Chapter Seventeen
In Britain the birth of the industrial age had occurred messily behind a thousand privately owned hedgerows, but in Prussia it emerged as the direct result of government policy. And while private property societies experienced a land revolution before the industrial, in Prussia they developed side by side. The circumstances and the sequence of events combined powerfully to the making of a state that was both modern and denuded of democratic resources. Out of that background came regimes responsible for two world wars and a society that for twelve years represented the antithesis of civilization.
The impetus for change was created by catastrophe. At the battle of Jena in 1806 Prussia’s iconic army whose professionalism had epitomized martial arts in the eighteenth century, and whose military ethos permeated Prussian society, was smashed by an invading force of French conscripts. The genius of Napoleon was not even necessary for France’s victory. The decisive encounter in the battle, the one that destroyed the Prussian king’s main force, was won by French citizen-soldiers under General Louis-Nicolas Davout without the presence of their great commander. Prussia’s stunned survivors understood what it meant to face a nation capable of directing all its human resources onto the battlefield thanks to the efficiency of mass mobilization. To meet the challenge, reform was needed, root and branch.
The birth of the new Prussia began on October 9, 1807, with a royal edict issued by the king but formulated by his chief minister, Baron Karl von Stein. Entitled “Edict regarding Facilitated Ownership and Free Use of Real Estate, [and] Personal Conditions of the Rural Populace,” its effect was to abolish serfdom and sweep aside a centuries-old tradition of restricting land ownership to the nobility, with the middle-classes confined to trade and the peasantry to land use. “Every inhabitant of our states,” the edict declared, “is entitled without any limitations to possess immobile [landed] properties of any kind.”
The law of entail, long used by the aristocracy to keep estates within the family, was abolished in order to create a larger land market and to make easier the granting of mortgages and other forms of credit. Like Jefferson and the eighteenth-century British Empire, Stein justified the change as a form of social engineering that would create property owners of the middle class and make them “the supporters of order, the strongest pillar of the existing monarchy and the class with the greatest obligation to the state.”
The edict, later strengthened by Stein’s successor, Karl von Hardenberg, also set the conditions for an industrial revolution by decreeing that every trade and occupation was “open to talent” whether noble or peasant, rather than being restricted to middle-class members of a guild or trade organization. The abolition of feudal restrictions theoretically created a marketplace where employers and workers were free to negotiate the value of labor. In law at least, Prussia’s land and industrial revolutions began in the same year. Finally, the feudal administration based on manor courts in the countryside and the jurisdiction of trade guilds in the cities was to be replaced by elected provincial assemblies and town councils.
The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, who had heard the guns of Jena and recorded the celebrity-impact of seeing Napoleon riding by—“It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it”—made it a central theme of his philosophy that history develops through the encounter between an ideal of perfect freedom and the reality of individual life. A Napoleonic hero, imbued with a totally self-realizing consciousness of freedom, could personally shift history onto a new level, but ordinary individuals had to accept “that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”
It was in this sense that Stein and Hardenberg understood their reforms to be a step toward greater freedom, not by making the state more democratic, but by making it more effective. In practice, the Prussian state became one of the most efficient in the world, but whether it realized an accompanying degree of freedom was more open to question.
Eighteenth-century Prussia had been an eastern province, centered on Berlin, bordered by the Baltic and Poland. But during the war with France, it had absorbed much of Poland, and for its contribution to the defeat of Napoleon, it was rewarded in 1815 with a block of western states along the Rhine to act as a barrier against any future French aggression. The new Prussia was a strangely elongated, artificial country, stretching almost a thousand miles from France to Russia. In 1818, it was formally enclosed within a single customs union, the Zollverein, later extended in 1834 to include most of Germany. The first beneficiaries of reform were, therefore, the bourgeoisie, meaning the traders, small manufacturers, and commercial businesses, set free from the constriction of urban guilds and suddenly presented with a vastly expanded market cleared of tariff restrictions. The bourgeoisie flourished especially in the west, where urban prosperity spilled over into a countryside where French influence had ensured that peasant holdings were already held virtually as property.
