Germany Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. I, The Period of Un8cation 1815-1871 (2nd edition); vol. 11, The Period of Consolidation 1871-1880; vol. 111, The Period of Fortification 1880-1898. By Otto Pflanze. Princeton: Prince- ton University Press. 1990. xxx + 518 + xvii + 554 + xi + 474 pp. $95.00 set / $39.50 + $39.50 + $35.00. Bismarck: The White Revolutionary. vol. I, 1815-1871; vol. 11, 1871-1898. By Lothar Gall. Translated by J . A. Underwood. London: Allen and Unwin. 1986. xix + 402 + x + 274 pp. Each volume E30.00. The Year of the Three Kaisers: Bismarck and the G e m n Succession, 1887-8. By J . Aldon Nichols. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1987. xii + 413 pp. $34.95. Bismarck and Mitteleuropa. By Bascom Bany Hayes. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. 1994. 623 pp. $65.00. Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Conference 1884-1885 and the Onset of Partition. Edited by Stig Forster, Wolfgang Mommsen and Ronald Robin- son. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press and German Historical Insti- tute. 1988. xx + 569 pp. f55.00. Junker and burgerliche GroJgrundbesitzer im Kaiserreich: Landwirt- schaftlicher GroJbetrieb, Groggrundbesitz und Familien.deikomm$ in PreuJen, 1867/71-1914. By Klaus HeB. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 1990. 345 pp. DM 74. Urban Planning and Civic Order 1860-1914. By Brian Ladd. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1990. xiii + 326 pp. E29.95. Grenzenloses Wachstum? Das rheinische WirtschafCsburgerturn und seine Industrialisierungsdebatte 1814-1857. By Rudolf Boch. Burgertum: Beitrage zur europaischen Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1991. 443 pp. DM 89. Der Militarismus der kleinen Lat e : Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiser- reich, 1871-1914. By Thomas Rohkramer. Munich: Oldenbourg. 1990. 301 pp. DM 78. German History Vol. 15 No. I 0 1997 The German History Society
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102 Geoff Eley German Nationalism and Religious Conflict. Culture, Ideology, Politics 1870- 1914. By Helmut Walser Smith. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1995. 271 pp. $39.50 I S33.50. Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Burgerturn im Rheinland, 1 794- 1914. By Thomas Mergel. Burgerturn: Beitrage zur europaischen Gesell- schaftsgeschichte, vol. 9. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1994. xiv + 460 pp. DM 112. I The Bismarckian period of German history presents a perplexing aspect. Thirty years ago, the turning to social history among a sizeable cohort of West German historians seemed likely to relativize Bismarcks importance in the making of the German empire, if not to displace him altogether. A variety of foundational works laid the ground for a new kind of interpretation. Hans Rosenberg shifted our attention to the socio-economic context of the so-called Great Depression of 1873-96, relating the key political develop- ments of the post-unification decades to the pressures exerted by a Kondratiev down- swing of the economy. Hans-Ulrich Wehler elaborated on this framework by charting the growth of a social-imperialist consensus among the ruling elites, which stabilized an authoritarian governing system by diverting popular energies into the drive for colonies overseas, and established a lasting pattern of manipulative techniques of rule. Finally, Helmut Bohme re-narrated the history of unification as the consequence of an economic struggle between Prussia and Austria for supremacy in Germany, in which Bismarcks wars of unification were exchanged for an economic logic of state-making and develop- ment as the prime mover. But even to venture this summary description is to obscure the richness of the new departures. It is worth staying for a moment with Bohrnes work in particular, because over the past two decades it has faded so much from the scene. Bohme challenged the political, diplomatic, and military cast of the older interpretations head-on. He approached German unification as a case study in the political economy of development, focusing less on the formal act of the empires foundation than on the political logic of securing a national market amidst the fragmented sovereignties of German-speaking central Europe, where Austria and Prussia were also in active competition. From this perspective, the Zollverein was the key arena., and during the 1850s and 1860s Austria was decisively edged out of the emergent national economy. In this perspective, 1858 and the opening of the New Era in Prussian politics became less important than 1857 and the economic downturn, which widened the gap between the Prussian and the Aus- trian economies; 1862 was important less For Bismarcks appointment as Prussian Minister-President than for the Prussian free trade treaty with France; and Austrias Hans Rosenberg, GroJe Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschajisahlauj Gesellschaji und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne and Berlin, 1969); Helmut Bohme, Deutschlands Weg zur GroJtnncht. Sfudien zum Verhdltnis von Wirtschaji und Staat wiihrend der Reichsgriindungszeit 1848-1881 (Cologne and Berlin, 1966).
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 103 military defeat in 1866 became the corollary of its prior economic defeat in the Zoll- verein two years before.? Bohme applied this analysis to the years after unification too. Here 1879 replaces 1871 as the end date of unification, attaching the effective completion of the latter to the new economic and political settlement of 1878-9, when Bismarck turned decisively to the right. The structural foundations of German government became reconfigured: the parliamentary coalition of 1871-3, based on National Liberals and Free Conserva- tives, and linked to a free-trading constellation of merchant capital, light manufactures, and east Elbian agriculture, subsided before a new protectionist front of Free Conserva- tives, Conservatives, National Liberals, and the Catholic Centre. Using the tariffs of 1879, and the ideological scare tactics of the Anti-Socialist Law from the previous year, Bismarck harnessed the demands of heavy industry, textiles, and big agriculture for a protected home market, and shaped these convergent protectionisms into the socio-polit- ical foundations of a new governing coalition, which then lasted, Bohme argued, until the collapse of the empire in 1918. This decisive departure amounted to a refounding of the German Empire. Thus in 1879-81, the first terminal point was reached in the thirty-year creation of the German Empire. Bohmes basic analytical move, which resituated the events of German unification in an argument about the movements of the national economy and their effects on society, was common to the other influential works of the late 1960s. Both Rosenberg and Wehler emphasized the impact of the depression after 1873 on government priorities, where not only the tariffs of 1879, but also the turning to colonies during the 1880s, bespoke the search for effective anti-cyclical therapy to handle the problems of over- production and declining prices threatening the optimistic scenario of Germanys con- tinuing economic growth. In this view, the depression brought a sea change in German politics, shifting the ground of policy for business, the parties and government, mobiliz- ing wide sections of the populace into activity, from workers to Mittelstand and farmers, and generally re-centring national politics around matters of economic policy. Liberalism was the casualty of this process. Its free-trading and universalist ideals lost ground to the new politics based on national protectionism and sectional economic interests. More fundamentally, this approach has argued, liberalism became overshadowed by an emerg- ing anti-modern ideological complex containing romantic, corporatist, and anti-Semitic forms of belief. Rosenberg formulated this argument as an all-encompassing key to the history of the Bismarckian era, and Wehler repeated the construction, making the Great Depression the explanation for all manner of social, cultural and intellectual develop- ments, from Bismarcks colonial policy and political anti-Semitism, to social darwinism and psychoanalysis. A new atmosphere of uncertainty and crisis resulted from the post- unification economic situation, in this view, so that a generalized mood of foreboding, See also Helmut Bohme (ed.), Probleme der Reichsgriindungszeit 1848-1879 (Cologne and Berlin, 1968); Prolegomena zu einer Soziul- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Deutschlunds im 19. und 20. Juhrhundert (Frankfurthlain, 1968); (ed:), The Foundation of the Germun Empire: Select Documents (Oxford, 197 1); Politik und Okonomie in der Reichsgriindungs- und spaten Bismarckzeit, in Michael Stunner (ed.), Dus kuiserliche Deutschlund. Politik und Gese//schuji 1870-IYI8 (Dusseldorf, 1970). pp. 26-50. Bohme, Deutschlands Weg, p. 15; Bohme (ed.), Probleme der Reichsgriindungszeit, p. 14; Bohme, Deutschlunds Weg, p. 9.
