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by Austro reich. . 2 reads.

German History (WIP)


“Nach uns, Stille”
Austro reich

Overview | Military | Trade
The Magdeburg Convention
To fight and conquer is not supreme excellence. Supreme Excellence is breaking the enemies resistance without fighting.

The History of the Germanic Peoples
Part I. The Early Germanic Tribes

The ethnogenesis of the Germanic tribes remains debated. However, for author Averil Cameron it is obvious that a steady process has occurred during the Nordic Bronze Age, or at the latest during the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From their homes in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany the tribes began expanding south, east and west during the 1st century BC, and came into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul, as well as with Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic cultures in Central/Eastern Europe.

Factual and detailed knowledge about the early history of the Germanic tribes is rare.

Collusion and conflict with the Roman Empire

Emperor Augustus considered conquest beyond the Rhine and the Danube not only regular foreign policy but also necessary to counter Germanic incursions into a still rebellious Gaul. A series of forts and commercial centers were established along the two rivers. Some tribes, such as the Ubii consequently allied with Rome and readily adopted advanced Roman culture. During the 1st century CE Roman legions conducted extended campaigns into Germania magna, the area north of the Upper Danube and east of the Rhine, attempting to subdue the various tribes. Roman ideas of administration, the imposition of taxes and a legal framework were frustrated by the total absence of an infrastructure. The campaigns of Germanicus, for example were almost exclusively characterized by frequent massacres of villagers and indiscriminate pillaging. The tribes, however maintained their elusive identities. In 9 AD a coalition of tribes under the Cherusci chieftain Arminius, who was familiar with Roman tactical doctrines, defeated a sizeable Roman force in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Consequently, Rome resolved to permanently establish the Rhine/Danube border and refrain from further territorial advance into Germania. By AD 100 the frontier along the Rhine and the Danube and the Limes Germanicus was firmly established. Several Germanic tribes lived under Roman rule south and west of the border, as described in Tacitus's Germania. These lands represent the modern states Baden-Württemberg, southern Bavaria, southern Hesse, Saarland and the Rhineland. Austria formed the regular provinces of Noricum and Raetia.[19][20][21] The provinces Germania Inferior (with the capital situated at Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, modern Cologne) and Germania Superior (with its capital at Mogontiacum, modern Mainz), were formally established in 85 AD, after long and painful campaigns as lasting military control was confined to the lands surrounding the rivers.

By the 3rd century the Germanic peoples began to migrate beyond the limes and the Danube frontier.[23] Several large tribes – the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Saxons and Franks – migrated and played their part in the decline of the Roman Empire and the transformation of the old Western Roman Empire.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the Franks, like other post-Roman Western Europeans, emerged as a tribal confederacy in the Middle Rhine-Weser region, among the territory soon to be called Austrasia (the "eastern land"), the northeastern portion of the future Kingdom of the Merovingian Franks. As a whole, Austrasia comprised parts of present-day France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Unlike the Alamanni to their south in Swabia, they absorbed large swaths of former Roman territory as they spread west into Gaul, beginning in 250.

By 500, Clovis had united all the Frankish tribes, ruled all of Gaul and was proclaimed King of the Franks between 509 and 511. Clovis, unlike most Germanic rulers of the time, was baptized directly into Roman Catholicism instead of Arianism. His successors would cooperate closely with papal missionaries, among them Saint Boniface. After the death of Clovis in 511, his four sons partitioned his kingdom including Austrasia. Authority over Austrasia passed back and forth from autonomy to royal subjugation, as successive Merovingian kings alternately united and subdivided the Frankish lands.

Part II. The Holy Roman Empire

After the death of Frankish king Pepin the Short in 768, his oldest son "Charlemagne" ("Charles the Great") consolidated his power over and expanded the Kingdom. Charlemagne ended 200 years of Royal Lombard rule with the Siege of Pavia, and in 774 he installed himself as King of the Lombards. Loyal Frankish nobles replaced the old Lombard aristocracy following a rebellion in 776.[46] The next 30 years of his reign were spent ruthlessly strengthening his power in Francia and on the conquest of the Slavs and Pannonian Avars in the east and all tribes, such as the Saxons and the Bavarians. On Christmas Day, 800 AD, Charlemagne was crowned Imperator Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans) in Rome by Pope Leo III.

Fighting among Charlemagne's three grandsons over the continuation of the custom of partible inheritance or the introduction of primogeniture caused the Carolingian empire to be partitioned into three parts by the Treaty of Verdun of 843. Louis the German received the Eastern portion of the kingdom, East Francia, all lands east of the Rhine river and to the north of Italy. This encompassed the territories of the German stem duchies – Franks, Saxons, Swabians, and Bavarians – that were united in a federation under the first non-Frankish king Henry the Fowler, who ruled from 919 to 936.

In 936, Otto I was crowned German king at Aachen, in 961 King of Italy in Pavia and crowned emperor by Pope John XII in Rome in 962. The tradition of the German King as protector of the Kingdom of Italy and the Latin Church resulted in the term Holy Roman Empire in the 12th century. The name, that was to identify with Germany continued to be used officially, with the extension added: Nationis Germanicæ after the last imperial coronation in Rome in 1452 until its dissolution in 1806.

Otto strengthened the royal authority by re-asserting the old Carolingian rights over ecclesiastical appointments.[53] Otto wrested from the nobles the powers of appointment of the bishops and abbots, who controlled large land holdings. Additionally, Otto revived the old Carolingian program of appointing missionaries in the border lands. Otto continued to support celibacy for the higher clergy, so ecclesiastical appointments never became hereditary. By granting lands to the abbots and bishops he appointed, Otto actually turned these bishops into "princes of the Empire"

Part III. The 30 Years War

Germany enjoyed a time of relative quiet between the Peace of Augsburg, signed in 1555, and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. The empire functioned in a more regular way than previously, and its federal nature was more evident than in the past. The Reichstag met frequently to deal with public matters, and the emperors Ferdinand I (r. 1556-64) and Maximilian II (r. 1564-76) were cautious rulers concerned mostly with strengthening their family’s hold on Austria and adjacent areas. Rudolf II (r. 1576-1612) was an indolent and capricious ruler who generally followed his advisers’ counsel. As a result, some German states were able to expand their territories by annexing smaller neighbors in the absence of an engaged and attentive emperor. Local rivalries engendered tensions that often were based on religious affiliation.

Like many wars of its time period, the 30 Years’ War had its root in politics and religion. From the religious point of view, this war was the Catholic attempt to overcome Protestantism. On the political side, it was the Habsburg Dynasty’s attempt to keep control while many other countries worked to rob them of it.