Further east, in traditional Prussia’s deeply conservative society, the changes caused widespread anxiety. Paradoxically the mood received its most eloquent expression in The Communist Manifesto in Karl Marx’s famous paragraph raging against the bourgeoisie whose embrace of the profit motive had “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations . . . it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life.”
Social upheaval exacerbated a need for national identity. The new enlarged Prussia was barely a generation old, and the idea of Germany existed only as myth and language. Most Prussians chose to look back to the smaller country of Frederick the Great, enlightened and militarily powerful, the power that with the eastern provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Brunswick had eventually brought about Napoleon’s defeat at the battles of Leipzig in 1813 and Waterloo in 1815. This Prussia was exemplified not by the well-tended fields in the west but by the vast, sandy, European plain stretching eastward into what had once been Poland and disappearing without a boundary into the mist-shrouded marshlands around the Baltic. And the ideal Prussians were not its efficient bourgeois merchants but the sternly disciplined Junkers who possessed this land.
Like the hidalgos, the younger sons who colonized Latin America because they could find no land for themselves in Spain, Prussia’s eastern states were originally occupied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by land-hungry junge Herren, or young lords, a label that became shortened to Junker. Deeply influenced by the Sarmatian values and serf economy practiced by Poland’s powerful aristocracy, the Junkers developed a caste mentality based on military discipline and total loyalty to the Prussian crown—the pejorative label to describe their unquestioning obedience was “corpse discipline”—and an absolute command over the peasant farmers on their estates, known as Gutsherrschaft, or judicial lordship.
In contrast to the small landholdings of west Prussia, four out of five Junker farms covered more than 250 acres, and many boasted additional forest and hunting grounds that extended across uncounted square miles. Much of the low-lying land beside the oozy rivers in the Oder basin and along the Baltic coast was virtually swamp, and Otto von Bismarck, himself a Junker lord, used to recall the importance of controlling the elaborate system of ditches and walls to save his cornfields from flooding. The great danger, he would say, was that “those who wish to operate with open pastures [peasant farmers with livestock] would win the upper hand from those who work with tilled, and water-free fields, and that all would be ruined by flood.”
The distinctive feature of Gutsherrschaft was the social and economic power it conferred on the feudal lord over the peasants on his estate, not merely making them subject to his manorial court, but—in theory at least—acknowledging his near-parental degree of control over their lives. Discipline was routinely enforced by physical beatings, and even the peasants referred to themselves as Untertanen, or subjects. A reciprocal obligation of care was placed on the feudal lord, but since he determined its extent, the relationship was tilted in his favor.
As late as 1912, the decidedly conservative landlord Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau could still give a classic account of the Gutsherrschaft relationship. He had always made it his paternalist duty, he said, “to be available to my people at all times and concerning any matter. To be sure, I was not lenient; rather, I insisted that, on the estate, obedience was the highest principle.” In fact, he added, “I had to enforce order and obedience with an iron fist.” On the other hand, though poorly paid, his workers were warmly housed, and those who behaved well and accepted their landlord’s guidance even in such personal matters as marital problems could expect to be “provided for during old age.”
What made the iron fist necessary, however, was the long tradition of peasant resistance to landlord power, especially in defense of their rights to graze animals on common ground, and to run pigs and take wood from the forest. As Bismarck implicitly admitted in his allusion to their attempts to influence flood controls, they continued to do so after the 1807 reforms, exploiting the confusion as market forces and the law gradually dismantled the intricate system of duties and customs inherent in Gutsherrschaft. But those same forces brought an end to the peasants themselves. Widely separated strips of land and unenclosed meadows and fields were incorporated into compact, boundaried farms where the poorest among them now worked as employed laborers. But the most successful became prosperous farmers with enough money to buy estates from Junkers who could not adapt to the new conditions. By the end of the nineteenth century, no more than a third of eastern Prussia’s land remained in traditional aristocratic hands.
For half a century, the new owners, both former peasants and wealthy outsiders, broadly prospered as they adjusted production to market demands, improving the breeds of cattle and sheep, and fertilizing their fields with nitrogen-fixing crops and manure from heavier, more numerous livestock. Under German’s legal code, the land was owned by an individual male on behalf of his family, and the 1850 constitution gave a straightforward guarantee, “Property is inviolable,” declaring it to be protected from seizure except by due process of law.
