign Office
and of the general staff; a seeming victory of the people’s will. But, of
course, the navy had a more serious practical political purpose. It was
the convincing pledge that the Reich would sustain to the limit the selling
policy of the great steel Kartell. With an iron and steel production now
surpassing the British the Kartell had steadily to cut their export prices in
order to force their way on to foreign markets ; and this in turn demanded
a larger guaranteed market for their steel at higher prices within Germany.
Protection was not enough; the Reich had itself to become a gigantic
and steady consumer of Ruhr steel. Hence mere talk of a great navy
^ would not do. The Navy Law of 1900 fixed, once and for all, the build-
ing programme for the next twenty years, thus incidentally making futile
the later British attempts to secure a reduction of German naval expansion,
fixed, that is, a minimum programme, for there was nothing to prevent,
as in 1906 and 1912, further concessions to heavy industry. The great steel
150
THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1 906
concerns and shipyards were not merely given assurance of a rigid govern-
ment demand
;
they were also given financial guarantees from the Reich,
so that the profits from government contracts were actually made on
government credit. The political effect of the naval programme was far-
reaching. It won the enthusiastic support of the great steel monopolies
who were its direct beneficiaries. But beyond that it held out a promise
to every capitalistic undertaking that, in case of difficulty, it would not
be left to its own devices, but that the full strength of the Reich would
be used to promote the relentless advance of German economic power, ff
Agrarian protection and a great navy were thus essentially the two sides ^
of a single bargain, although they represented contradictory policies : the”
only sensible use of a German navy was to safeguard the import of
foodstuffs in time of war, and agrarian protection was intended to make
the import of foodstuff’s unnecessary. The landowners agreed to a great T
navy as the price of keeping their estates solvent; the industrialists!
acquiesced in high food prices for their workpeople in order to secure
industrial expansion. Yet this interest-policy could be presented to the
German electors as a “national” policy with demagogic appeal. Thei
academic enthusiasts for the navy forgot their hostility to the Junker
reactionaries; the standard-bearers of the German crusade against the
Poles added the great navy to their creed. The cattle-raising peasants of
western Germany were injured by high grain prices for their cattle, yet
swallowed protection (and so, implicitly, the navy) from general loyalty
to conservative principles. The capitalists, without armament interests,
who were in the great majority, yet welcomed naval expansion (and so
agrarian protection) as the proof of the identity of “national” and
capitahst interests. But there was a still more dramatic convert. The
Centre, too, finally took the plunge and voted solidly for the second Navy
Law, a contradiction of all its political past. The Centre drew its support
from inland Germany, especially Germany of the west and south, where
maritime interests had no meaning. It was the party of the small man who
could benefit neither from agrarian protection nor from naval expansion.
Above all, it was by its creed, not a party of material power. All this
counted as nothing against a simple political calculation. The great navy,
with its demagogic appeal, was irresistible. The Centre, if it voted against
it, would be discredited, would lose votes, and would obtain no sectarian
concessions from the Reich. If it became part of the government coalition,
it would continue to obtain privileges for its schools and youth organiza-
tions. The Centre advocated “the peace of God” between nations. But
alas ! the peace of God did not exist in this wicked world. Therefore the
Centre made its peace with Mammon.
One concession the Centre tried to obtain for its adherents : it tried to
impose the condition that the cost of the navy should be met by direct
151
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
taxation, levied either by the Reich or through the states by an increase
of the matricular contribution. But shipbuilding and agrarian tariffs
were knit up together, so that if the cost of shipbuilding increased agrarian
protection would increase automatically with it—the larger the navy the
greater the benefit to the landowners. The proposal of the Centre would
have ruined this combination, and it was decisively rejected. But the
poUtical calculation of the Centre remained, and even without their
condition they voted for the gi’eat navy, thus completing the reconciliation
with the Reich which they had begun in 1879. As a matter of fact, even
the inflated food taxes were inadequate to meet the cost of German
armaments; and both army and navy were run on credit. The Reich,
created in 1871, had started without a nation^^debtj, and while the
French indemnity came in, it even had a credit on capital account. From
1879 on it allowed a deficit to accumulate, feeling that a national debt,
like so much else, was “necessary for the general purposes of Imperial
greatness”; and in the twentieth century this debt grew rapidly. Thus
while in England every increase in armaments expenditure involved an
increase in direct taxation—culminating in Lloyd George’s budget of 1909
—German armaments were built on credit, a concealed inflation which
was intended ultimately to show a profit at the expense of the foreigner.
German finance was therefore meaningless except on the assumption that
German policy would culminate in a new 1871 with new and vaster
indemnities levied on the conquered peoples of Europe.
The great navy and, still more, the “world policy” which it implied,
restored to Germany a temporary stability. The circle was once more
squared, and the difficulties seemed postponed at any rate until 1916
when the shipbuilding programme would begin to taper off. The con-
servatives, the industrialists, the Centre, were all happily accommodated
under the shadow of the Reich. There remained only the doctrinaire
radicals, irreconcilable but unimportant, and the Social Democrats.
But a great change was coming over the Social Democrats also. A decade
and more of legality, an ever-advancing vote, a share of prosperity for
their members, offered an absurd contradiction to their principles of
revolutionary Marxism. The young generation of Social Democrats were
not revolutionary conspirators, but hardworking trade union leaders,
quite without political understanding and asking from capitaUsm only
assured employment for their members. The same change, of course,
was coming over the Socialist movements in England and France. But in
the democratic countries of western Europe abandonment of the revo-
lutionary creed brought political advantage: Socialist politicians like
Millerand and Briand, working-class representatives like John Burns,
found an easy way to high office ; and it was only a matter of time for
the French and English political systems to accommodate themselves to
152
THE GERMANY OF WILLIAM II, 1 890-1906
actual Socialist governments. But in Imperial Germany, where office
was not open even to a man of middle-class origin and where the Chan-
cellor was determined by the arbitrary will of the Emperor, abandonment
of revolutionary doctrine would bring no pohtical advantage, but merely
a weakening of party enthusiasm. Therefore the Social Democratic party
clung to its outworn creed and sharply condemned the “revisionists” who
advocated co-operation with middle-class liberals in a policy of social
reform. Yet on the other side it equally condemned the few genuine
revolutionaries who wished to embark on a struggle for power and to
prepare for a great social upheaval. In fact the Social Democrats made
the worst of both worlds. Their revolutionary theory prevented any
united movement of the Left for liberal reform; their unrevolutionary
practice made them incapable of action in a revolutionary crisis. Yet, in
the last resort, the Social Democrats only reflected the political incom-
petence and incapacity which had spread, as by infection, from the
German middle classes to the German workers. They too were awed hy’
f
power, dutiful in the face of authority. Capable of economic discontent,
they were incapable of responsibility. Just as the German liberals had
been ready to believe that Bismarck was doing their work for them, so
now the German Socialists argued that monopolistic capitalism was their
St. John the Baptist: industrial concentration, they declared, was “a step
in the direction of Sociahsm.” Long before 1914, the Social Democrats,
half-unconsciously, were longing to return to the policy of Lassalle and
to co-operate with the authoritarian Junker state against middle-class
liberaUsm—but this time against the middle-class liberal states of western
Europe. They retained their Marxist virtue only because the Reich did
not trouble to seduce them.
In one sphere, and that a sphere of great importance, the apparent
estrangement between the Social Democrats and the Reich was, for the
Reich, of inestimable advantage. The German Social Democrats were
the largest and best-organized party of the Socialist International, the
unquestioned repositories of Marxist theory. They preached the doctrine
of the general strike against war and imposed it on the Socialist parties
of every other country. Thus they created the impression that the Reich
government, however malignant its intentions, would not be permitted
to start on a war of aggression ; and so greatly strengthened the opposition
to both military and diplomatic precautions against Germany in England
and France. The German Social Democrats were incapable of imposing
on the Reich a single under-secretary
;
yet they would, apparently, be
able to impose upon it a foreign policy. In their own minds the Social
Democratic leaders had evaded this contradiction. Germany, with its
great Socialist party and its industrial concentrations, was, they argued,
practically a Socialist country already ; and a German victory would bring
153
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
a Socialist victory all the nearer. Therefore, while it was the duty of
French and Russian workers to strive for the defeat and overthrow of
their governments, it was equally the duty of German workers to strive
for a German victory—a comforting conclusion not, however, appreciated
by the Socialist comrades in the International who continued, to the last,
to rely with confidence on the German general strike.
In the Biilow-Tirpitz era between 1898 and 1905 these calculations
seemed pointless, for war seemed remote. As in home affairs, Germany
won in foreign relations too a new stability, a “free hand.” Never had
Germany enjoyed so great security. World policy did not lead to an
estrangement from England, but instead to a series of British attempts to
win German favour. With Russia concentrated on the Far East, all
danger had gone out of the Franco-Russian partnership. Moreover, the
great navy, though a concession to German ambitions, was a blqw
against the Pan-Germanism which looked towards south-eastern Europe.
If, as William II said, “the future of Germany lay on the water,” this was
not the water of the Danube. Once more, as in the days of Bismarck,
Geim.any restrained Austria-Hungary in the Balkans and preached co-
operation with Russia; refused to assist the German cause in Bohemia;
and, most self-confident of all, between 1903 and 1906 acquiesced in the
Habsburg attempt to reduce in Hungary the Magyar supremacy, which
had been the basic condition of Bismarck’s success. Intoxicated by German
Power, the Germans felt the need of no allies and made concessions to
no oner this, Md this ‘^^^^^^ of the “encirclement” of
Germany. The landowners of eastern Germany were drawn to Tsarist
Russia by social sympathy and by the common oppression of Poland,
and estranged from England by her democratic constitution; they were
drawn to England by lack of economic rivalry and estranged from Russia
by the threat of Russian wheat. The industrialists, on the other hand,
had a common bond with capitalist England and disliked the open
autocracy of Tsardom; but they competed with English industry and
were beginning to establish offshoots of German industry throughout
European Russia. Therefore agrarians and industrialists came together
in hostility, or at least coolness, towards both England and Russia, con-
fident that it was unnecessary to choose. The radical lower-middle class
and the Social Democrats would have liked a reconciliation with France
;
but agrarians and industrialists rejected both the liberal reforms within
Germany and the concessions in Alsace and Lorraine which this would
have implied. Still, the Biilow-Tirpitz system rested on the assumption
that England, France, and Russia could never unite; the reverse of its
assumption at home that conflicting class interests could be indefinitely
reconciled. Neither assumption proved true. Hence the collapse in 1906
and 1907 of Biilow’s jugglery and, far more serious, the final ruin of the
system of Bismarck.
154
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN GERMANY, 1 906-1 6
CHAPTER IX
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN
GERMANY, 1 906-1 6
Prussian domination in Germany and German predominance in Europe|
fell together in 1918; but this destruction of Bismarck’s work was merely
the open culmination of a process which had been in full swing for twelve!
years. 1906 marked the opening of the crisis in both home and foreign
affairs : the authority of the Reich was challenged abroad, and the authorityL
of the Chancellor was challenged at home. In 1905 the German govern-F
ment, estranged from both Russia and England, decided to seize the
opportunity of Russia’s defeat in the Far East and of her revolution at
home in order to force France under German protection and so deprive
both Russia and England of any foothold in western Europe. This was
the meaning of the “first Moroccan crisis,” a crisis deliberately provoked
by the German government and achieving the dismissal of the French!
Foreign Minister, Delcasse, at German orders. But thereafter the crisis
did not develop according to German plans. Billow had always reckoned
to work with political opinion, but the Moroccan crisis had been devised
by the Foreign Office without any propaganda preparation, “cabinet
diplomacy” possible in the days of Bismarck, but ineffective in the age
of demagogy and mass agitation. The French, sustained by British diplo-
matic support, recovered their nerve, and at the conference of Algeciras
early in 1906 it was the German government which had to cHmb down.
For the Bismarckian Reich, founded on the successes of 1866 and 1871,
this was a catastrophe. Ever since 1871 the memory of these successes
had sustained the Reich at home and Germany abroad. Germany had
alwa}’s got her way by threat of war, and none had dared to threaten
Germany in return. Now the threat had not worked ; and Germany was
driven first to repeat it more raucously and then to put it into practice.
From the moment when the Algeciras conference broke up European
war was inevitable.
1906 saw, too, the opening of a pohtical conflict within Germany which
was an equal menace to Bismarck’s work. Ever since 1898 Biilow had
been provided with a secure majority not by a coalition but by the separate
support of three interest-groups—the agrarians, the National Liberal
industrialists, and the Centre. Each steadily pushed up its demands;
and in 1906 the Centre pushed up its demands too high. The actual
demand which caused the breach was for more Roman Catholic officials
and greater privileges for Roman CathoHc missionaries in the German I
colonies; but this was only one aspect of the demand that the Reich,
155
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
.after ali a Protestant foundation, should favour the Roman Catholic
Chmch and hamper its opponents, at first, no doubt, only free-thinkers,
but later Protestants as well. As a result the Centre voted against the
military estimate for suppressing a rebellion in South-west Africa ; and as
ithe Social Democrats always voted against colonial grants the estimate
was defeated. Biilow answered by organizing the “Biilow bloc,” a coalition
on a “national” basis, which carried the day at the subsequent general
election of 1907. The Biilow bloc was wider than Bismarck’s old coalition
of agrarians and National Liberals. It included the Progressives, the
liberals of principle, who became supporters of the government for the
first time since 1862; the quarrel between Biilow and the Centre actually
made the Progressives beneve that Biilow was going “left.” The Pro-
gressives were small in numbers, but their influence went deep into the
non-political middle class and beyond it to the democratic petty bour-
geoisie. Their change-over to the government side seemed a guarantee
that the “national” cause would belatedly accommodate itself to de-
mocracy ; and as a result, though the Centre vote remained unchanged,
many who had hitherto protested against the system by voting Social
Democratic now refrained, and the Social Democrats declined from 79
‘to 43.
J ,,The Biilow bloc and the general election of 1907 thus seemed evidence
that Germany too was following the line of political and social conces-
sion which was shown elsewhere, more or less contemporaneously, by the
establishment of universal suffrage in Austria, the Clemenceau govern-
ment in France, the Lloyd George budget in England, and even by the
impotent Duma in Russia. It could not be imagined that the Progressives
had abandoned their principles after forty-five years of devoted opposition
;
therefore the Junkers must be willing to abandon some measure of
Bismarckian autocracy. This was a false conclusion. The Junkers were
indeed increasingly alarmed at the way in which things had worked out.
They disliked the demagogy of “world policy,” the prospect of having
to fight not a limited war, but a war for world conquest, the megalomania
and the instability of Pan-Germanism. They regretted bitterly the quiiet
and security of the age of Bismarck, and, lacking all political under-
standing, attributed the repugnant developments of the twentieth cen-
tury not to the character of the Reich, but to the folly and hysteria of
William 11. Primitive peoples beat their tribal god when the weather
proves unfavourable; and in the same way the Junkers beat William II
when the social and political climate ceased to correspond to their wishes.
Thus the Bulow bloc carried with it a threat to the Imperial position ; but
whereas the Progressives criticized William for retaining the powers
which had been designed by Bismarck, the Junkers condemned him for
abandoning Bismarck’s policy. In fact the only unity was provided by
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN GERMANY, 1906-1 6
Billow, who in his vanity relished the prospect of taming William II and
so accompUshing a job that had been too much for Bismarck.