The Peace of Augsburg brought peace but did not settle the religious disagreements in Germany. For one thing, its signatories did not recognize Calvinism, a relatively stringent form of Protestantism that was gaining prominence around the time the Augsburg treaty was signed, in what has been called the Second Reformation. Adherents to both Calvinism and Lutheranism worked to spread their influence and gain converts in the face of the Counter-Reformation, the attempt of the Roman Catholic Church to regroup and reverse the spread of Protestantism. Followers of all three religions were at times successful, but only at the expense of the others.

Fear of religious subversion caused rulers to monitor the conduct of their subjects more closely. Attempting to help the modern reader understand the intensity and pervasiveness of this fear, Mary Fulbrook, a noted British historian of Germany, has likened it to the anxiety prevailing in the first years of the Cold War. An example of the social paranoia engendered by the religious tensions of the period is Protestant Germany’s refusal until 1700 to accept the Gregorian calendar introduced by the papacy in 1582 because the reform entailed a one-time loss of the days between October 5 and 14. Many Protestants suspected that Roman Catholics were attempting somehow to steal this time for themselves.

By the first decades of the 17th century, religious controversy had become so obstructive that at times the Reichstag could not conduct business. In 1608, for example, Calvinists walked out of the body, preventing the levying of a tax to fight a war against the Turks. In the same year, the Evangelical Union was established by a few states and cities of the empire to defend the Protestant cause. In 1609 a number of Roman Catholic states countered by forming the Catholic League. Although both bodies were less concerned with a sectarian war than with the specific aims of their member states, their formation was an indication of how easily disputes could acquire a religious aspect.

The Thirty Years’ War resulted from a local rebellion, but the admixture of religion transformed it into a European conflict that lasted for more than a generation and devastated Germany. In 1618 Bohemian nobles opposed the decision of Emperor Matthias (r. 1608-19) to designate his Catholic cousin Ferdinand king of Bohemia. Instead, the nobles elected Frederick of the Palatinate, a German Calvinist, to be their king. In 1620, in an attempt to wrest control from the nobles, imperial armies and the Catholic League under General Johann von Tilly defeated the Protestant Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague.

The Protestant princes, alarmed by the strength of the Catholic League and the possibility of Roman Catholic supremacy in Europe, decided to renew their struggle against Emperor Matthias. They were aided by France, which, although Roman Catholic, was opposed to the increasing power of the Habsburgs, the dynastic family to which Matthias and Ferdinand belonged. Despite French aid, by the late 1620s imperial armies of Emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619-37) and the Catholic League, under the supreme command of General Albrecht von Wallenstein, had defeated the Protestants and secured a foothold in northern Germany.

In his time of triumph, Ferdinand overreached himself by publishing in 1629 the Edict of Restitution, which required that all properties of the Roman Catholic Church taken since 1552 be returned to their original owners. The edict renewed Protestant resistance. Catholic powers also began to oppose Ferdinand because they feared he was becoming too powerful. Invading armies from Sweden, secretly supported by Catholic France, marched deep into Germany, winning numerous victories. The Catholic general Tilly and Sweden’s Protestant king, Gustavus Adolphus, were killed in separate battles. Wallenstein was assassinated on Emperor Ferdinand’s orders because he feared his general was becoming too powerful. After the triumph of the Spanish army over Swedish forces at the Battle of Noerdlingen in 1634, a truce was arranged between the emperor and some of the German princes under the Treaty of Prague. France then invaded Germany, not for religious reasons but because the House of Bourbon, the dynastic family of several French and Spanish monarchs, wished to ensure that the House of Habsburg did not become too powerful. This invasion is illustrative of the French axiom that Germany must always remain divided into small, easily manipulated states. (Indeed, preventing a united Germany remained an objective of French foreign policy even late in the twentieth century.) Because of French participation, the war continued until the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648.

The Peace of Westphalia largely settled German affairs for the next century and a half. It ended religious conflicts between the states and included official recognition of Calvinism. Its signatories altered the boundaries of the empire by recognizing that Switzerland and the Netherlands had become sovereign states outside the empire. Portions of Alsace and Lorraine went to France. Sweden received some territory in northern Germany, which in the long run it could not retain. Brandenburg became stronger, as did Saxony and Bavaria.

In addition, states within the empire acquired greater independence with the right to have their own foreign policies and form alliances, even with states outside the empire. As a result of these changes, the Holy Roman Empire lost much of what remained of its power and would never again be a significant actor on the international stage. The Habsburgs would continue to be crowned emperors, but their strength would derive from their own holdings, not from leadership of the empire. Germany was less united in 1648 than in 1618, and German particularism had been strengthened once again.

The Thirty Years’ War had a devastating effect on the German people. Historians have usually estimated that between one-fourth and one-third of the population perished from direct military causes or from illness and starvation related to the war. Some regions were affected much more than others. For example, an estimated three-quarters of Wuerttemberg’s population died between 1634 and 1639. Overall losses were serious enough that historians believe that it took a century after the Thirty Years’ War for Germany’s population to reach the level of 1618.

Germany’s economy was also severely disrupted by the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War. The war exacerbated the economic decline that had begun in the second half of the sixteenth century as the European economy shifted westward to the Atlantic states–Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries. The shift in trade meant that Germany was no longer located at the center of European commerce but on its fringes. The thriving economies of many German towns in the late Middle Ages and first half of the sixteenth century gradually dried up, and Germany as a whole entered a long period of economic stagnation that ended only in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Part IV. The German Confederation

The Congress of Vienna (1814-15), convened after Napoleon's defeat, sought to restore order to a Europe disrupted by revolutionary and imperial France. Its members' objective was a constellation of states and a balance of power that would ensure peace and stability after a quarter-century of revolution and war. In addition to the delegates of many small states, the congress included representatives of five large European states: Austria, Prussia, Russia, Britain, and France. After months of deliberations, the congress established an international political order that was to endure for nearly 100 years and that brought Europe a measure of peace.

The congress made no effort to restore the Holy Roman Empire and its 300-odd states. Instead, it accepted the disappearance of many small states that had occurred since 1789 and created the German Confederation. The confederation consisted of thirty-eight sovereign states and four free cities and included the five large kingdoms of Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg. The confederation met at a diet in Frankfurt, with an Austrian always serving as president.

