GERMANY

Germany was little more than a "geographical expression" on the eve of the French Revolution. A loose confederation of 314 sovereign territorial states, 1,400 independent imperial knights, and 51 "free" cities had existed since 1512 as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. For most of this period, the Catholic house of Habsburg at Vienna wore the crown of Charlemagne. Polycentrism characterized the Holy Roman Empire: there existed no cultural, economic, or political center comparable to London or Paris. The British historian James Bryce (1838–1922), citing Voltaire, stated that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Its primary purpose was to leave undisturbed the territorial sovereignty and social order of its roughly three hundred rulers. The empire's army existed mainly on paper—a motley collection of superannuated warriors whose various uniforms reflected the quilting of the German map. Its twenty million people had little contact with the empire's agencies.

revolution and restoration, 1789–1847

The greatest threat to the empire came from beyond its borders in 1789, when the French Constituent Assembly voted to abolish the nobility, nationalize church property, strike down feudal dues, ban guilds, introduce a land tax, secularize education, and promulgate a constitution as well as a bill of rights. The small German middle class—mainly university-educated civil servants—initially embraced these "French ideas." But as the Revolution in Paris took a radical turn with the creation of a republic in September 1792, the beheading of King Louis XVI in January 1793, and the Reign of Terror by September 1793, its German supporters recoiled. Still, neither Berlin nor Vienna introduced a single reform program to meet the challenges of the National Convention in Paris.

German rulers, under the leadership of Kaiser Francis II at Vienna, ignored the potential threat from French internal developments and instead measured that threat mainly in terms of its effect on the European concert. They half-heartedly mounted no fewer than three coalition wars against France between 1792 and 1806. They symbolically crowned the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, on 14 July 1792—the third anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris. And Austria and Prussia eagerly turned east to join Russia in the Partitions of Poland, with Prussia doing so in 1793 and both Prussia and Austria participating in 1795.

"Our aim is very simple to define: nothing more and nothing less than the preservation of the world as we know it." (Prince Klemens von Metternich, 1820)

"This war [between France and Germany] represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution…. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope…. The balance of power has been entirely destroyed." (Benjamin Disraeli, 1871)

"The earlier errors of a Turkish policy against Russia, a Moroccan against France, fleet against England, irritating everyone, blocking everyone's way and yet not really weakening anyone. Basic cause: lack of planning, craving for petty prestige victories." (Kurt Riezler, July 1914)

Napoleon Bonaparte rudely ended their insouciance in 1799 when he seized power in Paris and began more than a decade of warfare in a relentless drive for hegemony in Europe. In short order, "the world spirit on horseback," as the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called Bonaparte, on the bayonets of his armies reformed the empire. First, he conquered and annexed the left bank of the Rhine. Then, in 1806 he bundled sixteen German minor states, including Bavaria, Saxony, Westphalia, Württemberg, and Baden, into a satrapy, the Confederation of the Rhine. Next, he placed his brother Jérôme on the throne of a newly created Kingdom of Westphalia. And finally he introduced the Napoleonic Civil Code in these German states and ruthlessly secularized church lands. Napoleon defeated the old regime armies one by one—most notably that of Austria at Austerlitz in December 1805 and that of Prussia at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806. Few observers even noticed that Francis II, spurred into action by Napoleon, formally abolished the Holy Roman Empire on 6 August 1806 in favor of a new "Austrian Empire." Ironically, by eliminating some three hundred states, Napoleon took the first steps toward creating a more manageable "German" state.

The French incursions into central Europe crystallized political ideologies. Liberals embraced British notions of civil liberty and parliamentary government. Specifically, the majority rallied around a broad program of freedom of the press, freedom of trade, separation of church and state, habeas corpus, creation of a civilian militia, and a written constitution. Only a minority continued to look across the Rhine at republican/imperial France. Conservatives rallied under the slogan of "throne and altar" to deny the French Revolution and Bonaparte's reforms. They opposed free trade, secularization, constitutionalism, and militia, and instead upheld the principles of church, monarchy, and nobility. Finally, the French incursions also brought a third "ism," that of nationalism. Beginning with the notion of cultural nationalism, its proponents quickly moved forward to political nationalism—to the idea that all Germans should be united into a sovereign nation to defend the national culture.

Defeat often drives reform. Thoroughly humiliated by Napoleon, Prussia took the lead under King Frederick William III (r. 1797–1840). A group of reformers such as Karl vom Stein, Karl August von Hardenberg, and Hermann von Boyen led the royal bureaucracy to reform the state of Frederick II (r. 1740–1786). Stein's Reform Edict of 1807 abolished feudalism by decreeing that "there shall exist only free people." The following year, Stein's Municipal Ordinance gave self-government to cities. In 1810 Prussia abolished the medieval guild structure in the Freedom of Trade and Occupations Acts. Two years later, it emancipated its Jews. Under Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August Neithardt von Gneisenau, Prussia reformed its armed forces to better reflect the "nation in arms." And under Wilhelm von Humboldt it transformed the old Academy of Sciences into the modern secularized University of Berlin (now Humboldt University of Berlin).

While Prussia reformed, Napoleon in June 1812 sought to defeat the last Continental power, Russia. His Grand Army of 700,000 men (including 34,000 Austrians, 20,000 Prussians, and another 25,000 from his German satellites) was defeated by a combination of Russian resistance, partisan warfare, and harsh winter. As the army disintegrated and Napoleon fled to Paris, his German creations crumbled. The resulting "wars of liberation" against the Corsican were a mixture of monarchism and antiforeign feeling, vaguely nationalistic and quasi religious. The new motto, "With God for King and Fatherland," and the freshly minted Iron Cross reflected this unusual symbiosis. In October 1813 a multinational Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and Swedish army defeated Napoleon at Leipzig in the so-called Battle of the Nations. Exiled to Elba, Napoleon returned to France, only to be defeated again, this time by British and Prussian armies at Waterloo in June 1815.