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104 Geoff Eley tension and insecurity (a Kartell der Angst) pervaded the new German society. Anxiety became the well-spring of politics? At the most general level, this approach to the Bismarckian era entailed a very basic kind of materialism, which highlights the analytical and causal priority of economic factors in the movement of history-the objective conditions and cyclical fluctuations of the national and local economies, the organized representation of economic interests, and the consequences of a particular social structure. In effect, this was an economizing of the approach to German unification, bringing a shift of emphasis from Bismarck and Prussian militarism to the rise of a national market and the political economy of industrialization. In this respect, it was no accident that Bohme was a senior pupil of Fritz Fischer, whose work on Germanys expansionism in the First World War was concurrently emphasizing the primacy of an interest-based politics in the dynamics of German foreign p~l i cy. ~ In summarizing the significance of the breakthrough of the late 1960s, therefore, we might make the following points: 1 . Most fundamentally, the new historiography entailed the perspective I have called economization-a view of the political process as being constituted primarily from the interaction of organized interests in the economy. This was partly produced by certain structural characteristics of the German situation, including the much higher levels of organization and capital concentration in industry, the ease of direct access to the government bureaucracy, the growth of extra-parliamentary and corporative forms of political representation, and so on. But the turn to protection after 1873 also had its own dynamic. By the end of the 1870s a pattern had been established giving business associations and pressure groups exceptional influence in the con- duct of government affairs.6 Apart from GroJe Depression und Bismarckzeit, see also Hans Rosenberg, Political and Social Consequences of the Great Depression of 1873-1 896 in Central Europe, Economic His- tory Review, 13 (1943), 58-73, where his argument originated, and his Die Weltwirtschajiskrise von 1857-1859 (Gottingen, 1974, first published in 1934). which builds a similar structure of explanation for an earlier pre-unification moment. Wehlers totalized construction of the Great Depression is tendentiously presented in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Aufstieg des Organisierten Kapitalismus und Interventionsstaates in Deutschland , in Heinrich August Winkler (ed.), Orga- nisierter Kapitalismus. Voraussetzungen und Anfange (Gottingen, 1974), p. 5 I . I have discussed the problems with Rosenbergs Great Depression thesis in Geoff Eley, Hans Rosenberg and the Great Depression of 1873-96: Politics and Economics in Recent German Historiography, 1960-1980, in Eley, From Unification to Nazism. Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), pp. 2341. See Fritz Fischer, Germanys Aims in the Firsi World War (London, 1967, originally pub- lished in Germany in 1961). For a detailed narrative of the Fischer controversy, see John A. Moses, The Politics of Illusion. The Fischer Controversy in German Historiography (London, 1975). A number of important essays elaborated this corporative interpretation of German politics under the empire during the 1960s. See especially Thomas Nipperdey, Interessenverbande und Parteien in Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, in Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte (Cologne, 1966). pp. 369-88; Gerhard Schulz, Uber Entstehung und Formen von Interessengruppen in Deutschland seit Beginn der Industrialisierung, in Hans J. Varain (ed.), Interessenverbande in Deutschland (Cologne, 1973). pp. 25-54; Wolfram Fischer, Staatsvenvaltung und Interessenverbande imDeutschen Reich 187 1-19 14, in Fisher, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (Gottingen, 1972), pp. 194-2 13; Hans- Jurgen Puhle, Parlament, Parteien und Interessenverbiinde 1890-1914, in Stunner (ed.), Das kaiserliche Deutschland, pp. 340-77; Hans-JUrgen Puhle, Von der Agrarkrise zurn Prdfasch- ismus. Thesen zum Stellenwert der agrarischen Interessenverbdnde in der deutschen Politik am
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 105 2. A second key theme has been protectionism as an organizing political motif. The tariffs of 1879 crystallized a new protectionist bloc, whose goals extended past the immediate measures to a more general defence of the social order, from the privi- leges of aristocratic landowners east of the Elbe and all they entailed, to the viability of traditional small business in trade, shopkeeping and handicrafts, and paternalistic social relations of authority in industry. The language of social protec- tionism in this sense-Schutz der nationalen Arbeit (protection of the national labour)-was always inscribed in the demands for tariffs, especially during the conservative backlash against the export-oriented trading treaties of the Caprivi government of 1890-4, and in the new high tariff settlement that eventually fol- lowed (negotiated between the interests and the government between 1897 and 1902). I n other words, the refoundation of the empire in 1879 inaugurated a continuity of economic policy attached to a broader conservative social and polit- ical agenda, which lasted down to the First World War and beyond. 3. Anti-socialism was a vital part of this protectionist agenda. Produced by the social anxieties and dislocations of the depression, and made into government policy by the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878, this was a further constant of the history of the empire. Although the Law itself was abolished in 1890, the search for equivalent measures of restriction and repression against the labour movement continued, reaching its height during the peak demands for protectionism (in 1897-1902, and again on the eve of the war in 1912-14). 4. Social imperialism was Hans-Ulrich Wehlers distinctive contribution to this edifice of interpretation. Meaning partly a set of structural and intended linkages between an aggressive foreign policy and the achievement of patriotic consensus at home, and partly the manipulation of popular sentiments in the interests of a conservative status quo, this was pioneered by Bismarcks colonial policy, and then became extended after 1896 into Weltpolitik, the big navy policy, and the general pursuit of German power and prestige in the wider world. Pressure for reform was con- tained or silenced, the argument runs, by emphasizing nationalist priorities- defence and security issues, armaments, threats from abroad, building Germanys strength in the world economy, and securing Germanys rightful place in the sun-and by inflaming popular hostilities against socialists, ultramontanes, Poles, and J ews. Like protectionism and anti-socialism, moreover, social imperialism was produced by the depression: it simultaneously answered the need for anti-cyclical therapy, and played on popular insecurities to equip the government with much- needed popular support. 5. The political coalition sustaining Bismarcks turn to the right in 1879, known sub- Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1972); Heinrich August Winkler, Pluralismus oder Pro- tektionismus? Verfnssungspolitische Probleme des Verhandswesens im Deutschen Kuiserreich (Wiesbaden, 1972). Hans Rosenberg also contributed to this perspective: see his essays collected as Machteliten und Wi rtschafrskonj unkturen. Zur neueren deutschen Soiial-und Wirtschafrsge- schichte (Gottingen, 1978). Finally, the other key influence on this analytical perspective was Eckart Kehr, whose works of the 1920s were rediscovered during this same period of the 1960s: Schluchtjiottenha~i und Purteipolitik 1894-1901 (Berlin, 1930). and Der Primat der Innenpolitik (West Berlin, 1965), translated respectively as Buttleship Building and Parry Politics in Germany 1894-1901. A Cross-Section of the Political. Social, and Ideological Preconditions of German Imperialism (Chicago and London, 1973). and Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy (Berkeley, 1977).
