Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871-1918 (KLEINE VANDENHOECK REIHE) (Deutsche Geshichte, 9)

by Hans-Ulrich Wehler

Text: German

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction, European History

292 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1985

About the author

Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1931-2014) was a German historian, founder of the Bielefeld School and proponent of the Sonderweg approach to modern German history.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

the more rapid and complete the 'great spurt' forward of an industrial revolution (from an agrarian to an industrial society), the more complicated will be its effects and resultant problems pp9-10

Alexander Gerschenkron

The damage done by Bismarck's period in office is infinitely greater than the benefits it has brought. The gains in power will be wiped out in the next great upheaval of world history. But the oppression wrought was a disaster which can never be put right. p61

Theodor Mommsen


Wehler wrote this book in 1973 to provide a general textbook on the subject for teaching at university level and he had a deliberate intention to be provocative and to stir up debate.

There are a few areas to highlight which get to the core of the book.

It's focus is on the political structure as a glance at the table of contents confirms: Chapter 1 gives the background on the agrarian and industrial revolutions as well as the founding of the state (pp9-32), Chapter 2 deals with economic development during the second empire (pp32-52), Chapter 3 is on the ruling system and politics (pp52-231) and then there is a short concluding section of twelve pages. So whole swathes of life are outside the scope of the study or touched on incidentally as they interact with the political system (for instance education and socialisation). It's a short book and there are limits to what you can pack in, but this is above all a political book and not a general history.

Wehler was born in 1931. Inevitably how we get to 1933 and then to 1939, why each step was a reasonable one for his parent's generation is a constant issue throughout the text. Sometimes this is explicit, generally implicit. If you read this and then something like The Kaiser's Holocaust the appearance and policies of the Third Reich are no surprise but simply the sum of a formula. Not inevitable, but the widespread acceptability of the regime is explicable as is its capacity for extreme actions. The problem with this is that the question then is how did the Weimar Republic manage to survive as long as it did.

This book was published in 1973 which is important for two reasons. Firstly it comes after the Fischer controversy. Wehler doesn't go as far as Fischer in arguing that the German political elite had deliberately started WWI in a bid to become a world power, but the idea of war as an escape from internal problems is a constant in the text. Here the issue is a major one throughout the text - the lack of international comparison.

The other point about the date of publication is that it comes after 1968. In 1968 at the Christian-Democrat party conference Chancellor Kiesinger was slapped in the face by Beate Klarsfeld as she called him a Nazi. Kiesinger had in fact been a party member. Klarsfeld's action is symbolic of the way that criticism and examination suddenly ran through German society including the university system which had preserved features established already under the Second Empire such as the way that students were expected to address and interact with staff. This book is the child not only of an outbreak of liberalism but of a preparedness to be critical of society and its structures. To examine how these work and who benefits from them rather than to accept then as neutral and tending to produce a universally acceptable common good. The risk here is that because other countries haven't gone through a similar process that the Second Empire looks particularly bad, when in some ways it was unpleasantly typical of the dominant powers in the world.

Finally Wehler also acknowledges that the book is heavily focused on Prussia. The Second Empire was a federal state and the states preserved varying degrees of independence with centralisation strongest in the military. So there is a risk of assuming that what was normal for Prussia (and Prussia itself was diverse including both the large estate agriculture of aristocrats east of the Elbe as well as bustling, Catholic, industrial cities in the Rhineland) was normal for the whole of Germany.

The story of the Second Empire is the story of the struggle with the transition to modernity. The agrarian and industrial revolutions were faster than in Britain and France and as Gerschenkron observed the more complicated the resulting problems. The attempts to deal with these, and here Bismarck is a central figure, led to a society in which power was increasingly the domain of aristocrats and certain industrial elites while others were excluded and politically demonised. This served to create a notion of a peaceful, conflict-free and united society as an ideal, but the other side of the coin was that descent, disagreement or simply non-conformance was portrayed as a threat.