More than three hundred emperors, kings, princes, and diplomats met at Vienna to restore a broken world. Under the leadership of Prince Klemens von Metternich, Hardenberg, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, and Viscount Castlereagh of Britain, the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) struggled to find a compromise between revolution and restoration. It met only once—to sign the final accords. In secret sessions, the leaders rearranged the map of Europe: Austria obtained Tirol, Salzburg, Trieste, Istria, Dalmatia, Lombardy, and Venice, thus shifting its center of gravity to southeastern Europe. Prussia took two-fifths of Saxony, much of the former Kingdom of Westphalia, and most of the west bank of the Rhine River. Russia annexed Napoleon's Grand Duchy of Warsaw; Britain took overseas bases at the Cape, Ceylon, and Malta.

With regard to the future organizational form of the German states, the congress (by the Final Act of 1815) established a loose German Confederation (or Deutsche Bund) of thirty-five sovereign states and four "free" cities. The diet of the confederation convened at Frankfurt under permanent Austrian headship. Its mandate was "to preserve Germany's external and internal security and the independence and integrity of the several German states." Austria was the confederation's largest state with ten million inhabitants; Prussia came next with eight million; and within what was now referred to as the "Third Germany," Bavaria was the largest state with more than three million. All German signatories promised to promulgate constitutions for their lands, and eventually a number of them kept that promise, including Baden, Bavaria, Brunswick, Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Nassau, and Württemberg. The larger issues of "liberalism" and "nationalism" remained unresolved.

The period between the Congress of Vienna and the revolutions of 1848–1849 was pregnant with choice. Borders had to be redrawn. New states and a new German Confederation needed to be digested. Secularization of former church and imperial lands demanded time to heal. "French ideas" largely had been discredited, but there remained high expectations—of a constitution, of liberalization of press and assembly, of economic liberalization, and of national unity. Not surprisingly, the thirty years following the Congress of Vienna constituted a continuous tug of war between the forces of reform and restoration.

Metternich saw the confederation as his "own child," as a vehicle to maintain the "principle of political-social immobilization" in central Europe. To this end, he joined Alexander I in 1815 to concoct the Holy Alliance—through which they hoped to "provide succor and support in any place" against liberal and national activities. What Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) would later call the "international fire brigade" did in fact intervene between 1821 and 1831 to crush liberal uprisings in Naples and Piedmont, Greece, Spain, and Poland. By striking the adjectives "of peoples" and "of citizens" from the preamble of the Holy Alliance in favor of the term "of monarchs," Metternich and Alexander I had made their positions clear.

But the genie released by the French Revolution could not so easily be put back into the bottle. On 18 October 1817, the fourth anniversary of the Battle of the Nations and the tercentenary of Martin Luther's Reformation, radical university students organized into fraternities (Burschenschaften) gathered at the Wartburg Castle (where Luther had translated the New Testament into German) under the national colors black, red, and gold and burned lists of reactionaries (notably Metternich and Alexander I). They demanded what already had become the classic liberal reform platform as well as a "German national state based on freedom and unity." When Karl Sand, a theology student at Mannheim, in March 1819 assassinated the playwright and Russian councilor August von Kotzebue as a tsarist "spy," Metternich was outraged. His response was encapsulated in the so-called Carlsbad Decrees drafted between 6 and 31 August 1819. Three stand out. The University Decree banned the Burschenschaften and instituted a system of "supervising" university lecturers; the Press Decree reinstituted censorship of all journals, papers, and books; and the Search Decree established a special Central Office of Investigation to root out "revolutionary intrigues." As well, the national colors were banned in public, and parliaments were closed as being "un-German."

External events once more stirred passions in the German states. The French Revolution of July 1830, the Belgian independence movement of that same year, and the Polish uprising of 1830–1831 agitated liberals and nationalists alike. In May 1832 roughly twenty-five thousand liberals waving the black, red, and gold colors gathered at Hambach Castle in the Rhine Palatinate to demand political reform and national unity. The gathering was important because it included middle-class intellectuals, civil servants, students, Polish refugees, and (for the first time) women. Metternich's reaction was hardly surprising: on 28 June 1832 he crafted the "Six Articles" that strengthened the Carlsbad Decrees in rigor of enforcement and length of incarceration.

The next round in the struggle struck close to home, when a group of University of Heidelberg students stormed the main Frankfurt police station in 1833, killing six gendarmes. Prussian troops eventually restored order and sentenced two hundred students to long terms of hard labor and prison; Metternich drafted another sixty articles to again tighten existing restrictions on freedom of assembly, speech, and the press.

The most dramatic round in the battle between reform and restoration came in 1837 over the so-called Göttingen Seven. The University of Göttingen (in Hanover) had been the main center of "British ideas" on constitutionalism in Germany for decades. In 1837 Victoria of Hanover ascended the British throne and Ernst August, the Duke of Cumberland, took over that of Hanover. The king celebrated his coronation by dissolving parliament and by abolishing the constitution of 1833. Seven prominent academics (including the historian F. C. Dahlmann and the philologist Jacob Grimm) protested this political coup d'état—and were first dismissed from their posts and then exiled from Hanover. While the German Confederation did nothing to restore the constitution, Göttingen Seven societies sprang up in Great Britain, Switzerland, and the United States. Ernst August dismissed the brouhaha with the terse comment, "One can always get professors, actors and whores."

The political arena was not the only place where liberalism made a determined showing. In 1818 Prussia took the lead in abolishing internal tariffs and duties, encouraging free trade within the German Confederation. Its finance minister, Friedrich von Motz, even envisioned "a free Germany under the protection and umbrella of Prussia"—a notion that did not go down well in Vienna, but was realized by Prussia in 1834 through the founding of the Zollverein, a customs union that excluded Austria. Motz received backing from Friedrich List, a German-American economist, who spoke out not only for free trade within the confederation but also for protective tariffs against cheaper foreign-produced—read British—goods as well. Most ominously, List came up with the notion of a German-dominated central Europe (Mitteleuropa), which would play a prominent role in German war aims in 1914.