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106 Geoff Eley sequently as Sammlungspolitik-the convergent protectionisms of industry and agriculture, united by fears of foreign competition and domestic revolution- becomes another constant of German politics before the First World War. As a defensive interest-based coalition, cemented by anti-socialist resistance against democracy, this provided the core of the governments governing base in the Reich- stag in Bismarcks second decade. After the Caprivi interlude, it was the main focus of government thinking once again during the ascendancy of J ohannes von Miquel and Bernhard von Biilow in 1897--1902, remaining so for the duration of the empire, it is claimed, peaking in the Karrell der schuflenden Stunde (Cartel of the Productive Estates) launched in summer 1913, and the annexationist war aims coalition of the First World War. 6. These patterns of politics are thought to have expressed the continuing societal dominance of pre-industrial elites. In other words, inside the Prusso-German states institutional framework was lodged a more specific social interest, namely, the preservation of the predominance of the feudal aristocracy.x The social basis of Germanys constitutional authoritarianism, in this view, and of the Bismarckian system of politics itemized rather schematically above, was the ability of a pre- industrial elite of landowners to preserve the essentials of its power. Institutionally, the mechanisms of this dominance included the monarchy and its traditions of military and bureaucratic independence; the relative freedom of the executive from parliamentary controls; a privileged position in the Prussian Landtug and Prussias special status in the empire; a restricted franchise in most of the individual states; the socially weighted tax system in Prussia and elsewhere; fiscal immunities and transmuted seigneurial authority over a dependent rural population east of the Elbe; and so on. To these continuing structural factors may be added the preferential economic treatment that emerged from the tariff settlement of 1879. In other words, despite the capitalist transformation of German society and industrys growing pre- dominance in the economy, it is argued, political power remained in the hands of the economically weakened pre-capitalist ruling strata (J unkers, bureaucracy, military).9 Thus the politics laid down in the Bismarckian era are thought to have cast a long and dark shadow. They established powerful continuities reaching through the imperial per- iod to the Weimar Republic, and played the key part in rendering German society vulner- The main treatment of this structure of politics after Bismarck is Dirk Stegrnann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbande in der Spatphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands. Summlungspolitik 1897-1918 (Cologne, 1970). which concentrates exhaustively on the years 1909-1913, with a more schematic treatment of the 1890s and early 1900s. For the 1890s see Stegmann, Wirtschaft und Politik nach Bismarcks Sturz. Zur Genesis der Miquelschen Sammlungspolitik I 8961 897. in Imanuel Geiss and Bernd-Jurgen Wendt (eds.), Deurschland in der Weltpolitik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Fritz Fischer zum 65. Geburtstag (Dusseldorf, 1973), pp. 161-84. I have developed a detailed critique of this usage of the idea of Sammlungspo- litik in Geoff Eley, Sammlungspolirik, Social Imperialism and the Navy Law of 1898. in Eley, Unification to Nazism, pp. 110-53. This phrase is taken from a chapter heading of a leading second-generation monograph within this school of interpretation, Siegfried Mielke. Der Hansa-Bund fur Gewerbe. Hundel und lndustrie 1909-1914. Der gescheiterte Versuch einer antifeudden Sammlungspolitik (Gottingen, 1976). p. 17: The political system: preservation of the predominance of the feudal aristocracy. Ibid., p. 181.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 107 able to Nazism. The deep origins of the latter-and the factor distinguishing Germany from other western European societies in this respect-are deemed to have lain in the persistent authoritarianism of the Bismarckian empires political culture, the efforts of its ruling elites to stave off the potentially democratizing (and destabilizing) effects of industrialization, and the political strategies and techniques they devised for neutralizing the challenge of the liberal and socialist oppositions. We can let Hans-Ulrich Wehler speak for this larger body of interpretation, and in specifying the continuity between the Second and Third Reichs, he itemizes a long catalogue of historical handicaps that burdened the Weimar Republic, including the susceptibility to authoritarian politics; the hostility to democracy in education and party politics; the influence of pre-industrial leadership groups, norms and ideals; the tenacity of the German ideology of the state and the mystique of the bureaucracy; and the manipulation of political anti-Semitism and other crisis ideologies. In other words, the revisionist interpretation of the Bismarckian era which emerged during the 1960s also anchors a larger interpretation of the German past focused on the origins of Nazism. In the intervening quarter century, an enormous amount of work has been produced under the sign of this interpretation. Interestingly, though, the monographic scholarship on the political history of the Bismarckian era itself has remained rather thin on the ground. The deepening of the perspectives laid out above-an archivally grounded litera- ture on parties, pressure groups, elections, issues, and crises-has occurred mainly for the later periods of imperial history between the 1890s and 1914, although even here the coverage is less than ideal. Neither of the key newcomers of the 1960s-Bohme and Wehler-have produced any subsequent research on the empires first two decades, while the book on the Great Depression proved to be Hans Rosenbergs last substantial work. There are some exceptions-notably labour history and the social history of the working class-but on the whole this is a separately constituted tradition of scholarship, driven by a very different dynamic, and with little direct relationship to the body of interpretation 1 have been discussing. I The most important works on the political history of the Bismarckian period until recently have been Michael Stunners study of the 1870s, and Margaret Andersons biography of Ludwig Windthorst.12 The aim of this review article is to explore some of the ways in which this neglect of the Bismarckian era might begin to change. ( Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871-1918 (Gottingen, 1973). pp. 238ff. (translated as The German Empire 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985)). I One important exception to this generalization has been the career-long contribution of Ger- hard A. Ritter, which from Die Arbeirerbewegung i m Wilhelminischen Reich 1890-1900 (West Berlin, 1959) to Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871 bis 1914, with Klaus Tenfelde (Bonn, 1992), has always keyed the interpretation of labour history to an argument about the Kaiser- reichs political culture. For some reflections on Ritters work, see Geoff Eley, Class, Culture, and Politics in the Kaiserreich, Central European Hisrory, 27, 3 (1994). 355-60. Michael Stiirmer, Regierung und Reichstag im Bismarckstaat, 1871-1880. Casarismus oder Parlumentarismus (Dusseldorf, 1974); Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford, I98 I ). See also the excellent article by Margaret L. Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampj Some Reflections on the Historiography of Imperial Germany, Journul uf Modern Histoty, 54 (1982), 647-86.
