CHAPTER ONE
Count Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, minister-president of Prussia and chancellor designate of a newly united German empire, was a deeply worried man as the year 1870 drew to its close. Although the Prussian-led German armies had decisively defeated the French on the battlefields — indeed, Emperor Napoleon III had been captured and his government had collapsed — the enemy stubbornly kept fighting. For three months, heads of the German states and their representatives had been waiting at Versailles to prepare for the celebration of German unification, set to take place in the palace’s grandiose Hall of Mirrors as soon as hostilities ended. Alas, the French did not yield, but kept up a desperate resistance.
Bismarck could have had his peace in early September, when a hastily formed Republican government was willing to negotiate a settlement after the battle of Sedan. However, the Prussians’ demand that the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine be ceded rekindled the French fighting spirit. Regular armies and francs-tireurs (fighting units first formed in 1792, when irregular forces and volunteer levies were raised to assist in the early campaigns of the revolutionary wars) put up a dogged resistance, as did Paris. Following the example set by the Revolution’s Convention in 1793, the Republican government called for a people’s war — an arming of the people (levée en masse) to save the French nation from defeat. The war dragged on.
The Prussian minister-president was at loggerheads with the army command about the most effective tactic to subdue the Parisians. To bring about the end to the war, Bismarck wanted to shell the city with heavy artillery, killing civilians indiscriminately in the process. Army chief General Field Marshal Count Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke (commonly referred to as the elder Moltke), worried that the bombardment of civilians would outrage international opinion, preferred to force the Parisians to their knees by starving them. As his assistant, General Albrecht von Blumenthal, put it bluntly, ‘… the inhabitants shall cop it like mad dogs. We don’t give a damn about what happens to the Parisians. They bought it upon themselves.’1
Quarrels with the army were not the only problem for Bismarck. International opinion had begun to turn against Prussia. In particular, the Gladstone government in Britain had become critical of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. In Germany, too, the mounting costs caused by the continuation of the military campaign and the entertaining and upkeep of the aristocratic dignitaries at Versailles had begun to sap enthusiasm for the war. There was no end in sight to the haggling over the entry conditions of the South German states to the new Germany. Aware that the Prussian minister-president was under great pressure to finalise the unification of Germany, the regents of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and smaller states used every opportunity to strike a favourable bargain.
Worn out by so much stress, Bismarck was confined to bed for several days during December 1870. He had recovered by New Year, but news from the French countryside, where francs-tireurs continued to harass German troops, did not lift his spirits. He demanded that towns and villages which had co-operated with or sheltered francs-tireurs be burned to the ground and all male citizens hung. There was no need to take prisoners of war. Enemy soldiers should be mowed down, as taking prisoners would only hamper Germany’s war effort. Delinquents who spat on German soldiers from bridges were to be shot; so were the women and children who scavenged for potatoes on the fringes of Paris. His wife, Johanna von Bismarck, showed even less mercy: all the French, down to the little babies, should be shot or stabbed to death.2
The German soldiers did not need much prompting. The burning of towns and villages and mass killings of civilians had become widespread by the end of 1870. The longevity of the conflict, coupled with the serious supply problems that had arisen by the late autumn, rekindled a level of savagery reminiscent of the seventeenth century. The spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had not failed to have an impact on military conduct. While, for example, there were no international treaties regulating warfare, by the nineteenth century it had become a convention that private property was not to be appropriated, that there was to be no plundering, and that the occupying power was to maintain law and order — for example, that there was to be no theft or rape on the part of the soldiers. The Prussian armies, since the wars of Frederick II in the eighteenth century, had stood out for their strict discipline on and off the field. In this tradition, the Prussian King Wilhelm I reminded his army at the beginning of the 1870–71 war that he expected orderly conduct on their entering enemy territory. They were not to turn upon the civilian population; rather, it was the duty of every honourable soldier to protect private property and not to damage the reputation of the Prussian army by lack of discipline.3
By this time, however, the king’s admonitions were falling on deaf ears. The siege of Strasbourg in mid-August 1870 gave the first indication that the Franco-Prussian War was to evoke the savagery that had marked the Thirty Years’ War and would foreshadow the barbarism of twentieth-century warfare. The commander in charge of the Prussian army units, General von Werder, ordered a bombardment of the city. Four nights of continuous pounding with high explosive and incendiary shells destroyed a large part of Strasbourg, including some of its finest buildings. The Museum of Fine Arts, the Library with its treasures, the Palais de Justice, the Arsenal, and the Huguenot Temple Neuf were all burned to the ground, and fire also destroyed the roof of the Cathedral. Thousands of civilians were left dead or injured, and the killing or maltreatment of defenceless non-combatants, including women and children, quickly spread.
Paul Baron von Collas, Generalstabsoffizier in the First Prussian Army, regularly wrote to his parents in Kassel. His letter of 31 December 1870 illustrates the deterioration that had occurred in the conduct of the war:
Our war is taking on a rather strange character now, and will become much crueller, if the [French] people won’t come to their senses. Yesterday between Amiens and Abbeville a detachment of ours ran into enemy troops who were supported by inhabitants of a neighbouring village. The Commander of the detachment had immediately all 60 male inhabitants shot. Fortunately we have now reached a stage where we execute without fuss or delay anyone causing any kind of harm, and we now burn down whole villages. To force the fortress Peronne to surrender we shot within 48 hours 8000 shells into the town which is now ablaze with a gigantic fire.