Working virtual prairies with low-waged labor and horse-drawn machinery, eastern Prussia’s farmers grew fat on the demands of a growing population and improved transport to city centers, as canal barges replaced horse-drawn wagons, and were themselves overtaken by railroads. They found a growing market in Britain for their cheaply priced wheat, while Berliners bought their rye, the standby cereal that could be grown on the poorest soil. Agriculture was profitable enough for the area under cultivation to triple in size during the 1830s and 1840s.
Despite the number of newcomers, the Junker caste retained its old ethos, thanks to the Landschaften, the networks of landowners that provided both economic and social support for their members. Set up in the eighteenth century, the Landschaften offered a crucial source of investment through its credit unions, and politically they helped their members assert individual property rights against peasants defending communal rights to the use of forests and common land. The practical advantages of caste loyalty were obvious even to new recruits whose grandfathers might have fought to defend peasant rights.
Within months of the 1807 reform edict, the Junkers found that the old feudal remedies of manorial court decisions, backed up by physical beatings, were no longer effective. Faced by a rent and labor strike in 1808, the owners of the six-thousand-acre Stavenow estate in Brandeburg, together with seventeen other Landschaft members, turned instead to the untried system of local government created in 1807. In their petition to the district’s freshly appointed commissioners, they admitted that their own courts could “offer no further help whatsoever” and asked for the assistance of the “local military” to enforce their demands for rent.
It was at this local level, and in the Pomeranian, Brandenburg, or Silesian state assemblies where land laws were administered and enforced by the increasingly effective state apparatus of police, judges, and prison, rather than in Berlin where legislation was enacted, that eastern Prussian property owners initially sought the political representation they needed to protect their interests.
However, the economic importance of agriculture in general—as late as the 1860s, two thirds of the population lived in the country and 30 percent of Prussian revenues came from taxes on land—ensured that the absolutist government of the Hohenzollern kings would heed the concerns of landowners. The geographical position of Berlin in Junker territory guaranteed that theirs would be the rural voice most clearly heard, and understandably the roughly nine thousand owners of the largest Junker estates took the lead in asserting property rights.
Their influence showed itself in privileges that allowed the Junkers to escape 90 percent of the land taxes levied on west Prussian farms. They also benefited from legislation that restricted the movement of labor, thus making it more difficult for underpaid laborers to leave their farms. Even the final abolition of manorial courts in 1848, ostensibly a setback for Junker power, saved them the expense of an institution they reckoned had become “far more costly than profitable” and was less efficient at protecting their interests than provincial courts and militia.
Seen in this perspective, the development of Prussian land ownership broadly resembled an early stage of the private property economies. Had the precedents of 1688 and 1776 been followed, at some point a clash would occur between the royal power and the landowners’ drive for control over taxation, forcing the latter to seek allies and articulate ideas of rights and liberties that were immediate and practical rather than aspects of a remote Hegelian ideal.
That moment came in the convulsive year of 1861 when other societies across the Northern Hemisphere were about to be transformed by the freeing of serfs and the outbreak of civil war. At least as significant was the failure of Prussia to metamorphose into a democracy at the same time.
In 1861 the government of the new king, Wilhelm I, adopted a policy of raising taxes to fund a strengthened army and a more aggressive foreign policy. As a consequence the loopholes that had allowed Junkers to escape most of the tax paid by Rhineland farmers were eliminated. This warning that loyalty to the royal family of Hohenzollerns offered no guarantee of protection of their interests galvanized the Junkers into action.
A new political party, the Progressive Party, was formed in 1861 with the aim of making the executive arm of government answerable to the Prussian Landtag or legislature rather than to the king. Recognizing that royal power had hitherto been unconstrained by the Landtag, Heinrich von Sybel, the outstanding Prussian historian of the period and himself a member of the party, explicitly compared nineteenth-century Prussia to sixteenth-century England: “Today, the royal prerogative is stronger in Germany than in England; it maintains a position comparable in some ways to that of the Tudors.”