Particular victims of this included Catholics, Danes, Poles, Alsatians (not the dogs, but the people), pro-Austrians, Jews and Social Democrats (and anybody who was further left). The cynicism of this remains remarkable as some of those groups (Danes, Alsatians) had unwillingly found themselves in the new German Empire only as a result of its violent expansion, others (Poles, Jews, Catholics, Social Democrats) had long-lived inside the borders of the various German states and in the case of Catholics were in some places the majority population.

Wehler's argument is that the creation of a set of internal enemies helped to provide a focus for unification after 1871 (the wars for unification themselves a way to overcome political deadlock within Prussia). You were a true and loyal German by not being Catholic, Polish, Danish, Jewish or a Social Democrat and so on. The sense of the righteousness and superiority of one group within society had a racial, social-Darwinist component and logically enough led to a sense of inevitable struggle against other, 'inferior' nations. The alienation of those groups within society was at times presented in medical terms, Bismarck described the Polish nobility as a national Trichinosis. People presented as internal enemies were not simply seen as intrinsically disloyal but not even human. Conscription was disproportionately drawn from rural areas and small towns and the officer corps dominated by the nobility explicitly to limit the influence of subversive or simply untrustworthy recruits who might harbour Liberal or, God forbid, Social Democratic political sentiments. The army may have been the school for the nation but admission was strictly controlled.

The social dominance of the aristocracy and the militarisation of society - the Chancellor always wore his military uniform when appearing in the Reichstag to speak - was internalised producing the subservient mentality that was poked fun at in Man of Straw or Der Hauptmann von Köpenick. The non-nobleman could aspire to the glamour of it all by becoming an officer in the reserve, or joining a military association. When it came to war in 1914, with the exception of Karl Liebknecht, even the numerous Social Democrats in the Reichstag voted in favour of war loans to fund the conflict. This was foreshadowed by the actions of the Catholic Centre party in voting for Colonial policies for the expansion of the fleet. On the one hand official hostility led to a desire to demonstrate loyalty, but equally perhaps the internalisation of the values promulgated from above was insidious.

In short Wehler describes a revolution from above. While in Thinking in Systems one reads that the purpose of hierarchies is for the upper levels to benefit the lower strata the opposite principle was applied in this case.

This began in agriculture with the emancipation of the Prussian peasantry from 1811. Personal freedom was bought either by ceding land or by paying cash. Prussia established a mortgage bank for peasants which provided a source of finance to buy personal freedom from the aristocrats. This enabled the growth of large estate agriculture, particularly east of the Elbe. Agricultural production increased. Surpluses were exported. As a result the aristocracy were in the first half of the nineteenth century cash rich and enthusiastic supporters of free-trade. Unsurprisingly noblemen like Otto von Bismarck turned out also to be enthusiastic supporters of the Prussia that made them wealthy.

After 1848 political liberals were in favour of a united Germany nation - possibly including Austria, while urban populations and industrial production was growing. Bismarck's solution was to split the liberal movement in Prussia by unifying Germany and then to lock in conservative control over the new state. Electoral boundaries for the Reichstag for which there was universal manhood suffrage, were set in 1874 and never revised which led to rural areas being over represented and urban areas under represented as time went on. However since the Second Empire was a federal state the consistent parts had their electoral laws for their own assemblies. Prussia retained a public ballot on a three class system which was designed to over represent the wealthy, the cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck had limited franchises, Saxony one of the most industrialised areas of pre-world war one Europe was to introduce a three class voting system in 1894 which was one way to forestall Social-Democratic political influence.

Unification produced a new set of challenges, nation building proceeded through both negative means like the Kulturkampf against Catholics, but later in a 'positive' manner by campaigns the movement to build a fleet champion by Tirpitz which mobilised mass support. Tirpitz after his resignation went on to found the extreme right-wing/proto-fascist Fatherland Party whose co-founder Wolfgang Kapp organised a Putsch against the government in March 1920.