Tomorrow evening I will be back in Rouen where I have a very comfortable quarter.4
By the opening of 1871, the behaviour of von Collas’s unit had become the norm. Châteaudun, a town of 7,000 people, was burned to the ground.5 Near Toul, the Prussian 57th Regiment, pursuing francs-tireurs, burned the village of Fontenoy-sur-Moselle, but, finding no ‘citizen soldiers’, bayoneted all the inhabitants and threw them into the flames.6 On the river Loire, collective reprisals had become commonplace. Near Orleans, the town of Ablis was razed, and all males killed, in retaliation for an attack by irregulars. There is little evidence that the non-Prussian army corps behaved any better.7
By mid-January, it was obvious that capitulation by the Republican government was imminent. Now the formal unification of Germany could at last take place at Versailles. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose consent to his country’s admission to the German empire had netted him a large cash handout and an annual payment of 300,000 marks, had signed the official letter — drawn up by Bismarck — that offered King Wilhelm I of Prussia the Kaiser’s crown on behalf of the German princes.8 As Ludwig, the king of Saxony, and the king of Württemberg did not attend the coronation ceremony, it fell upon Grand Duke Frederick of Baden as the highest-ranking potentate to proclaim ‘His Imperial and Royal Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm’.9 The latter accepted without great enthusiasm. He is reported to have grumbled to Bismarck that his old Prussia had come to an end.10 Prince Otto of Bavaria, brother to King Ludwig, saw the ceremony as a pretentious, tasteless act on the part of an arrogant victor intent on demonstrating the absolute triumph of the Prussian military monarchy in the realms of both foreign and domestic policies. ‘I cannot describe,’ he wrote to Hohenschwangau, ‘how immeasurably painful and distressing I felt about each act … everything was so cold, so painful, pompous and ostentatious — and yet so heartless and empty’.11
That the German unification was based on six years of success on the battlefield earned enormous admiration and prestige for the army leadership, not only in Prussia but among a large section of the German population. This encouraged a widespread, rapidly growing tendency to reduce politics to a simple matter of military might and strong-arm tactics. The notion of merciless warfare (‘swift, decisive action’) that accompanied the unification, so readily accepted in German military and civilian circles, was a sombre sign of things to come. Little more than a generation later, a publication of the German general staff on the conduct of war demonstrated the legacy of 1870–71. Kriegsbrauch im Landkrieg (published in English as the German War Book) was critical of the tendency to humanitarianism claimed to be common in the nineteenth century. Such considerations, it claimed, had ‘degenerated into sentimentality and flabby emotions [weichliche Gefühle], leading to ‘a desire to influence the usage of war in a way which was in fundamental contradiction to the nature of war and its object’. Hence the German officer must be wary of false views about the essential character of war. He will have ‘to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions’ because ‘certain severities are indispensable to war, as the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them’.12
This helps to illustrate what little impact the attempts in the early twentieth century to prevent a reoccurrence of the savagery of the Franco-Prussian war by way of international treaties would have upon the German military, its supporters, and theoreticians. Although Germany officially adhered to the Hague Conventions, the nation’s military leaders and theorists had little respect for the limitations that the conventions’ rules would place on warfare.13
Unification brought about by victory over France — allegedly Germany’s arch-rival — led to an unparalleled level of national celebration and enthusiasm. According to a leading German historian, the Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie) — academics, lawyers, high school teachers, high-ranking public servants, the upper level of the clergy, and other university-educated citizens — had been elevated into a ‘highly emotional state of euphoria’.14 German liberals who, ten years earlier, had seen Bismarck as their arch-foe, the reactionary personification of Prussian conservatism, now faced about: for the first decades of the new German empire, they became his firmest supporters in the Reichstag. The joy of sticking it to the French in no uncertain terms (‘giving saures to the Frenchmen’) was for a long time a favourite topic at the beer tables and in the choral, rifle, gymnastic, skittle, and countless other societies that made up Germany’s rich club life. Imposing victory statutes were put up in every German town, followed by the construction of memorials recalling aspects of Germany’s glorious past. The largest of these constructions, the Hermann Monument near Detmold, rose to 54 metres. Its purpose was to commemorate the annihilation of three Roman legions in the nearby Teutoburg Forest by the Cheruscan leader, Arminius (now renamed Hermann), in 9 A.D. Just as Hermann had united the Germanic tribes to defeat the Romans, various inscriptions now praised the Prussian king for having again united the German tribes (Deutsche Volksstämme) against the arch-foe, France.
Opera composer Richard Wagner provided the musical embodiment of this new Teutonic spirit. The titles and characters of his works — Lohengrin, Ring der Nibelungen, Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung — all harked back to Germany’s mystical origins. His hero, Lohengrin, was the most popular figure of Germany’s legendary past, the embodiment of all that was perfect (and hence German). His bride, Elsa, embodying in her purity the German folk-spirit, was devoted, loving, and — as long as she was not seduced by the cunning perfidy of dark and hostile forces — blindly trusted by her saviour and leader. Having achieved the financial support of King Ludwig II, Wagner in the mid-1870s was able to stage magnificent performances at the Bavarian town of Bayreuth. The Wagner festival there became a cult for music lovers and for German patriots.
Only two shadows fell upon this picture of Teutonic harmony.