The explosion came in the autumn of 1908, over the grotesque incident
of an interview with William II published in the Daily Telegraph. The
interview was in the routine Imperial style, rather more restrained and
sensible in fact than usual, an emotional, aggrieved plea for English
friendship, naively voicing the bewilderment which most Germans
genuinely felt at English resentment against the German navy and German
“world policy.” In the ordinary way it would have passed unnoticed, as
so many of WilUam’s outpourings had done. But in the fevered anxious
atmosphere of 1908, with isolation apparent abroad and the collapse of
stability at home, every party seized on the Daily Telegraph interview as
evidence of William IFs incapacity. He alone was to blame : to blame for
weakening Bismarck’s system and for maintaining it, to blame for refusing
to introduce democracy and for introducing it, to blame for favouring
heavy industry and for failing to favour it enough ; at any rate to blame.
The Reichstag was in revolt; Bulow, ostensibly accepting responsibility,
encouraged the uproar ; and the Emperor was compelled to announce that
he would in future “respect his ^^constituti^^ obligation s. ‘
‘ Thu^auto-
cratic monarchy, the keysT5neofBismarck’s Prussian-German combina-
tion, seemed to have been ended, William II relegated in disgrace to a
decorative shelf. But autocracy could be ended only if something else
took its place; and of this there was no sign. The crisis of November
1908 had sense only if Biilow became a constitutional Prime Minister,
supported by a stable majority and ready to fulfil the wishes of his sup-
porters. Nothing of the kind happened: Biilow remained an Imperial
nominee without party connections, apparently absolute in that he had
humbled the Emperor without becoming dependent on the Reichstag,
in fact a figure in the void representing nothing, and within a few months
brought even lower than he had brought William II.
The Daily Telegraph incident was Billow’s smart, intriguing attempt to
redress the internal confusion. Almost simultaneously, he launched out
on a device of external recovery, to restore the prestige lost in 1906. The
Moroccan affair had been a defeat for “world policy,” its consequence
therefore a strengthening of Continental Pan-Germanism. Moreover the
display of German isolation at Algeciras, and the subsequent Anglo-
Russian entente in 1907, made the preservation of Austria-Hungary more
primary and more vital for German policy. The failure offhe last attempts
at reform within the Habsburg monarchy had brought into authority
men of violence, who believed in forceful methods ; and the result was the
annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and therewith a diplomatic dispute
between Austria-Hungary and Russia, in the autumn of 1908. Bulow, a
trained diplomat, understood the cardinal Bismarckian principle of
157
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTOllY
keeping out of any Austro^Russian conflict, as much as he understood
anything; and earlier in 1908 he had intensified the measures against the
Poles in eastern Germany partly to win back Russian favour. But with
Russia still weak and neither England nor France willing to be involved
in a Near Eastern dispute, the opportunity was too good to be missed.
Uninvited by Austria-Hungary, Germany pushed her way into the
Bosnian quarrel and by a thinly disguised threat of war compelled Russia
to give way. The weapon which had failed in 1906 recovered its efficacy;
German prestige seemed again rooted in success. But the sequel was dis-
couraging. In Bismarck’s day, or even after, a German threat not merely
brought the opponent’s withdrawal, but turned him into a client for
German favours. In 1909 this did not happen : instead the bonds between
England, France, and Russia were drawn tighter. All Biilow had suc-
ceeded in doing was to involve Germany in Austria-Hungary’s Balkan
difficulties. He condemned his own policy when, on his dismissal, he
said to William II: “No more Bosnias.”
Billow, in fact, survived as Chancellor only long enough to bring the
Bosnian crisis to its flashy conclusion. The conservative Junkers were not
long in repenting their co-operation with German liberalism which they
had embarked on to show their spleen against William II. The King-
Emperor, symbol of Junker domination, had been humbled; but the
Junkers had no intention of humblmg themselves. Biilow, whom the
Daily Telegraph affair had made ostensibly dictator of Germany, was
even less to their taste than William II had been. German policy in the
Bosnian crisis was a worse departure from the principles of Bismarck
than anything devised by William II; and even the latest measures of
1908 against the Poles had an alarming demagogic element. They em-
powered the government to take over lands in the eastern provinces by
compulsory purchase—a weapon directed against the Poles, but which
might easily be transformed into a general attack on the great estates.
Thus, by a strange contradiction, conservative spokesmen became
defenders of the Poles and opposed as “hberal” the measures taken
against them. The actual breach in the Biilow bloc came over the question
which had been implicit in the finance of the Reich ever since 1879
—
whether the richer classes ought not to contribute to the mounting expen-
diture. A balanced budget, and balanced too by direct taxation, was the
price demanded by the Progressives for their support, the evidence that
Germany had genuinely taken the turn towards Uberalism. Death duties,
always the enemy of great estates, were the symbol chosen—symbol rather
than reality, for the yield would have been small—and to prevent death
duties the conservatives broke up the bloc, returned to alhance with the
Centre, and defeated Biilow by a narrow majority. Nothing could better
illustrate the difference between the political foundations of Germany
158
THE CRISIS OF H O H E N Z O L L E R N G E R M A N Y , 1906-16
and England than the contrasting fates of the German death duties and
the EngUsh taxation of land values. Both were poUtical demonstrations,
not serious financial measures, and both were violently opposed by the
owners of property ; but in England the property-owners, though stretching
to perversion every device of the constitution, were defeated and accepted
their defeat; in Germany the property-owners were victorious without a
struggle, and victorious in alhance with a party which drew its support
almost entirely from the lower classes.
The defeat of the deathu duties ended the Indian summer of sham-
liberalism in Germany; ended also Biilow as Chancellor. Without a
Reichstag majority, Biilow was once more dependent on William II,
whom he had humiliated, and William II turned him out without delay.
Biilow was the last of the real Chancellors, the last to wield incompetently
and without understanding the vast powers created by Bismarck for
himself. The events of 1906 to 1909 reduced the Bismarckian con-
stitution to chaos: the Daily Telegraph affair had ended the autocratic/
power of the Emperor; the dissolution of the Biilow bloc ended the
independence of the Chancellor. Henceforth there was no one to speal<
with any semblance of authority. The office and title of Chancelloi
remained ; but it was not the Chancellorship of Bismarck's conception
The Chancellor became merely superior clerk, the administrator of a
vacant estate, pushed hither and thither by conflicting impulses, be-
wildered, impotent, and industrious. Bismarck, Caprivi, even Biilow, hadj
a "policy"; but there was no such thing as the "policy" of Bethmann
Hollweg or Michaelis. From 1909 to 1916 there was in Germany an
interregnum, "full steam ahead" no doubt, but no one even attempting'
to hold the wheel or set a course; it is not surprising that the ship ran on
to the rocks. After the fall of Bulow a consistent government of the
Reich was impossible. The Prussian conservatives had been strong enough
to prevent any step towards parHamentary rule, but they were not strong
enough to prevent the advance of "world policy" ; the middle classes had
failed poUtically, but threw their energy all the more into the march of
economic power. All that remained of the Bismarckian structure was the
army, the force with which Bismarck had won success. But the army
leaders, though resolute against pohtical interference in miUtary matters,
were without pohtical sense or ability, as aloof and innocent in worldly
affairs as any monks. After 1909 they went their own way, laboured
constantly to improve the army as a fighting weapon, tried rather
fumblingly to pursue their own foreign policy ; but only after seven years
of intensifying crisis did they realize that they must themselves take over
responsibility for the Reich which they alone held together.
Bethmann Hollweg who became Chancellor in 1909 typified in all that
he did and failed to do this strange period of interregnum. Unlike his
159
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
predecessors he had no experience either of politics or of foreign affairs.
He had not even the feeling of feet on the ground which comes of being a
great landowner : he was a civil servant from Frankfort, of a family who
had supplied the Hohenzollerns with bureaucrats for generations, and
would have been far more at home in the dull conscientious administration
of Frederick William III than in the feverish atmosphere of " world policy."
He was, without doubt, of higher private character than any of his pre-
decessors, with none of Bismarck's brutality or Billow's shiftiness.
Cultured, sympathetic, honest, he ran over with good intentions : desired
a reconciliation with Russia, good relations with England, fair play even
for the south Slavs, co-operation even with the Social Democrats. All he
lacked was any sense of power; and so it came about that this "great
gentleman" (a phrase taken from the elegant pages of Dr. Gooch) became,
through his very irresponsibility, responsible for the Agadir crisis, for the
military violence at Saverne, for the violation of Belgian neutrality, for
the deportation of conquered peoples, and for the campaign of unrestricted
submarine warfare—crimes a good deal beyond Bismarck's record, all
extremely distasteful to Bethmann, but all shouldered by his inexhaustible
civil servant's conscience. It was useless, one might say dishonest, for him
to have a high character : his sin was to belong to a class which had failed
in its historic task and had become the blind instrument of Power which
it could not itself master. Bismarck had said in 1867: "Let us put Ger-
many into the saddle. She will ride" ; but in reaUty he had been the rider
and Germany the horse. Now Bethmann threw the reins on the horse's
back.
/A runav/ay horse or, more truly, an overpowered engine out of control
;
such was Germany in the last years of apparent peace? RuTnaway in eco-
nomic development, with steel production now twice as great as British,
German exports passing the British mark, and German national wealth
well above that of either Great Britain or France. Runaway in population
with the sixty-five million mark passed in 1910 and more than 60 per cent
of the population Uving in towns. Runaway in armaments: in 1883
Great Britain and France together spent three times as much on arma-
ments, and Russia alone twice as much, as Germany; thirty years later
England and France together spent only one and a half times as much as,
and Russia considerably less than, Germany, and all three had great
extra-European empires to defend, Germany, for practical purposes,
none. Runaway in pohtical ambitions, all the Pan-German projects now
coming to maturity—the Baghdad railway accepted by all the interested
powers, the reversion of the Portuguese colonies to Germany agreed to
by England, all Germany's neighbours speaking with sympathetic awe of
Germany's claim for "a place in the sun." In both population and
economic power Germany advanced with unparalleled rapidity; and a
160
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN GERMANY, 1906-16
little time must have brought both France and Russia, as it had already
brought Austria-Hungary, into political and economic dependence. But
for this Germany needed patience, tact, and political direction. She had
none. German pride and German power demanded immediate results.
Blatant symptom of the runaway dominance of Pan-Germanism was-l
the second Moroccan^ crisis, the crisis of Agadir, in 1911. In diplomatic
form it resembled the" first—a renewed attempt to force France away
from Russia and England into the arms of Germany. But the spirit was \
so different as to make it inconceivable that only five years separated one
crisis from the next. In 1905 hardly anyone in Germany had cared for
Morocco, and popular indifference had led to the defeat of Germany at
Algeciras. In 1911 the Pan-German league adopted the shady Moroccan
claims of the Mannesmann brothers, adventurers in iron and steel. The
Agadir crisis, designed by Kiderlen,' Bethmann's Secretary of State, as a
restrained manoeuvre to win over France, became a demonstration of
German enthusiasm, a development as unwelcome to the great German
industrialists, who had been steadily buying up French iron ore under-
takings, as to the German diplomats. Far from having to whip up
German feeling, Bethmann—who had invoked German armed strength
far more openly than Billow did in 1905—was badgered and humiliated
in the Reichstag for his timidity, and had to defend himself by claiming
that he had given a painstaking imitation of a bully. Ominous for the
dissatisfaction which it caused in Germany, the threat of Agadir was
even more ominous for the reaction it provoked abroad. Instead of alarm
and surrender, there was resistance and a new solidarity between England, \^
France, and Russia. In France the advocates of a Franco-German
economic partnership were driven from power, and succeeded by the
men of the reveil national, first genuine assertion of French confidence
for a century. In England Agadir was followed indeed by a new attempt
to restore good relations with Germany, but not on the German terms
of the exclusion of England from Europe ; and the mission of Haldane
to Berlin, early in February 1912, designed to reconcile the two countries,
began instead a British reaUzation of the extent of German ambitions.
The power of the German threat was exhausted ; and with it the prestige
of the tottering political order within Germany. Futile and empty
mechanically to reproduce Bismarck's old manoeuvre of an enlarged
armaments programme. The Reichstag agreed without demur to Tirpitz's
new naval demands and to a supplement to the Army Law ; but it agreed
also without enthusiasm—the display of German weapons no longer
impressed either the Germans or foreign powers.
Clear symptom of the crisis within Germany was the general election
of 1912i,when the middle-class Hberal parties at last abandoned their
^
former prejudices and co-operated belatedly with the Social Democrats. ^
F 161
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
The Social Democrats were returned as the largest single party, at last
outstripping the Centre; and had it not been for the antiquated distri-
bution of constituencies, which gave the rural areas, though with only a
third of the population, equal representation with the towns, the Social
Democratic preponderance would have been even greater. Had the
liberal parties been sincere in their new professions, they would have
embarked on a fight for constituency reform ; but they made no move
—
they were ready to invoke the threat of the Social Democrats, but deter-
. mined to keep the threat an empty one. Still, Bismarck's work was clearly
in dissolution when, after forty years of unity, the government of the Reich
was unable to count on a majority in the Reichstag. Bethmann acted in
4^his crisis of home affairs as he acted with foreign powers: he made
impotent and meaningless gestures of appeasement, consulted the Social
Democratic leaders—though he did not act on their advice—and even
promised to end the three-class franchise in Prussia, basis of Junker
power, but took no steps to fulfil his promise. One step, and an important
one, taken in 1913, had a demagogic air and revealed by anticipation
how the political crisis must end. The general staff, alleging the danger
from the increased peace-time levies in Russia and from the change in
France from two-year to three-year military service (which would not be
effective until 1915), presented a demand for £50 million (1,000 million
marks) for "non-recurring military expenditure." This sum, incom-
parably vast for those days, was to be spent within the year and, for
once, was to be raised not by loan, but by direct taxation, by means of a
capital levy. The capital levy did not challenge the great landowners, as
death duties had done, for their capital consisted of mortgaged estates;
but being "Progressive," a concession to the view that expenditure
should be met by taxation, it was welcomed by the Reichstag and sup-
ported even by the Social Democrats. Germany, internally rent asunder,
- could still unite on a programme of great armaments, if only they were
given a certain demagogic flavour.
This demonstration did nothing to strengthen the position of Beth-
, mann. It served only to underline the contradiction of German wishes
:
the great majority of Germans wanted a Germany overwhelmingly strong,
asserting by means of this strength her claim to "a place in the sun,"
and basing her security on Power, not on agreement with her neighbours
;
at the same time they wanted a constitutional system inside Germany
and resented the arrogance and predominance of the military caste. Few
Germans felt the absurdity of desiring to dominate all Europe and yet to
escape domination themselves; and this blindness was convincingly
shown in a great protest against militarism which united almost all
Germany in the autumn of 1913. This was the affair of Saverne (Zabern),
one of the few districts of Alsace loyal to Germany, but where the arro-
162
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN GERMANY, 1906-1 6
gance of the officers of the garrison provoked quarrels with the town^
people ; the officer in command defied the law and, on his own authority^
arrested and imprisoned some of the inhabitants. All Germany was
stirred. Bethmann, as usual, thought that the mihtary were wrong and,
again as usual, thought it his duty to defend them. The government was
challenged in the Reichstag and, deserted by all but a handful of dumb
agrarians whose loyalty was inexhaustible, was condemned by a vote
of 293 to 54, impressive victory of Liberals, Social Democrats, and
Centre. But the vote had no sequel. Bethmann remained as Chancellor;.
Colonel von Reuter, the commander at Saverne, was acquitted by a
court martial; the capital levy continued to pour in and to be at once
poured out again to the great steel and armament firms ; and the military
leaders, recognizing Bethmann's impotence, continued to act on the
assumption that no civil government existed. The Saverne affair is
sometimes adduced as proof that Germany was on the way to consti-
tutionalism. It is made the basis of a plausible "if only" of the sort
which has so often served to cloak German failings. If only Bismarck
had not been superlatively clever, German liberahsm would have done
the trick ; if only William II had not been so wild, German foreign policy
would not have been so aggressive; and so, in 1914, if only the Serbs had
not defied Austria-Hungary, Germany would have matured into a demo-
cracy. In fact, the Saverne affair showed that the Germans were per-
fectly aware of their political condition and perfectly incapable ot^
remedying it.