In the area of religion, the return of orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, evinced strong reactions. In central and eastern Germany, theological rationalists, offended by the authoritarian church government of their states, founded the movement of the so-called friends of light or Lichterfreunde in 1841. In time, their religious rebellion took on common political ideals. Their Catholic reform-minded brethren, enraged when the "holy coat" of Jesus Christ in 1844 became the object of a pilgrimage of nearly one million faithful to Trier, broke away from Rome and instead called for a "German" national church and the abolition of confession, fasting, pilgrimages, indulgences, and celibacy of the clergy.

By the 1840s, the very face of Germany was beginning to change. Figures are notoriously imprecise for the early nineteenth century, but of the confederation's thirty million people in 1816, about 60 percent were engaged in some form of agriculture—as yeoman farmers, smallholders, and landless laborers. By 1848 that population (excluding the Habsburg lands) had swelled by roughly ten million; it would reach forty-five million by 1864. There had developed in the three decades after 1816 a modest shift of about 5 percent of the population from the countryside to the emerging preindustrial centers; that shift would grow steadily after 1850. More dramatic was a simultaneous movement overseas. If one takes as a yardstick the territories of the German Empire of 1871, emigration rose from 50,000 in the 1820s to 210,000 in the 1830s to 480,000 in the 1840s. Nine out of ten migrated to the United States. Numerous German states subsidized emigration in an effort to elude a perceived Malthusian nightmare of overpopulation.

Behind this population explosion lay the triple revolutions in agriculture, industry, and banking. The three-crop rotation system, the development of a fertilizer industry, the importation of Swiss and Dutch cows, the rapid expansion of potato and sugar beet planting, and the regular use of fodder crops doubled the use of arable land in Prussia, doubled its milk output, and grew by half its grain yields. A founding generation of lower-middle-class industrialists such as August Borsig, Georg Henschel, Leopold Hoesch, Friedrich Krupp, Mathias Stinnes, and Karl von Stumm accumulated wealth and spurred urban growth. Much of this was fueled in the 1830s by new annuity banks, then after the years 1846 and 1847 by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen's communal credit and savings banks, and finally by urban commercial and investment banks—joint-stock institutions able to mobilize venture capital. According to one estimate, the number of artisans, craftsmen, and textile and metal workers in German cities rose from 1.64 million in 1800 to 2.93 million by around 1847.

Finally, the 1840s saw a turn toward a vague but virulent nationalism. Professors of German language and literature met at special conferences (Germanistentage) to pursue the "national question" at an academic level. More popularly, songs such as "Die Wacht am Rhein" (The watch on the Rhine) and "Deutschland über alles" (Germany above all) not only became clarion calls for nationhood but even defined the physical parameters of that future state. And under King Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861), Prussia welcomed into its territories former nationalist "demagogues" such as Ernst Moritz Arndt and Ludwig Jahn—who in 1847 founded a national gymnastics club (Turnerbund) as the first step toward a citizens' militia—as well as many of the Göttingen Seven. Grimm joined the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Dahlmann became a professor at University of Bonn. All seemed forgiven.

revolution and reaction, 1848–1849

For the third time since 1789, foreign events again stirred the German pot: between 22 and 24 February 1848 revolts broke out in Paris against the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Throughout the German states, liberals took to the streets by mid-March to press their reform demands. Vienna erupted into violence on 13 March when students, workers, apprentices, and lower-middle-class burghers, fired up by the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth's liberal and nationalist speeches in Budapest, poured into the streets. Artisans and guildsmen destroyed factories to protest industrialization. Peasants stormed manor houses to burn feudal records. Initial street clashes caused sixty deaths; the Habsburgs moved to pastoral Innsbruck. Five days later, a similar crowd took to the streets in Berlin, only to be confronted by royal troops who shot 230 protestors; the Hohenzollerns fled to Potsdam.

There existed no central leadership to direct the liberals' efforts. Rather, the German revolts varied, colored largely by regional politics. In central and north Germany, they were carried out by a middle-class political elite. In southwest Germany, under Gustav von Struve and Friedrich Hecker, they had a radical, democratic slant. In Saxony, they turned comic-opera in 1849 because of the involvement of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the composer Richard Wagner. In Bavaria, they revolved around King Louis I (Ludwig I) and his colorful mistress, Lola Montez. Throughout central Europe, the revolutions followed a similar pattern. Initial demonstrations met with limited armed force, whereupon rulers generally panicked and agreed to the rebels' demands. After a frenetic pace of radical legislation, the liberals ran out of steam and finances. Counterrevolutionary forces—the military, bureaucracy, nobility, and crown—thereupon seized the initiative and regained control.

In the end, reaction triumphed. In Austria, senior army officers and royal bureaucrats placed the eighteen-year-old Francis Joseph I (r. 1848–1916) on the throne and reconquered the revolttorn provinces one by one: Count Joseph Radetzky, a Czech, defeated rebellious Italian forces at Custoza; Prince Alfred zu Windischgrätz, a German, smashed the Czech revolt at Prague; and Josip Jela?i?, the ban (provincial governor) of Croatia, joined Windischgrätz to storm Vienna. At Berlin, General Friedrich von Wrangel was disappointed when Berliners allowed his troops to retake the city without firing a shot. At Munich, Louis I abdicated; Montez fled to London. At Dresden, both Bakunin and Wagner yielded to advancing Prussian troops. Everywhere, reinstalled governments instituted martial law, revoked recently enacted liberal and national reforms, banned parliaments, and meted out harsh sentences especially to student leaders.