Prince Clemens von Metternich, who directed Austria's foreign policy from 1809 until 1848, was the dominant political figure within the confederation. He waged a decades-long campaign to prevent the spread of revolution in Europe by seeking to restore much of the political and social order that had existed before the French Revolution. Metternich's Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 established a pervasive system of press censorship and regulation of the universities that dampened German intellectual life and hindered the publication of writings advocating the principles of liberalism. In the 1820s, he engineered the formation of the Holy Alliance of the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia to quash political, social, and economic developments within Central and Eastern Europe thought to threaten political stability.

It was not possible for Metternich and his allies to suppress completely the desire for liberal reforms, including the establishment of constitutional parliamentary government, economic freedom, and civil liberties. Some of these reforms had already been under discussion during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and awareness of their desirability had spread during the Napoleonic era. In addition, the economic reforms introduced into the Rhineland by France had taken hold. The business class that formed after 1815 pressed for abolition of restrictive trade practices favored by traditional handicraft guilds. Businessmen also sought a common currency and system of measurements for Germany, as well as a reduction of the numerous tolls that made road and river travel expensive and slow.

During the 1820s, significant progress was made in reducing customs duties among German states. At Prussian instigation, the Zollverein (Customs Union) began to form, and by the mid-1830s it included all the most important German states except Austria. Prussia saw to it that its chief rival within Germany was excluded from the union. Vienna, for its part, did not realize at this early point the political and economic significance of intra-German trade.

Many of Germany's liberal intelligentsia--lower government officials, men of letters, professors, and lawyers--who pushed for representative government and greater political freedom were also interested in some form of German unity. They argued that liberal political reforms could only be enacted in a larger political entity. Germany's small, traditional states offered little scope for political reform.

Among those groups desiring reform, there was, ironically, little unity. Many businessmen were interested only in reforms that would facilitate commerce, and they gave little thought to politics. Political liberals were split into a number of camps. Some wished for a greater degree of political representation, but, given a widespread fear of what the masses might do if they had access to power, these liberals were content to have aristocrats as leaders. Others desired a democratic constitution, but with a hereditary king as ruler. A minority of liberals were ardent democrats who desired to establish a republic with parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage.

The ideal of a united Germany had been awakened within liberal groups by the writings of scholars and literary figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and by the achievements of French nationalism after the revolution. France's easy victories over Germany's small states made the union of a people with a common language and historical memory desirable for practical reasons alone. Others were impressed by the political and commercial accomplishments of Britain, which made those of the small German states seem insignificant. Some writers warmed to romantic evocations of Germany's glory during the Middle Ages.

Many members of Germany's aristocratic ruling class were opposed to national unity because they feared it would mean the disappearance of their small states into a large Germany. Metternich opposed a united Germany because the Habsburg Empire did not embrace a single people speaking one language, but many peoples speaking different languages. The empire would not easily fit into a united Germany. He desired instead the continued existence of the loosely organized German Confederation with its forty-odd members, none equal to Austria in strength. Prussia's kings and its conservative elite sometimes objected to Austria's primacy in the confederation, but they had little desire for German unification, which they regarded as a potential threat to Prussia's existence.

Germany's lower classes--farmers, artisans, and factory workers--were not included in the discussions about political and economic reform. Germany's farmers had been freed to some degree from many obligations and dues owed to the landowning aristocracy, but they were often desperately poor, earning barely enough to survive. Farmers west of the Elbe River usually had properties too small to yield any kind of prosperity. Farmers east of the Elbe often were landless laborers hired to work on large estates. Artisans, that is, skilled workers in handicrafts and trades belonging to the traditional guilds, saw their economic position worsen as a result of the industrialization that had begun to appear in Germany after 1815. The guilds attempted to stop factory construction and unrestricted commerce, but strong economic trends ran counter to their wishes. Factory workers, in contrast, were doing well compared with these other groups and were generally content with their lot when the economy as a whole prospered.

Europe endured hard times during much of the 1840s. A series of bad harvests culminating in the potato blight of 1845-46 brought widespread misery and some starvation. An economic depression added to the hardship, spreading discontent among the poor and the middle class alike. A popular uprising in Paris in February 1848 turned into a revolution, forcing the French king Louis Philippe to flee to Britain.

The success of the revolution sparked revolts elsewhere in Europe. Numerous German cities were shaken by uprisings in which crowds consisting mainly of the urban poor, but also of students and members of the liberal middle class, stormed their rulers' palaces and demanded fundamental reform. Berlin and Vienna were especially hard hit by what came to be called the revolutions of 1848. The rulers of both cities, like rulers elsewhere, quickly acceded to the demands of their rebellious subjects and promised constitutions and representative government. Conservative governments fell, and Metternich fled to Britain. Liberals called for a national convention to draft a constitution for all of Germany. The National Assembly, consisting of about 800 delegates from throughout Germany, met in a church in Frankfurt, the Paulskirche, from May 1848 to March 1849 for this purpose.

Within just a few months, liberal hopes for a reformed Germany were disappointed. Conservative forces saw that the liberal movement was divided into a number of camps having sharply different aims. Furthermore, the liberals had little support left among the lower classes, who had supported them in the first weeks of the revolution by constructing barricades and massing before their rulers' palaces. Few liberals desired popular democracy or were willing to enact radical economic reforms that would help farmers and artisans. As a result of this timidity, the masses deserted the liberals. Thus, conservatives were able to win sizable elements of these groups to their side by promising to address their concerns. Factory workers had largely withheld support from the liberal cause because they earned relatively good wages compared with farmers and artisans.

Once the conservatives regrouped and launched their successful counterattack across Germany, many of the reforms promised in March 1848 were forgotten. The National Assembly published the constitution it had drafted during months of hard debate. It proposed the unification of Germany as a federation with a hereditary emperor and a parliament with delegates elected directly. The constitution resolved the dispute between supporters of "Little Germany," that is, a united Germany that would exclude Austria and the Habsburg Empire, and those supporting "Large Germany," which would include both. The constitution advocated the latter.

The Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (r. 1840-58), was elected united Germany's first emperor. He refused the crown, stating that he could be elected only by other kings. At that point, the assembly disbanded. A few subsequent rebellions by democratic liberals drew some popular support in 1849, but they were easily crushed and their leaders executed or imprisoned. Some of these ardent democrats fled to the United States. Among them was Carl Schurz, who later fought at the Battle of Gettysburg as a Union officer, served one term as a United States senator from Missouri, and was appointed secretary of the interior by United States president Rutherford B. Hayes.

The German Confederation was reestablished, and conservatives held the reins of power even more tightly than before. The failure of the 1848 revolutions also meant that Germany was not united as many had hoped. However, some of the liberals' more practical proposals came to fruition later in the 1850s and 1860s when it was realized that they were essential to economic efficiency. Many commercial restrictions were abolished. The guilds, with their desire to turn back the clock and restore preindustrial conditions, were defeated, and impediments to the free use of capital were reduced. The "hungry forties" gave way to the prosperity of the 1850s as the German economy modernized and laid the foundations for spectacular growth later in the century.