Or thought perhaps of remedying it by foreign war? The advocates
of constitutional government were unable to overthrow the militarists in
time of peace ; but they would be reconciled to the mihtarists in case of
war. Even more than in 1870 war held out the only hope of national
unity; and indeed had there been in the Reich any planned direction, it
would have aimed at war in the summer of 1914. There is much evidence
of a conscious German focusing on August 1914: the capital levy would
then have been raised and spent ; the Kiel Canal would be open for the
passage of dreadnoughts; and Germany's gold reserve would be at its
highest level. This view cannot be combated by examining the official
documents of the German government ; for Bethmann's intentions, which
are all that these record, were irrelevant to the issue. The German military
leaders were confident of their strength, anxious for war, and without any
political scruples. But on the other hand they were also without political
gifts or understanding. They were professional soldiers, incapable of
action or policy until the guns began to fire. In fact to accuse Germany
of having consciously planned and provoked the outbreak of war in
August 1914 is to credit Germany with more direction than she pos-
sessed. Berchtold, the Austrian Foreign Minister, overwhelmed in July
163
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
1914 with contradictory telegrams from Bethmann and Moltke, the
German Chief of Staff, passed the best verdict on German politics:
'' What a
j
okQl Wj|p.,^()es rule Bethmann did not want
a waxaTalirnor even the advance of German supremacy ; the German
r masses wanted a glorious Germany, but without war or even military
J
domination; the great industrialists wished to advance their economic
I domination over north-eastern France and southern Russia, but could
do it better and more certainly without war; the Junkers wanted a mili-
tarist Germany to preserve their social position, but not a war of conquest
which would ruin it; the generals wanted a victorious war, but as an
academic exercise and ^^dthout the slightest idea what they would do
with their victory when they had won it. It would be absurd to imagine
that Bethmann ruled in Berlin, or even William II; but equally absurd
to suppose that Moltke, nervous, timid, ill—the man who imposed on the
Schlieffen plan of destroying France a defensive spirit—ruled in Berlin
either. What a joke ! No one ruled in BerHn. The impulses that desired
peace added up to nothing ; the impulses that aimed at aggression added
/up irresistibly to war.
/ The diplomatic crisis of July 1914, which preceded the outbreak of war,
was not, as"were"tHe two Moroccan crises or even the crisis of 1909, a
manufacture of the German Foreign Office ; it was imposed on Germany,
though it corresponded all the same to her needs. The two Moroccan
crises had been crises of "world policy*'; the crisis of 1909 a deliberate
stroke for internal popularity. The crisis of 1914 was more fundamental,
for it raised anew the question which had always hung over Bismarck's
Reich—was Germany to abandon or to extend the advance into south-
eastern Europe which had been proceeding without direction for cen-
turies? Bismarck had abandoned this advance, in the interest of the
Prussian landowners, or rather had attempted to arrest it; but he was
seeking to arrest the deepest force in organized German life. In 1914 the
ice which Bismarck had tried to perpetuate on the Danube and the
Balkans melted for good. Germany must either jettison Austria-Hungary
and go back—abandon, that is, south-eastern Europe and Bohemia to the
Slavs, tolerate the overthrow of Magyar supremacy in Great Hungary,
and content herself v/ith a Reich that would end at Vienna— , or she must
support Austria-Hungary and go forward—reassert the German character
of Bohemia, second Magyar predominance in Hungary, and carry German
power through the Balkans to the gates of Constantinople, and beyond.
Germany, in her internal political confusion, no doubt chose her means
badly : it was grotesque to leave the decision in the hands of the aristo-
cratic muddlers of Vienna. But even with better political leadership the
decision would have remained to be made. The Habsburg monarchy
was falling to pieces: was Germany to allow its legacy to pass into the
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN GERMANY, 1906-16
hands of the Slavs, or was she to claim the legacy of the Habsburgs as she
had already identified herself with the legacy of the HohenzoUerns? The
question answers itself. No German government of whatever political
complexion or political capacity could freely abandon all eastern Europe
from Bohemia to the Balkans ; the most it could do, as Bismarck did, was ^ /
to postpone the decision by attempting to keep the Habsburg monarchy n
in being. The Habsburgs were, in fact, the essential condition of "Little
Germany"; and the moment that the Habsburg system broke down—as
the breach with Serbia proclaimed that it had done—Greater Germany,
the Germany without limits, was the alternative which only a German
defeat in war could prevent. Many Germans, Bethmann at the time and
most German historians later, condemned the haste and provocation of
Austria-Hungary's action; but the difference was one of tactics—none
ever doubted that Magyar and German supremacy must be preserved
throughout south-eastern Europe. Similarly the difference between
Bethmann and Moltke, which has sometimes served to give the civilian
German government a sort of acquittal, was tactical : Moltke thought that
the superiority of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies was at its
greatest; Bethmann, believing that England could, be detached from
France and Russia, thought the moment ill-chosen, ^ut, as usual, Beth-
^
mann conformed to the requirements of the general staff : he condemned,
and supported, the Austro-Hungarian ultimat^ifi ;
condemned, and sup-
ported, the German march through Belgium, ^us all the agencies of
Bismarck's Reich—not merely the army command, but the Emperor and
Chancellor and all the social forces of Junkerdom which it had been
Bismarck's aim to preserve—threw themselves into a struggle for German
domination of Europe, a victory in which would make the survival of old
Prussia impossible. Such was the conclusion, paradoxical but inevitable,
of Bismarck's work : Greater Gerrnany had taken her Prussian conquero^ss^
captive. To outward appearance all Germany surrendered to Prussian
militarism—m reality it "Prussian militarism which wa^ fighting for
an alien (jerman cause/t3f this the regrets ofSie conscientious Prussian
(Shciai JietKrnann "were evidence; and even plainer were the protests of
Heeringen, the old-fashioned Prussian Minister of War, against the
inflation of the German army as the result of the capital levy—for him
the object of policy was not to conquer Europe, but to preserve the aristo-
cratic character of the Prussian Officer Corps. But the bargain imposed
^
upon Prussian landowners and German industriaUsts by Bismarck in
|
1871 had to be carried to its logical conclusion. The Junkers who desired
a conservative static policy agreed to conduct a war of aggression ; and
the capitalists who desired to master Europe by economic penetration
agreed to achieve their aim by military violence.
But it would be wrong to present the Four Years' War as solely the
165
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
product of a bargain between Junkers and capitalists; the German people
^
counted for something in this bargain too. In fact, if they had not played
^ their part, the bargain would have been meaningless. The cry of "the
Fatherland in danger" had latterly lost some of its force whenTaised in a
purely diplomatic crisis; but with war it once more came into its own.
The Social Democrats held out longest, but they too were swept away
by the prospect of war with Russia ; for this was the old radical programme
of war against Tsardom, the war which had been so often preached by
Marx and Engels. As a result the Reichstag, without receiving any clear
explanation of German policy, agreed unanimously on August 4th, 1914,
to the grant of war credits. Nor was this all. The parties went further
:
they declared Biirgfrieden, a civil truce, agreeing neither to criticize each
other nor to oppose the government. Nothing had changed in Germany
:
Bethmann was still feeble; William II still hysterical and erratic; the
militarists still arrogant and ruthless. Yet Bethmann, and the system for
. which he stood—the weakest of Chancellors and a system in dissolution
—
^received a demonstration of national confidence never accorded to
Bismarck, still less to the free German government of 1848. This was an
abdication of the whole German people, an abdication, not of course, to
Bethmann, but to the High Command. Tsarist troops in East Prussia
were the excuse for this abdication, not the cause. How could any
German who knew the vast preparations of German militarism suppose
that Tsardom was a serious danger to the German army? The Tsarist
danger soon proved mythical, the principal enemy France, and still
more England. But Social Democratic propaganda accommodated itself
as easily to the straggle against "entente capitalism" as it had done to
the defence against "Tsarist absolutism." The Social Democrats, in
truth, had long been waiting to enter into alliance with the authoritarian
Reich as the Centre had done before them; and in August 1914 they
returned eagerly to Lassalle's programme of alliance with Prussian mili-
tarism against capitalist liberalism, this time on an international stage.
The Prussian bureaucrats and the Prussian generals were to accomplish
the revolution which the Social Democrats had been unable to achieve
themselves. For just as the Prussian liberals of 1866 were confident that
I Bismarck would establish a liberal Germany, so the Social Democrats
I of 1914 were confident that the High Command would give them Socialism.
Rationing was Socialism; production of armaments at high profits was
Socialism ; the transportation of Belgian workers to distant ends of the
Reich was Socialism; the unification of all the industry and iron fields
of western Europe under German control was Socialism. " Socialism as
far as the eye can see," one of them exclaimed in 1915. The German
Socialist leaders knew well that the great expansion of German industry,
on which the security of their trade union members was based, had been
166
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN GERMANY, 1906-16
achieved by methods of economic conquest, and they recognized that
miUtary conquest was now necessary to second the economic advance.
One of them wrote: "The ruin of German industry would be the ruin of
the German working class." And as German industry would be ruined
by anything less than the conquest of all Europe, the German working
class were willing to become the instrument of this conquest.
The German war plan, consciously formed by the general staff, uncon-
sciously assumed by the German people, was a plan for a short war, a
repetition of the successes of 1866 and 1870. France was to be defeated
within six weeks, Russia within six months; England, internally divided
and without a Continental army, would be excluded from Europe. Hence
the lack of defined war aims ; hence the surrender of all parties to military
authority ; hence the ominous financing of the war by loans and the issue
of paper money—an indemnity would put everything right within a few
months. In September 1914, this war plan met disaster at the battle of
the Marne, imperishable glory of French arms. The chance of a quick
victory faded, disappeared. Yet at the same moment the defeat of the
Russians at Tannenberg gave Germany the security which was her
ostensible war aim, and at any time between September 1914 and the
summer of 1917 Germany could have had peace on the basis of the
status quo: no doubt the French would have demanded concessions in
Alsace and Lorraine, but they would have received little backing from
England and would have been helpless without it. But for Germany the
status quo was impossible: for it would have brought to an explosion
within Germany all the problems which had led to the outbreak of war.
Peace on the basis of the status quo would have ended the myth of Success,
on which the Bismarckian system was based, and so have brought the
authoritarian Reich to chaos ; the German armies could not come home
unless victorious. Peace .without victory was, moreover, impossible
financially, for it would have left Germany overwhelmed with debt; it
was impossible economically, for it would have arrested the expansion of
German industry ; it was impossible in Europe, for it would have left the
Slavs free to pursue their campaign for liberation; it was above all im-
possible spiritually, for it would have implied the abandonment of "world
policy" and the destruction of German self-confidence. Logically and
inevitably failure to win a quick victory compelled all Germans—the
High Command, Bethmann and William II, the liberals and the Social
Democrats—to identify themselves with the Pan-German proposals which
before 1914 they would have repudiated in all sincerity. Each group
contributed some acquisitive element of its own and in return swallowed
with reluctance the demands of the others ; but since there was no govern-
ment or unified direction the various programmes all added up to a
project of indiscriminate unhmited conquest.
167
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
The great industrialists thought in terms of control of French resources
and economic struggle against England: therefore annexation of north-
eastern France and a protectorate over Belgium. The Prussian land-
owners wished to strengthen themselves within Germany by joining forces
with the "Baltic barons," the German landowners in Russia's Baltic
provinces: therefore "freedom" for Livonia and Courland. These were
the war aims of the "national" parties. Conservatives and National
Liberals who in the crisis of 1917 revived in the Fatherland Party the
Bismarckian coalition of 1887. They v/ere repudiated—more because
they threatened to prolong the war, than from principle—by the parties
of the German people, the Centre, the Progressives, and the Social
Democrats. But these too had their programme of war aims: the
achievement of the Greater Germany of 1848. It was a Progressive,
Naumann, subsequently a pillar of the republic, who formulated these
demands in a famous book and gave them their classical name: MitteU
europa. In Naumann's "democratic" vision the severance of Austria
from Germany was to be undone and all Austria-Hungary v/as to become
part of the German national state; German cultural and economic
supremacy v/as to extend to Constantinople and perhaps beyond; the
Tsarist Empire was to be dismembered for the sake of the Ukraine, so
that ultimately the bounds of Greater Germany would extend to the
Caucasus and the Persian Gulf. This programme was supported by pacific
democratic Germans on the na'ive ground that as north-eastern France
and Belgium—except of course for Antwerp—would be left untouched,
England and France would be prepared to ignore what was afoot on the
hither side of Germany and would make peace. It was a programme
significant of German aims, but even more significant in that it was not a
programme of what is loosely called the "governing classes"—though
they had ceased to govern—, the industrialists and the Junkers. For this
programme, reuniting to Germany the Roman Catholic Germans of
central Europe, was in direct contradiction with Junker interests and, for
that matter, offered to the industrialists of the Ruhr only the distant
iron-ore of Styria. As in 1848 Mitteleuropa was the programme of a
coalition between Roman Catholic romantics and radical Pan-Germans
;
and, to complete the likeness, the coalition demanded the freeing of
Poland from Russia. In this way the Social Democrats could be assured
that, though marching under the standard of the Hohenzollerns, they
were faithful to the doctrines of the revolutionary war.
Both programmes, the programme of the "governing classes" and the
programme of popular Pan-Germanism, implied a total German victory,
the virtual disappearance of independent states in Europe. But there
existed in Germany in the Four Years' War forces which repudiated this
programme of conquest and sought for an alternative. The first of these
THE CRISIS OF HOHENZOLLERN GERMANY, 1906-16
forces came from all those members of the "governing classes"—intelli-
gent industrialists, sceptical generals, rigid Junkers, competent bureau-
crats, Bethmann himself—who believed that Germany could not win the^
war ; but as a peace without victory raised even more terrifying problenis
than endless war, their opposition counted for nothing. They regretted,
they lamented, they complained ; but they acquiesced in every step taken
to achieve a world conquest which they believed to be impossible. On
the other side there grew up within the ranks of the Social Democratic
party two separate movements of those who could not stomach the
co-operation with the authoritarian Reich to which the party had com-
mitted itself in August 1914, The first was the movement of Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg, later known as Spartacists ; the second the group
of Social Democrats who, when expelled from the party, took the name
of "independents." The Spartacists were revolutionaries, loyal to the
teaching of Marx and Engels which was still the official party programme,
and for whom the war mattered only as a way of achieving their revo-
lutionary aim. To this revolution everything else was subordinated; but
in fact their national aim, which they would have had to operate if they
had ever gained power, was Pan-German—in Rosa Luxemburg's phrase,
"a great united German republic," as Marx had demanded in 1848,
including, that is to say, both the Czechs of Bohemia and the Slovenes
of Carniola and Istria. Thus the Spartacists objected to the programme
of Pan-Germanism only that it was being achieved by counts and generals
and the Hohenzollem Emperor instead of by Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht. The Independent Socialists, however, genuinely repu-
diated Pan-Germanism as well as its "protagonists. They were the last
upholders of civil virtues ; the last to value freedom and the rights of
the individual above conquest and the rights of Germany. Their war
programme, so far as they had one, was to end the v/ar by agreement
and to establish in Germany a democratic regime. Or rather democratic
regimes ; for at bottom they repudiated the Reich, with its military foun-
dation, and, knowing well the weakness of democratic feeling, desired
lo make a beginning in the separate states. They were, that is to say,
particularists, at any rate by implication ; the heirs of the liberals of the
early nineteenth century, who had found "true Germany" in the Hberal
particularism of Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Baden. In essence, they
found the problem of the Reich insoluble—perhaps rightly—and therefore
wished it out of existence ; but by doing so they wished themselves out of
existence as a German force—they could achieve their aim only if others
destroyed German power, and they acquired a temporary importance
only in the hour of German defeat. In repudiating Pan-Germanism, they
repudiated Germany. Of course, both the Spartacists and the Indepen-
dents gained a certain fictitious support as the war dragged on and its
F* 169
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
hardships mounted; for, with no war taxation and less control on war
profits than in either France or England, the conditions of life between
rich and poor became ever more blatantly contrasted. But the support
they received was merely the expression of a grumbling discontent ; much
as the English working man who finds the public-house out of beer at
7 p.m. proclaims himself a communist. In reality few of the Spartacists
were Marxist revolutionaries; and even fewer of the followers of the
Independents desired the destruction of the Reich.