As the regional revolutions ran their course, the Frankfurt National Assembly convened at St. Paul's Church on 18 May 1848 amid the ringing of church bells and the thunder of cannon fire to draft a constitution and to bring about unification. Dominated by civil servants, lawyers, educators, and judges, the gathering constituted the first freely elected assembly in German history. It quickly enacted a host of legislation pertaining to individual freedoms, secular education, sanctity of private property, a national supreme court, the creation of a German navy, and a bicameral system of constitutional monarchical government. But it soon divided over the issue of nationalism. What constituted the "German nation"? Was it to be defined by language, by culture, or by "ancient" ancestral rights of possession? In the end, most delegates voted for the latter, that is, to include in the new Germany the Polish lands of Posen (Poznan?) and West Prussia, the Czech kingdoms of Bohemia and Moravia, and even the "German harbor" of Trieste.

The final act of the Frankfurt parliament came on 27 March 1849 when, after long debate, by a vote of 290 for and 248 abstentions it offered the imperial crown to King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Once more accompanied by the pealing of church bells and the thunder of cannon fire, the assembly sent its offer out over Europe's first electric telegraph. But Frederick William IV, now firmly back in power at Berlin on the bayonets of his army, refused to accept what he termed a "crown from the gutter," that is, one offered by parliamentary hands. British historian A. J. P. Taylor discerningly called Germany's failure to embark upon a parliamentary constitutional course in 1848–1849 the "hinge of fate" at which Germany "failed to turn."

Reaction ruled after 1849. The Frankfurt parliament simply crumbled. Frederick William IV dissolved a freshly elected Prussian parliament. Francis Joseph I of Austria renounced his predecessor's promise of a constitution. Terms such as democrat and liberal were deemed to be subversive. Many of those who had fought for change and had lost turned their back on Germany. Popularly known as "Forty-Eighters," they quickly came to dominate the German communities of the American Midwest. Many joined the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln under the slogan "For Unity, For Freedom, Against Slavery." Former German liberals such as Hecker, Struve, and Carl Schurz, well before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, made abolition of slavery a central goal. Led by the Forty-Eighters, 6,000 Germans in New York, 6,000 in Illinois, and 4,000 in Pennsylvania answered President Lincoln's call of April 1861 for volunteers.

Still, the twin issues of constitutional reform and national unity refused to disappear from the stage. They simply moved from the streets and parliaments to national associations such as the Congress of German Economists (founded 1858), the National Union (1859), the German Jurists (1860), and the National Chamber of Commerce (1861). Ironically, Frederick William IV, having contemptuously rejected the imperial crown, now lusted after it. Beginning in the spring of 1850, he appealed to fellow kings and princes to convene as an imperial Reichstag and to underwrite his dream of German unity by royal fiat. This transparent stratagem was quickly spied by the Austrian prime minister, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg. On 29 November 1850 he ordered the Prussian prime minister, Baron Otto von Manteuffel, to Olmütz in Moravia, and there forced him to renounce all union plans and to reaffirm Austrian leadership within the German Confederation. The so-called Punctation of Olmütz was widely regarded as a public humiliation for Prussia.

unification under prussia, 1864–1890

Otto von Bismarck was one of the few Prussians delighted by Olmütz. The king's union plan smelled to him too much of liberalism and Romanticism. He firmly believed that unification could be achieved only through a clash of arms between the two main contenders, Austria and Prussia. "There is no room for both," he wrote a friend, "thus we cannot get along over the long haul. We steal each other's breath." The only legitimate Prussian state policy, he wrote, was one based on "egoism rather than Romanticism." But this was wishful thinking by a radical outsider. The king had earlier summarized Bismarck with the comment, "red reactionary, smells of blood, to be used only when the bayonet reigns."

Frederick William IV rendered his state one last service: he stayed out of the Crimean War (1853–1856), thus earning Russia's gratitude, while Francis Joseph I repaid Russian help against Hungarian rebels in 1849 by joining Britain and France in an alliance in December 1854. In 1857 Frederick William IV suffered a series of strokes, and the following year his brother William replaced him as regent. William's one love was the army, and when Sardinia, aided by Emperor Napoleon III of France, in 1859 tried to wrest the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia from Austria, the regent ordered mobilization of his army. It was a disaster. Units were grossly understaffed, ill trained, and badly led. Infuriated, William appointed General Albrecht von Roon as war minister to reform the army. This would cost money and likely lead to a clash with the liberals and their fondness for militias, for two-rather than three-year military service, and for control over "the power of the purse." When the moderate Prussian liberals in May 1861 agreed to fund the reforms "provisionally," the left wing of the moderate liberals reconstituted itself in June as the German Progressive Party. Roon pushed for unconditional passage of his army bill. And he had a close friend, one he knew would not shy away from confrontation: Bismarck.

William I, king since 1861, appointed Bismarck prime minister in September 1862 as a last, desperate effort to end a constitutional crisis that had developed over the liberals' refusal to pass Roon's army budget. In his first speech to the budget commission of the Prussian parliament, Bismarck took up the challenge—and more. The "great issues of the day," he informed a startled gathering, would be decided not by speeches and majority votes as at Frankfurt in 1848–1849, but rather by "iron and blood," that is, on the field of battle. To that end, Prussia needed to reform its military. He resolved the budgetary impasse by a piece of constitutional chicanery. Because the House of Lords and the House of Deputies had failed to hammer out a firm military budget, a "gap" existed in the constitution, one that left king and government with no recourse other than to run the affairs of state in lieu of consent. An angry parliament adamantly refused to ratify the army budget; a determined Bismarck simply collected taxes; and a delighted Roon thoroughly reformed the military.

"Prussian I am, and Prussian I want to remain." These words succinctly encapsulate Bismarck's views on German unification. The Austro-Prussian antagonism unleashed by Frederick the Great's invasion of Silesia in 1740 could be resolved only by a test of strength. He desired no merger of Prussia with other states, no constitutional convention to unify the German states. Instead, Prussia was to wrest primacy in Germany from Austria. Above all, it needed to pursue only policies that lay within its "own interest," the concept of realpolitik being hereafter closely associated with Bismarck.