Part V. German unification

The unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor after the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War. Unofficially, the de facto transition of most of the German-speaking populations into a federated organization of states had been developing in fits and starts for some time through alliances formal and informal between princely rulers. Self-interests of the various parties hampered the process over nearly a century of autocratic experimentation beginning in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and subsequent rise of German nationalism.

Unification exposed tensions caused by religious, linguistic, social, and cultural differences among the inhabitants of the new nation, suggesting that 1871 only represented one moment in the larger unification process. Given the mountainous terrains of much of the territory, it was inevitable that isolated peoples would develop cultural, educational, linguistic, and religious differences over such a long period. Germany of the 19th century enjoyed transportation and communications improvements that began uniting people and culture.

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which included more than 500 independent states, was effectively dissolved when Emperor Francis II abdicated during the War of the Third Coalition in August 1806. Despite the legal, administrative, and political disruption associated with the end of the Empire, the people of the German-speaking areas of the old Empire had a common linguistic, cultural, and legal tradition further enhanced by their shared experience in the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars.

European liberalism offered an intellectual basis for unification by challenging dynastic and absolutist models of social and political organization; its German manifestation emphasized the importance of tradition, education, and linguistic unity of people in a geographic region. Economically, the creation of the Prussian Zollverein (customs union) in 1818 and its subsequent expansion to include other states of the German Confederation reduced competition between and within states. Emerging modes of transportation facilitated business and recreational travel, leading to contact and sometimes conflict among German speakers from throughout Central Europe.

German Cultural Identity
In the late 18th century, the sense of a German cultural identity began to emerge. Before 1750, the German upper classes looked to France for intellectual, cultural, and architectural leadership; French was the language of high society. By the mid-18th century the “Aufklärung” (The Enlightenment) had transformed German high culture in music, philosophy, science, and literature. Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the pioneer as a writer who expounded the Enlightenment to German readers; he legitimized German as a philosophic language.

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) broke new ground in philosophy and poetry as a leader of the Sturm und Drang movement of proto-Romanticism. Weimar Classicism was a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, Classical, and Enlightenment ideas. The movement, from 1772 until 1805, involved Herder as well as polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), a poet and historian. Herder argued that every folk had its own particular identity expressed in its language and culture. This legitimized the promotion of German language and culture and helped shape the development of German nationalism. Schiller’s plays expressed the restless spirit of his generation, depicting the hero’s struggle against social pressures and the force of destiny.

Rise of German Nationalism
Under the hegemony of the Napoleonic French Empire (1804–1814), popular German nationalism thrived in the reorganized German states. Due in part to the shared experience under French dominance, various justifications emerged to identify “Germany” as a single state.

A common language may have been seen to serve as the basis of a nation, but as contemporary historians of 19th-century Germany noted, it took more than linguistic similarity to unify these several hundred polities. The experience of German-speaking Central Europe during the years of French hegemony contributed to a sense of common cause to remove the French invaders and reassert control over their own lands. The exigencies of Napoleon’s campaigns in Poland (1806–07), the Iberian Peninsula, western Germany, and his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 disillusioned many Germans, princes and peasants alike. Napoleon’s Continental System nearly ruined the Central European economy. The invasion of Russia included nearly 125,000 troops from German lands, and the loss of that army encouraged many Germans, both high- and low-born, to envision a Central Europe free of Napoleon’s influence.

The surge of German nationalism, stimulated by the experience of Germans in the Napoleonic period and initially allied with liberalism, shifted political, social, and cultural relationships within the German states during the beginning of the German Confederation. Figures like August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Ludwig Uhland, Georg Herwegh, Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Ludwig Börne, and Bettina von Arnim rose in the Vormärz era. Father Friedrich Jahn’s gymnastic associations exposed middle-class German youth to nationalist and democratic ideas, which took the form of the nationalistic and liberal democratic college fraternities known as the Burschenschaften.

The Wartburg Festival in 1817 celebrated Martin Luther as a proto-German nationalist, linking Lutheranism to German nationalism, and helping arouse religious sentiments for the cause of German nationhood. The festival culminated in the burning of several books and other items that symbolized reactionary attitudes. One item was a book by August von Kotzebue, who was accused of spying for Russia in 1819 and then murdered by a theological student, Karl Ludwig Sand, who was executed for the crime. Sand belonged to a militant nationalist faction of the Burschenschaften. Metternich used the murder as a pretext to issue the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which dissolved the Burschenschaften, cracked down on the liberal press, and seriously restricted academic freedom.

Metternich was able to harness conservative outrage at the assassination to consolidate legislation that would further limit the press and constrain the rising liberal and nationalist movements. Consequently, these decrees drove the Burschenschaften underground, restricted the publication of nationalist materials, expanded censorship of the press and private correspondence, and limited academic speech by prohibiting university professors from encouraging nationalist discussion.

Other Factors for Unification
By the early 19th century, German roads had deteriorated to an appalling extent. Travelers both foreign and local complained bitterly about the state of the Heerstraßen, the military roads previously maintained for the ease of moving troops. As German states ceased to be a military crossroads, however, the roads improved; the length of hard-surfaced roads in Prussia increased from 3,800 kilometers (2,400 mi) in 1816 to 16,600 kilometers (10,300 mi) in 1852. By 1835, Heinrich von Gagern wrote that roads were the “veins and arteries of the body politic…” and predicted that they would promote freedom, independence, and prosperity. As people moved around, they came into contact with others on trains, at hotels, in restaurants, and for some, at fashionable resorts such as the spa in Baden-Baden. Water transportation also improved.

As important as these improvements were, they could not compete with the impact of the railway. Historians of the Second Empire later regarded the railways as the first indicator of a unified state; the patriotic novelist, Wilhelm Raabe, wrote: “The German empire was founded with the construction of the first railway…” Rail travel changed how cities looked and how people traveled. Its impact reached throughout the social order, affecting everyone from the highest-born to the lowest. Although some of the outlying German provinces were not serviced by rail until the 1890s, the majority of the population, manufacturing centers, and production centers were linked to the rail network by 1865.

As travel became easier, faster, and less expensive, Germans started to see unity in factors other than language. The Brothers Grimm, who compiled a massive dictionary known as The Grimm, also assembled a compendium of folk tales and fables that highlighted the storytelling parallels between different regions. Karl Baedeker wrote guidebooks to different cities and regions of Central Europe, indicating places to stay, sites to visit, and giving a short history of castles, battlefields, famous buildings, and famous people. His guides also included distances, roads to avoid, and hiking paths to follow.