The Reich existed in the armies; the government of the Reich had
already ceased to exist as a directing force. In the first two years of war
first Moltke and then Falkenhayn, his successor as Chief of the General
Staff, were overwhelmed with their military tasks and had neither time
nor ability to attempt also the task of government. Therefore Bethmann,
last remnant of Bismarck's system, was left in nominal control, impotent
to influence events, but striving still to hit on a programme which would
both end the war and satisfy the demands of the political forces inside
Germany—with the exception, of course, of the Spartacists and the
Independents. To tempt the Allies he made offers to withdraw from
Belgium and northern France ; to satisfy the industrialists he made these
offers spurious. To satisfy the Social Democrats he held out hopes of
the liberation of Poland; to satisfy the Junkers and to keep the door
open for a separate peace with Russia he made these hopes spurious also.
To satisfy the Greater Germans he encouraged the re-establishment of
German supremacy in Bohemia; to remain faithful to the principles of
Bismarck's policy he continued to treat Austria-Hungary as an indepen-
dent and non-German power. Similarly, in home affairs, he promised a
reform of the Prussian franchise ; and took care never to put his promise
into action. This was not government, nor even tactics ; it was the helpless
lurching of a machine utterly out of control. The government of the
Reich had become as shadowy and meaningless as the movement of
constitutional liberalism which it had ordered out of existence fifty years
before; it would vanish at a word. This word was spoken on August
29th, 1916, when—as the result of the failures on the western front
—
WiUiam II dismissed Falkenhayn and appointed in his place Hindenburg,
hitherto commander in the east, with Ludendorff as his Quartermaster-
General. On that day the supremacy of the military leaders, which
Bismarck and even his successors had resisted, was estabUshed; the
Chancellor, and for that matter the Emperor, ceased to exist as a separate
force; and there began a dictatorship of the High Command, which
ended only after the defeated German armies had marched home and
dispersed.
170
THE RULE OF THE GERMAN ARMY, 1916-19
^ CHAPTER X
THE RULE OF THE GERMAN ARMY, 1916-19
In August 1916, the German military leaders became for the first time
the undisputed rulers of Germany, no longer subordinated to the Emperor,
still less held in check by the Chancellor. The reason for this change was
simple : German pohcy, as represented by Emperor and Chancellor alike,
had failed. Success, the key to pohtical authority in Germany, rested with
the military leaders alone. The parties of the Reichstag, unimpeded even
by the Social Democrats, flung themselves under the leadership of Luden-
dorff, as, long before, the liberals had flung themselves under the leader-
ship of Bismarck, regardless of the fact that by so doing they were
destroying the constitutional structure to which the Reichstag belonged.
In October 1916, Vv'hen Bethmann was vainly trying to hold up the
declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, the Reichstag, on the
motion of the Centre, virtually declared that it would support the Chan-
cellor only if he obeyed the orders of the Supreme Command. Thus the
dictatorship was in the fullest sense a dictatorship by consent, a logical
development from the original jettisoning of liberal principles during the
struggles of the nineteenth century.
The Supreme Commander was Hindenburg, legendary figure of un-
shakable popularity, but without either political or military gifts; his
role was to play William I to Ludendorff''s Bismarck. The dictatorship
of Ludendorff^ was very far from being, as is often alleged, a new version
of the "rule of the Junkers"; it was the rule of an independent mihtary
machine which had escaped from the control of its authors. Ludendorff
himself was of non-Junker origin, his low birth an insuperable barrier
to the attainment of nominal supremacy, but not to the possession of real
power. The German army was no longer an army of peasants officered
J3y landowners. The soldiers had long been predominantly industrial
workers and were now Social Democrats and Roman Catholic Centrists
;
the Junker officers had perished in the first battles of 1914 and their places
taken by reservists from the professional middle classes—aping the harsh-
ness and brutahty of the Junkers, but with none of their political caution
and restraint. The generals and high staff" officers were still ofJunker origin,
and disUked much of Ludendorff^'s policy : they were still loyal to WilHam II,
the superseded "supreme war lord," they resented the patronage of
Poland, they abhorred Pan-Germaiiism. But they could do nothing.
The Hindenburg legend was the success myth without which the army
would cease to fight : therefore, so long as Hindenburg reposed confidence
in Ludendorff, the Ludendorff" dictatorship was unshakable, a demagogic
171
THE COURSE OF G ERM A N HI S T O R Y
dictatorship even though wielded by a general. The rank was an accident
;
the essential thing was the success-myth and the confidence of the mass
army which that implied, and a corporal who captured the myth could
"^ ^11 the role quite as well—in fact better, for he would be free of the Junker
prejudices which still hampered Ludendorff'.
LudendorfF was without political training and, still more, without
political ambition. He became dictator unwillingly, solely to preserve
Germany, and his political programme was improvised from day to day,
according to the needs and standards of the army. Thus, in domestic
affairs he had no guiding principle beyond the resentment, felt by every
soldier in the front line, that the factory workers should work under
easier conditions and for greater rewards than the man in the trenches;
a feeling no doubt anti-liberal, but none the less demagogic for all that.
Similarly his "foreign policy" or programme of War aims, absurdly
enough, was not a programme for a peace treaty, bat solely for the conduct
of the next war, and in it he included the most contradictory elements.
The industrialists' demand for north-eastern France and Belgium, a
Little German demand, would strengthen the German armament industry
;
Ludendorff espoused it. The unrestricted submarine campaign, anti-
English and therefore also Little German, would defeat England ; Luden-
dorff forced it through. The Junker demand for Livonia and Courland,
which would give the Prussian landowners a new lease of political life in
Germany, would strengthen Ludendorff's left flank in the next war : he
added it to his programme. But at the same time, he added elements
from the Greater German creed of democratic tradition, elements which
would ruin the last fragments of Junker power. Ever since the beginning
of the war, German policy had fumbled with the problem of Poland
—
anxious on the one hand to fool the Social Democrats by a pro-Polish
policy; anxious on the other not to raise an insuperable barrier to a
separate peace with Russia ; anxious, above all, not to establish in Russian
Poland a genuine Polish movement which would demand the return of
Prussia's Pohsh territories as well. In the autumn of 1916 Bethmann
thought that he was at last within sight of peace with decaying Tsardom.
Ludendorff, concerned only to bring out a Polish army on the German
side, overrode Bethmann and insisted on the proclamation of an indepen-
dent Kingdom of Poland in November 1916. So, too, with the affairs
of the Habsburg monarchy, Ludendorff thought only of how to sub-
ordinate Austria-Hungary completely to the German High Command.
The answer : German supremacy in Austria, the dream of the radicals
of 1848 and of the extreme German nationalists of the eighteen-eighties
;
the "Austrian mission," that high-sounding will-o'-the-wisp, became
nothing more than an organization for compelling the Slav peoples to
fight for German domination both of Europe and of themselves, and the
172
THE RULE OF THE GERMAN ARMY, 1916-19
Czechs, Slovenes, and Croats were driven irrevocably on to the side of
the Allies. Ludendorff went further : he was impatient with the Magyar
attempts to preserve their authority and independence in Hungary, and,
if he had had time, would have reduced Hungary, a basic part of Bis-
marck's system, as ruthlessly as any conquered area. Beyond Austria-
Hungary, there was German occupation of Roumania, German adminis-
tration of Serbia, German military direction of Turkey, German power
ranging to the Persian Gulf.
Thus, for purely mihtary reasons, Ludendorff became the champion
of the old programme of Greater Germany, the programme in 1850 of
Schwarzenberg and Bruck, Bismarck's greatest enemies. But Ludendorff
did not operate this programme effectively. It was a demagogic pro-
gramme and needed for its execution a demagogic spirit. Ludendorff's
demagogy was unconscious
;
consciously he was a narrow-minded Prussian
general. To make German supremacy in Austria-Hungary effective
Ludendorff would have had to co-operate with the Austrian German
radicals and the Austrian German traders whose influence extended to
the yEgean. Instead he continued to work with generals and politicians
drawn from the Habsburg aristocracy, who were still skilful enough to
make his policy empty. The German fanatics in Austria were not given
power ; instead the politicians of the old aristocracy, driven desperate by
fear, tried to escape from the war by a separate peace vv'ith the Allies
and impeded every German proposal for total victory. Still more in
Poland, Ludendorff estranged Tsardom and the Prussian Junkers without
winning over the Poles; he could not really bring himself to play the
Polish game which might have brought Germany speedy victory in the
east. There was an enduring moral : the programme of Greater Germany,
to which the army had now committed itself, could only be executed by a
genuine demagogue, a man risen from the masses, in fact a corporal,
not a general.
Still, even with this lack of a real demagogic spirit, Ludendorff's policy
marked the end of the Prussian system. The King of Prussia might have
tfie empty name of supreme war lord; in reality Prussia as much as
Austria was subordinated to the High Command. Little Germany and
Greater Germany, radical hostility to Russia and conservative hostility
to England, expansion down the Danube and expansion overseas (or,
more correctly, under them) were all amalgamated. The "national"
parties of Junkers and industrialists supported, with a wry face, the
Greater German demagogy of the masses; the masses, sincerely con-
vinced that they were engaged in a
202.
REPUBLICAN INTERREGNUM, 1919-30
The collapse of the republic was accelerated, but not caused, by the
economic crisis which swept the entire world between 1929 and 1933.
The crisis was not due to the Four Years’ War, still less to reparations:
in the six years of stability, the Germans paid I’l per cent of their national
income in reparations and received in foreign loans (never repaid) two
and a half times what they paid out in reparations. The crisis sprang from
general defects in the prevailing economic system, and the most successful
and prosperous capitaUst countries were the most seriously struck.
England was worse hit than France, Germany worse than England, the
United States far worse than Germany. The crisis inevitabl^jiroduced
unemployment, poverty, demands for econoi^TpfliefFwas’^^ at
all why it should justify a nationalistic policy and rearmament, still less
an aggressive war. In the United States it produced the New Deal, in
England a si^ccessful economy campaign against such armaments as
existed. In Germany the crisis merely revealed that there was no one to
exercise “authority.” The Social Democrats, reasonably enough, would
not attack the standard of life of their trade union supporters; the
“national” parties were deUghted to see the republic in difficulties. The
only “authority” remaining in Germany was once more the army; and
on the advice of the army leaders Hindenburg called in Briining, machine-
gun captain of the last war and now a leader of the Centre party. All
other parties had certain principles : the Social Democrats to defend the
republic, the “national” parties to destroy it. The Centre alone had
none and was wiUing to make a pact with the miHtary leaders, as it had
always struck a bargain with whatever force happened to be controlUng
Germany. Just as Hertling, the war Chancellor, and Erzberger, the
author of the armistice, had sat side by side during the Four Years’ War
so now Briining could emerge from the ranks of the party which had
helped to found the repubUc and which had ostensibly espoused demo-
cracy. If the army was to rule once more, the Centre would be its instru-
ment.
The appointment of Briining as Chancellor in March, 1930, marked
the end of the German republic. Germany had slipped back without
effort to the days just before defeat when, too, a Roman Catholic Chan-
cellor had carried out the orders of Hindenburg. Then it had been the
ultimatum from Supreme Headquarters, now it was the “emergency
decree,” by which Germany was ruled; both were signed by the same
hand. The “crisis” of March 1930, which brought Briining into power,
was the deliberate manufacture of the army leaders, and especially of
General Schleicher, the army speciahst for political intrigue. The dechne
in world trade, the increase in unemployment, had hardly begun; the
only crisis was that even in the years of prosperity the budget had failed
to balance. The “national” classes still drew the line at direct taxation;
203
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
and it was to impose direct taxes that Muiler, Social Democratic Chan-
cellor of a coalition government, proposed to use emergency decrees.
But Schleicher and his associates would not put Hindenbarg’s prestige
behind a democratic government ; for while the Social Democrats did not
impede German rearmament they would not actively promote it. On
the other hand, the “national” party leaders were too wild: if called to
office, they would at once denounce the Young Plan and overthrow the
shell of the constitution. The Reichswehr leaders were not driven on by a
demagogic demand : quite the reverse, their action provoked the demagogic
demand. When Briining became Chancellor there were only twelve
National Socialists in the Reichstag ; it was owing to his policy that in th.6
general election of September 1930, 108 National Socialists were returned.
The National Socialist victory, abhorrent to Briining, unwelcome to the
Reichswehr, was the inevitable outcome of Briining’s dictatorship.
The “crisis” of March 1930 was provoked by the Reichswehr, and
Briining chosen as Chancellor, for the sole purpose of speeding up German
rearmament. The economic crisis was an afterthought, an accident, which
took the Reichswehr by surprise. The Reichswehr leaders stood behind
Briining, gave him assurance against disorder, enabled him to disregard,
as Imperial Chancellors had done, defeat in the Reichstag. Briining, in
return, pushed on rearmament, redoubled the campaign against the
remnants of Versailles, yet, being a member of the Centre, served as
window-dressing both to Germans of the Left and to the Allies, who,
forgetting his activities during the Four Years’ War, failed to see in the
pious Roman Catholic the spokesman of German militarism. Yet
Briining’s position was sincere enough: wishing to serve Germany, he
could serve only the army. Moreover in promoting rearmament he was
pursuing a policy in which he himself believed ; thus being in a superior
position to all other Centre poUticians, whether under the Empire or of
the republic, who were indifferent to the policies which they executed.
The army was the sole “authority” : that was the key to Briining’s position.
The republic had failed to develop a “governing class.” The middle
classes, themselves in awe of authority, had never forgiven the republic
for the defeat of 1918; the working classes, with no social revolution to
inspire them, were loyal, devoted, but ineffective. The economic crisis
of 1929-33 did not give the deathblow to the republic; at most it drew
attention to the fact that the republic was dead. Any system can stand
in fair weather ; it is tested when the storm begins to blow. This test the
German republic could not pass: with few supporters and no roots, it
fell at the first rumble of thunder.