In 1871, Pope Pius IX had issued a ‘Declaration of Papal Infallibility’ intended to strengthen Rome’s hold over Catholic communities everywhere. This clashed with Bismarck’s goal to bring the Catholic Church in Prussia under the control of the state. When Catholic clergymen refused to undergo training at state institutions and to submit church appointments for government approval, the chancellor turned upon them. Soon, nearly 1,000 parishes were without a pastor, most Catholic religious orders had been suppressed, over 200 priests jailed, three bishops and two archbishops removed from office, and the archbishop of Trier had died shortly after he was released from a nine-month imprisonment. Although resentment lingered, particularly among the Bavarians, the Catholic Church was beaten into submission and was transformed, through its political arm, the Centre Party, into a conservative institution and one supporting the German Reich.
The second shadow was cast by the German socialists. Founded in the 1860s, the German labour movement was peaceful and law-abiding. It hoped to improve the lives and working conditions of Germany’s rapidly growing industrial population by peaceful means, through parliament. The socialists were seen, however, by the barons of Germany’s coal and steel industries — all close friends of the chancellor — as a threat to the unlimited power they wielded over their workforce as the Herr im Hause, the ‘master of the house’. In 1878, two assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I led to a wave of hysteria. Although, in reality, the attempts had nothing to do with the German labour movement, but were staged individually by fanatics, the nation’s foremost historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, called on employers to sack workers suspected of socialist sympathies. In the late 1870s, Bismarck introduced anti-socialist laws that were passed by both the conservatives and the liberals. Mass arrests and widespread imprisonment followed. The socialist party was outlawed, meetings banned, and newspapers suppressed, and capital punishment was reintroduced in Prussia and other German states.
Things were quiet domestically, at least for a while. Then, ten years later, a new wave of dissatisfaction and discontent swept the country, due not to new quarrels over church and religion, or even the socialist threat (the anti-socialist laws had been abandoned in 1890 after Wilhelm II had ascended to the throne and dismissed Bismarck). The new concern was that the young German empire was not enjoying the status it rightfully deserved among the world powers. In particular, the colonial carve-up of the globe was believed to have severely disadvantaged the Reich. To quote Max Weber’s inaugural lecture at Freiburg University, ‘the unification of Germany was a youthful prank’ too costly to have been undertaken unless it marked the beginning of a German Weltmachtpolitik or ‘world-power politics’.15
Imperial politics, parties, and pressure groups
The Reich that Bismarck had created ensured that power firmly rested with the crown. The kaiser could appoint and dismiss any member of cabinet at will. There was a parliament made up of an upper house (the Bundesrat) and a lower house (the Reichstag), but neither the chancellor nor ministers had to account to these houses or accept any resolution passed by either. The kaiser was also in charge of all the chief aspects of the political decision-making process. In particular, he held the right to declare war and peace, and he was in charge of the army. With the kaiser at its head, the army — virtually a state within the state — was the empire’s most powerful institution. In cases of emergency, when it was believed there was a threat to the imperial establishment, the army had the power to declare martial law and suspend civil liberties. Its prestige after the unification wars was enormous. Most non-commissioned officers entered the German civil service after serving, and this meant that a pronounced spirit of Prussian militarism permeated the nation’s everyday life. The kaiser had the support of the nobility, whose members were naturally keen to prevent any erosion of their privileges. Conservatism and conservative parties also had solid support in Protestant rural and semi-rural regions, and the Lutheran pastors ensured that nonconformist or dissident thought had little chance of infiltrating their communities.
Reichstag elections were based on direct, universal male suffrage. The Reichstag could debate all matters political, and the annual budget had to be passed by both the Bundesrat and the Reichstag. All decisions of the Reichstag, however, could be vetoed by the Bundesrat, which was the assembly of representatives from all states belonging to the Reich. Only the Bundesrat could initiate legislation, and Prussia clearly dominated this chamber. As elections in Prussia were conducted under a three-class franchise system based on title and wealth, significant social or political changes were not likely to occur. With the Reichstag holding no effective power, the German parliamentary system was less democratic than its British or French equivalent.
The German middle classes did not lack political influence, and were not altogether excluded from the decision-making process. They dominated Germany’s rapidly growing industrialisation, were in charge of the nation’s outstanding education system, accounted for the bulk of lawyers and public servants, and, as the twentieth century approached, controlled a large share of the media — which was rapidly becoming a key factor in influencing both domestic and foreign policies. In fact, the majority of Germany’s middle classes (politically represented by the National Liberals) was opposed to any tampering with Bismarck’s constitution. The National Liberals believed that political power was not a matter for the masses. To them, Reichstag membership was properly the domain of the educated and propertied. Hence they had no inclination to challenge Prussia’s three-class franchise system or to support attempts to overcome the drastic inequalities that marked the distribution of electoral boundaries which discriminated heavily against the urban population.
A minority of so-called progressive or left liberals advocated that the Reichstag be given more power, and that the cabinet be responsible to the legislative assembly. Some left-liberals even argued that the working class should be socially and politically integrated.16 However, most of middle-class Germany, regardless of its party affiliation, stood behind the empire that Bismarck had created. They had little respect for the Western political systems where, it was widely believed, parliaments held excessive power. They said that in France’s Third Republic (where a popularly elected assembly could appoint and dismiss ministers at will), party bickering, personal ambitions, and a restless struggle for ministerial positions had led to widespread corruption, favouritism, nepotism, and administrative inefficiency. By contrast, they believed that in Germany a strong monarchy kept a check upon unlimited parliamentary power, and an incorrupt, independent civil service allowed for efficient and reliable government.