Laboriously he explained that a parliamentary party should have “the right to approve state revenues on an annual basis” and that the royal government lacked any representative standing because it was responsible only to the king. The manifesto that he and his fellow Junkers drew up simply demanded that “government commits to the tax laws and the spending budgets approved by parliament; and that it does not pass any sort of laws without parliamentary assent.”
Demonstrating their enthusiasm for a democratic goal that would serve their interests, large numbers of Junkers joined the Progressives, including the party’s two leading figures, Leopold von Hoverbeck and Hans Victor von Unruh. Belatedly they started to seek political allies to challenge the power of royal government, especially among the rapidly growing industrial sector.
The timing of Prussia’s industrial revolution, in tandem with the evolution of property in land, ensured that it could not follow the path of the private property economies where factories were financed through rural capital, and the recycled profits of colonial and slave-based trade. Although two Prussian businesses that would achieve iconic status, the Krupp steelworks and the Siemens electrical company, had begun in that way, by 1850 they employed barely fifty people between them. The largest textile and metal producers were some two million craftsmen and women—90 percent of weavers still used a handloom, thirty years after steam and water had wiped them out in Britain. Thirty years after reform, Prussian business still struggled to develop industrial plants or to build an efficient transport system. It found a solution across the Atlantic.
In 1841, after five years in Pennsylvania, Friederich List, by then a university professor, published the results of his observations in The National System of Political Economy. Prussia, he suggested, could benefit not from American democracy and liberty but from the American example of using the government’s financial power to develop a managed industrialized economy. Although acknowledging that “It is bad policy . . . to promote everything by employing social [i.e., government] powers, where things may . . . be better promoted by private exertions,” List was adamant that “it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power.”
Railroads represented the perfect example of the advantages of public investment. Not only could government provide the finance, it was also able to see all the strategic considerations, rather than having to follow a purely commercial rationale, that determined where a line should be constructed. The national payoff from railroads was fourfold: they connected suppliers to markets, offered protection against famine, made defense easier, and, according to List’s Hegelian conclusion, “The iron rails become a nerve system which, on the one hand, strengthens public opinion, and, on the other hand, strengthens the power of the state for police and governmental purposes.”
Prussia’s powerful bureaucracy, who were in charge of administration at every level of government, county, provincial, and state, and, like China’s mandarins, were promoted through an examination system, adopted List’s thesis as its economic bible. Every kind of manufacture, from steel mills to sugar beet refineries, came under officialdom’s close supervision. Its powers were brought together in a far-reaching commercial code that Prussia’s Trade Ministry enacted in 1849, allowing officials to manage each of the important components of manufacturing, from raising capital through the issue of bonds to the siting of factories and the movement of labor. The railroads found that routes, freight charges, and even timetables were all subject to government direction
Well financed and carefully nurtured, the textile industry grew by half from the early 1840s to 1860; mining and metal production tripled in value; and the newborn railroad companies increased their traffic by 20 percent a year. But by the late 1850s, manufacturers, and especially the railroads, were powerful enough to want to be rid of their government nannies. A lobbying campaign for greater freedom, orchestrated by chambers of commerce and trade organizations, was already underway when the Progressive Party was launched. Its call for constitutional reforms that would make government and civil servants answerable to the people rather than to the king drew an enthusiastic response from both business and industry.
The first opportunity for the new alliance of property owners to assert their rights came in 1862 when the royal government introduced a high-taxation military budget to the elected chamber of the Landtag. By a clear majority, the united representatives of landowners, industrialists, and businessmen rejected the budget. In retaliation, Wilhelm I appointed as his new Minister-Präsident, or Prime Minister, the Junker Otto von Bismarck.
A classic photograph of Bismarck portrays him in gold-braided military uniform, standing as an equal with field marshals Helmuth von Moltke, the army’s chief of staff, and Albrecht von Roon, the war minister, although his only army experience was as a reserve lieutenant. In his speeches, he harked back to his Junker origins as though he embodied their disciplined, rural qualities. But the Iron Chancellor’s air of solidity, the drooping jowls, heavy mustache, and quilted eyelids, all were deceptive. It was with the wiliness of a coyote that he played upon the dreams and nightmares of Germans and non-Germans alike to herd them in the direction he wished them to go. “Bismarck’s dodge,” remarked Princess Victoria, the king’s British daughter-in-law, “is always to make the Germans think they are going to be attacked, wronged, insulted, and their interests betrayed if he were not there to protect them.”