204
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
CHAPTER XII
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AND THE
COMPLETION OF GERMAN UNITY
AFTER 1930
In 1930 parliamentary rule ceased in Germany. There followed, first,
temporary dictatorship, then permanent dictatorship. Technically the
Reichstag remained sovereign (as it does to the present day); actually
Germany was ruled by emergency decrees, which the democratic parties
tolerated as the “lesser evil”—the greater evil being to provoke a civil
cofiflict in defence of democracy. Unemployment, the result of the
economic crisis, sapped the spirit of the skilled workers, who were the
only reliable repubhcans. Their skill had been the one secure possession
to survive the inflation
;
unemployment made it as worthless as the paper
savings of the middle classes. Therefore, though still loyal to the republic,
they became half-hearted, indifferent to events, feeling that they stood
for a cause which was already lost, ready to respond, though with shame,
to a “national” appeal. The ^^P^^^sion, too, completed the demoraliza-
tion of the respectable middle class. The brief period of prosperity had
stimulated a tendency, or its beginning, to postpone “revenge” to a distant
future—^just as French pacificism after 1871 began as a very temporary
affair. Of course Versailles had to be destroyed, but not while profits
were mounting, not while salaries were good, not while more and more
bureaucratic posts were being created; the German bourgeoisie felt that
their generation had done enough for Germany. But in 1930, with the
ending of prosperity, the distant future of “revenge” arrived: the crisis
seemed almost a punishment for the wickedness of neglecting the restora-
tion of German honour and power, As for the great capitaHsts, they
welcomed the depression, for it enabled them to carry still further the
process of rationaHzation, which had been its cause. As one of them
exclaimed: “This is the crisis we need!” They could shake off both the
remnants of AUied control and the weak ineffective brake of the republic,
could make their monopolies still bigger, could compel even the Allies
to welcome German rearmament as the only alternative to social revo-
lution.
The repubhc had been an empty shell; still its open supersession in 1930
created a revolutionary atmosphere, in which projects of universal up-
heaval could flourish. Now, if ever, was the time Oi the Communists,
who saw their prophecies of capitahst collapse come rue. But the Com-
munists made nothing of their opportunity : they still regarded the Social
Democrats as their chief enemy, still strove to increase confusion and
205
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
disorder in the belief that a revolutionary situation would carry them
automatically into power. The German Communists, with their pseudo-
revolutionary jargon, were silly enough to evolve this theory themselves
;
but they were prompted on their way by the orders of the Comintern,
which was still obsessed with the fear of a capitalist intervention against
the Soviet Union and so desired above everything else to break the demo-
cratic link between Germany and western Europe. The Soviet leaders,
with their old-fashioned Marxist outlook, thought that the German army
leaders were still drawn exclusively from the Prussian Junkers and there-
fore counted confidently on a renewal of the old Russo-Prussian friendship.
In 1930 German democracy was probably too far gone to have been
saved by any change of policy ; still the Communist line prevented the
united front of Communist and Social Democratic workers which was
the last hope of the republic. The Communists were not very effective
;
so far as they had an effect at all it was to add to the poHtical demoraliza-
tion, to act as the pioneers for violence and dishonesty, to prepare the
way for a party which had in very truth freed itself from the shackles of
“bourgeois morality,” even from the morahty devised by the German
bourgeois thinker, Karl Marx.
To talk of a “party,” however, is to echo the misunderstandings of
those lamentable years. The National Socialists were not a party in any
poHtical sense, but a movement: they were action without thought, the
union of all those who had lost their bearings and asked only a change
of circumstances no matter what. At the heart of the National Socialists
were the Free Corps, the wild mercenaries of the post-war years, whose
“patriotism” had taken the form of shooting German workers. The
Munich rising in November 1923 had been the last splutter of their
Free Corps days. Sjnce then they had been taught discipline by a ruthless
gangster leader, Hitler, a man bent on destruction, “the unknown soldier
of the last war,” but unfortunately not buried, expressing in every turn
of his personality the bitter disillusionment of the trenches ; and a greater
master of hysteric oratory than either Frederick William IV or William II.
The National Socialists had no programme, still less a defined class
interest; they stood simply for destruction and action, not contradictory
ibut complementary,. *1rhey united in their ranks the disillusioned of every
Mass: the army officer who had failed to find a place in civil life; the
rmined capitahst; the unemployed worker; but, most of all, the “white
cellar” worker of the lower middle class, on whom the greatest burden
of the post-war years had fallen. The unemployed clerk; the university
student who had failed in his examinations ; the incompetent lawyer and
the blundering doctor : all these could exchange their shabby threadbare
suits for the smart uniforms of the National Socialist army and could
find in Hitler’s promise of action new hope for themselves. In England
206
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
they would have been shipped off to the colonies as remittance men : their
presence in Germany was the high price which the victors of 1918 paid
for the worthless tracts of German colonial territory.
TheJiailyre of the Munich rising in 1923 had taught Hitler a bitter
lesson: he must not run head on against the army and the possessing
classes. From that moment until September 1939 he used the method
of intrigue, of terror and persuasion, not the method of open assault.
Just as the Communists had tried to outbid the “national” parties in
whipping up nationalist passion, so now Hitler outbid the Communists,
but with the added attraction, for the upper classes, that this nationaUst
passion would be turned against the German working classes as well.
He was at once everyone’s enemy and everyone’s .fjri^nd : his^programme
@f contradictory principles could succeed only in a community which had
already lost all unity and self-confidence. To the workers he offered
employment; to the lower-middle classes a new self-respect and inipor-
tance; to the capitalists vaster profits and freedom from trade union
restraints; to the army leaders a great army; to all Germans German
supremacy; to all the world peace. In reality it mattered little what he
offered : to a Germany still bewildered by defeat he offered action, success,
undefined achievement, all the sensations of a revolution without the
pains. In September 1930, when the economic crisis had hardly begun,
but when the French had evacuated the Rhineland, the National Socialists
were already hot on the heels of the Social Democrats as the largest party
in the Reichstag; the “national” card was irresistible.
This moral was drawn too by Briining, who, in his hatred of National
Sociahst paganism, adopted in succession almost every item of the
National Socialist creed. Called in to save German capitalism and to
promote German rearmament, Briining went further on the path already
marked out by Stresemann. Stresemann had tried to make the republic
popular by winning concessions in foreign affairs. Briining demanded
concessions in foreign affairs in order to win support for his system of
presidential dictatorship. If Germany v/as allowed to rearm, the Germans
might not notice the reductions in their wages. More than that, if Ger-
mans were brought together in a campaign of hatred against Poland, the
disparities between rich and poor would be overlooked. Where Strese-
mann had tried to conciliate the Allies, Bruning blackmailed them: if
they did not make concessions to him, they would have to deal with
Hitler and the National Socialists. Briining knew that the economic crisis
was due to deflation, the decline of prices and vv’ages; still, far from
attempting to arrest or even alleviate this deflation, he drove it on
—
forced wages and, less effectively, prices, still lower—perhaps to get the
crisis over all the sooner, perhaps to threaten the Allies with the prospect
of German ruin. For the Briining Cabinet was primarily a cabinet of
207
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
“front-line fighters,” officers of the Four Years’ War, who were domi-
nated by the resolve to reverse the verdict of 1918, Stresemann too had
desired to liquidate Versailles, but he had cared also for democracy;
Bruning was for the undoing of Versailles pure and simple, hoping, no
doubt, to win popularity with the German people, satisfying still more his
own deepest feelings, For him, as much as for the great capitalists, the
crisis was welcome, the crisis he needed. His most ambitious effort was
the customs union with Austria in March 1931, ostensibly a measure
against the depression, though it is difficult to see the use of a customs
union between two countries both suffering from unemployment and
impoverishment. In reality the purpose of the customs union was not
economic, but demagogic, an evocation of the programme of Greater
Germany, and, so far as it had any sense, a move of economic war against
Czechoslovakia, exposed outpost of the system of “Versailles. France
and her central European aihes protested and, almost for the^ last^ time,
got their way: the separation of Austria
^ j^^^^ Germany was the only
remaining guarantee against an overwhelming German, power, a^ this
last fragment of victory was shored up for a few more years.
The Bruning policy of combating evil by taking homoeopathic do^es of
]pie same medicine, far from checking the National Socialists, aided their
“Advance. If the Allies trembled before Bruning’s blackmail, they ,would
collapse altogether before the blackmail of Hitler. Bruning made everyone
in Germany talk once more of rearmament, of union with Austria, of the
injustice of the eastern frontier; and every sentence of their talk made
them turn, not to Briining, but to the movement of radical revision. Above
all, Bruning had overlooked the lesson of the Four Years’ War which
Ludendorff had learnt too late—that a programme of German power
must rest on a demagogic basis. Austria, Poland, Bohemia, could not be
conquered, and Versailles defied, by a Chancellor supported only by a
section of the Centre party ; for that, a united German will was needed.
Captain Briining was half-way between General Ludendorff and^Qorporal
Hitler, with the weaknesses of both, the advantages of neither, ^riiningj
the defender of the Roman Catholic Church, shared the error of Strese-
mann, the defender of the republic: both thought to draw the sting of
nationahsm by going with it, to silence demagogy by trying to capture
its tone. Neither grasped that his every step strengthened his enemy;
neither understood that the only security for German democracy, or for
German Christian civilization, lay in a full and sincere acceptance pf the
Treaty of Versailles. Only if Germany made reparation
; only if Germany
remained disarmed ;
only ifIhe ‘Giirman frontiers were final
;
only, above
all, if the Germans accepted the Slav peoples as their equals, was there any
chance of a stable, peaceful, civilized Germany. No man did mpre than
Bruning to make this Germany impossible.
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
The decay, disappearance indeed, of peaceful Germany was openly
revealed in 1932 -when the time came to ^lect a new President. The
candidate of upheaval and violence was Hitle|*; the candidats_Qf , the
peaceful constitutional Left was Hindenburg, hero of the Four Years’ War
and candidate in 1925 of the “national” parties. TheJlleftllJiijd m^^
immeasurably to the ” right ” in the last seven years : what was then a defeat
wouldHoow rank as a dazzling victory—for it could not be supposed that
a senile soldier of over eighty and never mentally flexible had changed
his outlook since 1925, or for that matter since 1918. tThe^German people
ha4^accepted militarism : the only dispute was between the orderly mih-
tai:ism of a field-marshal and the unrestrained militarism of a hysterical
corporeal. Hindenburg carried the day, evidence that the Germans still
graved to reconcile decency and power, militarism and the rule of law.
YeFHindenburg’s victory, strangely enough, was the prelude to National
Socialist success. Bruning drew from the presidential election the moral
that his government must win greater popularity by some demagogic
stroke; and, as a stroke in foreign poHcy was delayed, he sought for
achievement in home affairs. His solution was his undoing. He planned
to satisfy Social Democratic workers and Roman Catholic peasants by an
attack on the great estates of eastern Germany, breaking them up for the
benefit of ex-servicemen ; and as a first step he began to investigate the
affairs of the Osthilfe, the scheme of agrarian relief inaugurated in 1927
by which tens of millions of pounds had been lavished on the Junker
landowners. This was a programme of social revolution, and it could be
carried out only with the backing of enthusiastic and united democratic
parties. But Briining’s solution of Germany’s ills was the restoration of
the monarchy, and he would not condescend to democracy by a single
gesture ; he relied solely on Hindenburg, and this reUance was his undoing.
For Hindenburg, once himself the patron of land settlement for ex-
servicemen, had been long won over by the Junker landowners, who in
1927 had launched a plan for presenting Hindenburg with an estate at
Neudeck, once a Hindenburg property, but long alienated. It was
characteristic of the Junkers that even for their own cause they would
not pay : all the estate owners of eastern Germany only subscribed 60,000
marks, the rest of the required million was provided by the capitalists of
the Rulir— principally by Duisberg, manufacturer of paints and cosmetics.
But thereafter Hindenburg counted himself a Junker landowner; and he
turned against Bruning the moment that he was persuaded that Briining’s
plans threatened the great estates. On May 29th, 1932, Bruning was
summarily dismissed.
With the dismissal of Bruning, there began eight months of intrigue
and confusion, in which the old order in Germany, which had now come
into its own, struggled to escape from the conclusion that, to achieve
209
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
its ends, it miist strike a bargain with the gangsters of National Socialism,
Fragments of past policies were resurrected haphazard, as a dying man
recalls chance echoes of his life. First device was the Roman Catholic
cavalry officer, Papen, and Jijs ”cabipft^^ ^..?oIlection of anti-
quarian conservatism unparalleled since the days of Frederick William IV,
the sort of government which might have existed for a day if a few romantic
officers had refused to acknowledge the abdication of William II in 1918.
Papen’ s great achievement in the eyes of the Prussian landowners was to
end constitutional government in Prussia: the Sociahst ministers were
turned out without a murmur. It was both curious and appropriate that
Prussian constitutionalism, which had originated in the Junkers’ selfish
interest in the Ostbahn, should owe its death to the Junkers’ selfish interest
in the Osthilfe. Papen, in his daring, blundering way, continued, too,
Briining’s undoing of Versailles, and accomplished the two decisive steps
:
reparations were scrapped in September 1932; German equality of
armaments recognized in December. But it was impossible for a govern-
ment of frivolous aristocrats, which would have been hard put to it to
survive in 1858, to keep Germany going in 1932. Even the Centre, with
its readiness to support any government, dared not offend its members
by supporting Papen and expelled him from the party. The Germans,
divided in all else, were united against the “cabinet of barons.”
The army was forced to the last expedient of all: it took over the
government itself. In December, Papen in his turn was ordered out of
office and succeeded by General Schleicher, forced into office by his
own intrigues. Schleicher, too, intended to do without the National
Socialists, though he had often flirted with them in the past. He was
the first professional soldier to rule Germany without an intermediary
since Caprivi. Like Caprivi he was a “social general,” intelligent enough
to see the advantages of an alliance between the army and the Left, not
intelligent enough to see its impossibility. To win over the Social Demo-
crats, he revived the proposal for agrarian reform in eastern Germany
and proposed to publish the report of the Reichstag committee on the
Osthilfe at the end of January ; in return he asked the trade union leaders
to stand by him in his quarrel with the National Socialists. The prospect
of the publication of the Osthilfe report made the Junkers around Hinden-
burg abandon all caution. The agent of reconciUation between the
^ conservatives of the old order and the demagogic National Socialists
was none other than Papen, who now hoped somehow to manoeuvre
himself into the key position of power. Papen not only swung the Junkers
behind Hitler. Early in January 1933 he negotiated an alliance between
Hitler and the great industriaUsts of the Ruhr: Hitler was to be made
Chancellor ; the debts of the National SociaUsts were to be paid ; and in
return Hitler promised not to do anything of which Papen or the Ruhr
210
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
capitalists disapproved. Papen’s sublime self-conndence had already
landed him in many disasters ; but even he never made a more fantastic
mistake than to suppose that Hitler’s treachery and dishonesty, immutable
as the laws of God, would be specially suspended for Franz von Papen.^
Against this combination Schleicher was helpless. He could not even
count on the support of the Reichswehr; for though the army leaders
had often acted independently of the Junkers and sometimes gone against
them in great issues of foreign policy, they were not prepared to become
the agents of agrarian revolution. They returned to the union of generals
and landowners from which Bismarck had started. The Osthilfe report
was to be published on January 29th. On January 28th Schleicher was
dismissed and publication held up; and on January 30th Hindenburg,
a field-marshal and a Prussian landowner, made Hitler Chancellor.
It was a symbolic act. The privileged classes of old Germany—the
landowners, the generals, the great industrialists—made their peace with
demagogy: unable themselves to give “authority” a popular colour,
they hoped to turn to their own purposes the man of the people. In
January 1933 the “man from the gutter” grasped the “crown from the
gutter ” which Frederick William IV had refused in April 1849. The great*”
weakness of the Bismarckian order, the weakness which caused its final
hquidation in January 1933, was that the interests of the “national”
classes could never correspond to the deepest wishes of the German
people. It was the Centre and the Social Democrats, not the Conservatives
and still less the National Liberals, who had gained mass support. There
was no need for a new party or a new leader to carry out the wishes of
the landowners and the industrialists ; but there was need for a new party
and a new leader who would capture the mass enthusiasm, formerly
possessed by the Centre and the Social Democrats, for the “national”
programme. This was J^Lttkc’s achievement, which made him indispen-
sable to the “national” classes, and so ultimately their master. stple^
the thunder of the two parties which even Bismarck had never been able
to. subdue. The sham Socialism of his programme captured the dis-
illusioned followers of the Social Democrats ; the real paganism of his
programme rotted the religious basis of the Centre.