In the United States, because of the ‘machine-like nature of American politics’, the bureaucracy was seen as being widely corrupt, suffering from the ‘domination of the stock exchange’.17 The United Kingdom (commonly referred to in Germany as ‘England’), which had earlier drawn admiration from some German political observers, was now seen as sinking into decline if not decadence. ‘In the halls of Parliament’, a leading German historian proclaimed, ‘one heard only shameless British commercial morality, which, with the Bible in the right hand and the opium pipe in the left, spreads the benefits of civilisation around the world’.18 Economically, too, Britain was said to be falling behind, and German exports had began to outstrip those of Britain.
Pressure for global involvement came from many directions. The Zentralverein für Handelsgeographie und Förderung der deutschen Interessen im Ausland, an umbrella organisation of industry and commerce, impressed on the government the economic advantages of colonies. The Verein für Sozialpolitik, a group combining anti-free-trade economists, intellectuals, and academics, and headed by Gustav von Schmoller, argued that the creation of an overseas empire would assist in solving the social problems that had emerged with rapid industrialisation. A broad section of the middle classes from Kleinbürgertum (the petty bourgeoisie) to the Bildungsbürgertum joined the chorus, as did most of the academic establishment.
By the mid-1880s, public pressure for overseas expansion had swollen immensely; moreover, the National Liberals, upon whose support Bismarck’s government had been able to rely since unification, had suffered a massive loss at the 1881 Reichstag election. The acquisition of colonies, a major aim of the National Liberals, was bound to revive their electoral fortunes. In 1884, Bismarck gave his consent to the acquisition of colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Until then he had shown only limited interest in overseas ventures, which he considered unlikely to yield sound economic returns and which would entail the risk of costly and unnecessary involvement outside Europe. He allegedly claimed that his map of Africa lay in Europe.
The raising of the German flag in South-West Africa in March 1884, and at various locations in north-eastern New Guinea and surrounding islands in November 1884, marked the beginning of Imperial Germany’s colonial enterprise. At its peak, the empire also included Togoland, the Cameroons, German East Africa, the Marshall, Caroline, Palau and Mariana Islands, part of Samoa, and Kiautschou Bay in China.
German expansion overseas was accompanied by the formation of a plethora of nationalistic and imperialistic pressure groups. Most vociferous was the Colonial Society, founded in 1882 by Carl Peters, a daring colonial adventurer who virtually single-handedly acquired the German colony of East Africa. Peters was also prominent in the foundation of the Pan-German League in 1894, which pushed for German expansion overseas, German dominance in Europe, and the Germanisation of ethnic minorities within the Reich. Active also was the ‘Association for Germandom Abroad’, which aimed to carry German culture to the remote corners of the globe, and at home the ‘Society for the Eastern Marches’ was set up to destroy Polish identity in Germany’s eastern provinces. The largest of these imperialist organisations was the Navy League, whose membership was about 300,000 at the outbreak of World War I. The league was financially supported by the arms manufacturer Krupp, which was profiting from the construction of the German battle fleet.
Krupp’s economic good fortune was one outcome of Germany’s naval construction program; another was the increasing diplomatic, political, and military isolation of the Reich. Whereas Germany’s colonial expansion did not cause overwhelming concern among the rival powers — they all were active in the global carve-up, and the best pickings had long been made — the construction of a large battle fleet soured relations with the British empire, still the world’s leading power. The consequences of this were to prove fatal.
After unification, Bismarck’s foreign policies became conservative, and — in contrast to his oppressive domestic actions — aimed to consolidate the status quo. He knew that rapprochement with France was out of the question because of Alsace-Lorraine. But he nurtured friendly relations with the Austro-Hungarian empire and, more importantly, with tsarist Russia. Hence France was left isolated, with little chance to pursue revanchist policies. He also continued Prussia’s traditional policy of goodwill towards the United Kingdom.
After his dismissal from office by Kaiser Wilhelm in 1890, this changed. The Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, a cornerstone of Bismarck’s foreign policy, was almost immediately abandoned by his successor, Leo von Caprivi. Worse, reciprocal treaties that lowered German tariffs on agricultural imports, particularly Russian grains, were strangled by the furious agitation of the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte). Made up chiefly of big East Elbian landowners, this organisation managed to recruit a multitude of members to campaign against any candidate opposed to agricultural tariff protection. The league has been seen as the first major step towards the formation of a radical political right bent on mobilising the masses for aggressive conservative ends — a precursor of twentieth-century fascism.19 The tsarist government countered by entering a series of economic and military treaties with France.
By the mid-1890s, Germany’s pursuit of Weltpolitik had gathered considerable momentum. In December 1897, the state secretary of the Foreign Office, Bernhard von Bülow, gave a memorable speech in the Reichstag’s debate on foreign policy. Von Bülow left no doubt about the future course of the German empire:
Fears have been expressed that we are about to enter a risky venture. Don’t you worry, Gentlemen. Neither the Chancellor nor his advisors are the kind of people that seek unnecessary conflict. We don’t all feel the necessity to put our fingers into every pie. However, we do hold the opinion that it is not advisable to exclude Germany at the very beginning from the competitions of other countries.
(Bravo!)
The times when the Germans left the earth to the [the influence] of one of their neighbours, the seas to another, only reserving for themselves the heaven above where pure doctrine holds …
(Laughter, Bravo!)
… those times are over. We see it as one of our prominent tasks to support the interest of our navigation, our trade, and our industries … [and] we demand that German missionaries, German goods, the German flag, and German ships are treated with as much respect as those of other powers.
(Bravo!)