In his memoirs, Bismarck wrote the story of German unification as the piece-by-piece unraveling of a great score that he had orchestrated. Reality was different. He was a pragmatist. To be sure, he had a clear conception of Prussia's role in future German affairs and an iron will to execute that policy. Yet, he could be flexible in his methods, and he appreciated the concerns that motivated the other players on the European chessboard. He, unlike his successors, practiced the "art of the possible." He was perfectly willing to react to the ebb and flow of European affairs, to pounce on opportunities as they presented themselves.

He did not have long to wait. In November 1863 the Danish king, Christian IX, announced that he would annex the province of Schleswig and promulgate a constitution for Holstein, both of which Denmark administered under the Treaty of London (1852). Bismarck cared little for the Germans in the provinces—"It is no concern of ours whether the Germans of Holstein are happy"—but he spied an opportunity to revoke a constitution, preempt the national issue, and draw Austria into an untenable situation. Vienna rose to the bait, and in January 1864 joined Prussia in a war against Denmark. By the end of that month, Christian IX conceded defeat; Austria and Prussia assumed separate administrations of the two provinces.

There is no question that Bismarck set out to make the Austrian position in Holstein as difficult as possible. "The clock of German dualism," he informed an associate, "has to be put right by war." Prussian forces invaded Bohemia in June 1866, launching the Austro-Prussian (or Seven Weeks') War. An alliance with Italy threatened Austria's southern front; Russia maintained benevolent neutrality toward Prussia as reward for its noninvolvement in the Crimean War. Most of the states of the "Third Germany" sided with Austria. On 3 July Roon's reformed army under Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, routed the Austrians at the battle of Königgrätz (now Hradec Králové, Czech Republic; also called battle of Sadowa). Austria surrendered its primacy in Germany and was forced to accept a "compromise" (Ausgleich) with the Magyars of Hungary.

Bismarck revealed his mettle as a statesman in victory. He rejected the generals' demands to continue the war and their desire for a victory parade through Vienna. He had achieved his political goals. Prussia was free to reconstitute central Europe. He now instituted his "lesser German" (Kleindeutsch) solution to national unity, one that did not include Austria. Prussia annexed Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and Frankfurt, and it engineered military conventions with the three southern German states of Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg. At home, the Prussian parliament by a vote of 230 to 75 passed an indemnity bill, forgiving Bismarck for having ruled illegally since 1862.

The German Confederation at Frankfurt ceased to exist. In its place, Bismarck created the North German Confederation. He crafted a constitution with a bicameral system. The Bundesrat was a federal council of the forty-three ambassadors of the confederation; Prussia, with the votes of the recently annexed states, had seventeen votes, sufficient for a veto. The Bundesrat exercised control over foreign and defense policy, fiscal matters, and communications and commercial law. The Reichstag, the lower house, was elected by universal, secret, manhood suffrage—the most progressive in Europe. Its members enjoyed immunity from prosecution and the power annually to accept or to reject the budget. Bismarck set the size of the standing army at 1 percent of the population, automatically funded at the rate of 225 thaler per recruit.

The third war of German unification—the Franco-Prussian War—remains hotly debated. In February 1870 the Spanish parliament (Cortes) chose Prince Leopold, a member of the Catholic (Sigmaringen) branch of the House of Hohenzollern, as their king. France, for centuries paranoid about Austro-Spanish Habsburg "encirclement," now feared Prusso-Spanish Hohenzollern "encir-clement." On 19 July 1870 Napoleon III declared war on Prussia after Bismarck "edited" William I's charitable telegram from Bad Ems on a conversation with a French envoy by excising from it all conciliatory phrases.

Where does the responsibility for the war lie? With Napoleon III's "bellicosity"? With Bismarck's "duplicity"? Bismarck's biographers by and large agree that there is no incontestable proof that he forced war with France. Rather, they argue that once the candidate for the Spanish throne emerged, Bismarck seized the moment either to humiliate France diplomatically or to provoke a war with Paris—both aimed at completing national unity. The war against Napoleon III was settled with a stunning Prussian victory at Sedan on 2 September; that against a hastily constituted provisional government of national defense dragged on until January 1871. This was no ordinary "cabinet war." National passions were aroused. Casualties escalated demands. While the generals again desired a complete victory, Bismarck opted to conclude peace with France for fear of European involvement. On 18 January 1871 the German Empire—including the three southern German states—under Kaiser William I, was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The historian Otto Pflanze has argued that it was a union of three powerful forces: Hohenzollern authoritarianism, Prussian militarism, and German nationalism. The annexation of Alsace and part of Lorraine was the result of the latter of those three forces.

Bismarck's "German revolution," in the words of the British Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, had "entirely destroyed" the European balance of power. What to do? Initially, Bismarck sought to avoid "entangling alliances." But recurring squabbles in the Balkans and a Russo-Turkish War in 1877 aroused in him the "nightmare of coalitions." Thus, he used his annual "cure" to assess Germany's future. The resulting Bad Kissingen memorandum of June 1877 is a model of clarity. Bismarck set up two cardinal axioms: no conflicts among the major powers in central Europe, and German security without German hegemony. He ruled out further territorial aggrandizement. Germany was "satiated" and required no more Danes, French, or Poles; it

had to be content with its position of "semi-hegemony" in Europe. France was to be isolated and the other major Continental powers brought into a diplomatic web radiating out from Berlin. And as long as Germany did not build a fleet and pursue a policy of imperialism, British vital interests would not be threatened.

Bismarck quickly enacted his alliance plans. In October 1879 he concluded the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary; in 1882 he expanded it to include Italy (forming the Triple Alliance); and in 1883, Romania. The capstone of his alliance policy was the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887. Historians later spoke of a pax Germanica. Berlin had become the diplomatic capital of Europe. Paris had been isolated. Vienna, Rome, and St. Petersburg had been reined in with regard to their ambitions in the Balkans—a region the "Iron Chancellor" deemed not worth "the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." Historians have argued that Bismarck, through his alliance system, forced four decades of peace on Europe.