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108 Geoff Eley I1 While the main logic of the 1960s was to shift the causal narrative away from Bismarcks person to the role of institutional traditions, organized interests, and imper- sonal forces, the Iron Chancellor remained surprisingly central to the resulting rein- terpretation. In both Bohmes and Wehlers accounts the crucial element of political agency was reserved for Bismarck. If not exactly a spider at the centre of a web-more the technician at the control panel of a huge and elaborate moving machine-he is certainly presented as the main political arbiter, skilfully managing his relations with the Kaiser, deploying his political authority with and against the Bundesrat and the Reichstag, orchestrating public opinion, gauging the climate of the business world, mani- pulating the mass electorate, and of course paying close attention to the conduct of foreign affairs. Wehlers imposing account of Germanys colonial expansion in the 1870s and 1880s is a case in point. Bismarck und der Imperialismus is divided into six sections: a theoretical and historiographical introduction; the structural context of Ger- man economic growth and its unevenness; the formation of an ideological consensus behind the need for colonies; the tentative overseas expansion of the 1870s; the acceler- ation of the 1880s and the drive for direct colonial rule; and finally the formation of Bismarcks policies per se. But the translation of the structural analysis into a dynamic history of politics depends purely on the chancellors directive role. This is a persistent problem for the advocates of structural history.I3 Their ability to conceptualize the relationship between the conduct of government and the impersonal social and economic forces they see as shaping German historical development is ham- pered by a profound disbelief in the effectiveness of the Bismarckian parliamentary system, and a severe underestimation of its capacities for representing the interests of the economy and society. Because the parliamentary constitution of 1871 failed to correspond to what is thought to have been the Anglo-American podel of representative democracy, ips0 fact0 the representation, competition and management of organized interests must have taken some other form, and hence the turning to concepts of caesar- ism, bonapartism, and social imperialism to express Bismarcks approach to the political process. Bismarck necessarily emerges as the arch manipulator, as the instigator and manager of the political process, because the intermediate zone of the parliamentary arena, the parties, and the public sphere have been given so little credibility in the established views of the 1871 constitution and the political system of the Kaiserreich. In fact, the alleged instabilities of post-Bismarckian German government between the 1890s and 1914 once the guiding authority of the Iron Chancellor was gone, including the crisis that produced the First World War, are explained by the absence of an adequate l 3 Various terms have been used to describe the grouping that arrived on the West German historical scene during the 1960s as the advocates of a modernized social-science practice within the discipline, including the Kehrites, after their indebtedness to the influence of Eckart Kehr, and theBielefelder, after the relationship of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, JUrgen Kocka, and others to the University of Bielefeld. No termis completely satisfactory, not least because the composition and orientations of the grouping have changed over time, being fairly broad and heterogeneous in the late 1960s, when certain progressive commitments (both to methodological self-conscious- ness and to a pedagogy of coming to terms with the past) concealed considerable diversity of approach, and rather morespecific by the 1980s. The flagship journal of the cohort, Geschichre und Gesellschufi, launched in 1975, has retained its character as a broadly based forum.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 109 mediation between society and the state in that sense, so that Germanys rulers were thrown constantly back onto forms of manipulation and plebiscitary mobilization-onto secondary integration-in order to achieve the linkage. Narratively speaking, Bismarcks presence is required in Wehlers and Bohmes account precisely because the normal political circuit of interests, parties, parliament and government is missing. His colossal dominance of these political histories is the measure of Germanys differ- ence from the liberal democracies of western Europe in the same period, as such accounts see it. Paradoxically, this simultaneously elevated Bismarck in the accounts, without produc- ing any interest in his biography. This becomes all the more accentuated in Wehlers general textbook account of the Kaiserreich, where even Bismarcks agency fades back into the incidental workings of the structural-functional edifice. There is no place in Wehlers elaborate architecture of chapter thematics for any biographical discussion, the closest being a brief sub-chapter a quarter of the way into the book on The Bonapartist Dictatorship up to 1890, buried in a discussion of The Ruling System and Politics.14 This same pattern is also replicated in Volker Berghahns recent textbook, which builds up its account of imperial Germany from the structural ground of the economy and society-the long-term trends of agricultural and industrial change; demography, family, and social stratification; social conflict, socialization, and social inequality; cultural life, education, and the press; and the political system-deliberately foregoing the tradition of a grand chronological narrative. Any dynamic account of Bismarckian politics is consigned to an extremely brief treatment at the very end of the book, after the sections on Economy, Society, Culture, and the structural characteristics of The Realm of Politics have established the analytical pri ~ri ty. ~ The growth of a strong biographical interest in Bismarck at the end of the 1970s in Germany was thus a noteworthy historiographical development, and one certainly keyed to a broader public interest in the older nineteenth-century past.I6 Undoubtedly the most important publication was Lothar Galls Bismarck. Der we g e Revofutionur (FrankfudMain, 1980), which appeared in translation in 1986. To this may be added l 4 See Wehler, The German Empire, pp. 55-62. This form of structural-functional narrative is repeated in the latest volume of Wehlers Gesellschafsgeschichte (History of Society), where Bismarck is dealt with biographically in two short sections (The Rise of Bismarck, and Bismarcks Chancellor Regime: Coordination at the Ruling Center), in a volume of over 1,500 pages. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschafsgeschichte, vol. 111, Von der Deutschen Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849-1914 (Munich, 1995), pp. 264- I s See Volker R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 187/-19/4. Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics (Providence and Oxford, 1994). pp. xvi, 267-70. I The most important manifestation in this public sphere of historical interest wa3 the highly prestigious Prussia exhibition in West Berlin from August to November 1981, Prussia: Attempt at a Balance. See Manfred Schlenke, Peter Brandt, H. Kiihn, A. Marquardt, and H. Rathsack (eds.), PreuJen: Versuch einer Bilanz: Ausstellung Berlin, 1981, 5 vols. (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1981); together with the critical report by Christine Lattek, in History Workshop Journal, 13 (Spring 1982). 174-80. Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, tr. J . A. Underwood (2 vols., London, 1986). See also Andreas Hillgruber, Otto von Bismarck. Griinder der europdischen GroJmacht Deutsches Reich (Gottingen, 1978); and the reissue of a conservative biography of the 1950s, Ludwig Reiners, Bismarcks Aufstieg 1815-1864, and Bismarck griinder d a s Reich 1864-1871 (both Munich, 1980). In English there was also Edward Crankshaw, Bismarck (London, 1981). For a reflection on this earlier moment of the early 1980s, see David Blackbourn, Bismarck: the Sorcerers 80, 849-54.
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110 Geoff Eley Ernst Engelbergs two-volume biography, Bismarck: UrpreuJe und Reichsgriinder (East Berlin, 1985) and Bismarck: Das Reich in der iMitte Europas (Berlin, 1990) (reviewed in Gennan History, 9, 2 (199 I) ) , while Otto Pflanzt: also brought to a conclusion his own long-awaited study of Bismarck and the Development of Germany, begun in the 1960s.