We are only too happy to allow for the interest of other nations, provided that our own nation’s are treated with the same respect.
(Bravo!)
In a word: we demand a place under the sun.20
His were not just empty words. Von Bülow, on becoming chancellor two years later, presided over two initial navy bills that authorised an increase in German battleships from seven to 38. Plans for further enlargement of the battle fleet did not take long to follow. Not many outside Germany believed that this sudden build-up was needed to safeguard Germany’s export trade or its overseas possessions. The broad belief in free trade that marked the Age of Imperialism meant that German trade did not need large-scale military protection. Some individuals and companies benefited from the colonial enterprise, but, by and large, the colonies were a financial liability. Costs of running them far outweighed the income they brought, and they did not provide raw materials or markets for industry — or an outlet for excess population.
The British empire had little doubt about who would eventually be on the receiving end of this naval build-up. In 1902, the British government ordered large-scale modernisation and expansion of the empire’s battle-fleet. The launching of the all-big-gun Dreadnought in 1906 made all existing ships obsolete, and British naval construction over the subsequent years far outpaced Germany’s. Equally important, Britain entered into the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904, and made a similar agreement with Russia in 1907.
Von Bülow’s claim that Germany had no intention of putting her fingers into every pie also proved misplaced, as governments in the new century blundered from mistake to mistake. Their policies aimed at humiliating the French over Morocco failed, and their abrupt and negative stand towards the attempts of the Hague Conference to keep the arms race under control, establish a universal system of arbitration, put limits on the conduct of warfare, and refrain from violence against civilians all offended international opinion. Equally offensive was German support of Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina on the Balkan peninsula. The Habsburg monarchy was now its only ally.
This opposition to many of Imperial Germany’s policies led to a popular belief, fostered by the bulk of the media, pressure groups, and politicians, that Germany was being encircled and that Britain, France, and Russia were preventing the German nation from taking up its deserved role in the world. France had stooped so low as to enter into an alliance with reactionary tsarism in pursuit of her revanchist policies. Russia, in her craving for a pan-Slavonic empire, was seeking a crucial showdown between the Slavonic and Germanic peoples. To complete this dark scenario, England, ‘perfidious Albion’, envious of Germany’s economic growth (Handelsneid), had joined the international enterprise to prevent the proud German nation from taking its rightful place in the global community.
Only the Social-Democratic German labour movement seemed to stand apart from this growing bellicosity.
German social democracy
The foundation of the German Social Democratic Party dates back to the merger of the General German Workers Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV) with the Social Democratic Workers Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) in the Thuringian town of Gotha in 1875. The former organisation had been founded in 1863 by Ferdinand Lasalle, a lawyer and classical scholar, who had been active in the 1848 Revolution. To better the living conditions of the working population, it had advocated the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in free and equal elections; adequate salaries for elected deputies; a fairer wage system; the formation of independent workers’ co-operatives; a reduction in daily working hours; a curtailment of female labour and the abolition of child labour; the introduction of a single progressive income tax instead of indirect taxes; and the supervision of work conditions in mines, factories, and workshops by worker-elected officials.
As its program was far too modest for Karl Marx, who had established himself as the most outspoken international socialist, Marx deputised two of his strongest supporters in Germany, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, to set up the SDAP as a rival organisation in 1869. It was soon obvious, however, that the existence of two separate parties was counter-productive, and this led to their unification into the German Socialist Workers Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschland, SAP), renamed in 1890 the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD, the title it still carries today. The Gotha conference reaffirmed the previous demands, but added the Marxist principles of class abolition, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and international workers’ solidarity.
By the mid-1870s, Marx had become the leading theoretician of the Socialist International labour movements. Marx’s key argument was that the capitalist system would collapse because of its cannibalistic nature. As he says in Chapter 32 of Capital:
One Capitalist always kills many … Along with the constantly diminishing number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolise all advantages, … grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation, but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of capitalist production … Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist husk. Thus they burst asunder. The knell of private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
Once this happened, the gateway to the new Jerusalem would open to a socialist and, eventually, communist society, where there would be no more exploitation of one class by another. This did not mean that all were equal, an idea that Marx dismissed as utopian — it would be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
With hindsight, few would argue with his claim that capitalism is a fundamentally precarious economic system. If it has survived all challenges, it is certainly not because of its inherent strength. We should bear in mind, too, that the system we have today has little resemblance to the one Marx had analysed in Capital. It is his belief in the revolutionary nature of the workers’ movement that did not eventuate. The workforce in the English-speaking world — Britain, North America, Australia, and New Zealand — where industrialisation was most advanced by the second half of the nineteenth century, showed little inclination to work towards the overthrow of the capitalist system. This was in part because, bad as conditions were for the majority of workers, they did not become impoverished to the extent Marx had envisaged. Workers could vote for parliamentary candidates who promised to look after their needs. The formation of unions strengthened their cause, and their own political parties sprang up. By the turn of the century, in some Australian states and in New Zealand, for example, Labour parties had already gained office. All of this led to slow, gradual improvements.
Developments in the English-speaking world did not go unnoticed in Germany. The Gotha program had made a nominal commitment to Marxist principles, but the policies pursued by the SAP were reformist and not bent on confrontation. However, when the full weight of Imperial Germany’s ruling establishment descended upon the Social-Democratic labour movement after the introduction of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, the new Erfurt program, introduced in 1891, made a far stronger commitment to Marxist ideals. In line with Marx’s demand for a ‘dialectic unity of theory and practice’, the party’s chief theoretician at the time, Karl Kautsky, drew up a theoretical and a practical part. Emphasis was firmly on theory, which committed the SPD to work towards a proletarian revolution. The practical part reiterated pragmatic, everyday policies to improve the living and working conditions of the workforce.