At the same time civil service reforms created a system of vetting applicants on the basis of presumed political sympathies which largely excluded Catholics and led to the upper ranks of the administration and judiciary being disproportionately occupied by aristocrats. Naturally given the length of the human working life this means that the national and state governments of Weimar Germany remained conservative, hostile to democracy and in favour of policies that supported the aristocracy - von Buelow's tariff of 1902 which protected German agriculture and large-scale heavy manufacturing from foreign imports was to remain in force until 1945. The cost of this was born by the growth area of small-scale light manufacturing and the urban population whose rise in wages was largely off set by the increasing costs of food. Germany's inability to feed itself was demonstrated during the First World War and the implications in policy making in later years are explored in The Taste of War.

The campaign to build a fleet brought together social-Darwinism (winning that place in the sun), heavy industry and mass mobilisation of popular support (possibly because so many were excluded from the army). This kind of linkage though was not unique to Germany. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie lobbied to have the USA develop a modern fleet of steel warships with extra thick steel armour. The contracts this would provide for his steel foundries were of course entirely coincidental to his pure patriotic feeling (along which lines isn't there a further sinister note to Kipling urging the USA to "take up the white man's burden" when one remembers that with the exception of Siam and Abyssinia colonies could only be acquired by seizing them from another coloniser?).

Of course when the political discourse stresses the inevitability of conflict and the need to prepare for conflict - some 75% of the Imperial budget went on military expenditure - in the face of actual conflict it becomes very difficult to back down.

Since Ranke said that every age was next to God meaning that every age was unique and had to be understood in its own context - and since the Second Empire was not unique in its attitudes towards Social Democracy and trades unions perhaps we can say that every age is sick in its own way. Sick with the inheritance of preceding times and due to gift distinct troubles on to the next generation. What stands out from Wehler's account is that Germany had a constitution which enshrined rights which the state ignored in certain cases - as in the case of minority languages. A tradition of legalism sat alongside a certain self-interested freedom in taking arbitrary, contra-constitutional action. Here perhaps we see Bismarckism as Bonapartism - a naked dictatorship with a constitutional fig leaf to create an impression of decency.

[User F. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man versteht die Kritik daran (das Buch ist im Grunde eine Anklageschrift), aber man versteht auch manche Irritation mit jüngeren Darstellungen mit vielleicht allzu hohem Wohlfühlfaktor besser.

[Shaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book for history-nerds and anyone interested in the history of Germany!

[Alex Helling · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The German Empire 1871-1918 Hans-Ulrich Wehler provides a look at the second german reich from unification to its downfall at the end of the first world war through a socio-economic lens. The lens may be socio-economic but the book is about politics and governance. The industrial development of Germany provides context and the initial starting point but the vast majority of the book is on the evolution of the political system and distribution of power within Germany.

It is explicitly a book that takes a theory that pretty much everything in the Empire politically is about the aristocracy maintaining control; Bismarck managed to beat the liberals politically then everything that might seem a concession is about maintaining power within the elite. While interesting I think Wehler takes it rather too far, minimising individual action or other motivations too much. I take this view as in some areas, like foreign policy it does not work; e.g. he makes no mention of the alliance with Austria (and its competition over the Balkans) in alienating Russia, instead putting it all to economic factors. In particular it is unconvincing that fear that the concentration of power can only be maintained for a while longer without a war propells Germany into WWI - if so why the 1914 crisis rather than one of the others? He also goes out of scope to attribute the fall of Weimar to the same factors - which he clearly does not have space to sufficiently demonstrate.

While much of the book hangs together reasonably well there are some things I find a bit contradictory. “The breakthrough of the industrial revolution” happened in Germany between 1873-1895 yet Wehler also points to this mostly being for most of these 22 years a period of downturns in the industrial economy (pp32-3, to be fair it is only clear it is a downturn in industry for one of the three downturns, the other two could be taken across the economy but missing industry). But the figures he gives does not imply a downturn; massive increases in investment in industry and output (p39-40). Another is the suggestion that the German state had no ability to use fiscal tools to influence the economy (p50), yet huge sums are spent on the army and navy, is that not fiscal?