There was nothing mysterious in Hitler’s victory ; the mystery is rather
that it had been so long delayed. The delay was caused by the tragic
incompatibiUty of German wishes. The rootless and irresponsible, the
young and the violent embraced the opportunity of licensed gangsterdom
on a heroic scale; but mosc Germans wanted the recovery of German
power, yet disliked the brutality and lawlessness of the National Socialists,
by which alone they could attain their wish. Thus Bruning was the
1 Or perhaps not so great a mistake. Personally, though not politically,
they were suspended—at any rate until the present moment.
211
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
nominee of the Reichswehr and the enemy of the republic, the harbinger
both of dictatorship and of German rearmament. Yet he hated the
paganism and barbarity of the National Socialists and would have done
anything against them—except breaking with the generals. Schleicher,
in control of the Reichswehr, was obsessed with German military recovery
;
yet he contemplated an alliance with the trade unions against the National
Socialists and, subsequently, paid for his opposition with his life. The
generals, the judges, the civil servants, the professional classes, wanted
^ what only Hitler could offer—German mastery of Europe. But they” did
not want to pay the price. Hence the delay in the National Socialist rise
to power ; hence their failure to win a clear majority of votes even at the
general election in March 1933. The great majority of German people
wanted German domination abroad and the rule of law at home, irrecon-
cilables which they had sought to reconcile ever since 1871, or rather
ever since the struggles against Poles, Czechs^ and Danes in 1848.
In January 1933 the German upper classes imagined that they had
taken Hitler prisoner. They were mistaken. They soon found that they
were in the position of a factory owner who employs a gang of roughs to
break up a strike : he deplores the violence, is sorry for his workpeople
\
who are being beaten up, and intensely dislikes the bad manners of the
gangster leader whom he has called in. All the same, he pays the price
and discovers, soon enough, that if he does not pay the price (later, even
if he does) he will be shot in the back. The gangster chief sits in the
1 managing director’s office, smokes his cigars, finally takes over the
\ concern himself. Such was the experience of the owning classes in Germany
” after 1933. The first act of the new dictators won the game. When the
terror of their private armies looked like failing, the National Sooalfsts
/set fire to the Reichstag, proclaimed the discovery of a Communist plot,
and so suspended the rule of law in Germany. The Reichstag fire, burning
away the pretentious home of German sham-constitutionalism, was the
unexpected push by which the old order in Germany, hesitating on the
brink, was induced to take the plunge into gangster rule. The new
Reichstag, still, despite the outlawing of the Communists, with ncT cTear
National Socialist majority, met under open terror. Hitler asked for an
Enabling Bill, to make him legal dictator. He was supported by the
“national” parties, and the Centre, faithful to its lack of principles to
the last, also voted for Hitler’s dictatorship, in the hope of protecting the
position of the Roman CathoUc Church; impotent to oppose, they
deceived themselves with the prospect of a promise from Hitler, which
was in fact never given. Only the Social Democrats were loyal to the
republic which they had failed to defend and by a final gesture, impotent
but noble, voted unitedly against the bill. But even the Social Democrats
went on to show the fatal weakness which had destroyed German liberties.
212
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
When in May 1933 the Reichstag was recalled to approve Hitler’s foreign
policy, the Social Democrats did not repeat their brave act : some
abstalhed, most voted with the National Socialists. This was an absurdity.
If Germany intended to undo the system of Versailles, she must organize
for war, and she could organize for war only on a totalitarian basis
Only by renouncing foreign ambitions could Germany become a demo
cracy ; and as even the Social Democrats refused to make this renunciation
the victory of the National Socialists was inevitable.
This is the explanation of the paradox of the ”Thu;d^Reich.” It was a
system founded on terror, unworkable without the secret police and tKe
concentiatioh camp^^ was also a “sysferh which represented the
deepest wishes of the German people. In fact it was the only system of
German government ever created by German initiative.’ ” The old empire \
had been imposed by the arms of Austria and France; the German
Confederation by the armies of Austria and Prussia. The HohenzoUern
empire was made by the victories of Prussia, the Weimar repubhc by the
victories of the Allies. But the “Third Reich” rested solely on German i
force and German impulse ; it owed nothing to alien forces. It was a ‘I
tyranny imposed upon the German people by themselves. Every class
disliked the barbarism or the tension of National Socialism; yet it was
essential to the attainment of their ends. This is most obvious in the
case of the old “governing classes.” The Junker landowners wished to
prevent the expropriation of the great estates and the exposure of the
scandals of the Osthilfe; the army officers wanted a mass army, heavily
equipped ; the industrialists needed an economic monopoly of all Europe
if their great concerns were to survive. Yet many Junkers had an old-
fashioned Lutheran respectabihty
;
many army officers knew that world
conquest was beyond Germany’s strength; many industrialists, such as
Thyssen, who had financed the National Sociahsts, were pious and simple
in their private lives. But all were prisoners of the inescapable fact that
if the expansion of German power were for a moment arrested, their
position would be destroyed.
But the National Socialist dictatorship had a deeper foundation.
Many, perhaps most, Germans were reluctant to make the sacrifices
demanded by rearmament and total war ; but they desired the prize which
only total war would give. They desired to undo the verdict of 1918;
not merely to end reparations or to cancel the “war guilt” clause, but to
repudiate the equality with the peoples of eastern Europe which had then
b^n forced upon them. During the preceding eighty years the Germans
had sacrificed to the Reich all their liberties; they demanded as reward
the enslavement of others. No German recognized the Czechs or Poles
as equals. Therefore every German desired the achievement which only
total war could give. By no other means could the Reich be held together.
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
It had been made by conquest and for conquest; if it ever gave up its
career of conquest, it would dissolve. Patriotic duty compelled even the
best of Germans to support a policy which was leading Germany to
disaster.
This implacable logic of circumstance doomed to failure every attempt
to arrest the advance of National Socialist “totalitarianism.” The
institutions which had been too much for Bismarck, the conflicting
political forces which had for so long pulled Germany this way and that,
were all overborne. The political parties were abolished in the summer
of 1933; the trade unions were taken over without the semblance of a
struggle ; the states, last relics of particularism, were wiped out of existence.
Nuremberg, proudest of Free Cities, became the meeting-place of , the
annual National Socialist demonstration; and Bavaria, most separatist
of states, the very heart of the National Socialist movement. Only \he
Roman Catholic Church attempted to resist
;
and, though it was defeated,
yet its defeat was perhaps a little less thorough than that of every other
organization in Germany. Roman Catholics accepted Hitler’s course of
policy, and none ever protested against any of the barbarities of German
conquest; but they were allowed to remain Roman Catholics. In this
record of subjection, the National SociaUst programme was no exception.
Where it clashed with the claims of total war, it too was disregarded.
The destruction of “interest slavery,” liberation from “monopoly
capitalism,” a new social order, these turned out to mean nothing at all;
and even when war raged, the profits of the German capitalists were less
controlled than in any other belligerent country. Still a Socialist element,
in the German sense, remained. What German Socialists and German
workers had objected to in capitalism was not so much inequality of
incomes, as freedom of enterprise and the freedom of action which comes
with the secure ownership of property. This freedom the German capi-
talists lost as completely as if they had been expropriated : they could not
conduct their undertakings (”enterprises” no longei) according to their
own wishes and were no more free to choose their course than the most
degraded worker driven into the factory by hunger. Capitalism had
deprived the industrial workers of their freedom, or so they thought.
National Socialism was their revenge: it deprived the capitalists of
freedom also.
The strain and tension of National Socialist rule was always great;
and at no moment was their ” total” riile complete. A vague grumbling,
sometimes more, remained as the last protest of the human spirit. But
only on one occasion was there any serious attempt to turn this^.^otest
to account and to retard the process of totahtarian advance. The organizer
of this attempt was again Papen, the irrepressible conspirator: swindled
by Hitler, who speedily deprived him of any real power, he planned in
214
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
1934-4e^-uadD..the effects of his own cunning and to makejhimself the
mouthpiece of German decency. Behind him, vaguely co-ordinated, was
a strange coaUtion: Reichswehr generals who still hoped to combine a
great army and civilized government; great industriaUsts who still hoped
to combine great armament contracts and the rule of law; and on the
other side, HMer’s more radical followers, led by Rohm, sexual pervert
and organizer of the gangster bands, who still hoped for a social revo-
lution. Figures from the last days of the republic—Schleicher, even
Briining—moved somewhere in the shadows; but it was typical of all
“decent” Germans that they should look to the man who had intrigued
them into their difficulties to intrigue them out again. And equally typical
that Pap^exi^^hould make the mistake of William II, of the Weimar republic,
of Briining, and of Schleicher, and rely on Hindenburg, now eighty-six, as
the saviour of Germany. On June 17th, 1934, Papen delivered the only
speech against the regime ever made in National Socialist Germany.
As usual Papen’s plan misfired: in fact, putting Hitler into power was the
only plan of Papen’s which ever succeeded, to Papen’s bitterest regret.
Hindenburg did not respond. Perhaps, tottering into the grave, he was
beyond action
;
perhaps he was carried away by Hitler’s threadbare device
of a Communist plot. On Hindenburg’s orders Papen was spared to
continue his irrepressible career of unsuccessful intrigues. All the other
elements of opposition were wiped out—Schleicher, Rohm and the
Brown Shirt extremists, old enemies of Hitler from the time of the 1923
failure, anyone who might impede the dictatorship or its workings. The
“blood bath” of June 30th, 1934, washed away the last scruples : it was
the clear assertion that there could be no turning back.
Within a month Hindenburg died ; and Hitler succeeded him as Presi-
dent and Commander-in-Chief. But his proudest title was Fiihrer, the
leader. At last someone ruled in Berlin. The amalgamation of demagogy
and the old order was complete. The gangster sat in the managing
director’s chair. But with a strange, though inevitable, result. Once in
the director’s chair, the gangster was faced with the problems which had
faced his predecessor and attempted to solve them in the same way.
Hitler became Ludendorff, and Goring became Thyssen—no doubt a
very painful change for Thyssen, but of no moment to anyone else.
Just as Bismarck had balanced between agrarians and industriaUsts, so
Hitler balanced between the possessing classes and the masses, keeping
the confidence of both by his simultaneous pursuit of Little German and
Greater German aims. Hitler had one great advantage over Bismarck,
which enabled him to weather greater crises. Bismarck had no “Bis-
marck class,” apart from a few family friends, who would stand by him
through thick and thin; therefore he could not put up a fight when he
was turned out in 1890. Hitler discovered a “Hitler class,” his unshakable
215
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
resource in extremity, the class which he organized into the well-paid,
well-dressed Black Guards, the S.S.—the middle class of education but
no property. Their education estranged them from the masses, their lack
ofproperty from the possessing classes
;
they were the elite, the “managers”
of the National SociaUst system, under whose leadership Germans were
united as never before.
Germany was united against the foreigner: this alone justified the
suppression of sectional interests, the “mobilization,” in fact, of Ger-
many. From January 1933, or without reserve fipm June 30, 1934, Ger-
many was mobilizing for total war. This was the meaning of the planned
economy and of the conquest of unemployment, once so admired by
English and American observers: England and America too have now
discovered that war conquers unemployment. The difference is only that
Germany had the foresight to mobilize before declaring war and so
enjoyed a great initial advantage. One^^art of the emotional mobilization,
a relic of the discarded National Socialist programme, was anti-Semitism,
stock-in-trade of every nationalistic movement. In the beginning, anti-
Semitism was an easy outlet for the vague sociahsm of the National
SociaUst rank-and-file, the destruction of Jewish shops a showy substitute
for social change. As always, anti-Semitism was the sociaUsm of fools.
But it soon came to serve a moriFsimMeF^ip^
helpless objects on which millions of Germans first exercised the brutality
essential if Germany was to dominate all Europe. They were the practising
ground, the battle-training school, for the Nordic virtues, which were later
to find then- full expression in Poland, in France, and in occupied Russia.
The great pogrom of November 1938, following hard on the victory of
Munich, was the test mobilization of German morale. If the Germans
could stomach that, they could stomach anything. No voice of protest
was raised, in not one instance did a Christian Church, whether Rornan
CathoHc or Protestant, open its doors to the Jews in refuge, no German
bishop put on the star of David. The Germans had passed the test with
flying colours : they were indeed united.
In one sphere, and one only, Hitler’s unification of Germany was
surprisingly delayed, a delay which was to recall once more all the con-
flicting elements of the “German question.” Hitler was himself an
Austrian German by birth, and the National Socialist programme came
almost entirely from Habsburg Austria : the nationalism from Schonerer,
German leader in the Czech-German struggle in Bohemia, the sham
socialism and the anti-Semitism from Lueger, demagogic leader of the
Vienna lower-middle class. Hitler’s Reich could have no meaning unless
Austria was included, nor could the achievement of the Greater German
programme be begun without the encirclement of Czechoslovakia.
Independent Austria was, in fact, the keystone of the settlement of
216
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
Versailles. But nothing had been done to make the keystone secure.
Austria was supposed to be economically unworkable ; but that was one
of the myths, a fable convenue of the age. Of course, rump Austria, once
the centre of an empire of fifty million people, was heavily over-capitalized
:
not only too many great buildings, too many banks, too many railway
stations, but still more over-capitalized in persons—too many bureau-
crats, too many generals, too many bankers, too many professional men.
The process of adjustment was painful for these classes, but it was accom-
plished ; and by the middle of the nineteen-thirties Austrian economic life
^d reached a balance. A^^ia was not so hard hit as Germany by the
economic crisis, and she emerged from it without relyiiig on unlimited
production of armaments. What Austria lacked was not economic >
existence, but spiritual belief, a “way of life.” Only the order of tHe
Allies had made Austria independent, and only the veto of the Allies
kept her so. Unlike the other “succession states,” Austria had no
sentiment of nationality—except German. No “Austrian idea,” divorced
from the vanished empire of the Habsburgs, was discovered. The National
Sodalist dictatorship ^ave Austria her last, and great, opportunity.
With the submerging of the Centre and the Social Democrats in Ger-
^
many, Austria could have held out a German alternative : a true version,
not a perversion, of the Greater German vision of 1848—a free federal
Germany, not worshipping power, founded on Christian civilization and
on democratic Socialist principles.
The opportunity was thrown away. The Christian Socialists, Austrian
equivalent of the Centre, who ruled in Austria, wished to preserve Austrian
independence, but they attempted to fight without allies, or rather with
the wrong ones. Instead of seeking for a commpn democratic front with
the Social Democrats, they strove, even in the nineteen-twenties, to
destroy both the Social Democrats and democracy. Seipel, the priest who
then led the Christian Socialist party, replied to the Social Democratic
attempts at reconciliation : “No mildness! ” With the rise of the National
SociaUsts, Dollfuss, Seipel’s successor, faced supreme peril. But he was
still obsessed with the struggle against “Marxism.” He rejected co-opera-
tion with democratic Czechoslovakia, and relied instead on the support y
of Fascist Italy, a support which enabled him to break openly with
dernocracy and in February 1934 to destroy the Austrian Social Demo-
crats in civil war. Artillery breached the working-class flats in Vienna;
and those shots breached, too, Austrian independence, last hope both of
German civilization and of European peace. In July 1934 Hitler engin-
eered a National Socialist putsch in Vienna. Dollfuss was murdered, but
tHe German army was not yet strong enough to challenge the Italian
forces which were moved to the Austrian frontier. The putsch was dis-
avowed, and for nearly four years Austria maintained a posthumous
217
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
existence under the protection of Italian bayonets, Sdm^hnigg, who
took the place of Dollfuss, did nothing to heal the quarrel with the Social
Democrats, who represented almost half the Austrian population;
nothing, that is, until five days before the entry of Hitler into Vienna in
March 1938. The Austrian clerical government made, instead, a revisionist
bloc with Hungary and Italy. Hungary could demand “revision” at the
expense of Czechoslovakia, Roumania, and Yugoslavia; Italy at the
expense of Yugoslavia, France, and the British Empire. But at whose
expense could the Austrian clericals demand revision? Only at their own.