The qualities were apparent in his first speech to the Landtag’s budget committee in 1862, when he warned them of fearful dangers ahead, and Prussia’s need for high military spending to defend itself. “The great questions of the time,” he predicted, “will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions . . . but by iron and blood.” When the deputies still refused to vote for higher taxes, Bismarck bypassed them by declaring the previous year’s budget to be still in effect.
This illegal move provoked nationwide opposition, and one protest meeting in Frankfurt attracted business owners with enterprises worth a total of three hundred million taler (approximately $250 million). But Bismarck countered with alarmist warnings of the threat to Prussia’s northern and southern borders from Denmark and Austria. Out of a sense of patriotic duty some Junkers did succumb to his appeal to support the government, but it was Bismarck’s wooing of industry that was most damaging to the campaign for representative government.
In the summer of 1862, the Trade Ministry announced a new commercial code that cut away a swath of government regulations on business, among them restrictions on the movement of labor, and allowed manufacturers to set their own economic agendas. Then in September, a series of large contracts were put out for military armaments, clothing, and victualling, the start of an extraordinary decade of government expenditure among steel manufacturers, coal miners, textile producers, and large farmers. Soon Progressives began to note that industrialists were no longer attending political gatherings in opposition to Bismarck.
In October 1864 Alfred Krupp, the steel magnate, gave a lead to his fellow manufacturers by advancing a two-million-taler credit to the War Ministry for the purchase of weapons. One after another, the mining, construction, and railroad industries followed with different schemes for underwriting the financial credibility of Bismarck’s autocratic rule in return for government contracts that benefited their businesses. Their choice was brutally characterized by Marx and Engels as “a commercial and industrial class which is too weak and dependent to take power and rule in its own right . . . exchanging the right to rule for the right to make money.”
The final dismantlement of the movement for political reform occurred when nationalist fervor swung Junker opinion solidly behind the government once it committed Prussia to war, first against neighboring Denmark in 1864 and, more crucially, against Austria in 1866. In an influential newspaper article written after the decisive battle of Konigrättz in 1866, Hermann Baumgarten, a founding member of the Progressives, confessed that the victory over the Austrians, gained at the cost of seven thousand Prussian casualties, had convinced him he had been wrong to oppose Bismarck’s armaments program. “We have seen that these much-maligned Junkers know how to fight and die for the Fatherland,” he wrote. “We will limit our bourgeois conceitedness a bit and be content with maintaining an honorable position beside the aristocracy.”
Their reward and Bismarck’s ultimate goal were gained in 1871 with Prussia’s third great victory, this time over France, and the proclamation of Wilhelm I as emperor of a united Germany in the mirrored hall at Versailles. With a population of forty-nine million, an industrial base about to become the most productive in Europe, and an army that had no rival, a new world power had been born. But the political cost was high.
“The Bismarck System is developing terribly quickly in exactly the way I always feared,” Max von Forckenberg, the mayor of Berlin, lamented to his Junker friend Franz von Stauffenberg in 1879. “Universal compulsory military service, unreasonable and exorbitant indirect taxes, a disciplined and humiliated Reichstag, and public opinion that is corrupted by the battle of material interests and thus helpless.”
By then, it was too late. The new Germany was engulfed by the worldwide recession in 1873, and before its effects were over, the mechanization of North American grain lands began to flood Europe with cheap cereals. In response, after a decade of increasingly free trade in agricultural and industrial produce, Bismarck and his successors built a wall of tariffs and health regulations in the 1870s and 1880s to restrict imports of cheap foreign manufactured goods and food. The policy known as “the marriage of iron and rye” apparently protected agriculture as much as industry, and an elaborate system of subsidies to promote the export of Junker wheat seemed to show the political influence of Prussia’s large landowners. A program of nationalization brought strategic industries such as railroads and telegraph companies into government ownership, while electrical and steel companies were the recipients of lucrative government contracts in the 1890s following the inception of a massive program of warship construction.