Bismarck's domestic policies were less successful. To be sure, he extended the North German Confederation's bicameral constitutional system to the new empire. For the first decade as chancellor, he worked with liberal deputies and government bureaucrats to promulgate a uniform civil and criminal legal code (1873), to nationalize the Prussian state railroads under the Imperial Railroad Office (1875), to create a national postal system (1876), to found a central treasury and bank (1876), and to establish a High Court of Appeals at Leipzig (1879). As well, he introduced a national currency and the metric system. And for the first decade of his rule, he encouraged liberal free-trade policies.

Yet, two forces bedeviled him: political Catholicism in the Rhine, Silesia, Baden, and Bavaria as well as the new Marxist labor movement in the rapidly industrializing urban centers. A third force, liberalism, he would abandon once it had served his purposes. Catholics made up 40 percent of the German population and after 1871 were organized in the Center Party under Ludwig Windthorst. The party's program principally was to safeguard Catholic rights in a Protestant empire. The Center Party was emotionally allied with the Catholic states Prussia had defeated: Austria and France. With a regular 30 percent of the national vote, it played a pivotal role in parliament. Bismarck deeply disliked Windthorst. "I have my wife to love," he famously stated, "and Windthorst to hate." When the Vatican Council pronounced the dogma of papal infallibility during Prussia's war with France, Bismarck took this as a call to battle. In 1873 he had Adalbert Falk, the Prussian minister of ecclesiastical affairs and education, pass a series of laws that established state supervision of schools, withdrew state support from the Catholic Church, instituted obligatory state marriage, and made state examinations mandatory for all candidates for church office.

The so-called Kulturkampf ("struggle of cultures") was aimed not so much at Rome but at the Center Party in general and at its French and Polish voters in Germany in particular. Bismarck hoped to strangle the party in the cradle. But proscription often breeds success: during the Kulturkampf, the Center's share of votes rose by a third. The sordid affair was laid to rest in 1887 by Pope Leo XIII, who saw not Protestant Prussia but secular Italy as the Vatican's real enemy. Its legacy was one of internal divisiveness, bitterness, and dissension. It would cast its long shadow down to the Center Party's votes for Adolf Hitler's Enabling Act in 1933.

The year 1878 also saw Bismarck's turn away from liberalism. He had put in place much of the National Liberals' economic program, and the start in 1873 of what is sometimes called the Great Depression (which extended to 1896) alarmed him sufficiently to embrace protectionism—against cheap Russian and American grains and British manufactured goods. In the so-called rye and iron alliance, he forged an uneasy bond between industry and agriculture. He used two assassination attempts by anarchists against William I in 1878 to "refound" the Reich along conservative, protectionist lines—and to split the liberals into two competing factions. A small group continued as the National Liberals while a majority faction organized itself as the Progressive Liberal Party. Again, the legacy was one of divisiveness and bitterness. Social historians would later suggest that the lack of a liberal revolution to sweep away the Reich's premodern social structure constituted a divergence (Sonderweg) from Western "normative" societies.

Bismarck's assault on liberalism was closely tied to his attack on socialism. He became alarmed at the physical transformation of the Reich: in the two decades after unification, 75 percent of the growth of Germany's population—some ten million—took place in urban centers. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), founded in 1875, quickly captured the votes of this human infusion. Bismarck disliked the party's revolutionary Marxist domestic program and its pacifist, internationalist foreign policy. In 1878 he decided to strangle the socialist movement in the crib, as he had tried earlier with the Center Party. A host of antisocialist laws outlawed the SPD's nonparliamentary organizations, banned its public meetings, and proscribed its printed materials. Conversely, the Iron Chancellor sought to woo the rank and file away from the party through state-sponsored social security legislation, most notably national health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, and both disability and old-age insurance in 1889. But the antisocialist laws suffered the same fate as the Falk laws: by 1890, trade-union membership rose fivefold, to 278,000, and the SPD's share of the national vote to 1.43 million. Rebuffed by the state, the SPD turned to what sociologists have termed "negative integration," creating organizations and programs parallel to official state ones and in spirit and body turning inward and rejecting the state.

William I died in 1888. His terminally ill successor, Frederick III, served for only ninety-nine days. He was succeeded by his twenty-nine-yearold son, William II. Bismarck, alarmed by so-called enemies of state, such as liberals, Catholics, and socialists, turned to reaction. He toyed with notions of overthrowing the constitution, of replacing the Reichstag with an economic council, of reviving the infamous "gap" theory of 1862, and even of launching a military coup. In March 1890 William II dismissed the Reich's founder. The bitter titan disappeared into retirement at Friedrichsruh near Hamburg.

imperial interlude, 1890–1914

"Dropping the Pilot," as a cartoon in the English weekly magazine Punch put the dismissal of Bismarck in March 1890, was well received in many German quarters. A generation had reached maturity since unification, one tired of hearing of the great deeds of 1866 and 1870, the "satiated" Reich, and "semi-hegemony." It thirsted for action and deeds of its own. Unification, the sociologist Max Weber argued in 1895, would have been little more than "a youthful spree" and a "costly extravaganza," had it been anything less than "the starting point of German power-politics on a global scale." Bismarck's self-imposed bonds of restraint were soon broken in favor of an ill-defined but virulent policy of "world politics" (Weltpolitik).

At first, William II, influenced by the Christian Social Workers movement, founded by Adolf Stoecker, a court chaplain, set out to rule as the self-styled "king of the beggars." William allowed the antisocialist laws to lapse in 1890. That same year, he canceled the hated Reinsurance Treaty with despotic Russia. His government extended social legislation to prohibit Sunday work, set up courts of arbitration to deal with wage disputes, and outlawed the employment of children under the age of thirteen. The new chancellor, General Leo von Caprivi, rescinded Bismarck's protectionist policies and replaced them with a liberal Russo-German trade treaty in 1894.