Yet the ink on the Erfurt program had scarcely dried when the theoretical part was severely questioned. The most outspoken of the critics was Eduard Bernstein, a journalist and a leading member of the party who, living in London during the 1890s, entertained close contacts with the British labour movement.
Bernstein questioned Marx’s predictions of the impeding collapse of capitalism. To him, the growth of cartels and trusts did not mean that capitalism was becoming exclusively a system of a few large-concern owners; nor did he agree that the members of the lower middle class were being proletarianised. Hence, he thought, the claim that the rich at the top were getting fewer and fewer and the exploited at the bottom more numerous was incorrect. He questioned the assumption that there was a system of rigid division between classes, and the notion of class struggle altogether. He did not see evidence that the proletariat was being forced into ever-increasing misery, but argued rather that the living standards of the working class were rising. Thus Bernstein concluded that the capitalist system would not collapse in revolution, that a violent overthrow of the prevailing system was in fact unlikely to occur, and that social changes should be gained by evolutionary and not revolutionary means. The strengthening of workers’ parties and their unions, and the formation of consumer co-operatives and other kinds of mutual enterprises, would lead to a system of what he called ‘municipal socialism’. This was more likely to bring real improvement than was revolutionary rhetoric.
The arguments of the ‘revisionists’, as Bernstein and like-minded Social Democrats were soon to be called, caused a heated and increasingly bitter debate in party periodicals and newspapers, and at annual conventions. The left wing of the party strongly attacked Bernstein’s arguments. The comment by Rosa Luxemburg, who was establishing herself as one of the most prominent and outspoken members of the socialist left, that the work of the unions was the ‘labour of Sisyphus’, particularly angered the majority of party and union officials. The left did not see the growth of cartels as a stabilising economic factor, but as a sign that capitalism was nearing its final stage, in which vast properties were controlled by a few. Nor did a few years of economic growth, accompanied by a modest improvement in living conditions for the workers, mean that major convulsions of the capitalist system were necessarily a thing of the past.
The left wing of the SPD was also concerned about the party’s coy stand on the ever-increasing militarisation, nationally and internationally. The Social-Imperialists (social democrats supporting Germany’s policies of imperial expansion) were a minority before the war, but the domestic policy of the party leadership to avoid rocking the boat as much as possible caused growing concern. In the early twentieth century, there was a heated debate in the Socialist International about what action the proletariat should take in the event that war broke out. It was the German party leadership, in particular, that thwarted any attempt to commit national parties to the principle of international worker solidarity above the right of national self-determination.
Having suffered a major defeat in the so-called ‘Hottentot election’ of 1907, Social Democrat leader August Bebel gave a profoundly patriotic speech highlighting his party’s sense of duty and its commitment to the German state. A number of other socialists re-iterated his stance, impressing some of their opponents. The National Liberal deputy Graf Du-Molin Eckhardt, for example, commented that in the last sitting of the Reichstag he had ‘detected more German strength and national courage in the ironic laughter of the embittered Social Democrats than in the hollow phrases uttered by all speakers from the establishment parties’.21
The SPD deputies’ reaction after the 1907 election was understandable: having refused to vote for further funds to enable the German government to continue its war of annihilation against the Herrero people in South-West Africa, the SPD was viciously targeted by the establishment for failing to support the fatherland. Their seats in parliament were reduced from 81 to 43.
More serious was the performance of Bebel and other party leaders at the 1907 congress of the Socialist International held in Stuttgart. At the centre of the debate was the principle of international socialist solidarity. Many speakers warned that acceptance by the international workers’ movement of the right to national self-determination meant that the workers might properly be called upon to defend a nation’s independence. Commenting on August Bebel’s position on the need to defend the fatherland, Karl Kautsky made the cynical comment that ‘one day the German government could succeed in persuading the German proletariat that they had become the victim of aggression, the French government could do the same to the French people, which means that there could be a war in which French and German proletarians would with great enthusiasm murder each other and cut each other’s throats’.22 Bebel replied that it would be a sorry business if men who had made politics their profession were not able to judge whether or not they were facing a war of aggression. Six years after Kautsky’s grim prediction, the majority of the SPD voted for the vast increases in military spending demanded by a regime that the party had once sworn not to support with a single penny.
Signs that the German labour movement was heading towards a division were not confined to the party’s theoreticians or to intellectual debates, but were also evident among the SPD’s rank and file, and the workforce in Germany at large. Although huge industrial conglomerates had been formed by the beginning of the twentieth century — coal and steel empires, gigantic plants in the newer chemical and electrical industries — the majority of the German workforce was still employed in small-to-medium workshops, and factories in small-to-medium towns and cities. This meant that the industrial growth rate had not been too fast, and that large numbers of workers did not have to be recruited, accommodated, and incorporated into the workforce in the shortest possible time.