Like Briining in Germany, Dollfuss and Schuschnigg repudiated demo-
Icracy and so cleared the way for a more ruthless and effective dictatorship.
Without a reconciliation between Roman Catholics and Socialists,
Austria could not be a challenge to National Socialist Germany ; and after
February 1934, reconciliation was almost impossible. Austria’s fate was
sealed : the few people in England and France who cared for Austria were
estranged by the suppression of the Social Democrats, and the moment
that Italy ceased to be strong enough to oppose Germany the last prop
would be withdrawn—a moment not difficult to attain. Vienna could’no
longer offer a German alternative
;
therefore, even before the absorption
of Austria, the unification of Germany was complete. Hitler had united
Germany, had bound together all the contradictory elements of German
ambition. With the same logic as Ludendorff, coherently though not con-
sciously, he abandoned the “either … or” for the “both . . . and . .
.”
Demagogic Pan-Germanism could not succeed without the backing of
theJunkers and the great industriahsts ; the Junkers and great industrialists
could not maintain themselves without the backing of demagogic Pan-
Germanism. By origin. Hitler was a Greater German, concerned with
Austria, with Bohemia, and the Danube route to the Near East; but by
adoption, as head of the Reich, he was also a Little German, concerned
with Poland and, to a lesser extent, with overseas colonies. The two
programmes were amalgamated, emphasis laid first on one, then on the
other, as a matter of tactics, solely to divide his opponents. Little German
ambitions were directed against England and France, and, being anti-
Polish, were by implication friendly to Russia ; Greater German ambitions,
directed against the Slavs and the Ukraine, were anti-Russian and,
indifferent to colonies, were by implication friendly to the western powers.
Both were being pursued; but it was essential for their attainment that
Russia and the western powers, both vitally menaced, should not unite
against them. To keep Russia and the western powers divided was the
great achievement of German policy between 1934 and 1941, and^the
key to German success. Anti-Bolshevism in England and France, sus-
picion of the capitalist powers in Russia, did the trick and almost gave
Germany the mastery of the world.
218
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
Translated into practical terms, the Little German policy threatened
Poland, the Greater German policy Czechoslovakia, the two limits to
Gertpan -power. Had Poland and Czechoslovakia ever joined forces, the
great powers of east and west would have joined forces too ; their dis-
union was the basis of German success. The Poles were Slavs, but ever
since the Slav Congress of 1848 they had opposed Slav unity: in part
because they were a “historic nation” with a living aristocracy and so
could not co-operate with peasant peoples, in part becase Slav unity
could only be achieved under Russian leadership, which the Poles would
neyer accept. Recent events had added new causes of disunion. The Poles
would not forget their failure to take Teschen from the Czechs in 1919.
Still^more, the Poles were irrevocably estranged from Russia by the
Treaty of Riga of 1921, by which Poland took advantage of Russia’s
weakness to annex great stretches of Ukrainian and White Russian land.
The Treaty of Riga made a Russo-Polish alliance impossible, for, while
the Russians would not take the initiative in recovering their territory,
they could not be expected to fight for the maintenance of Polish rule over
peoples of Russian stock. The Treaty of Riga, not the Treaty of Versailles,
made possible the second German war. The Poles, whether convinced
or not, had to take Hitler seriously as a Greater German and to imagine
that he would neglect Poland for the valley of the Danube; hence the
neutrality agreement between Poland and Germany in 1934, which gave
Hitler a free hand to attack the Czechs in Bohemia. German policy was
turned decisively towards the attainment of Greater German goals ; and
the succeeding steps of German power—the establishment of a conscript
army in 1935, the militarization of the Rhineland and the war of inter-
vention in Spain in 1936 which gave France a third hostile frontier, were
in relation to the western powers genuinely defensive. Hitler wished to be
left alone while he carried out the Greater German programme.
It appears at first sight paradoxical that the Greater German pro-
gramme should come first, that Germany should concentrate on the
Austrian lands, which had been severed from the Reich in 1866, to the
neglect of the Polish lands, which had been lost only in 1918, that the
attack on Austria (March 1938) or on Czechoslovakia (September 1938)
should have preceded the attack on Poland. The explanation was simple
:
the greater includes the less. In 1848 the Greater Germans of the Frank-
fort parUament soon jettisoned their sympathy with Poland at the call of
“healthy national egoism,” even though this committed them to an
alliance with the Prussian army; and in 1914 the Social Democrats, who
ostensibly supported only the war against Tsardom, were soon persuaded
to direct their hostihty against “entente capitahsm” as well. On the other
hand, the Little German programme, as Bismarck had shown, could
become a positive barrier against Greater Germany ; and the old Russo-
219
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
Prussian friendship had been newly reinforced by Russian assistance to
German rearmament in the nineteen-twenties. If Germany had first
reconquered the lands lost at Versailles, so many powerful elements would
have been satisfied, the army leaders above all, that it would have been
difficult to go further. As it was, the continued humiliation of the “corri-
dor” actually made Prussian Junkers desire the inclusion of Vienna in the
Reich, although this reversal of the verdict of 1866 would destroy the
last remnants of Junker independence.
This calculation was in itself decisive, but it was reinforced by inter-
national considerations. The Poles, as the neutrality agreement of 1934
showed, would not go to the assistance of the Czechs ; in Tact they parti-
cipated in the attack on Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Czechs, however,
would go to the assistance of the Poles: recognizing the nature of the
German menace, President Benes refused in 1936 a neutrality agreement
such as Pilsudski had accepted in 1934—unless Poland were included in it.
Further, England and France would go to the assistance of Poland even
without the co-operation of Russia—and Russia might then be drawn in.
Russia would not go to the assistance of Czechoslovakia without the
co-operation of England and France.^ The greater programme was there-
fore not merely the more attractive, but actually the easier to accomplish :
and, on any reasonable calculation, its attainment would make the
attaining of the lesser programme so easy as to be automatic. It was
naive of the British and French to suppose that the sacrifice of Aust^
^nd Bohemia would satisfy the German craving for “world power”;
but even more naive of the Russians to suppose that Russo-German
1 To explain these two sentences would need a long excursion into inter-
national politics. England and France having a common frontier with Ger-
many (England only by sea) could threaten Germany without Russian per-
mission; Russia, having no such common frontier, could threaten Germany
only if England and France induced Poland to enter the war (the 1938 project
of Russia’s attacking Germany through Roumania and sub-Carpathian Russia
was obviously impracticable in the long run). Anglo-French aid to Poland
could not tar Poland more thoroughly with the character of an agent of
“entente capitalism” than she was tarred already; Russian aid to Czecho-
slovakia would tar Czechoslovakia with the character of an agent of “Bol-
shevism” and expose her to the fate of the Spanish republic. Anglo-French
policy was based on the hope that, if the Germans must go somewhere, they
would go east; a German attack on Czechoslovakia would be the welcome
news that the Drang nach Osten was being renewed. But Poland is not the
route to the Balkans, and an attack on Poland, with its inevitable consequence
of a partition with Russia, would be evidence that the Germans were turning
west. Poland belongs to eastern Europe only geographically; politically she
belongs to the west. She owed her resurrection both in 1807 and in 1919 to
the victories of western arms ; and if Russia had remained in the victorious
coalition until 1919, there would have been no great Poland. But Czecho-
slovakia would have come into existence in 1919 with a victorious Russia
quite as much as without: she belongs to the eastern system, though to the
western system as well.
220
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
friendship could be renewed in 1939 on the Little German basis of a
partition of Poland, when the most cardinal elements in the Greater
German programme had already been achieved. Above all it was naive
of anyone to suppose that compromise with National Socialist Ger-
many was ever possible on any point. Economically, politically, spirit-
ually, Germany had to keep up a ceaseless process of expansion. Victories
on an ever greater scale were its life-blood; and without this increasing
flow of victories, not merely the National Socialist dictatorship, but the
entire German order would have collapsed. A sane diplomacy, pro-
ceeding one step at a time, could have established German mastery
imperceptibly and without war. Still more, the weight of German econo-
mic power would soon have forced all eastern Europe, and later western
Europe too, into dependence on Germany; and in fact the represen-
tatives of British industry were in Diisseldorf in March 1939, arranging
to become junior partners in a trade war against the United States in
South America, when German violence spoilt the game. Like the Agadir
coup in 1911, the occupation of Prague in 1939 was the shock which
brought Germany’s prey out of their hypnotic trance just before they
were devoured, in 1911 in time to resist more or less effectively, in 1939
(too late to save anything on the European continent.
March 15th, 1939, saw the resurrection of the traditional frontiers of
the old Reich, Bohemia once more a protectorate, though now a sham
one. So complete was now the amalgamation of Little German and
Greater German aims that the same day saw the beginnings of the cam-
paign for the recovery of the frontiers of Bismarck’s Reich, though these
frontiers had no meaning except as a barrier against Greater Germanism.
iXhe decisive sign that Germany had postponed further pursuit of the
Greater German programme and had turned instead against Poland was
tLe handing over of the republic of “Carpatho-Ukraine,” after twenty-
four hours of independent existence, to Hungary. Therewith Germany
renounced the project of detaching the Ukraine from Russia in co-
operation with Poland. For, in fact, Poland would not co-operate.
Poland was compelled by her geographical situation, and still more by the
circumstances of her rebirth after the Four Years’ War, to be genuinely
neutral between Russia and Germany. The territories which she had
rightly acquired from Germany in 1919 made her reject an alliance with
Germany as decisively as the territories which she had wrongfully acquired
from Russia in 1921 made her reject an alliance with Russia.
The German encouragement of Hungarian “revisionism” had deeper
motives: in fact there is nothing in German political psychology deeper
than the attachment, even respect, felt by all sections of German opinion
for the Hungarian “political nation.” On everything else Little Germans
and Greater Germans might disagree. Greater Germans favoured the
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
conquest of eastern Europe and the defeat of Russia; Little Germans
expansion overseas and the defeat of the liberal western powers. But
Greater German democrats rose at Vienna in October 1848, in defence
of Hungarian independence ; and Bismarck, greatest of Little Germans,
imposed Hungarian freedom on the Habsburgs and guaranteed it. In the
Four Years’ War, as for the matter of that in Hitler’s war, all other “allies”
of Germany soon became helpless dependants
;
Hungary alone retained
an arrogant independence, and refused to treat her Germans as a privi-
leged minority. In Hungary, and nowhere else in Europe, the Germans
ceased to feel themselves the “master race.” Many elements produced
this strange modesty: gratitude for the Hungarian “revisionist” campaign
against the treaty of Trianon in the nineteen-twenties which paved the
way for the German “revisionist” campaign against Versailles in the
nineteen-thirties ; the awe of a “master race,” still imperfectly sure of
itself, for a “master race,” which in far more difficult circumstances never
lost its confidence and arrogance; but above all, common fear of the
rising Slav tide. For_on the continent of Europe, beyond the limits of
Latin civilization, only “”Germans and Magyars stood out above the
ocean of Slav peoples.^ German arrogance and brutality, like Magyar
arrogance and brutality, were in the last resort the expression of an over-
mastering fear. In earlier centuries, great landed estates and serfdom,
absolutism or aristocratic government, had obscured this great Slav
preponderance. Land reform, universal education, political democracy,
and—above all—the industrialization of eastern Europe, at last began to
give to the Slav masses their true weight. Sooner or later, the Slav peoples,
with their deep sense of equality, their love of freedom, and their devotion
to humanity, would end the artificial lordship of both Germans and
Magyars. The tide was mounting; and Hitler’s war was, in its deepest
meaning, an attempt to sweep this Slav flood from the crumbling bastions
of Greater Germany and Great Hungary. It is not surprising that the
two “master races” clung together; they were venturing out into a storm
^ .which would be their ruin.
The change of German policy on March 16th, 1939, was a confession
that the Slav problem was becoming too big for Germany, and an assertion
that it would be easier to turn against the western world. Just as the
moves against France in 1936 had been defensive—to win a free hand
for expansion in the east—, so the moves against Poland in 1939 were
defensive—to win a free hand for expansion in the west. Poland could
have bought herself off”, as Czechoslovakia could not, with small conces-
sions, with little more in fact than the cancelling of her alliance v/ith
France. But this alliance was her sole guarantee against partition between
Germany and Russia ; and, refusing to abandon it, she became the means
by which instead Russia was bought off and the old Junker-Tsarist partner-
222
DEMAGOGIC DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1930
ship renewed in strangely changed form. As in 1938 the western powers
lad rubbed their hands at the promise of the Drang nach Osten, so in
\ugust 1939 the Russians folded their hands, if not rubbed them,
it the Drang nach Westen. The German oscillation between east and
tvest. Greater German and Little German, was still effective. Hitler had
ichieved Ludendorff’s ambition: one army (and one emotional appeal)
bould win victories on two fronts, his enemies accepting battle only at his
time-table. In June 194Q, the defeat of France made Germany master
Df the European continent as far as the frontiers of Russia. The ambition
3f the generals for total victory, the ambition of the industrialists for the
destruction of their competitors, the Socialists’ projects for a united Europe,
:he idealists’ dream of Europe at peace under the protection of the
German sword, were all fulfilled in the National SociaUst “New Order.”
Throughout Germany the bells rang for three days.
They rang too soon. The British were excluded from Europe; they
X)uld not be driven to confess defeat. To sustain the dizzy momentum
3f German industry and German psychology, new employment was
needed for her armies and new victories to make the church bells ring.
With the Little German programme still uncompleted, Germany swung
back to the east, into the Balkans, and at last, on June 22nd, 1941, took
the great plunge against Russia. It was the climax, the logical conclusion,-^
[)f German history, the moment at which all the forces which had con-
;ended against each other within Germany for so long, joined in a common
struggle against all the world. Germany was at last united. Anti-Bolshev-
ism, anti-capitaUsm, the conquest of the west, the conquest of the east, J
German conservatism and German demagogy, were merged in a single I
:ause. This cause was the supremacy everywhere of German arms, of
j
German industry, of German culture, of the German people. It was
^ause which carried German power to the Pyrenees and the English
Channel ; to the Arctic Circle and the gates of Leningrad ; to Crete and
the gates of Alexandria ; to the gates of Stalingrad and the foothills of the
Caucasus. This was the cause for which the German people had sacrificed
liberty, rehgion, prosperity, law.
But June 22nd, 1941, was not only the climax of German history; it
was also its turning point. Ostensibly the beginning of a new chapter of
v’ictories, it was in reality the day of Germany’s doom. For on that day^
by thd^greatest act of statesmanship of the^century—say rather,^of4noid^m
times—WlliTtotT^^SrchmproClii^^ amance^f England and
Russia. There were no folded hands in England for the renewed Drang
nach Osten. The “many great natipjis,” whom Bismarck had dismissed
with scorn, at last awoke, Germany owed her unity and success to the
disunion of Her ^neighbours. That was now at an end. There will be no*
German “New Order” in Europe. Instead there will be a “New Order”
223
THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY
in Germany which will owe nothing to German efforts. It will be imposed’
by the united strength of fetgl-^rdrRussia, and the UnitecTStates fand it
will prove impermanent unless these three powers remiain as united in
peace as they have been in war.