* Finally, this activity was crowned by a major exhibition in Berlin during the period August to November 1990, whose representation of Bismarcks Prussian, Ger- man, and European contexts coincided symbolically with the return of a united Germany to the map. All three major biographers take a resolutely traditional approach to their subject, eschewing structural analysis, extended historiographical discussion or any elaboration of theory, and consistently harnessing the times to the life. The approach in each case is also monumental, although by comparison with the 1,600 pages offered by both Engelberg and Pflanze, Galls 700 pages seem positively self-denying. All three treat the life as a whole, and devote great detail to Bismarcks early career. Both Engelberg and Gall divide their studies in 1871, but while the former distributes the attention roughly evenly on either side of that year, Gall weights his work strongly towards the pre-unification time, devoting only 274 pages to Bismarcks chancellorship, as opposed to 402 to the earlier career. Only Pflanze seems to have the career in proportion, devoting roughly 60 per cent of his text to the years between 1871 and 1890, when the shaping of the new German state increased the range and complexity of the contexts in which Bismarck has to be understood, arguably requiring more analytical and narrative space rather than less. On the other hand, more of the later story has been told before, facing the biographer with the need for synthesis rather than for generating large amounts of fresh research. In this respect we have more to learn about Bismarcks family and youth, his social place, his outlook, and early career. Galls first chapter (on home, school and choice of profession) is a model of succinct biographical scene-setting, broadening out into a discussion of Bismarcks entry into politics during the Revolution of 1848 in chapter 2, where the crisis of 1848-50 is used to enframe the inception of Bismarcks main political orientations, including his early conservative identification, his capacity for a creative and sometimes radical pragmatism, and his relationship to the emerging national question. This establishes the formal pattern for Galls first volume-a seamless analytical narrative moving continuously back and forth between his protagonist and the unfolding Prussian, national, and international contexts, always modulated by the specific institutional setting of the monarchy and its policies.2 Pflanze adopts a similar strategy for his first four chapters, following a brief introduction to Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century with a presentation Apprentice, i n Blackbourn, P opulisfs and Patricians. Essays in Modern German Hisroty (London, 1987). pp. 33-44. I * The first of Pflanzes volumes was originally published in 1963, and was revised and expanded for this new edition: Bismarck and the Development of Germany (3 vols., Prince- ton, 1990). See the Catalogue for the Exhibition, for which Lothar Gall was the historical director: Bismarck-PreuJen, Deurschland und Europa (Berlin, 1990). The exhibition was originally con- ceived in 1987 to herald the coming into force of the Single European Act at the end of 1992, by presenting Germanys contribution to an earlier transformation of Europe in the nineteenth century. 2o The seamlessness is also formal, and the detailed outline of topics and events provided in the table of contents for the progression of each chapter is not keyed by page numbers to the actual text, an omission that is extremely frustrating.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 111 of Bismarcks origins and outlook (oddly titled The Internal Functions of Power) and a description of his early political career, culminating in his appointment as Prussian envoy to the German Confederation in Frankfurt in April 185 1 (The External Functions of Power), while the 1850s are telescoped into a more discursive treatment of his polit- ical credo (The Strategy of Realpolirik). In the second part of this first volume, Pflanze opts for more of a formal counterpoint, with the evolving political context and the biographically centred narrative in alternating chapters, until Bismarck is appointed Min- ister-President of Prussia, whereupon a continuous narrative takes over for the remainder of the book, tracking Bismarck through the process of unification. Both authors provide excellent guides to the complex history of the latter, from the perspective of the Prussian governing centre. After the foundation of the empire, the life and times are almost completely merged into a continuous high-political narrative, for which Bismarck provides the active centre. By now, the main lines of such an account are well established, and these three bio- graphies push very little on the existing framework of assumptions. The parallelism of domestic politics and foreign affairs in the chapter organization is one predictable fea- ture, as is the fulcrum of 1878-9, universally taken as the main turning point of Bismarcks chancellorship. But the main framing is supplied by the two descriptions chosen by Gall for Bismarcks career-on the one hand, the white revolutionary, on the other hand the sorcerers apprentice-and i t is worth pausing for a moment with the meanings of these images. In the course of the manoeuvring against Austria in 1866, Bismarck remarked to Friedrich von Beust that, For all your courage and spirit, you would not know how to place yourself at the head of the revolutionary party i n Germany. As for me, I could at any time become its chief.2 The bravado of this claim was the measure of Bismarcks new distance from his traditionalist conservative mentors, the brothers Ludwig and Leo- pold von Gerlach, for whom the revolution (meaning here the party of movement, or the principle of progress and change) was a kind of virus, or conspiracy of dema- gogues and marginal intellectuals, which was unconnected to larger social forces or legitimate popular support. To Leopold von Gerlach, Bismarck had written in 1857 that 1 also recognize as my own the principle of struggle against revolution, but . . . in politics 1 do not believe it possible to follow principle in such a way that its most extreme implications always take precedence over every other consideration. On this basis, Bismarck could break out of the immobilism that threatened to isolate the Prussian monarchy during the constitutional conflict of the 186Os, refusing to be trapped into counter-revolutionary adventures no longer sustainable in the more complex bourgeois society Germany was becoming. The form in which the king exercises his rule in Ger- many has never been of special importance to me, he said in a letter of 1869; I have devoted all the energies God gave me to strive for the substance of his His willingness to pick up the standard of a united Germany expressed a sociological judge- ment in this sense: Every great community in which the careful and restraining influence of the propertied classes is lost on material or intellectual grounds will always develop a pace that will cause the ship of state to founder, as happened in the case of the French I Pflan7e. Ri.smurck and the Development of Germany. vol. I, pp. 308f. 22 /hid., p. 78. Ernst Nolte, Germany, in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber (eds.), The European Right (London, 1965). p. 286.
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112 Geoff Eley Rev~lution.~ Thus for the Gerlachs German unification may have been Bismarcks godless deed, but for Bismarck himself it signified the necessary conciliation of the propertied classes, for whom liberalism, with its desire for the nation and the consti- tutional state, was now a principal voice. He was in this sense the Hohenzollern mon- archys best advocate. As Pflanze says: Previously its supporting pillars had been dyn- astic loyalty, Prussian patriotism, Protestantism, Junker nobility, and the Prussian army and bureaucracy. To these were now added it new and eventually massive column: German nati~nalism.~ This is Bismarck the white revolutionary, who squared the circle of Prussian politics in the 1860s, appropriated the momentum of the German nationalist movement, dished the liberals, transformed the map of central Europe, and presided over the creation of a constitutional nation-state. The two biographers handle this idea somewhat differently. For instance, while Gall sees Bismarcks pragmatism as a radical departure from existing conservative practice, Pflanze assimilates it less persuasively to a longer 200-year pattern of revolution from above in Prussian history, going back to 1640, and presaged most recently in the Stein-Hardenberg reforms. But the basic trope is the same. After the 1870s, on the other hand, the imagery shifts. Bismarck is now the sorcerers apprentice (the sub-title of Galls second volume), calling into life forces he could never ultimately control. This was true both of specific phenomena initially promoted by Bismarck for his own purposes, but then sustaining an unruly and disruptive life of their own (such as the Kulturkumpf, the repression of the labour movement, the Germanization measures against the Poles, and the social-imperialist play for colonies), and of the structural complexity of the political system of the Kuiserreich as such. This is an argument about the entailments of creating a German nation-state to begin with, given its restless and uncontainable energies. By the end, when Bismarck fell from office in 1890, the diffi- culties of managing either his international policy or the domestic situation were requir- ing ever more contorted and convoluted manoeuvres. Moreover, beyond this technical complexity is the more general underlying assumption that Germanys social transform- ation was unleashing a dynamism (via the dualism of capitalist economy and bourgeois society), whose tasks and tensions exceeded even Bismarcks formidable capacity for damage control. One part of this end phase of Bismarcks chancellorship is exhaustively presented in J. Aldon Nichols study of the imperial succession, which does a valuable service to the field with its meticulously composed high-political analytical narrative.26 How do we assess the relationship of this biographical scholarship to the historio- graphical departures outlined at the start of this essay? Most obviously, it is conceived 24 Otto von Bismarck, Gednnken und Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1898). vol. 11, p. 59, cited by Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic, 1871-1918 (New York, 1931). p. 27. Compare this statement of traditionalist conservatism by Ludwig von Gerlach from 1851. which refused the ecumenical construction of the propertied classes used by Bismarck: Having done its work of corrosion . . . money alone will survive to grind into dust our lands. our corporate social order and, long before that, the life of our cities. By means of laws which will dissolve . . . all that is firm and substantial, money will subvert marriage and school, the family and the Sabbath, State and Church , . . the pillars and the fundamentals of our fatherland, and finally the army and the throne. . . . Only mechanical foims of government and justice will remain possible . . . until the cultured peoples, ripe for their downfall, give way to the barbarians . . .. It is impossible to imagine such a tirade on Bismarcks lips, although he delivered plenty of tirades of other kinds. See Nolte, Germany, p. 278. Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. I, p. 306. The Year of the Three Kaisers (Urbana and Chicago, 1987).