The words of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben expressed not only the linguistic unity of the German people but also their geographic unity. Patriotic songs as “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”) by Max Schneckenburger began to focus attention on geographic space, not limiting “German-ness” to a common language. Schneckenburger wrote “The Watch on the Rhine” in a specific patriotic response to French assertions that the Rhine was France’s “natural” eastern boundary.

The German nation was comparatively young, formed in 1871 by the unification of more than two-dozen German-speaking kingdoms and duchies. The men who instigated and led this process were nationalist politicians and generals, some of whom had been urging German unification for many years. Advocates of unification were convinced that a German superstate – with its sizeable territory, natural resources, industrial might and military power – could come to dominate Europe. The most powerful of the German-speaking states was Prussia, the Hohenzollern kingdom fixated with war and militarism. The Prussians were renowned for their military prowess: their army contained an elite officer corps leading ranks of highly trained soldiers. Prussia had Europe’s most skilled army of the 1800s, a fact born out by stunning victories over Austria (1866) and France (1871). These victories paved the way for German unification, as the smaller German-speaking kingdoms began to see the political and economic advantages of falling in behind the powerful Prussian monarchy. The creation of the German Empire was finalised in Versailles, near Paris, in 1871.

From 1871 to 1890, imperial Germany was guided by the firm but watchful hand of Count Otto von Bismarck. No single figure contributed more to shaping imperial and modern Germany – and indeed to pre-war Europe. Though Bismarck was a nationalist at heart, he was also a realist who wanted to protect the new German state by preventing another major European war. His greatest fear was a two-front war with both France and Russia, Germany’s strongest military rivals in mainland Europe. Bismarck adopted foreign policy methods later known as Realpolitik. Its most visible feature was the ‘Iron Count’s’ web of treaties, which furthered German interests without risking war. Bismarck focus on maintaining the balance of power in Europe meant he had little interest in expanding or developing Germany’s foreign colonies, which remained small and under-utilised in comparison to those of Britain and France.

At home, Bismarck’s domestic leadership was a study in ‘benevolent authoritarianism’. Both Germany and its parent state, Prussia, had the trappings of a democratic state: constitutions, elected legislatures and multiple political parties. But limited voting rights and restrictive electoral systems ensured that conservative elites maintained their grip on power. Prussian Junkers (land-owning aristocrats) dominated the imperial government and the upper ranks of the military. Bismarck and his ministers also adopted policies to unify Germany beyond the political arena. German was sanctioned as the empire’s official language; its use became compulsory in civil administration, business and schools. Bismarck’s notorious Kulturkampf of the 1870s attempted to curtail the social influence of the Catholic Church. The government imposed a national system of law that overrode or replaced legal systems from pre-unification.

Part VI. Imperial Germany

The German Empire was founded on January 18, 1871, in the aftermath of three successful wars by the North German state of Prussia. Within a seven-year period Denmark, the Habsburg monarchy, and France were vanquished in short, decisive conflicts. The empire was forged not as the result of the outpouring of nationalist feeling from the masses but through traditional cabinet diplomacy and agreement by the leaders of the states in the North German Confederation, led by Prussia, with the hereditary rulers of Bavaria, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Württemberg. Prussia, occupying more than three-fifths of the area of Germany and having approximately three-fifths of the population, remained the dominant force in the nation until the empire’s demise at the end of another war in 1918.

At its birth Germany occupied an area of 208,825 square miles (540,854 square km) and had a population of more than 41 million, which was to grow to 67 million by 1914. The religious makeup was 63 percent Protestant, 36 percent Roman Catholic, and 1 percent Jewish. The nation was ethnically homogeneous apart from a modest-sized Polish minority and smaller Danish, French, and Sorbian populations. Approximately 67 percent lived in villages and the remainder in towns and cities. Literacy was close to universal because of compulsory education laws dating to the 1820s and ’30s.

Domestic concerns
From its origins in 1871, the empire was governed under the constitution designed four years earlier by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister, for the North German Confederation. This constitution reflected the predominantly rural nature of Germany in 1867 and the authoritarian proclivities of Bismarck, who was a member of the Junker landowning elite. There were two houses: the Reichstag, to represent the people, and the Bundesrat, to represent the 25 states. The former comprised 397 members elected by universal manhood suffrage and a secret ballot. The constituencies established in 1867 and 1871 were never altered to reflect population shifts, and rural areas thus retained a vastly disproportionate share of power as urbanization progressed. In theory the Reichstag’s ability to reject any bill seemed to make it an important reservoir of power; in practice, however, the power of the lower house was circumscribed by the government’s reliance on indirect taxes and by the parliament’s willingness to approve the military budget every seven (after 1893, every five) years. Most legislative proposals were submitted to the Bundesrat first and to the Reichstag only if they were approved by the upper house. Although members of the Reichstag could question the chancellor about his policies, the legislative bodies were rarely consulted about the conduct of foreign affairs. Imperial ministers were chosen by and were responsible to the emperor rather than to the legislature.

A problem that was to plague the empire throughout its existence was the disparity between the Prussian and imperial political systems. In Prussia the lower house was elected under a restricted three-class suffrage system, an electoral law that allowed the richest 15 percent of the male population to choose approximately 85 percent of the delegates. A conservative majority was always assured in Prussia, whereas the universal manhood suffrage resulted in increasing majorities for the political centre and left-wing parties in the imperial parliament. William I was both German emperor (1871–88) and king of Prussia (1861–88). Apart from two brief instances the imperial chancellor was simultaneously prime minister of Prussia. Thus, the executives had to seek majorities from two separate legislatures elected by radically different franchises. A further problem was that government ministers were generally selected from the civil service or the military. They often had little experience with parliamentary government or foreign affairs.

The constitution had been designed by Bismarck to give the chancellor and monarch primary decision-making power. Universal manhood suffrage had been proposed because of Bismarck’s belief that the rural population would vote for either the Conservative or Free Conservative parties. (Female suffrage had not been proposed because politics was considered a male preserve at the time.) The Progressives, a left-wing liberal party, were expected to do poorly in the two-thirds of Germany that was rural in 1867. Bismarck had not counted on new parties such as the Centre Party, a Roman Catholic confessional party, or the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD), both of which began participating in imperial and Prussian elections in the early 1870s. The Centre generally received 20–25 percent of the total vote in all elections. The SPD grew from 2 seats in the first imperial election to 35 by 1890, when the SPD actually gained a plurality of votes. Bismarck termed the Centre and SPD along with the Progressives Reichsfeinde (“enemies of the empire”) because he believed that each sought in its own way to change the fundamental conservative political character of the empire.