The final part of Bismarck’s truly astonishing invention of the modern corporate state came as part of his battle with the rising appeal of Socialism. From its foundation in 1869, the Social Democratic party would grow to become the largest single political party in the Reichstag by 1913—because it promised a government responsive to the needs of the propertyless. To counter its popularity, Bismarck first banned all Socialist activity, then in 1879 pushed through three pieces of groundbreaking legislation designed to remove its chief attraction—the creation of a national health scheme, an accident insurance system, and an old-age pension for German workers.
What paid for this was Prussia’s new model of managed capitalism. Unlike the first industrial revolution, the second that grew out of chemicals and electronics required systematic research and development, a complex production process, and large numbers of scientifically literate employees. To supply these needs, Germany’s ministries of education and commerce worked closely with employers to match university research to industrial needs and improve an already highly developed system of science and technical education.
Even German agriculture benefited from their collaboration. In 1911 the work of Fritz Haber at the University of Karlsruhe, who developed a method of deriving ammonia from nitrogen, was allied to that of Carl Bosch at the chemicals company, BASF, to produce artificial fertilizer on an industrial scale. It is estimated that half the protein in each human today is made from chemically fixed nitrogen, and that a third of the world’s population owe their lives to the process, a total that even outweighs the millions killed by the high explosives and poison gas that Haber also developed. The logic of Germany’s new corporate capitalism was undeniable. The nature of its government was less clear.
Nearly every adult male could vote, and the lower houses of both the Prussian Landtag and the German Reichstag exercised increasing influence, although no power, over legislation. But the appetite for making the executive responsible to the legislature rather than to the king had gone. A supposedly representative system of government in fact left ultimate power concentrated entirely in the royal executive.
In the mid-twentieth century, German historians, led by Hans Rosenberg, argued that Bismarck’s substitution of authoritarian for democratic government condemned Germany to follow a particular path of political development, the Sonderweg, that led to the imposition of Nazi rule in the 1930s. The lack of an ingrained tradition of democracy, it was argued, made it easy for thuggish bigots to seize the levers of power. Intrinsic to this argument was the role of the Junkers in promoting Prussian loyalty and discipline as national and social qualities rather than merely military virtues.
“If a manufacturing enterprise is to flourish,” Carl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg, founder of the Neunkirch Steel Works, declared in the 1890s, “it must be organized in a military, not parliamentary, way . . . all take the field against a common enemy when their king calls them to arms, so the members of the Neunkirch Works stand united as one man when it comes to battling competition as well as the dark forces of revolution.” Although not a Junker, Stumm-Halberg adopted their ethos, declaring that every aspect of his workers’ lives was subject to his discipline—their behavior outside the factory, their political affiliations, and even their private lives, to the point of deciding whether an employee should get married: “If you don’t follow my advice,” he warned, “I will terminate your employment, obviously with notice.”
As Rosenberg amply illustrated, similar values extolling the need for corpse discipline were transmitted by the brothers and sons of Junker estate owners, who provided a disproportionate number of officers in the all-powerful army, and senior officials in government ministries. Yet it was not the power of the Junkers that was toxic to democracy so much as their weakness. Despite their ingrained sense of social superiority—Bavarian farmers used to say that the typical Prussian Junker believed that “humanity begins at the rank of baron”—they failed to assert fundamental rights against the state that were claimed by the lowliest American and British property owner, and indeed by ordinary farmers in Bavaria.
The political impotence of the Junkers was exposed when Bismarck’s successor, Count Leo von Caprivi, handpicked by the Emperor Wilhelm II, boasted in 1890 of his freedom from landowners’ influence, declaring that, although a Prussian, he possessed “Kein Ar und Halme” not an acre or blade (of grass). Ignoring furious protests from the Junkers’ Agrarian League, he signed free-trade deals with Russia and Romania to import their wheat at low prices in exchange for the export of German machinery. His policy reflected the sea change in Germany’s economy. Agriculture, in 1871 the country’s biggest employer with almost 49 percent of the workforce, and its biggest earner, supplying 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), had been brushed aside by the growth of industry. By 1907, barely a third of German workers were still employed on the land; farming contributed 23 percent of GDP; and the accelerating exodus of country dwellers, either to cities or abroad, especially to the United States, had reduced the rural population by one fifth, with the sharpest falls occurring in the Junker homeland of eastern Prussia.
