Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In 1848, Germany’s attempt at a bourgeois revolution failed and with it the struggle of the German professional and commercial classes for political and social equality with the

ancien regime

. In other words, Germany failed to make the socio-political advances that England, Holland, France and North America had achieved, in some cases generations before. German liberalism, or would-be liberalism, was based on middle-class demands for ‘free trade and a constitutional framework to protect their economic and social space in society’. When this attempt at constitutional change failed, to be followed in 1871 by the establishment of the Reich, led by Prussia, a most unusual set of circumstances came into being. In a real sense, and as Gordon Craig has pointed out, the people of Germany had played no part in the creation of the Reich. ‘The new state was a “gift” to the nation on which the recipient had not been consulted.’

³⁹

Its constitution had not been earned; it was simply a contract among the princes of the existing German states, who in fact retained their crowns until 1918. To our modern way of thinking, this had some extraordinary consequences. For example, one result was that ‘the Reich had a Parliament without power, political parties without access to governmental responsibility, and elections whose outcome did not determine the composition of the government’. In addition to the Reichstag, there was the Bundesrat, not an elected body at all but a committee of state governments, which shared power with Parliament, but neither of whom could depose the Chancellor. Moreover, the internal arrangements of the individual states were not affected by the events of 1871. The franchise for the Prussian Parliament, for example (and Prussia made up three-fifths of the population), depended on the taxes one paid, meaning that the top 5 per cent of tax-payers had one-third of the votes, the same proportion as the bottom 85 per cent.⁴⁰ Nor did the Chancellor rule with the aid of a cabinet: the imperial departments, which expanded their influence as time went on, were run by subordinate state secretaries. This was quite unlike – and much more backward than – anything that existed among Germany’s competitors in the West (though this ‘belatedness’ or otherwise of Germany is the subject of lively academic controversy right now). Matters of state remained in the hands of the landed aristocracy, although Germany had become an industrial power. This power was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands for, with urbanisation, the growth of commerce and the expansion of industry, the patchwork of old German states became less and less powerful and the empire more of a reality. The state thus became progressively more authoritarian as it took on a greater role in regulating economic and social issues. In short, as more and more people joined in Germany’s industrial, scientific and intellectual successes, the more it was run by a small coterie of traditional figures – landed aristocrats and military leaders, at the head of which was the emperor himself. This essential dislocation was fundamental to ‘German-ness’ in the run-up to the First World War. It was one of the greatest anachronisms of history.⁴¹