224
INDEX
Aachen, 61, 67
Africa, 156
Agadir, crisis of, 160, 161, 221
j
Alexander I, 40, 41, 47, 50, 59
/Alexandria, 223
j
Algeciras, conference of, 155, 157, 161
Alvensleben convention (1863), 102, 103, 105
;
Alsace, 112, 113, 131, 132, 154, 162, 167
Anti-Socialist laws, 130, 142
Anti-semitism, 216
Antwerp, 168
,
Arndt, 69
I
Asia Minor, 91, 148
Augsburg, 36; peace of (1555), 21, 22, 25
Austria : 7, 10 ; in Holy Roman Empire, 23, 31,
213; under Joseph 11, 31, 32; wars against
revolutionary France of, 34, 35 ; Austrian
Empire created, 36; resistance to Napoleon I
by, 36-8, 44; aristocracy of, 31, 60, 112, 128,
144, 145; and German confederation, 47-53,
56-8, 64, 68, 71, 87. 89, 117, 213; before
1848, 65; revolution of 1848 in, 71, 72, 75;
relations with Frankfort parliament, 77-9,
83; revolution in October 1848 in, 84, 85;
‘ Greater German plans of, 91 ; defeat of
revolution in, 92; poHcy of, in Crimean war,
93; German policy of, in 1850s, 90, 94-9;
attitude of Bismarck to, 101, 102; conflict
with Prussia (1863-6), 103-9, 112-14, 121,
150
Austria (as part of Austria-Hungary), 119, 123,
125, 131, 133, 136, 144, 156, 169, 172
Austria (republic of, or German Austria), 9,
10; creation of, in 1919, 188, 189; proposed
customs union of, with Germany, 208;
failure of, to provide German alternative,
216-18; annexed by Hitler, 219, 220
Austria-Himgary, 31; establishment of. 111;
alHance of, with Germany, 128, 157, 161,
164, 168, 170, 172, 173; Balkan policy of,
133, 135, 136, 142, 154, 158, 163; army of
165; collapse of, 179
Austro-Prussian War (1778), 32; (1866), 108
Bach, A., 84, 89, 91, 93, 98, 133
Bach, J. S., 20
Baden, 87, 90, 129, 169
Baghdad railway, 63, 148, 160
Balkans, 91, 107, 132, 133, 135, 136, 142, 144,
154, 164, 165, 220, 223
Baltic, 82, 105, 114, 177, 191
Banat, 132
Barres, 146n
Bavaria, 25, 26, 32, 36, 46, 56, 62, 65, 66,
71, 87, 117, 123, 142, 144, 169, 183, 188,
214
Bazin, 146n
Bebel, 129, 141
Beethoven, 20
Belgium, 56, 160, 165, 168, 170, 172, 179
Benes, 220
Bennigsen, 124
Berchtold, 163, 195
Berlin, as capital of Prussia, 26, 29, 44, 86, 87,
95, 102, 108 ; as capital of German Reich,
10, 118, 161, 164, 174, 195, 215; University
of, 61; and railways, 67; revolution of 1848
in, 70-4, 80, 81 ; defeat of revolution in, 83,
85, 89 ; revolution of 1918 in, 180, 181 ; Kapp
putsch in, 191, 192, 198
Berlin, Congress of, 135
H :
Bethmann Hollweg, character of, 160; and
navy, 150; and Agadir crisis, 161; and
Saverne affair, 163; and Social Democrats,
162; and Reichstag, 161, 162, 166, 170, 171
;
and Four Years’ war, 164-7, 169, 170; and
LudendorflF, 172, 174, 179; fall of, 175, 176
Biarritz, 106
Bismarck, 10, 80, 144, 160, 163, 166, 171, 199,
200, 214, 215, 219 ; hysteria of, 28 ; character
of, 19, 96; and United Diet, 95, 96; in 1848,
73 ; at Federal Diet, 95, 97 ; at St. Petersburg,
98 ; becomes Prime Minister of Prussia, 99
;
and meeting of the princes, 103, 104; and
Lassalle, 107, 108; and Junkers, 95, 101, 102,
114, 122; and France, 111, 112; and Prussian
parliament, 100, 101, 109, 110; and Austria,
101, 103, 105-8, 133, 134; and Russia, 102,
103, 112; and Reichstag, 115, 116; and
German states, 117; as German Chancellor,
118-20; and Hungary, 111, 133, 154, 222,
223; and colonies, 134-6; and protection,
124-8; and Roman Catholics, 123, 128; and
crisis of 1887, 136-8, 143; fall of, 139-41;
political system of, 145-9, 153, 155-9, 161,
162, 164, 170, 173, 201, 211
Black Forest, 54
Blum, 84
Bohemia, 10, 53, 92, 94, 109, 133, 216, 218;
Kingdom of, 17; in Thirty Years’ war, 22;
in Habsburg monarchy, 23, 58; in German
confederation, 49, 52; revolution of 1848 in,
77, 78, 80-3; and Bismarck, 131, 136; and
Caprivi, 142 ; and Biilow, 154 ; and Bethmann,
164, 165, 170; and Spartacists, 169; and
Social Democrats, 189; and German repub-
lic, 206; and Hitler, 219-21
Bolshevism, 14, 52, 53, 177, 182-4, 187, 192,
197, 198, 220
Bosnia, 157, 158
Boulanger, 136
Brandenburg, 26, 28, 29, 31
Brest-Litovsk, treaty of, 175, 177, 178, 186
Briand, 152
Bruck, 91, 92, 173
Briining, 203, 204, 207-10, 212, 215, 218
Briinn (Brno), 49
Brunswick, 56, 65, 183
Bucharest, treaty of, 175, 178
Budapest, 31, 32, 133
Biilow, and William II, 147; and “world
policy,” 148, 149, 154; and Morocco, 155,
161; and Bulow bloc, 156; and Daily Tele-
graph affair, 157; and Bosnian crisis, 158,
159, 160 ; proposed as Chancellor in 1917, 175
Biilow bloc, 156, 158, 159, 175
Bulgaria, 179
Buol, 92
Burns, J., 152
Caprivi, foreign policy of, 141 ; home policy of,
142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 159, 210; relations
of, with Prussia, 120, 143, 149
Cassel, 90
Caucasus, 13, 168, 177, 178, 223
Centre party, and Bismarck, 121-4, 128-30,
136, 137; and Caprivi, 139-43; and Hohen-
lohe, 144, 145; and Bulow, 151, 152, 155,
156, 158; and Bethmann, 161, 163, 166; in
Four Years’ War, 168, 171, 174-8; and Ger-
man republic, 181, 185, 194, 203, 204, 208
210. 211; and Hitler, 212
INDEX
Charlemagne, 13-16, 36, 78
Charles V, 17, 18, 21, 22, 111
Charles VII, 26
Charles I, King of England, 88
China, 148
Christian Socialists, 217
Churchill, 223
Clemenceau, 156
Colbert, 126
Cologne, 60
Colonial Society, 146
Colonies, German, 119, 134, 148, 155, 207,218
Comintern, 53, 193, 206
Communists, 193, 194, 197, 198, 205-7, 212
Confederation of the Rhine, 15, 36, 48
Constantinople, 31, 164, 168
Courland, 168, 172, 178
Crete, 223
Crimean War, 93, 97, 102, 105
Cromwell, 115
Croats, 9, 83, 173
Czechoslovakia, 188, 189, 208, 216-20, 222
Czechs, 9; in German confederation, 49, 58,
68; in 1848, 77-80, 82, 83; in 1866, 109; and
TaafiFe, 133, 169, 173; after 1919, 186, 189,
212, 213, 219, 220
Daily Telegraph affair, 157-9, 17
Danes, 77, 81, 82, 212
Danube, 63, 78, 93, 132, 134, 154, 164, 173,
186, 218
Danzig, 32
Dawes plan, 201
Delcasse, 155
Democratic party, 184, 185, 193
Denmark, 81, 82, 83, 105
Deroulede, 146n
Dollfuss, 189, 217, 218
Dresden, 76, 87, 90, 92
Diisseldorf, 221
Duisberg, 209
East Prussia, 27-9, 49, 67, 68, 81, 127, 131, 166,
188
Ebert, 180-3, 187, 193, 195, 202
Egypt, 135
Eisner, 183, 184, 191, 198
Elbe, 13, 26, 34, 63, 66, 149, 182
Ems telegram, 144
England, 13-15, 17, 26, 27, 29, 47, 48, 82, 93,
94, 96-8, 105, 110, 115, 116, 124-6, 131, 134,
135, 137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 152,
154-6, 158, 159-61, 165-8, 170, 172, 173, 184,
191, 196-200, 203, 206, 216, 218, 220, 223,
224
Engels, 61, 70, 77, 78, 87, 108, 141, 166, 169, 189
Erfurt Union, 90-2, 103
Erzberger, 174, 175, 178, 181, 203
Eugene, Prince, 91
Eulenberg, 147
Falkenhayn, 170
Fatherland party, 168, 191
Ferdinand, Emperor of Austria, 65, 84
Federal Diet, 48, 50, 53, 74-6, 92, 93, 95, 97,
108, 118
Fichte, 44, 45, 61
Finland, 178
Foch, 182, 186
Four Years’ War, 10, 52, 118, 165, 168, 187,
189, 190, 199, 203, 204, 208, 209, 221
France, 13-16, 110, 115, 116, 126, 131, 148, 152,
156, 160, 187, 196, 203, 218; and Holy
Roman Empire, 21-3, 25, 27, 29, 106, 213;
under Napoleon, 34, 36, 40, 46, 50; and
German Confederation, 47, 51, 57, 65, 71,
117; and Crimean War, 93, 94; and Austro-
Prussian War, 107; and Bismarck, 97, 98,
100, 103, 111-14, 123, 128, 132, 134, 136;
France
—
confd.
and Post-Bismarckian Germany, 141, 153,
154, 164, 165 ; and first Moroccan crisis, 155
;
and Bosnian crisis, 158 ; and second Moroccan
crisis, 161; three-year service in, 162; in/
Four Years’ war, 166-8, 170, 172, 175, 177:’
and German republic, 191, 196, 197, 200, 2021
208 ; and Hitler, 216, 220, 222, 223
Francis I (until 1806 Francis II, Holy Roman
Emperor), 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 47, 49, 50, 58,
65, 104 1
Francis Joseph, 84, 92, 103, 104, 111 I
Franco-Austrian war, 98
Frankfort, 35, 56, 57, 74, 83, 87, 95, 97, 118,
139, 160; meeting of the princes at, 103, 104
Frankfort Parliament (National Assembly of
1848), 74-8, 80-7, 90, 99, 100, 105, 109, 121,
184, 185, 219
Frederick II, 27-32, 39
Frederick III, 138
Frederick Charles, Prince, 114
Frederick William III, 44, 60, 137, 139, 160;
and Napoleon, 39, 51 ; and reforms, 40, 41,
50 ; promise of constitution by, 42, 59, 66,
67; and Metternich, 47 ,52
Frederick WiUiam IV, 54, 91, 98, 210 ; character
of, 65, 66; and United Diet, 67, 68; and
revolution of 1848, 72-4, 85 ; and Frankfort i
parliament, 77, 86; and Erfurt Union, 90, I
92, 94, 95 ; after Olmutz, 97 ; William II
f
compared with, 139, 140; Hitler compared I
with, 206, 211 I
Free Corps, 183, 184, 186, 191-3, 198, 206
French revolution of 1789, 9, 24, 33, 34, 41, {
63, 71, 96, 108, 116; of 1830, 56; of 1848,71 I
Furth, 66
Gallipoli, 105
Gastein, treaty of, 106
Geneva, 53, 56
Gentz, 39, 54
George III, 144
George IV, 46
German Confederation, 15, 48, 49, 53, 55, 56,
58, 63, 65, 68, 71, 74, 78, 87, 90, 92, 97, 99
102, 109, 213
Gladstone, 130
Gneisenau, 42, 43
Goring, 215
Goethe, 21, 54, 184
Gooch, Dr. G. P., 146n, 160
Gorchakov, 103
Greater German policy, 8, 78, 79, 86, 102, 103,
105, 109, 121-3, 126-8, 131, 133, 134, 136,
137, 142, 165, 168, 170-3, 178, 189, 208,
215-17, 219, 221-3
Groner, 180-3
Habsburg dynasty and monarchy, 17, 22, 23,
26, 30, 38, 39, 47, 49, 52, 62, 66, 75, 76, 78,
79, 83, 103, 106, 109, 111-13, 121, 123, 128,,
133, 134, 142, 145, 154, 165, 217, 222; lands i
of house of, 10, 26, 31, 35, 52, 79, 91, 129
157, 164, 165, 188
Haldane, 161
Hambach, 56
Hamburg, 25, 26, 62, 76, 147
Hanover, 25, 47, 56, 62, 123
Hanseatic League, 17
Hansemann, 88
Hardenberg, 41, 42, 53
Haydn, 20
Hecker, 69
Heeringen, 165
Hegel, 61
Heidelberg, 74, 77
J
Hercegovina, 157 i
Hertling, 176, 179, 203 11
Hesse-Darmstadt, 62 H
INDEX
Stresemann, 175, 197-202, 207, 208
Stalingrad, 223
Struve, 69
Stuttgart, 87
Sub-Carpathian Russia, 220, 221
Substitutes, law of, 119
Sweden, 22, 23, 25, 106
Swinburne, 71
Switzerland, 9, 183
Taaffe, 133, 142
Talleyrand, 35
Tannenberg, 167
Teschen, 219; peace of, 32, 97
Thirty Years’ war, 22, 23, 62
Thyringia, 198
Thyssen, 213, 215
Tilsit, peace of, 40
Tirpitz, 119, 149, 150, 154, 161, 199
Transylvania, 132
Treitschke, 52
Treves, 60
Trianon, treaty of, 222
Trieste, 91, 131
Trotsky, 177
Turgot, 141
Turkey, 148, 173, 177
Tyrol, 39, 58
Ukraine, 135, 168, 177, 178, 218, 221
United Diet, 67, 68, 72
United States, 87, 88, 174, 178, 203, 221,
224
Venice, 17
Versailles, 112; treaty of, 186-94, 196, 197,
199, 201, 204, 205, 208, 210, 213, 217, 219,
220, 222
Vienna, 10, 32, 44, 49, 70, 71, 74, 78, 79, 83,
84, 97, 99, 102, 103, 144, 164, 189, 216-18,
220, 222 ; congress and treaty of, 35, 46, 52,
60, 64, 65, 79, 80, 82, 97, 98, 106
Vistula, 13, 47, 67
Waldersee, 141
Wallenstein, 23
Warsaw, 40, 47
Waterloo, battle of, 46
Weimar, 54; republican constitution of, 179,
184, 185, 187-9, 213, 215
Westphalia, kingdom of, 47; peace of, 22-6, 30,
32, 34, 35, 46, 48, 57
West Prussia, 27, 29, 47, 49, 59, 67, 80, 131,
132, 187
Windischgratz, 79
William I, accession of, 98 ; character of, 99
;
and Prussian parliament, 99-101, 131; and
Austria, 103, 104, 109; becomes German
Emperor, 112, 113; as German Emperor,
118, 138, 139; Hindenburg compared with,
171
William II, and Bismarck, 138-40; character
of, 139; and New Course, 141-2; and
Hohenlohe, 144; and Tirpitz, 119, 149; and
world policy, 149, 154; and Daily Telegraph
affair, 156-9; in Four Years’ War, 163, 164,
166, 167, 170, 175, 178; abdication of, 180,
210, 215 ; Hitler compared with, 206
Wurtemberg, 36, 62, 87, 169, 178
Yiddish, 31
Yorck, 46
Young plan, 201, 202, 204
Yugoslavia, 218
ZoUverein, 61, 64, 92, 106, 118, 126
229
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