The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

The Prussian constitution, and the Empire’s, remarked Wilhelm’s biographer, Emil Ludwig, “were a tissue of contradictions.” Responsibility moved from King to Chancellor-Premier, and then “back on the King, until in the inextricable meshes it disappeared once and for all. Actually no one in Prussia or in Germany was responsible in the democratic sense which today prevails in all European countries. In very truth, the Emperor King was absolute,” said Ludwig, the only limit on his authority the right of the Houses to deny supplies. Undoubtedly the German constitutional labyrinth, by the opportunities it offered for evading democratic controls, exposed its rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the anachronistic temptations of eighteenth-century autocracy.