The German people settled for tyranny. Following Luther, every major sociopolitical group sided with authority over liberty; as the 19th century wore on, compromises herded liberals, Junkers, Catholics, and capitalists toward the militarized, Prussian state. Socialism, the remaining force with a popular, national base, succumbed in the Weimar era.
Bismarck’s handiwork in excluding Habsburg Austria from Klein Deutschland is the efficient cause of cataclysm. He is Taylor’s roundest figure, comfortably surpassing Wilhelm II and Hitler, a ‘barbarian of genius’ mastering the ‘mechanics’ of civilization but not its spirit. Liberal-minded actors hardly figure, subordinated to socioeconomic classes.
The tradition of lessen und denken is dismissed as idealism divorced from power. Slavs are valorized, as a rhetorical counterweight to corrupt German society. Socialism, though equally fractious as the bourgeois groups and at least nominally anti-liberal, is treated more as counterfactual than another failed paragon.
Writing in the penultimate year of World War II, Taylor asserts divided Germany is the only solution to the threat of militarized domination of Europe. Notably different from Struggle for the Mastery of Europe’s focus on personality-driven diplomatics and, to a lesser extent, Habsburg Monarchy’s concern with the imperial dynasty and its elites, this work is more polemic and epistemic.
Charlemagne’s Reich, Europe’s oldest continuous political form, was established in 800 as universal and Christian. It was never coterminous with the German people in the same way the English or French state correlates with its citizenry. Instead it was barbarism on the edge of Western civilization: the Germans, numbering 70-80 million, aped western Europe while brutally suppressing some 250 million Slavs, whose ‘deep sense of equality, love of freedom, and devotion to humanity’ sooner or later would end ‘artificial lordship’.
Slavic subjugation was firstly borne of martial conquest, then economic exploitation. The Hanseatic league’s breakup precluded English and Dutch traders, helping establish German burghers or Yiddish Jews (Yiddish being a Rhenish dialect) to the leadership of such towns as Prague, Budapest, Riga, and Lemberg. The Hanse ought to have produced the German king; nonetheless, as they were not subordinate to the emperor, their peoples enjoyed liberties not known in contemporary England or France.
Luther, who exemplified later Romanticism’s irrationality and Sonderweg, lost faith in the people after the Peasant’s Revolt of 1525, taking up with the northern princes. Though defending conscience, the confession became conservative and quietist. What started as a ‘middle class’ nationalism turned into an absolutist particularism, whereas Catholicism produced a genuine national culture. Consequently there could be no popular unity, only the question whether the emperor could consolidate Mitteleuropean lands. Charles V tried and failed. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg recognized the multitude of German princes and established the populace would follow the ruler’s creed.
The Thirty Years War saw imperial conquest of Protestant princes, then imperial defeat by Sweden and France. 1648’s Treaty of Westphalia secured princely independence via external powers. The check on Habsburg unification created ‘greater Germany’s’ Austrian problem. Therefore the German burgher thought of freedom as the lack of princely rule. Authority had no sympathy with national sentiment; national sentiment opposed authority. Serfdom was reintroduced.
Prussia’s rise started with Friedrich II’s seizure of Silesia from Maria Theresa in 1740 to create manufactures, and the partition of Poland in 1772, which linked Brandenburg with East Prussia. The army improved through harsh discipline and bureaucracy. The Junkers were yet unimportant, working their estates, not leisured so as to pursue a constitutional or artistic course.
Joseph II recognized his Austrian base was too slender to rule Germany, and so resolved to add Bavaria. First he made a claim to its throne after a Wittelsbach line failed, which Prussia blocked by 1778-79’s War of Austrian Succession, and then sought to trade it for the Austrian Netherlands, which Frederich II stymied by establishing the Fürstenbund to assert traditional princely rights in the empire (notably attractive to Saxony and Hanover).
Napoleon’s 1803 Confederation of the Rhine gave the smaller principalities French-style constitutions, legal codes, and civil liberties; emancipated Jews; and temporarily ended Habsburg-Prussian dualism. The free cities nourished liberal thought. None struggled for their gains. Moreover, there was no popular rising in 1813-14, no national sentiment. The Treaty of Paris produced only modest reorganization of the statelets: Hanover (i.e., England) and Prussia gained western, Catholic lands – the latter’s possessions now predominantly west of the Elbe – while Saxony lost half of its kingdom for joining the allies too late.