There is a certain level of initial knowledge needed for this book - with quite a few names linked to processes unexplained; for example what are the Scharnhorst reforms? (I know this one); the liberal views of Bennigsen? (I have a vague idea); or the right wing Heidelberg Programme? (no clue!) It is not a serious issue, particularly in the age of the internet any reader can just look them up, but it would not have been too difficult to fix in the book itself.

So I have a lot of quibbles. But ultimately what I thought most a problem was how negative it was. The German empire did some pretty progressive things; take pensions and social insurance (barely mentioned), or the massive expansion of education (that somehow is turned to a negative as an expansion of social control). It would have been a bit more balanced to take the good as well as the bad!

On the subject of negative, this review has noted far more bad than good. But that is in part simply because I don't agree with the theory, I am unconvinced. You may well be.

[Marina Koerber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ein fantastisches Buch... ich werde es bestimmt noch einmal lesen. Hier zitiere ich einfach den letzten Satz, der mit jedem Tag verständlicher wird.
"Bis 1945, ja in manchen Bereichen darüber hinaus, wirkte sich, durch ältere historische Traditionen und neue Erfahrungen begünstigt, der fatale Erfolg der kaiserlichen Machteliten aus: In der Anfälligkeit für die autoritäre Politik; der Demokratiefeindschaft im Bildungs-und Parteiwesen; im Einfluss vorindustrieller Führungsgruppen, Normen, Wunschbilder; in der Zähigkeit der deutschen Staatsideologie; im Mythos der Bürokratie, in der Manipulation des politischen Antisemitismus – so beginnt ein langer Katalog schwerer historischer Belastungen. Schon deshalb bleibt die Kenntnis der Geschichte des Deutschen Kaiserreiches von 1871 bis 1918 unabdingbare Voraussetzung für ein Verständnis der deutschen Geschichte… " Seite 238/239

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book, which I bought on reading Wehler’s 2014 obituary in The Guardian. It can take me a while to get round to books; too many snag my interest. This important history based on his university lectures is written for the greater part in dense and long academic sentences. It traces the origins of the underlying problems of German society and politics back their roots in the hierarchical, socially divided and undemocratic German Empire. This far from unified assembly of diverse independent states varied from the dominant and highly militarised Prussia with vast feudal estates east of the Elbe to tiny princedoms. Saxony and Brandenburg had undergone relatively successful and rapid industrial revolutions and an extensive new railway network helped to pull the country together. Growing prosperity had suppressed some urges for reform.

However, Germany remained backward in other respects, dominated by feudal barons with a long military tradition. Their power was reinforced by a large civil service, a very weak Reichstag and a very strong tradition of social deference, all reinforced by Bismarck and inculcated in schools and churches. Fear of revolution, particularly after 1848 led Bismarck to use repeated military campaigns to unite the country, suppressing rising urges for democracy and reform. Antisemitism was a long-standing outlet for blame and communism was another bogeyman useful to unite a deeply conservative society. Great Britain was admired for its successful empire and feared lest its democratic traditions infect Germany. Military and later naval leagues united the populace. In 1918 all this collapsed but the revolution which deposed the Kaiser created a botched Weimar Republic that failed through poor political leadership to establish an effective democracy. Most of the pressures for reform remained unresolved. Coupled with the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, this led directly to the rise of Hitler and the National Socialists.

[Harrison Helms · Rating 3 out of 5]

The classic statement of the Sonderweg thesis - that an explanation of the rise of National Socialism in 1933 must begin with the failure of the German bourgeoisie in the Kaiserreich to revolutionize, or break away from (aufbrechen) pre-industrial social structures. No German historian today would agree with this view, but you can’t deny the sophistication of Wehler’s argument.

[Rijk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Als je één boek gaat lezen over de Duitse geschiedenis 1871 - 1918, laat het dan dit boek zijn.

[Frankie Finch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an explicitly Marxist interpretation of the Second Reich. For what it is, it is an excellent recap of the social dynamics of the period following German unification. The author, like all Marxists, has a teleological interpretation of history that is flat out mistaken, but at least the facts are well presented.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good.