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 113 as a somewhat defiant rejoinder to the latter. The pity is that neither Gall nor Pflanze engage explicitly with the methodological or even the substantive arguments in play, and the unsuspecting reader could be forgiven for missing the point. While Pflanze slips occasionally into attenuated and ill-considered polemics, Gall is forever studied and urbane, telling his story with acuteness and elegance, but never with reference to the historiographical issues at stake. This comment should not be misunderstood: their respective contributions are very impressive, and provide excellent summations of the Bismarckian era. Pflanzes second and third volumes are now the indispensable general account in English of Bismarcks governmental politics in the 1870s and 1880s. But neither author is self-conscious or open about what it means to indulge biographical monumentalism at this juncture in the life of the discipline-whether in relation to the controversies raging in the 1960s and 1970s around the reinterpretation of the history of the Kuiserreich, or in relation to the other strategies now available for writing history in the biographical mode.27 Moreover, although both Pflanze and Gall are actually extremely sceptical about the main concepts advanced by Wehler and his co-thinkers- from social imperialism and Summlungspolitik, to Bonapartism as a way of characteriz- ing the kind of political regime constructed by Bismarck, and the associated state-society relationships-there is never any explicit citation of the opposing views, and sometimes there is little distinguishing Galls argument from the latter beyond the aversion to the project of theorizing per se.28 As well as omission of historiographical discussion and avoidance of debate, Pflanzes three volumes contain no consolidated listing of archives or bibliography, which is an astonishing omission for a work of this size and length. Abstaining from historiographical discussion is all the more damaging because Pflanze and Gall actually adopt tendentious and partisan positions, notably on one of the primary commitments of the revisionist literature, namely, the Primat der Innenpolitik, or pri- macy of domestic policy. The counterpoint to this idea, the Primat der AuJeripolitili (primacy of foreign policy), was always one of conservatisms strongest cards, for i t placed German (and Prussian) history in a story of foreign perils and pressures, in a logic of foreign endangerment beyond the responsible statesmans control, basing it on geopolitics, on the absence of natural frontiers (for Prussia in general, for Germany to ? I am thinking here of the ways in which post-structuralist theory of various kinds, the ques- tioning of grand narratives, the growing self-consciousness of cultural historians about the consequences of specific narrative strategies, and the decentring of subjectivity-all those con- temporary intellectual tendencies often misleadingly summarized (and demonized) as postmod- emism-have complicated the conventional production of biographies, while opening up new possibilities for experimental and innovative writing. One perceptive, but ultimately disap- pointing and overly polemical, discussion of this situation is Kenneth Barkin, Bismarck in a Postmodern World, with a rejoinder by Michael Geyer and Konrad J arausch, Great Men and Postmodern Ruptures: Overcoming the Belatedness of German Historiography, German Stud- ies Review, 18 (May 1995), 241-51 and 253-73. This is notably true of the argument about Bonapartism, where Gall dismisses the concept while continuing to describe what was tantamount to a Bonapartist system of rule. See Lothar Gall, Bismarck und der Bonapartismus, Historische Zeitschrif, 223 (1976). 619-37; and Alan Mitchell, Bonapartism as a Model for Bismarckian Politics, with comments by Otto Pflanze, Claude Fohlen, and Michael Stiirmer, and a Reply by Mitchell, Journal of Modern History, 49 (l977), 181-209. For a similar dismissal of Summlungspolitik, social imperialism, and other concepts of the 1960s revisionism, see Otto Pflanze, Bismarcks Herrschaftstechnik als Problem der gegenwartigen Historiographie, Historische Zeitschrif, 234 (1982), 561-99; and Samrnlungspolitik 1875-1 886. Kritische Bemerkungen zu einem Modell, in Otto Pflanze (ed.), lnnenpolitische Probleme des Bismarck-Reiches (Munich, 1983). pp. 155-93.
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114 Geoff Eley the east), on the priority accorded to military defence, war readiness and foreign affairs, and generally on the consequences of Germanys central European location, which exer- cised a powerful, even determining, influence on the structure of domestic political options. Pflanze in particular provides excellent accounts of the key moments in Bismarcks foreign policy, from the War in Sight Crisis of February to May 1875 (the greatest diplomatic defeat of his career, vol. 11, p. 272), and the context of the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, to the ever more complex balancing act which kept Russia and Britain simultaneously interested in Germanys friendship during the 188Os, not to speak of countless smaller episodes. There is a way in which foreign affairs, with its still-intact and well-functioning self-regulated and self-contained world of diplomacy, is the ideal site of Pflanzes preferred history, which sticks resolutely to its own high-political script. Foreign policy is i3 completely legitimate specialism; how- ever, it does not need to be analysed in isolation from the domestic political context. Bascom Barry Hayes in Bismarck and Mitteleiiropa provides an exhaustive account of particular domains of Germanys international interests under Bismarck, grounding his work in a necessary acknowledgement of broader domestic consideration^.^^Hayes is good on the broader context of public opinion in the press and the academic world of historians and economists, and provides a solid account of the Austro-Hungarian context, with much valuable material for an understanding of the multivariate German national- ism of the period. In the light of this work, and of the valuable work published in the volume Bismarck, Europe and Africa, the bluntness of Pflanzes dismissal of the Primat der Innenpolitik appears all the less persuasive, substituting a talismanic affirmation of the autonomy of statecraft and the mutual separation of the foreign and domestic arenas for a more extensive exploration of the complicated field of interests and relations in which foreign policies are necessarily made. 2y London and Toronto, 1994. The conference volume on the centenary of the Berlin Africa Conference (Bismarck, Europe and Africa (Oxford and London, 1988)) provides terrific access to the African histories involved, as well as the broader European diplomatic, commercial and imperial interests (including Belgium, Portugal and Spain, as well Britain and France), although interestingly there is no essay on Bismarck himself, unless we count Wolfgang Mommsens on Bismarck, the Concert of Europe, and the Future of West Africa, 1883-1885 (pp. 151-70). Otherwise, Bismarcks centrality has to be inferred from the detail of the thirty essays in the volume. To that extent, the latter belongs more wi1.h the tendencies of the revisionist literature of the 1960s than with the biographical counter-reaction represented by Pflanze and Gall. The prerequisite for showing the relationship between domestic factors (whether economic, bocial, cultural, or more contingently political) and foreign affairs is set simplistically high, and evidence thereby sought in the intentions and motivations of the diplomats and foreign policy makers, with predictably meagre results. E.g. Actually each arena contained a largely auton- omous system of competing forces, whose dynamic relationships and interactions were affected but not necessarily determined by those occurring in the other. Each system had requirements that did not necessarily coincide with and at times even contradicted those of the other (p. 96). This and a few other short and anodyne statements (e.g. pp. 246f.) are the sum of Pflanzes contribution to this debate. The complex articulation between economics and commercial policy with the central European diplomatic initiative in the conjuncture of 1879 is not an issue that particularly exercises his analytical imagination. His account of Bismarcks colonial policy in the early 1880s is similarly disappointing, barely scratching the surface of the extremely rich scholarly literature, and ignoring for instance Hartmut Pogge von Strandmanns important article on The Domestic Origin of Germanys Colonial Expansion under Bismarck, Past and Present, 42 (1969). 140-50, and for that matter the various contributions now accessible through the Bismarck, Europe and Africa volume (including a more recent essay by Pogge von Strandmann).
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 115 Much of the discussion of German politics in the Bismarckian era is driven by a set of assumptions about the political weaknesses of the German middle class or bourgeoisie. Of course, such assumptions have been central to the idea of the German special path or Sonderweg, which provided the main framing for the revisionist historiography of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and his supporters, forming a kind of generational credo for this progressive grouping inside the West German profession. This was itself brought into question by a major debate beginning in the late 1970s, where both the degree of Ger- manys difference from the West and the prevailing forms of its social explanation became challenged.3 In response, a huge amount of attention became focused on the social history of the German bourgeoisie and its emergence during the nineteenth century as a source of collective identification. Werner Conze, the patriarch of West German social history, sponsored a project on the Bildungsburgerturn via the Arbeitskreis f u r Sozialgeschichte, while in Frankfurt Lothar Gall launched a city-by-city investigation of the urban bourgeoisie. Most grandiosely of all, J iirgen Kocka, an indefatigable exponent of the Sonderweg thesis, and second only to Wehler in the strength of his advocacy, conceived a comparative study of Burgerturn und Biirgerlichkeit in the nine- teenth century as an annual theme of the Zentrurn f u r interdisziplinare Forschung at Bielefeld in 1986-7, preceded by a similar project at the Munich Historisches Kolleg the year before. A massive and continuing fl ow of publication has been the result, with collaborative volumes of essays presaging a steady stream of research monographs on the different facets of nineteenth-century bourgeois class formation. The main thrust of the resulting work has been to revisit the claims of the Sonderweg. I See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung. Die ge- scheiterte biirgerliche Revolution von 1848 (FrankfurtlMain, 1980), which initiated the debate and was reissued in a revised and expanded English-language edition as The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984). * See Werner Conze and Jiirgen Kocka (eds.), Bildungsbiirgertum im 19. Juhrhundert, vol. I , Bildungssystem und Professionalisierung im internationalen Vergleich (Stuttgart, 1985); Kocka (ed.), Das Bildungsbiirgertum in GeselBchuji und Politik (Stuttgart, 1989); Lothar Gall (ed.), Stadt und Burgerturn im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990); Gall, Burgerturn in Deutschland (Berlin, 1989); Franz J. Bauer, Biirgenvege und Burgerwelten. Familienbiographische Untersu- chungen zum deutschen Biirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1991); Kocka (ed.), Arbeiter und Burger im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1986); Kocka (ed.), Burger und Biirgerlichkeit im 19. Juhrhundert (Gottingen, 1987); Ute Frevert, Biirgerinnen und Biirger. Geschlechtenterhdltnisse im 19. Jahrhundert (GSttingen, 1988); Hannes Siegrist, Biirgerliche Berufe. Zur Sozialgeschichte der freien und akademischen Berufe im internationalen Vergleich (Gottingen, 1988); Dieter Lan- gewiesche (ed.), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europaischen Vergleich (Gottingen, 1988); Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad Jarausch (eds.), German Professions, 18W1950 (New York, 1988); Adolf M. Birke and Lothar Kettenacker (eds.), Biirgertum, Adel und Mon- archie. Wandel der Lebensformen im Zuitulter des biirgerlichen Nationalismus (Munich, 1989); Kocka (ed.), Biirgertum in 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europaischen Vergleich, 3 vols. (Munich, 1988). also available as a one-volume selected translation, Kocka and Alan Mitchell (eds.), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford and Providence, 1993); Lutz Niethammer et al., Biirgerliche Gesellschaji in Deutschland. Historische Einblicke, Fragen, Per- spektiven (FrankfurtlMain, 1990). See also the series Biirgertum: Beitruge zur europaischen Gesellschafsgeschichte, edited by Wolfgang Mager, Klaus Schreiner, Hans-JUrgen Puhle, and Hans-Ukch Wehler, inaugurated by Hans-Jurgen Puhle (ed.), Burger in der Gesellschaji der Neuzeit. Wirtschaji-Politik-Kultur (Gottingen, 1991 ;.