The greater Germany of 1815 was 75 percent agricultural, with an urban population but half as big as Paris, few merchants, and no coal industry or budding factories. Austria’s drift from little Germany would grow in the ‘quiet years’ to 1848. In Prussia, where Hegel’s predominance associated freedom in the state and the state with inevitability, the Zollverein commenced in 1818 as a common tariff from Konigsberg to Aachen, making Hohenzollern lands seem essential. Intended as consolidation on Prussian terms, it foreshadowed Bismarck’s amalgamation. Liberalism made no advance, gained no power, though the statelets’ diets, middle-class bureaucracies, and lack of class privileges gave off such form. The landed nobles should have allied with the peasantry, but were stymied by princes and bureaucrats more responsive to fear of Prussian and Habsburg power, the latter embodied by the Metternich.
1848 was the decisive year of Germany history. For the first time since the Peasant’s Revolt, the people were center stage, but relied on ideas not power and so failed the turning point. Incipient middle classes as well as emergent labor lacked the fervour of French revolutionaries.
The Frankfurt National Assembly, assembled in May, mainly comprised burghers and schoolmen but elevated an aristocrat, the Austrian Archduke John, as its executive. Presently its pretensions were exposed. At the contemporaneous Slavic congress, the Czechs laid claim to Bohemia. Having no army, Frankfurt was forced to rely on Habsburg forces – setting up the counter-revolution’s first victory. Denmark’s claim to Schleswig and Holstein magnified the point: as Hohenzollern troops advanced on the disputed provinces, England and Russia opposed Prussian possession. Prussia, unable to fight both, conceded against Frankfurt’s wishes.
The reconquest of Vienna in fall 1848 disillusioned confederation Germany of the Habsburgs, whereas Prussian counterrevolution, completed by April 1849, caused no open breach. Little and greater Germans were brought into open competition. The idealist liberals, the radicals, and the Catholics championed the former, in opposition to (Protestant) Prussia; pragmatists argued little Germany was pregnant. Frankfurt offered to crown Friedrich William, which he disdained, and then proclaimed revolution. The Prussian army scattered it from existence. Many radicals fled to the USA, joining the hundreds of thousands who had already migrated; some 250,000 would leave annually in the 1850s. The liberals withdrew from politics, drifting toward business, and the budding capitalist class learned to side with the winners, the military.
Nonetheless, Prussia’s coercive efforts to assume control of foreign policy and military affairs, commencing with 1849’s League of Three Kings (with Saxony and Hanover) and followed by 1850’s Erfurt union, foundered on Wurttemberg and Bavarian defiance and anti-liberal self-interest along with Hannover and Saxon defection. Rebellion in Prussian ally Hesse-Cassel completed reversion to Habsburg leadership of the confederation, via the Russian-sponsored Punctation of Olmutz. Austria made the running until reconciling with the papacy in 1855 and defeat at Solferino in 1859; Prussia, nursed grievance, copied British industry (notably in the Ruhr coalfields) and state railway construction (to be pre-approved by the military).
The efficient cause of Bismarck’s rise was Schmerling’s 1861 coming to power in Austria. In establishing a Viennese parliament and pressing for reform of the German confederation, the latter prompted fears of resurgent liberalism; the Kaiser was persuaded to call for the former not so much to assert Prussia in Germany as to shore up the military / landowning class. (Improbably, the settler landlords of East Prussia were less rigidly aristocratic than the core of Brandenburg, Silesia, and Pomerania.) Bismarck’s greatness was not in mastering events but accommodating them as if he were in charge. So if Germany were to be unified, it would follow Prussia, exclude Catholic Austria, and sacrifice Volk in the east and southeast so as to avoid exposing the marcher Junkers to Russia.