Houses for most workers were not slums. Some even owned their own small house, or rented a flat in a block with access to a square of garden to grow vegetables, and perhaps even a small shed for husbandry — important assets at a time when wages were never much above subsistence level. Unions aimed to gain gradual income rises, improve working conditions and working hours, and establish co-operative stores to provide cheaper goods — achievements far more significant than some distant workers’ paradise. The memory of the difficult years under the anti-socialist laws had not altogether faded: why risk a new wave of suppression? And another factor was emerging: with compulsory schooling, and with most German schoolteachers being ardent nationalists and imperialists, the message that Germany was being denied its proper place in the world was reaching schools in working-class districts as well. The daily propaganda in the conservative media of the day about Germany’s world mission had its effect on workers. Although they still received rough treatment from Imperial Germany’s economic, legal, and political establishment, the ‘fellows without a fatherland’ (vaterlandslose Gesellen), as Kaiser Wilhelm II had once labelled the SPD members, were starting to grow closer to the fatherland — a process that would have been even speedier had they not continued to receive rough treatment from the rest of society.
Karl Marx, however, did not have all his science wrong. In Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, and other large cities, and many parts of the Rhenish-Westphalian region and centres in Thuringia and Saxony, industrialisation had advanced at such a rate that there was indeed proletarianisation. Housed in heartless tenement blocks (Mietskasernen), overcrowded and with poor or no sanitation, exploited by landlord and employer, and confronted with appalling working conditions, the workers here had nothing to lose but their chains, to quote another of Marx’s famous dictums. Among them were Poles and other migrant labourers from eastern and south-eastern Europe — and German workers, like most other Germans, tended to think of the Slavic East as backward. There was little respect for ethnic minorities. Hence the real division in Germany as the twentieth century progressed lay not between the Social-Democratic movement and the rest of society, but within the workforce and the party itself. This split was not apparent until war broke out, but the origins of the division within the German labour movement date to the beginnings of the twentieth century. It was to become a bitter division that had fatal consequences for the Weimar Republic, which continued into the Cold War era, and which still influences German politics today.
‘The spirit of 1870–71’
At the head of the kaiser’s great pride, the imperial navy, stood Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. The son of a judge and the son-in-law of a doctor, he came from the professional middle class and, like so many of his contemporaries, had joined the navy rather than the army, whose upper hierarchy was preserved for the nobility. Tirpitz achieved a meteoric rise, resulting in his appointment as secretary of the navy in 1897. In his new position he managed, by tireless lobbying and constant intriguing, to increase the size of the German battle-fleet from seven capital ships in 1898 to 43 by the outbreak of war. Kaiser Wilhelm’s ardent support for the construction of a powerful German navy greatly aided his cause. Tirpitz, a fanatical Social Darwinist, firmly believed in the superiority of German culture, and was convinced that the decisive battle for German world leadership had to be fought eventually against the decadent, materialist British empire. However, he attempted to conceal his intention not only from British leaders — without success — but also, because of the enormous costs of his program, from the Reichstag. He also concealed his plans from the army leaders, because his ambitions would rival their own plans and influence.
The admiral’s assumption that sooner or later a Social Darwinist struggle for world domination would have to take place between the ageing, moribund, and essentially frivolous British civilisation and the spiritually superior German empire was shared by eminent history professors and theologians at German universities, who became outspoken exponents of Weltpolitik and its inevitable showdown with the United Kingdom:
Quite consciously they were going to change established rules of international relations because of a commitment to a peculiar German philosophy of history and politics and, one could add, theology of state. There was hardly a pastor or theologian who did not believe Germany’s God-given right to expand, by force if necessary, at the expense of the putatively inferior and moribund cultures of the other Great Powers, especially Britain’s, because it was demonstrably the will of Almighty God.23
The idea that war was a kind of ‘biological necessity’, and that international politics amounted to a struggle between rival nations for supremacy and survival, was widely held in leading German military and political circles. The firm belief in German superiority was not directed towards Britain alone. Erich von Falkenhayn, the empire’s war minister, Kurt Riezler, advisor to Reich chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s, and Georg Alexander von Müller, the chief of the imperial navy cabinet, for example, all saw war as a means of preserving or asserting the German race against the Latins and Slavs.24 Belief in the need of the German empire to expand was not confined to Social Darwinist disciples; voices in big business and industry also advocated the necessity for German economic hegemony (and, in its wake, political dominance) in Europe, a goal not likely to be achieved by peaceful penetration. However, the newer industries, the electrical and chemical conglomerates that had been witnessing a phenomenal rise in the pre-war years, shrank from the idea of major military conflict, as this would cause considerable harm to their flourishing trade. The chemical giants, in particular, that had outpaced all global rivals in the invention and manufacture of new pharmaceutical products, had nothing to gain from war. But as the excitement mounted, the leaders of German chemical companies could not escape the rekindling of the spirit of 1870–71. A short and decisively victorious war would cement the German empire’s rightful place in this world, and (incidentally) facilitate further large-scale economic expansion. A study of Germany’s chemical industries aptly summarises the situation:
Patriotism, the sense that German aspirations were being stifled by its European rivals, and the expectation that the glorious triumphs of Sedan in 1870 could be repeated, were as openly expressed in the Rhineland boardrooms and laboratories of Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa and BASF as they were in the aristocratic salons of Potsdam, the bourgeois cafes of Berlin’s Unter den Linden, and the working-class beer Keller of Essen and Hamburg.25
Heading for war
The German army had not grown as rapidly as the imperial navy. The army leadership was reluctant to expand, because this would have meant including middle-class rather than aristocratic officers, and working-class rather than peasant soldiers. Nevertheless the size of the army rose by almost one quarter from 480,000 to 588,000 between 1893 and 1905. By now, the Schlieffen Plan had become the preferred option in case of war, and it demanded a much larger army. Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German army from 1891 to 1906, had designed a two-pronged strategy should Germany find itself simultaneously at war with both France and Russia. The plan stipulated that almost all of the German army would invade the south-eastern Netherlands and Belgium, and then thrust into France from the north, defeating the French forces and capturing Paris. In Schlieffen’s opinion, only a token force was needed to protect the border with the tsarist empire, because it was envisaged that Russia would not be able to conduct serious warfare for a number of years. Moreover, Russian mobilisation, it was believed, would take at least six weeks, by which time the capitulation of France would have ensured that an army at full strength would be able to achieve victory in the east as well.