It proved to be a brief reforming interlude. Within two years, William II had swung back to a conservative, protectionist course. Bismarck's levies against foreign iron and grains were reintroduced. Johannes von Miquel, the Prussian finance minister, revived Bismarck's "rye-and-iron" alliance under the guise of an aggressive union of agrarians and industrialists (Sammlungspolitik)—against Social Democrats, National Liberals, and Progressives. Under the "politics of concentration," industrialists voted for high tariffs against Russian and American grains, while agrarians voted for expenditures on what they termed "the ugly, ghastly fleet."

Indeed, the creation of a battle fleet under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz beginning in 1898 marked the official launching of a policy of "world politics." Wealth was no longer concentrated in land but rather in industry and commerce. In the four decades after unification, German coal production rose from 38 to 179 million tons; steel production of 13 million tons in 1913 was second only to that of the United States. Giant cartels dominated the burgeoning chemical, electrical, coal, and steel industries. Stock companies grew to more than five thousand, with aggregate holdings of about $3.4 billion. The Reich's share of global trade climbed to 13 percent, just behind Britain's 15 percent. Its population grew by 60 percent, to 67 million by 1914. Emigration fell to less than 200,000 people per annum. The flow from country to city became a flood; urban industrial centers tripled in population under William II. Historians have depicted Imperial Germany as an anthill, constantly on the move and constantly working. The SPD's share of the popular vote rose in proportion to urbanization: from 27 percent in 1898 to almost 35 percent (4.5 million votes) in 1912.

Not surprisingly, this economic explosion created demands for what Weber had called "power-politics on a global scale." Middle-class pressure groups such as the German Navy League, German Colonial League, Pan-German League, and even the Women's League endorsed Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow's demand for "a place in the sun." Hand in hand with Tirpitz, the unctuous Bülow after 1898 vigorously pursued Weltpolitik. Berlin expanded and added on to a colonial empire initially established by Bismarck—in the words of historian A. J. P. Taylor, as "the accidental byproduct of an abortive Franco-German entente"—the island of Nauru, Palau, the Carolines and Marianas, German Southwest and East Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Jiao Xian. It mattered little that these colonies were economic drains or that few Germans invested in them (3.8 percent of total overseas investments) or colonized them (only one out of every thousand emigrants went there). Prestige dominated the drive overseas. No island was too rocky, no plot in Africa too barren to escape attention. Kurt Riezler, senior consultant at the chancellor's office, in 1914 summarized Weltpolitik simply as "craving for petty prestige victories."

The Imperial German Navy became the most obvious manifestation of "world politics." Its architect, Tirpitz, saw it as both a domestic and a foreign political instrument. At home, it would rally the parties of Miquel's Sammlungspolitik by way of state building contracts and global trade (social imperialism), and thus serve as a "strong palliative against Social Democrats." Overseas, it would catapult Germany into the ranks of global powers, eventually able to challenge a declining Britain's "heritage." Tirpitz saw only two alternatives: Germany either became a prosperous world power or it would remain forever a "poor farming country." By way of two major navy bills in 1898 and 1900—augmented by supplementary bills in 1906, 1908, and 1912—he strove to create a mighty battle fleet of sixty capital ships by the mid-1920s, one capable of confronting "perfidious Albion" (i.e., Britain) in the North Sea.

It was not to be. Britain met Tirpitz's unilateral challenge financially and materially—the former by way of its vastly superior capital markets and the latter by way of a technological breakthrough with HMS Dreadnought in 1906. The Reich government, unable under the Bismarckian constitution to levy direct taxes, fell ever deeper into debt. By 1914, it had exhausted domestic capital markets by borrowing 5,000 million gold marks. As well, Weltpolitik had alienated not only the established colonial powers but also newcomers such as Japan and the United States. The German challenge was so direct that Britain abandoned "splendid isolation" and concluded agreements with rivals old and new: Japan in 1902, France in 1904, and Russia in 1907. After a serious diplomatic defeat during the first Moroccan crisis of 1905–1906, German leaders spoke of "encirclement." William II likened the Reich's position after 1907 as being akin to that of Frederick II after the Austro-French-Russian "diplomatic revolution" of 1756.

Domestically, politics took place less and less in the Reichstag; instead, it became dominated by extraparliamentary mass movements through public meetings and rallies as well as lobbying of deputies. The Kaiser's maladroit handling of political crises such as the 1907 homosexual scandal uncovered by the journalist Maximilian Harden, the 1908 Daily Telegraph interview in which he told the British that his fleet was being built not against them but against America and Japan, and the 1913–1914 civil-military confrontation in Zabern (Saverne), Alsace, eroded the crown's prestige. Most dramatically, the elections of 1912 brought a crushing victory by what Bismarck had once termed "enemies of the Reich": the Social Democrats, Guelphs, Poles, Alsatians, and a new Jewish party received more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Twelve of the deputies elected were Jewish. Nationalists were outraged. Anti-Semitism became more pronounced. The net result was a vulgarization of politics and a brutalization of debate. Visions of Weltpolitik receded from view.

The upshot was a return to Continental politics. In 1905 Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German General Staff, completed his desperate plan to fight a two-front war against France and Russia. The army again received primacy in defense outlays. Foreign policy was scaled back from "world politics" to "Balkan politics." The German flag would have to "fly over the fortifications on the Bosphorus," the Kaiser decreed, "or I shall suffer the sad fate of the great exile on St. Helena," Napoleon I. Even the political vocabulary had changed by 1914. William II, Schlieffen, and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg spoke ever more frequently in racial and social Darwinistic terms—of a coming "struggle for survival" that would pit the "Germans in Europe" against both the "Latins (Gauls)" and the "Slavs (Russia)." The assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir apparent, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914—the trigger for World War I—took place against a backdrop of pessimism and despair.