1863’s Alvensleben convention with Russia secured Russian neutrality as well as the eastern lands at Poland’s expense, to the dismay of radicals and Austrians hoping to hasten the czar’s fall. Francis Joseph came to Frankfurt to promote unity but Wilhelm I declined, for Bismarck sought to isolate Austria, to effect Prussian-Habsburg alliance on little German terms. Though most segments which opposed the Hohenzollerns including radicals, imperial traditionalists, princes, and Catholics still looked to Vienna, war became inevitable – this time without the possibility of Russian intervention. Following Sadowa (Koniggratz), Bismarck settled quickly while ‘asking’ of the Reichsrat an indemnity for unconstitutional collection of taxes for rearmament. (Treitschke, a Saxon liberal of Bohemian Czech origin, converted to the Prussian cause after 1866 – laboriously in Taylor’s view.) The French war, prosecuted despite inferior population and material (rifles) but with superior railway mobility, was fought in the name of conquest not nationality. Realpolitik supplanted Europe’s concert of powers,
Bismarck’s opponents were romantic, greater Germans looking backward to a Habsburg-led empire and radicals wanting universal suffrage. In the 1860s the romantics became the Catholic Center, opposed to liberals and Junkers (for their treatment of Polish peasants), and the radicals became the Marxist Social Democrats, opposed to landowners and industrialists. Both disliked separation from Austria, both thought constitutional monarchy and an impotent Reichstag on the basis of little Germany unacceptable. Bismarck offered the vote to make the Junkers allies of the ‘most progressive and powerful’, the working classes and the capitalists. The former accepted the prizes of security and voting, the latter prosperity and soon unification. Presenting Junker and industrial interests as ‘national’ forced the two opposition groups to become particularist though in fact they were the truly nationwide groups. The Kulturkampf taught the Catholics to seek power at the expense of principle. The crash of 1873 prompted calls for economic protection: imported American and Russian grain (ironically brought in by rail) led to tariffs. State capitalism became another foe of liberalism.
Bismarck fell in 1890 when the national parties declined to a political minority; Wilhelm II was keen to set his own course, ironically still more demagogic. Meanwhile the parties had learned to extend special pleading (e.g., agrarians for further protection from imported wheat, industrialists for continuing building). Thus Bismarck had made autonomous, genuine social change impossible: the ‘world policy’, war as the means of national reconciliation, was necessary as an outlet. After Bulow’s fall, the chancellor’s office was chaotic and the Kaiser, humbled a Daily Telegraph interview, lacked authority. Successive chancellors like Bethman-Hollweg had no policy, the Kaiser no command of the state machinery. The Azbern affair, in which a German commander in Alsace imprisoned civilians, provoked both an overwhelming vote of no confidence and no follow through. But economic production newly surpassed the United Kingdom and France.
No one was in charge of pre-war decision-making but all acquiesced in support of the Habsburg empire, and equally the institutions which underpinned little Germany (for which greater Germany was unthinkable so long as Austria-Hungary contained so many Slavs). The military took overt control with Ludendorff’s accession in August 1916; the Reichstag in October declared it expected the chancellor to fall in behind military command. It required one million solders to enforce the Brest-Litovsk treaty, forces which were needed on the Western front: Schlieffen’s strategy had failed.
Following armistice the allies treated repression of the October revolution, notably Luxemburg’s murder, as the price of forestalling Bolshevism. Socialism failed the republic (but preserved militarism) by dissociating with the Spartacist movement. The Weimar Reichstag contained 19th-century parties with new names; agrarians, industrialists, Prussian conservatives, national liberals were mere interest groups, not disciplined parties, formerly bargaining with the chancellor, now with one another. The military and all manner of nationalists were merely biding time; the Freikorps, which supported Kapp’s failed 1920 putsch, was deployed to quell labor strife.
Poincare called ‘the bluff’ of hyperinflation, which was tantamount to repudiating war debt. The National Liberal Stresemann, succeeding to power in August, initiated six years of liberalism, and American loans via the Dawes plan followed (not preceded) recovery. Between 1924-29 Germany industry gained from rationalization – after which only revived armament sufficed for the cartels. Stresemann was not deceitful but only doing his best for liberal capitalism, failing in the same way Bismarck could not save the Junkers.
After Stresemann’s passing the Center was willing to ally with the miliary, while unemployment during the depression sapped the will of skilled workers, again said to be the only reliable republican block. The communists could not see the need to ally with the social democrats, who were the (another?) last hope for the republic. The National Socialists stepped in as gangsters. There was chaos in the 8 months after Bruning’s dismissal in May 1932: Hitler was Ludendorff’s successor in demagogy.
Could Germany have become a liberal democracy by renouncing foreign ambition? Victory was the lifeblood of the most important classes (the Junkers have fallen by the wayside after the 1920s), and in May 1933 the Social Democrats refused to oppose Hitler’s foreign policy. But did authoritarianism drive policy or vice versa? Without reconciliation between Austrian Catholics and socialists, the Habsburg empire could not forestall her neighbour. The Poland-German neutrality pact freed Hitler’s way to claim Bohemia, a greater Germany manoeuvre. The Czech Bohemian problem was all but as important as the Polish problem in eastern Prussia. Then followed the resumption of the draft, re-militarizing the Rhineland, and intervening in Spain, all of which seemed defensive to the west but were actually revanchist. Western powers recognized the current only in 1938-39.