Beginning in 1871, he launched the Kulturkampf (“cultural struggle”), a campaign in concert with German liberals against political Catholicism. Bismarck’s aim was clearly to destroy the Centre Party. Liberals saw the Roman Catholic church as politically reactionary and feared the appeal of a clerical party to the more than one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. Both Bismarck and the liberals doubted the loyalty of the Catholic population to the Prussian-centred and, therefore, primarily Protestant nation. In Prussia the minister of ecclesiastical affairs and education, Adalbert Falk, introduced a series of bills establishing civil marriage, limiting the movement of the clergy, and dissolving religious orders. All church appointments were to be approved by the state. As a result hundreds of parishes and several bishoprics were left without incumbents. Clerical civil servants were purged from the Prussian administration.

The Kulturkampf failed to achieve its goals and, if anything, convinced the Roman Catholic minority that their fear of persecution was real and that a confessional party to represent their interests was essential. By the late 1870s Bismarck abandoned the battle as a failure. He now launched a campaign against the SPD in concert with the two conservative parties and many National Liberals. Fearing the potential of the Social Democrats in a rapidly industrializing Germany, Bismarck found a majority to outlaw the party from 1878 to 1890, although constitutionally it could not be forbidden to participate in elections. Party offices and newspapers were closed down and meetings prohibited. Many socialists fled to Switzerland and sought to keep the party alive in exile. During the 1880s Bismarck also sought to win the workers away from socialism by introducing legislation granting them modest pensions, accident insurance, and a national system of medical coverage. Like the Kulturkampf, the campaign against the SPD was a failure, and, when the 1890 elections showed enormous gains for the Reichsfeinde, Bismarck began to consider having the German princes reconvene, as in 1867, to draw up a new constitution. The new emperor, William II, saw no reason to begin his reign (1888–1918) with a potential bloodbath and asked for the 74-year-old chancellor’s resignation. Thus, Bismarck, the architect of German unity, left the scene in a humiliating fashion, believing that his creation was fatally flawed. Indeed, his policy of supporting rapid social and economic modernization while avoiding any reform of the authoritarian political system did lead to an atmosphere of persistent crisis.

The Economy
The empire was founded toward the end of two decades of rapid economic expansion, during which the German states surpassed France in steel production and railway building. By 1914 Germany was an industrial giant second only to the United States. After the establishment of the North German Confederation (1867), the impediments to economic growth were quickly removed. The usury laws and fetters on internal migration disappeared. A uniform currency based on gold was adopted by Bismarck and his National Liberal allies. An imperial central bank was created, and the tough regulations hindering the formation of joint-stock corporations fell by the wayside. Combined with the euphoria over unification, these changes led to an unprecedented boom between 1870 and 1873. The Gründerjahre (“founders’ years”), as the years after unification were called, saw 857 new companies founded with a capital of 1.4 billion talers—more new companies and investment in the private sector than in the previous 20 years. Dividends reached an astounding 12.4 percent. The railway system almost doubled in size between 1865 and 1875. Tens of thousands of Germans invested in stock for the first time to demonstrate both their patriotism and their faith in the future of the new German Empire.

These halcyon years came to an abrupt end with the onset of a worldwide depression in 1873. The prices for agricultural and industrial goods fell precipitously; for six successive years the net national product declined. A sharp decline in profits and investment opportunities persisted until the mid-1890s. About 20 percent of the recently founded corporations went bankrupt.

In agriculture, the deeply indebted Junker elite now faced severe competition as surplus American and Russian grain flooded the German market. Among the more immediate consequences of the crash was a burst of emigration from the depressed provinces of rural Prussia. During the 1870s some 600,000 people departed for North and South America; this number more than doubled in the 1880s. As a result of the depression, social and economic questions increasingly preoccupied the Reichstag, while constitutional and political issues were put on the back burner.

It would be incorrect to draw the conclusion that the economy remained in the doldrums for an entire generation. While the 1870s and early 1890s were depressed periods, the 1880s saw significant recovery in industry, if not in agriculture. The British, who had paid scant attention to Germany’s emergence as an industrial power, began to respect their competitor during this decade.

In adjusting to the depression of the 1870s, Germany’s leaders chose to return to a regulated economy after a generation of increasingly free trade. The hallmark of the new age was concentration; Germany became the land of big industry, big agriculture, big banks, and big government. The two areas in which the trend toward a controlled economy was most evident were tariff policy and the formation of cartels. Cartel agreements, which were sanctioned by the state, apportioned markets, set standards for manufactured goods, and fixed prices. It is not coincidental that Germany, where the guild system prevailed into the 19th century, should have given birth to the cartel. Cartels arose rapidly in the steel, coal, glass, cement, potash, and chemical industries. Between 1882 and 1895 the total number of business enterprises grew by 4.6 percent, but the number employing more than 50 workers grew by 90 percent.

In 1878–79 Bismarck initiated a significant change in German economic policy in conjunction with his new alliance with the two conservative parties at the expense of the National Liberals. Protective import tariffs were introduced on iron and the major agricultural grains; the latter were raised in 1885 and again in 1887. This departure from liberal economic policy addressed complaints from industrialists, estate owners, and peasants about the terrible impact the depression was having on their respective incomes. Only Britain held out against the protectionist tide that swept Europe in the 1880s. Bismarck’s shift, nevertheless, had serious political implications. It signified his opposition to any further evolution in the direction of political democracy. The grain tariffs provided the Junker estate owners of Prussia, who constituted the main opposition to full political emancipation, with subventions that insulated them somewhat from the international market. Thus, the landed elite, major industrialists, the military, and the higher civil service formed an alliance to forestall the rise of social democracy, prevent further political liberalization, and make sure that the uncertainties of the market did not weaken the elites.

Foreign policyUntil his resignation in 1890, Bismarck had a relatively free hand in the conduct of foreign policy. After three successful wars, he saw his task as promoting peace and gaining time so that a powerful German Empire in the middle of Europe would come to be accepted as natural rather than as an interloper. The Prussian victories had led to great insecurity among the Continental powers, who now reformed their armies in imitation of Germany and maneuvered for defensive alliances so they would not find themselves isolated in the event of war. Bismarck’s two areas of concern were the Balkans—where the disintegration of the Turkish Ottoman Empire could easily lead to conflict between Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary and Russia—and France, which desired revenge against the German victors. Each might spark a general European conflagration that would inevitably involve Germany.