Literally thousands of books have been written about the "July crisis" of 1914. After decades of acrimonious debate, historians are now largely agreed on several conclusions. First, the decision for war was not a German "grab for world power," as the historian Fritz Fischer provocatively termed it, but rather one to secure (and if possible enhance) the position of "semi-hegemony" created in 1871. Second, Vienna, and not Berlin, seized the initiative after Sarajevo and made the first decision to risk a European war to uphold its position as a Great Power. Third, Berlin reacted to Vienna's call for help by issuing the infamous "black check" of 5 July, assuring full German

support even if, in the Kaiser's words, "some serious European complications" (read war) should arise. Helmuth von Moltke (the younger), chief of the General Staff, likewise counseled war, "and the sooner the better." Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg was prepared to take what he called a "calculated risk": if Russia backed down and did not support Serbia, then Berlin would have "outmaneuvered" the Anglo-French-Russian Entente, that is, scored a diplomatic victory; and if Russia opted for war and Germany entered it simply to preserve Austria-Hungary, "then we have the prospect of winning it." In the end, he was prepared to take what his confidant Riezler called "a leap in the dark." Bismarckian realpolitik was the first casualty of war in 1914.

See alsoAustro-Prussian War; Bebel, August; Bismarck, Otto von; Congress of Vienna; Franco-Prussian War; Frederick William III; Frederick William IV; Gagern, Heinrich von; Hardenberg, Karl August von; Napoleonic Empire; Prussia; Restorationy; Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum; William I; William II; Windthorst, Ludwig.

bibliography

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Bucholz, Arden. Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning. New York, 1991. A solid comparison of the strategic thoughts of Imperial Germany's most famous chiefs of the General Staff.

——. Moltke and the German Wars, 1864–1871. New York, 2001. A well-presented study of the general who fought Bismarck's three wars.

Carr, William. The Origins of the Wars of German Unification. London, 1991. Good analysis of Bismarck's three wars by a senior scholar.

Cecil, Lamar. Wilhelm II. 2 vols. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989–1996. A superbly crafted biography of the last of the Hohenzollerns.

Craig, Gordon A. Germany, 1866–1945. Oxford, U.K., 1978. An encyclopedic history of Germany since unification; a sequel to James Sheehan (below).

Epstein, Klaus. The Genesis of German Conservatism. Princeton, N.J., 1966. The first volume of what was to have become the standard work on German conservatism.

Eyck, Frank. The Frankfurt Parliament, 1848–1849. London, 1968. Essential analysis of the delegates and their actions at Frankfurt.

Farrar, L. L., Jr. Arrogance and Anxiety: The Ambivalence of German Power, 1848–1914. Iowa City, 1981. Good analysis of the major strains of German foreign policy from Bismarck to Wilhelm II.

Fischer, Fritz. War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914. Translated by Marian Jackson. New York, 1975. Translation of Krieg der Illusionen: Die deutsche Politik von 1911 bis 1914 (1969). An unfortunately truncated version of Fischer's classic indictment of German Weltpolitik up to the July crisis of 1914.

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Geiss, Imanuel. German Foreign Policy, 1871–1914. London, 1976. A brief but useful survey of German foreign policy from unification to World War I.

Geiss, Imanuel, ed. July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War: Selected Documents. New York, 1968. A radically shortened version of Geiss's two-volume Julikrise und Kreisgausbruch 1914: Eine Dokumentensammlung (1963–1964). Provides some of the most important documents pertaining to Germany's "leap in the dark" of July 1914.

Gooch, G. P. Germany and the French Revolution. London, 1920. Still the standard account of the topic.

Hamerow, Theodore S. Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815–1871. Princeton, N.J., 1958. A solid analysis of German politics from the Congress of Vienna to unification; follows the arguments of Rudolf Stadelmann (below).

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Herwig, Holger H. "Luxury" Fleet: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918. Rev. ed. London, 1987. By now the standard analysis of German naval building under Tirpitz and William II.

——. Hammer or Anvil? Modern Germany, 1648–Present. Lexington, Mass., 1994. A manageable paperback history of Germany since the Peace of Westphalia.

Kissinger, Henry. A World Restored: Metternich, Castle-reagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822. Boston, 1957. A political science analysis of balance of power and "satisfaction" theories.

Kraehe, Enno E. Metternich's German Policy. Vol. 2: The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815. Princeton, N.J., 1983. A balanced, masterful analysis of Metternich's German polices.

Meinecke, Friedrich. The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815. Translated by Peter Paret and Helmuth Fischer. Berkeley, Calif., 1977. Translation of Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung, 1795–1815 (1957). A classic analysis of the wars of liberation in their political and intellectual context.

Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State. Translated by Richard Deveson. London, 1995. Translation of Der autoritäre Nationalstaat: Verfassung, Gesellschaft, und Kultur des deutschen Kaiser-reiches (1990). A brilliant synthesis of German society and politics from unification to defeat.

Pflanze, Otto. Bismarck and the Development of Germany. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Princeton, N.J., 1990. The standard English-language treatment of Bismarck's domestic and foreign policies.

Sheehan, James J. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, 1978. A dated but still informative survey of classic nineteenth-century German liberalism.

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Simon, Walter M. The Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement, 1807–1819. Ithaca, N.Y., 1955. A useful overview of the Prussian reformers after 1806.

Stadelmann, Rudolf. Social and Political History of the German 1848 Revolution. Translated by James G. Chastain. Athens, Ohio, 1975. Translation of Soziale und politische Geschichte der Revolution von 1848 (1948). Brilliant, brief, unrivaled analysis of the German revolutions.

Taylor, A. J. P. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1919. Oxford, U.K., 1954. A solid, well-reasoned work that sets the background to the "German question."

Wehler, Hans Ulrich. The German Empire, 1871–1918. Translated by Kim Traynor. Leamington Spa, U.K., 1985. Translation of Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (1973). A monument to the argument for the "primacy of domestic politics."

Holger H. Herwig