In The Stechlin, a book that encapsulated the atmosphere of the 1890s, the novelist Theodor Fontane used a telling metaphor to describe the growing futility of the Junkers. “They’re no longer the pillars holding everything up,” he wrote, “they’re the old stone and moss roof that still goes on straining and pushing down on things, but can’t offer protection against storms any longer.”
The failure of Prussia’s landowners to force property rights onto the political agenda of the united Germany when they had the power to do so was exacerbated by the simultaneous absence of any statement of innate human rights. In the 1871 constitution drawn up for the new empire, a German was declared to have the right “to have a fixed dwelling, to trade, to be appointed to public offices, to acquire property,” but these were expressly “civic rights,” created by law, and to be enjoyed only by Germans. Although the newly constituted Supreme Court did step in to sustain such rights in both civil and criminal cases, it also supported as a matter of course the government’s greater right to override them in the interests of “national security.”
The lack of any concept of natural rights for individuals, either through their possession of property or by being built into the constitutional foundation of the state, proved to be of fatal significance. During the later years of Bismarck’s dominance, he deliberately chose to bolster his power by whipping up waves of nationalist hatred against Catholics, Poles, Danes, and Socialists. During these campaigns, the Supreme Court could be relied upon to uphold arbitrary arrests and confiscation of property by police and prosecutors whenever the executive argued that the safety of the empire required it. Not by chance, the most sustained resistance to Bismarck’s fear-inducing tactics was voiced in the legislatures of former independent states, such as Bavaria and Saxony, where landed interests were most strongly established.
The weakness was incorporated into Germany’s 1894 Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB), probably the most comprehensive and effective codification of civil law in existence. Its clarity and logic have led to its adoption as a model in one guise or another by countries around the world, from Japan in the nineteenth century to China in the twenty-first.
The five volumes cover the whole range of law, but the third volume, relating to ownership and its transfer, reveals a detail that points to a difference in its origin from codes based on common law. Both common law and the BGB separate the transfer of property in land into two phases that roughly speaking cover the exchange of payment and exchange of rights to the property. But through the morass of complications in the common law, it is possible to discern that the transfer conveys property rights that have been sustainable against the crown or state since the sixteenth century. The BGB conveys ownership guaranteed by the law of the land, but in extreme situations the code’s guarantees cannot be defended against state intervention without one further safeguard—a constitutional commitment to innate human rights, an emblem of democracy since 1948.
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Lacking executive authority and any philosophy of individual rights to win broader popular appeal, the Junkers became increasingly isolated and so short of electoral support they routinely had to resort to ballot-box fraud in order to return sympathetic representatives to the Reichstag, even from their east Prussian stronghold. Nor could tariffs insulate them from the catastrophic drop in the worldwide price of cereals. While western and southern German farmers adapted by rearing livestock, growing beets for the sugar industry, and developing market gardens for city consumption, the east remained hamstrung by its dependence upon cereals. The introduction of a floor price for wheat in 1906 was less a reflection of Junker power than of Junker desperation.
It was not by chance that the Agrarian League founded in 1893 to represent Junker interests resorted to blaming their ills on a Jewish conspiracy incorporating free enterprise, free trade, and liberal opinion. Like Hitler’s thugs in the 1920s, the aristocratic landowners of east Prussia had become political outsiders.
Private property societies in the last half of the twentieth century took the outcome of Germany’s managed corporate society as a dreadful warning. The tragedy of the Holocaust seemed to flow directly from the country’s culture of obedience to authority shaped by the Junkers and built into its political structure. But among the many strands that led to twelve years of Nazi tyranny, Junker influence was conspicuously absent. Germany’s democracy failed because no system of individual rights was established before the country was industrialized.