Bismarck’s most important diplomatic objective was to prevent France from allying itself with either Austria-Hungary or Russia to create a coalition of enemies in both the east and the west. In 1873 he negotiated the Three Emperors’ League with Russia and Austria-Hungary. The league collapsed in the mid-1870s when rebellion broke out in Turkey’s Slavic provinces. In 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey, leading both Britain and Austria-Hungary to express serious concern about Russia’s expansionist war aims. When Russia forced Turkey to cede considerable territory in the Treaty of San Stefano, Bismarck called for an international conference to reconsider the peace treaty and to forestall another military conflict. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Bismarck played the role of honest broker among the powers. Russia reluctantly accepted more modest territorial gains, and tensions dissipated.

But a conflagration had barely been avoided. Soon after the conference, Bismarck negotiated an alliance with Austria-Hungary (1879), which remained in effect through World War I. While Bismarck did not intend to do so, he had tied the fate of the youthful German Empire to the aged multinational empire that faced continuous problems from its many ethnic minorities. The chancellor had clearly opted for the Dual Monarchy over Russia should a war break out. The alliance gave him leverage in Vienna, and he steadfastly used it to prevent a war over the Balkans. He chose Austria-Hungary because he feared that its dissolution would lead to Russian hegemony over the empire’s Polish, Czech, and other Slavic provinces. In addition, seven million Austro-German Catholics might seek admission to the German Empire, leading to a strengthening of the hated Centre Party.

Having a solid ally, Bismarck demonstrated his virtuosity by negotiating a revived Three Emperors’ League in 1881. He now had influence in St. Petersburg as well as in Vienna to prevent a conflict over the Balkans. In 1882 Italy, fearing French hostility, joined the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary, making it into the Triple Alliance. On the surface Bismarck had triumphed. France had no allies for a war of revenge, and the alliance with both Austria-Hungary and Russia gave him influence with the two major adversaries in the Balkans.

The transient nature of this artistry soon became apparent. A crisis in Bulgaria inflamed Russo-Austrian relations, leading to the breakup of the revived league. Once again a war was avoided with Bismarck’s intervention, but Austria-Hungary and Russia could no longer patch up their differences. Bismarck negotiated a separate Reinsurance Treaty with the Russian tsar in 1887. Nevertheless, France and Russia began courting each other before Bismarck left office.

Between 1870 and 1890 Bismarck earned the respect of European leaders for his pacific policies. Apart from a few colonial additions in the mid-1880s, Germany under his guidance acted as a satiated power. The question remained whether this burgeoning industrial power led by the Junker and industrial elites would continue this policy while the other Western powers carved out world empires.

Politics
The political structure established by Bismarck in 1867 remained with scant change until the empire’s demise in 1918. Leo, Graf (count) von Caprivi, Bismarck’s successor, was a political neophyte, having spent his entire career in the military. Given the disjuncture between the Prussian and German political systems (see above Domestic concerns), Caprivi, surprisingly, sought to work with the parties of the centre and left, Bismarck’s Reichsfeinde. With their support, he reduced the grain tariffs and negotiated long-term trade treaties with Russia, the Dual Monarchy, and Romania. Food prices fell as a result, and industry flourished. National wealth rose rapidly, as did the standard of living of the industrial labour force. The Junker elite were outraged at Caprivi’s willingness to sacrifice their interests on behalf of industry and labour. Utilizing their political power in Prussia and their access to the emperor, they were able to force his resignation in 1894, making his chancellorship the shortest before the war.

Succeeding chancellors learned from Caprivi’s fall that opposition to the landed elite was fraught with peril. Bernhard, Fürst (prince) von Bülow, chancellor from 1900 to 1909, abandoned Caprivi’s trade policy and resurrected the alliance of the agrarian and industrial elites.

As Germany entered the 20th century, its economy was the most dynamic in Europe, but its authoritarian political system was marked by paralysis. With each election, the increasingly urban electorate returned Social Democrats in growing numbers. By 1890 the Social Democrats (who had adopted a Marxist program of revolution at their Erfurt congress in 1891) received more votes than any other party, although four other parties won more seats. By 1912 they had more voters supporting them than the next two largest parties combined. Both the Centre and Social Democrats were able to create parties with a mass base in German society. The Conservatives, National Liberals, and Progressives were more traditional parties, led by notables who were ill at ease in the world of populist politics. All three declined relatively, especially the Conservatives, who, despite flirting with anti-Semitism after 1893 by becoming a Christian party, fell to less than 15 percent of the vote by 1912. Many contemporary observers thought that a major crisis was impending between the recalcitrant elites and the increasing number of Germans who desired political emancipation similar to that of Britain and France.

While the Liberals and Conservatives declined in the Reichstag, new single-issue extraparliamentary interest groups gained adherents. For the most part organizations such as the Pan-German League, the Navy League, the Farmers League, and the Colonial League were authoritarian in their politics and aggressively expansionist in foreign policy. Their constituencies were overwhelmingly middle-class and educated (except for the Farmers League), and they sought to influence the decision-making process both directly, by impressing the ministers with their strength, and indirectly, by supporting parties that adhered to their goals. Given the wealth and high status of their membership (professors were highly visible as leaders), they were unusually effective in publicizing their goals. One of the striking characteristics of the empire was the support it received from the educated strata of the population, despite (or perhaps because of) its elitist constitution.

In the last election during the empire (1912), the Social Democrats scored a great victory, capturing 34.8 percent of the vote and 110 seats. On the local level they had begun to cooperate with the Progressives and occasionally with the Centre Party. Southern states such as Württemberg were moving toward full parliamentary government, and Alsace-Lorraine was given a surprising degree of self-government. Thus, there were some indications that the empire was evolving into a representative democracy. On the other hand, the states of Saxony and Hamburg adopted even more restrictive franchises than Prussia in the years before World War I. Above all, Prussia and its Junker, military, and bureaucratic elites, supported by much of the professoriat, stood firm in opposition to any substantial democratization of the Prussian electoral system, which was a key to political reform in the Reich. It is not at all clear, therefore, how German politics might have evolved if war had not come in 1914. Some historians have viewed the outbreak of war in that year as an attempt by these elites to shore up their sagging position with a successful war and annexations, as Bismarck had done in the 1860s when the authoritarian Prussian state was besieged by a liberal opposition.