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116 Geoff Eley Was the German bourgeoisie really so supine and self-abnegating? Was it quite as beholden to the pre-industrial elites as recent interpretations have claimed? The answer is mixed. Thus the power of the critique is acknowledged, and the main outcome of Kockas Bielefeld project seems to be that the old canard of the feudalization of the German bourgeoisie has been abandoned. In their general writings both Kocka and Wehler now speak of the suffusion and even the dominance of bourgeois values in German society after unification. Wehler now acknowledges both the growing inte- gration of the bourgeoisie as a separate class arid the wider resonance of its distinctive cultural formation in society. Such a combination of internal cohesiveness and societal prestige, founded in the remarkable expansiveness and self-confidence of the unfolding success story of modem capitalist economic growth, produced something resembling bourgeois hegemony: in the law and in the public sphere; in associational life and styles of living; in literature and the arts; in sexuality and the intimate sphere of the nuclear family; in the work ethic, and ideals of efficiency and productivity; in the valuing of science and expertise; and in the general celebration of the autonomous and rationally acting individual. This normative claim to leadership in the emergent society made late nineteenth-century Germany fully comparable, Wehler now argues, to the other western European lands: In the German empire too the power of the fascination for bourgeois values [Burgerlichkeir] among the non-bourgeois classes went so deep that they acceded, step by step, to the hegemonic claim.33 But on the other hand, in the political sphere proper (Wehler and Kocka argue) bour- geois dominance was not attained. There are certainly ways in which the Kaiserreich may be viewed institutionally as the classical embodiment of bourgeois values in the above sense. We might cite the constitutionalizing of public authority via the parliamen- tary institutions of 1867-71 ; the recodifications of commercial, civil, and criminal law; the reigning models of administrative efficiency, particularly at the level of the city; and the growth and elaboration of public opinion in the form of an institutionally complex and legally guaranteed public sphere. In all sorts of ways the dynamism of Bismarckian Germanys capitalist transformation set tasks for the new state, which required an extremely close interaction between public authority and bourgeois economic and social interests in a functional sense. Wehler goes some distance in acknowledging the bour- geois character of the imperial German polity, in fact. Thus: As a constitutional state the empire also embodied the triumph of bourgeois liberals, despite its compromise character; and a range of practical advances, in areas like the progressive expansion of the rule of law, the governance of cities, and the strengthening of public opinion, must actually have nourished the feeling that the Kaiserreich was still capable of further modernization, and with a lot of patience could be further reformed in the sense of bourgeois Yet what these revisions leave avowedly intact is the Sonderwegs central argument about the backwardness of the Kaiserreichs core political structures (involving the mon- archy, the military, aristocratic privilege, Prussian predominance in Germany, more ambivalently the bureaucracy-in general, the institutionally secured primacy of pre- industrial interests and elites), which are always already counterposed to the ideal of These are major concessions to the critique. 33 See Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschafsgeschichre, vol. 111, pp. 763-72. The quotations are taken 34 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wie biirgerlich war das Deutsche Kaiserreich?, in Wehler, Aus der frompp. 763, 766, 767 respectively. Geschichre lemen? Essays (Munich, 1988). pp. 206, 208.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 117 the modernity that in Germany was not attained. After the recession of powerful bour- geois politics since the 1870s, Wehler still argues, the bourgeoisie in Germany accom- modated itself to a subordinate political position, or at most to co-partnership with the old elites, pushed further in this same direction by the rising pressure from the labour movement from below. Even the most acute bourgeois observers made this accommo- dation. Thus the vital signs of political maturity-including civic self-assurance, confi- dence in victory, freedom from self-doubt, political experience, resistance against the new dangers from the right-were missing from the political culture of the German bourgeoisie, whether before 1914 or in the prelude to 1933. In this way, the master narrative of the Sondenueg, the deep structuralism of the account of the origins of Na- zism, still persists. The bourgeoisies march into history stopped at the gates of the political system. This was what distinguished German histdry in the nineteenth century from the successful modernizations of the West. And of course, the long-term fall-out was immense: i t was Nazism that provided the bill for bourgeois conservatism and nationalism, for bourgeois timidity before the risky trial of strength, for the deficit of liberal-bourgeois political culture, of successful bourgeois politics, of the bourgeois stamp on state and society in general.35 The repeated implication is that the weakness of liberalism profoundly compromised the victory of bourgeois values in Germany before 1914, blocking their translation into the kind of politics associated with a Gladstone or a Lloyd George, or the republican tradition in France, and distorting their effects on German public life. Moreover, Kocka argues very strongly that the bourgeoisies specific constellation-one resting on the tradition of Enlightenment and a specific separation between countryside and town, making a small but coherent and highly influential social formation defined by common opponents and a shared culture-was dealt a death blow by the First World War and the accompanying revolutionary upheaval.36 The resulting dissolution of bourgeois social cohesion and cultural dominance was common to western Europe as a whole. But in the West in the strict sense-Britain, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia-the strength of liberal political goods outlived the specifically bourgeois aspirations that originally gave them life. After 1918 democracy in the West became strengthened and secured, resisting the rise of fascism until the military diblcle of 1940. But in Germany, bourgeois political culture closed itself bitterly against the forces of the left before 1914, and so the democratic consolidation never had the chance to occur. Moreover, where instances of bourgeois political assertiveness under the Kaiserreich can be found-in the industrial tariffs of 1879 and 1902, the successful containment of trade unions in heavy industry and most of the leading sectors of the economy, the naval armaments drive after 1897, and so on-they were co-opted by the pre-industrial elites, it is argued, rather than opening the way for the brave new bourgeois world. Given that liberalism failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough in the political culture, therefore, the transition to a fully democratic society (or the ideal of a bourgeois society in Wehlers utopian sense, in which all groups gain access to emancipation through the victory of universal values) was ~tillborn.~ In the West this breakthrough already came 34 Ibid., pp. 216f. 36 J iirgen Kocka, The Middle Classes in Europe, Journal of Modern History, 67 (Dec. 1995). 785f. 37 See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Geschichte und Zielutopie der deutschen biirgerlichen Gesell- schaft, in Wehler, Aus der Geschichte lernen?, pp. 241-55.