The Schlieffen Plan was described by the German military, and later by apologists of the German action, as ‘preventive warfare’. This concept dates back to the Prussian King Frederick II (the so-called Great), who in 1756 had faced a coalition of continental Europe’s three main powers, France, the Habsburg empire, and tsarist Russia. In a preventive strike, he invaded the small German state of Saxony to launch an attack on the Austrian empire — the event that started the Seven Years War of the eighteenth century. In reality, the execution of the Schlieffen Plan would be an unquestionable act of offensive warfare. The elder Moltke, the German war hero who led the army to victory over France in 1870–71, had also planned for a possible war on two fronts. He would hold the German forces behind the frontiers. In the west, the German army would wait until the French invaded the disputed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and then attack. In the east, superiority of German road and rail communications lines meant that wherever the Russians attacked, German forces could move to await and crush them. If this did not cause a complete Russian collapse it would eventually drive the tsar to sue for peace.
Moltke’s plan was a defensive one. Schlieffen’s Plan, regarded by the military and political leadership as a certain recipe for victory, was not. By the time the plan was in place, the German military had made it clear that they had no interest in the two conferences at the Dutch capital, The Hague, aimed at preventing a repetition of the savagery that had featured in both the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the American Civil War.26 The German empire was among the signatories of the Hague Convention IV ‘Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land’, which forbade pillage and the punishment of innocent civilians, including the taking of hostages and the use of human shields, as well as assault or bombardment ‘by whatever means’ of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings that were undefended. Convention IV further stipulated that armed corps had to be under responsible command and observe the laws of war, and that there must be no destruction of the property of municipalities or institutions of a religious, charitable, or educational character, nor of historic monuments and works of art and science.
Although Germany signed, it soon became clear that the German army had no intention of observing these provisions, either in spirit or in letter. Senior military figures dismissed the convention as hypocrisy, signed by nations that ‘behave as if they were serious about the silly negotiations and agreements’, but in reality had no intention of sticking to them. Aspirations to peace ‘were simply evidence of these nations’ moral and military decay’.27 Not surprisingly, field-service regulations issued in 1908 clearly stated that ‘preventive’ measures against civilians were justified.
The Schlieffen Plan demanded many more soldiers than were available in 1905. The German army leadership, for the reasons stated above, resisted any significant enlargement, but after new crises in North Africa and the Balkans, in particular after the first Balkan War of 1912, there was a decisive change in attitude. Germany had suffered a further international diplomatic setback in this conflict, which led Kaiser Wilhelm to meet with military leaders in December 1912, where he called for immediate war against France and tsarist Russia. He was strongly supported by the chief of the army’s general staff, Count Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke (commonly referred to as the younger Moltke), who was a particular enthusiast for the Schlieffen Plan. He stated that war had become inevitable, and that the sooner the showdown with the rival European powers could start, the better. This view was supported by the army’s leaders, but opposed by Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, because the navy was as yet not ready for warfare against Britain. Other than ordering an increase of the German army (eventually to 800,000), no concrete decision was taken at this ‘War Council Meeting’. The continental Entente powers responded by also sharply raising the size of their military.
As war clouds were gathering, the majority of Germans had become convinced that the empire was facing a deadly challenge from its rivals. This scenario was fostered no doubt by commentary from the government and much of the media, but the image of revanche-lusting French, Russian Slavonic expansionists, and trade-jealous Britons found an eager audience. The signs were ominous, should things go wrong.
And things did go wrong. The assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 triggered a chain of events. Supported by assurances of German support in case of conflict, the Austro-Hungarian empire on 23 July presented the Kingdom of Serbia with a ten-point ultimatum to cease all activities directed against the Habsburg empire, to outlaw all organisations involved in such activities, and to allow police officials from Vienna to participate in a full investigation into the couple’s murder. The Serbian government accepted nine of the demands, but rejected Point Six, empowering Austro-Hungarian officers to participate in the investigation, as this was an insult that no independent state could tolerate. This led the Habsburg empire to declare war on Serbia on 28 July. Tsarist Russia ordered a partial mobilisation the same day and, after the Austrian bombardment of Belgrade, as a precautionary step but not as a war-declaration, it ordered a full mobilisation on 30 July. Although the German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, agreed that the tsar’s mobilisation measure did not mean that Russia was intent on waging war,28 this step was used to rally the German people behind what was claimed to be a defence against aggression from the barbarian east. On 1 August, the German government declared war on tsarist Russia, followed by a declaration of war on France on 3 August. On 4 August, the German army, in accord with the Schlieffen Plan, invaded Belgium. As this was a violation of Belgian neutrality, the British government presented Berlin with an ultimatum to stop the invasion immediately. When this was not forthcoming, the British empire declared war on Germany at midnight on 4 August.
Austria-Hungary’s declaration on 28 July marked the outbreak of war. Germany’s subsequent policies turned what was a localised conflict into a global conflagration.