The economy, 1890–1914
The speed of Germany’s advance to industrial maturity after 1890 was breathtaking. The years from 1895 to 1907 witnessed a doubling of the number of workers engaged in machine building, from slightly more than one-half million to well over a million. An immediate consequence of expanding industrial employment was a sharp drop in emigration; from an average of 130,000 people per year in the 1880s, the outflow dropped to 20,000 per year in the mid-1890s. The surplus population continued to leave Prussia’s eastern provinces, but the destination was the growing and multiplying factories of Berlin and the Ruhr rather than the Americas. Earlier British fears of German competition were now fully justified. While Britain produced about twice as much steel as Germany during the early 1870s, Germany’s steel production exceeded Britain’s in 1893, and by 1914 Germany was producing more than twice as much steel as Britain. Moreover, only one-third of German exports in 1873 were finished goods; the portion rose to 63 percent by 1913. Germany came to dominate all the major Continental markets except France.

The focus of national wealth as well as population shifted to the urban industrial sector by 1900. Only 40 percent of Germans lived in rural areas by 1910, a drop from 67 percent at the birth of the empire. Cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants accounted for one-fifth of the population in 1914, compared to one-twentieth at the time of unification. The application of intensive agricultural techniques led to a doubling in the value of all farm products despite a sharp decline in the rural population. Industry accounted for 60 percent of the gross national product in 1913.

The German working class grew rapidly in the late 19th and the early 20th century. Total union membership reached 3.7 million in 1912, of which 2.5 million were affiliated with the socialist unions. Bismarck’s social welfare legislation covered some 13.2 million workers by 1911. Although German employers were extremely authoritarian and hostile to collective bargaining, the labour force did make significant economic gains. Between 1867 and 1913 the average number of hours worked per year declined by 14 percent. Nearly every study of real income shows a rapid rise until 1902 and then a modest increase yearly thereafter. National income per capita rose from 352 marks to 728 during the life of the empire. Despite these advances, industrial workers lacked full political rights, which led a large number of them, including many Roman Catholic workers, to vote for the revolutionary socialist party.

While industrialization was rapid, it occurred only in certain sectors of the economy; other areas were only marginally affected. Some two million Germans persisted in traditional artisanal enterprises even as the nation became an industrial colossus. While Germany was characterized by large Junker estates and cartels, it was also the nation of dwarf-sized farms (60 percent of farmers owned less than five acres) and small workshops. German factories were larger and more modern than their British and French counterparts, but the preindustrial sector was more backward. During depressions those in the traditional trades often turned to anti-Semitism as an ideology that was portrayed as both patriotic and anticapitalist.

Foreign policy, 1890–1914
Bismarck’s successors rapidly abandoned his foreign policy. The Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 with Russia was dropped, leaving Germany more firmly tied to the Dual Monarchy and Russia free to conclude an alliance with France in 1894. Within four years Friedrich von Holstein, a councillor in the political division of the foreign office, had weakened Germany’s influence in the Balkans and allowed France to end its isolation. German overtures to Britain remained ineffective.

In 1895 the brilliant young sociologist Max Weber gave an inaugural lecture in Freiburg in which he pointed out that, while Germany was establishing a nation-state belatedly, the other powers had been founding world empires in Africa and Asia. Weber admonished his audience that Germany had to follow suit or become another Switzerland. Weber’s contemporaries needed little convincing. From 1897 to 1912 William II, with his politically astute naval adviser, Alfred von Tirpitz, sought to make Germany a global power. Germany’s naval power went from being negligible to being second only to Britain’s in little more than a decade. Nor did Germany build a navy simply to defend its coastline; rather, the new battleships were capable of challenging the other naval powers on the oceans. Tirpitz was a master of publicity, able to win much of the commercial and industrial middle class for his vision of a mighty empire, whose shipping lanes would be guarded by his fleet. The fleet was also expected to make the monarchy more popular and stem the growth of the left-wing parties. Germany’s efforts to build a global empire proved to be a colossal failure. Germany came on the imperial scene late, when the choicest territories had already been occupied. Togo, Cameroon, part of New Guinea, a few Pacific islands, and east-central and southwestern Africa—all territories of limited economic value—hardly seemed to justify the enormous expenditures on the navy. Moreover, Tirpitz’s plans alienated Britain. Germany already had the most powerful army in the world when it fastened on becoming a great naval power. The British found this threatening and negotiated an alliance with Japan in 1902 and another one with France in 1904. In 1907 Britain settled its differences with Russia, and the Triple Entente (including France) was established. Germany now found itself surrounded by three major powers allied against it.

The more established powers found Germany meddling everywhere. This behaviour was particularly striking because it followed two decades of Bismarck’s policy of avoiding conflict. The Japanese objected to Germany’s involvement in China in the 1890s. Russia watched as German power and influence grew in Turkey, its hereditary enemy. The French, of course, still harboured dreams of undoing their defeat in 1870. With Britain also alienated, Bismarck’s nightmare of a coalition against the young upstart empire had become a reality. Twice Germany’s rulers sought to break up the alliance that was forming against it. In 1905 and 1911 Germany created crises over the French penetration of Morocco. In each case the British and Russians stood firm, and, even though Germany gained concessions, the Triple Entente remained solid. At home, the political system that Bismarck had created was in serious trouble, in part because neither his successors nor the unstable young emperor, William II, shared the master politician’s gifts, in part because Bismarck’s social world no longer existed. It became increasingly difficult to govern with a democratically elected Reichstag and a Prussian parliament that represented a conservative plutocracy.

In 1912 the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and his ministers reassessed the decade and a half of efforts to achieve global power and judged them a failure. The army, which had not been expanded since 1894, once again became the pride of the regime. Eastern Europe and the Balkans were now considered the most likely areas for German economic and political penetration. Since Italy had become unreliable, Austria-Hungary was the only ally to be counted on in the event of war. Any threat to the stability of the Dual Monarchy could leave Germany totally isolated.

The assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Bosnian Serb in June 1914 augured poorly for the future of Austria-Hungary unless it showed resolve in dealing with the provocation. William II and Bethmann Hollweg urged strong measures against Serbia and reasserted their unconditional loyalty if war should eventuate. With Russia rapidly recovering from its defeat by Japan in 1905 and Austria-Hungary increasingly threatened by the national aspirations of its minorities, time appeared to be on the side of the Triple Entente. Thus, if war was inevitable, the sooner it came, the better. A localized conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia with a quick victory for the former would be desirable. If Russia chose to intervene to help its Slavic brother, Serbia, then a general European conflict would ensue. This was acceptable to the German government both because of its pessimism about the long-term strength of the Central Powers (i.e., the German Empire and Austria-Hungary) and because the civilian population could be expected to rally to the war effort if tsarist Russia appeared to bear much of the responsibility.

Part VII. World War One

Austro reich

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