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118 Geoff Eley before 1914; in Germany the persistence of illiberalism during that period (as the entrenched authoritarianism of pre-industrial elites) paralysed the opportunities. Situat- ing the bourgeois era before the First World War in this way has two crucial effects. On the one hand, it denies bourgeois character in Kockas and Wehlers terms to those political actions of bourgeois social groups that subsequently opened the way for fas- cism, making the latter the pathology of an un-modernized polity in which bourgeois social and political interests were perverted and undermined, rather than something such interests played a part (directly and indirectly) in producing. For the current historians, the heyday of European bourgeois culture was over by 1914: if by that time the bour- geoisie had penetrated to the core of the state, the future of democracy could be assured; if it was held at bay (as in Germany, by the power of pre-industrial elites), the future was damaged and flawed. On the other hand, historians like Lothar Gall place bourgeois authenticity even ear- lier. Gall associates the vitality and coherence of the German liberal outlook (subtly elided, as usual, with the bourgeois societal presence) in the middle third of the nine- teenth century with the transitory circumstances of a partially transformed pre-industrial society-that is, those parts of Germany energized by the economic opportunities and advanced ideas of the dual revolution, but as yet relatively unpolarized by the conse- quences of large-scale industrialization and class differentiation-thereby producing the apparent paradox of a modernizing creed in a traditional society. In this argument, the liberal ideal of a biirgerliche Gesellschufr--in that double sense of a society of citizens organized around self-consciously bourgeois values-required particular kinds of pre-industrial communities in which to flourish, so that the old sociological notion of liberalism as the political expression of a rising bourgeoisie becomes mischievously revised. From being a movement for the general emancipation of society, committed to an ideal of a classless society of citizens of the middling sort . . . in which the middle-class citizenry ultimately represents society as such and becomes the general estate, Galls argument runs, liberalism then fell prey after industrialization to the strains of social differentiation, became dominated by the class-specific interests of a now fragmented bourgeoisie, and lost its ability to harmonize a socially mixed support.* The problem with these views is that they severely underestimate the bourgeoisies political dominance under the Kuiserreich, in which the foundation-laying of the Lothar Gall, Sundenfall des liberalen Derikens oder Krise der biirgerlich-liberalen Bewegung? Zum Verhaltnis von Liberalismus und Imperialismus in Deutschland, in Karl Holl and GUnther List (eds.), Liberalismus und imperiulistischer Sfaat (Gottingen, 1975). pp. 149ff.; also Gall, Liberalismus und biirgerliche Gesellschaft: Zur Charakter und Entwicklung der lib- eralen Bewegung in Deutschland, Historische Zeirschrif, 220 (1975). pp. 324-56. In the same direction, see James J . Sheehan, German Liberalism in fhe Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978); Karl Rohe, Liberalismus und soziale Struktur-Uberlegungen zur politischen Gesellschaft und zur politischen Kultur des Ruhrgebiets, Liberal, 18 (1976), 43-56, 113-21. Mack Walker, Ger- man Home Towns: Community, Sfare, General Estate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca, 1971). is also relevant here. More recently, see also Lothar Gall, . . . Ich wiinschte ein Biirger zu sein. Zum Selbstversandnis des deutschen BUrgertums im 19. J ahrhundert, Historische Zeiruchrifr, 245 (1987). 60-23. For critiques of this general approach to the history of German liberalism, see Wolfgang J . Mommsen, Der deutsche Liberalismus zwischen klassenloser Biirgergesellschaft und organisiertem Kapitalismus: Zu einigen neueren Liberalismusinterpretationen, Geschichre und Gesellschaf, 4 (1978). 77-90; Geoff Eley, James Sheehan and the German Liberals: A Critical Interpretation. Central European History, 14 (I981 ), 273-88.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 119 Bismarckian period played such a vital part.39 Galls 1989 study of the Bassermann family, intended as a microcosm of the bourgeoisies rise and fall, is an excellent case in point. From origins in the classic pre-industrial commercial occupations of milling, baking and innkeeping, through prosperous mercantile enterprise in a variety of regional commodities, the Mannheim Bassermanns rose by the early nineteenth century to a notable place among the southwest German bourgeoisie. By hard work, disciplined acquisitiveness, clever marriages, and a culture of enlightened sobriety, the Bassermanns became powers of the economy, organizers of the public sphere, patrons of the arts, and arbiters of taste. With Friedrich Daniel Bassermann ( 1 8 11-55), the second-generation beneficiary of the familys triumphal passage from the old-style burgher status into the new class identity of the bourgeoisie, the familys fortunes were brought to a first climac- teric: entering Baden liberal politics in the 184Os, and joining the national political stage in 1848-9, Friedrich Daniel committed suicide amidst the post-revolutionary disappoint- ments. A later generation saw this prominence further ratified in the leadership of the National Liberal Party of Ernst Bassermann (1854-1917). The accumulation of econ- omic and political power was always complemented by the amassing of cultural capital, moreover, via connections to the academic world, support for theatre and the arts, leader- ship of Mannheims cultural organizations, and so on. The counterpart to Ernst was his nephew, the renowned actor Albert Bassermann (1867-1952), whose achievements traversed the German theatrical repertoire between the 1890s and the Third Reich (which he experienced from emigrati~n).~ It is interesting that Gall should turn to biography in making his argument about the bourgeoisie (right after his biography of Bismarck, that is), and the relationship of the life (or lives, in the case of the Bassermanns) to the times is again artfully and problem- atically metonymic, standing in for complexities of bourgeois class formation and its articulations with political history, for which a different kind of analytic is req~i red.~ Narrativizing the bourgeoisies rise and fall as an epic of family crisis and decline is seductively appealing, for this has been a familiar way of representing the German bourgeoisies relationship to Nazism in novels and film: such portrayals have tended to dwell in moralizing fashion on the hubris of class power, the logics of economic and political opportunism, and the implosion of post-Nietzschean aesthetics, invariably them- 2J Here I need to enter a vital caveat, concerning the specific ways-both theoretically and empirically-in which the bourgeoisie could exercise political dominance. At the level of theory, for instance, there are big problems with conceptualizing any social class as a collective subject or agent capable of ruling in some direct and unmediated sense, whether by staffing or con- trolling the state with its own personnel, or by manipulative mechanisms, or whatever. It makes far more sense to see dominant classes as a complex formation, whose societal power (founded importantly but not exclusively in production) structures and defines the arenas in which politics and government have to take place. Empirically speaking, on the other hand, there will be countless instances in which particular bourgeois groups or interests (in the sociological sense) secure the implementation of particular policies or projects, whether for lucrative government contracts. for the adoption of fiscal measures, for the pursuit of social policy legislation, for the defence of public morality, for ideals of civic equality, and so on. When I talk in this essay about the dominance of the bourgeoisie, it is this complex definition I have in mind. For further discussion. see Geoff Eley, The British Model and the German Road: Rethinking the Course of German History before 1914. i n Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German Hisfory, especially pp. 12743. 4o Gall, Burgerturn in Deurschland. 4 For a similar, but in this case multi-family and i n my view more successful, biographical exploration, see Bauer, Biirgcrwege und Burgerwelten.
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120 Geoff E1e.y atized as decadence and sexual corruption. Gall does not exactly reproduce this scen- ario-in his concluding discussion of Albert Bassermann aesthetics become a source of resistance and value-but his chosen narrative is none the less partial for that. As sug- gested above, the particular rhythm of Galls story embodies a set of rather specific understandings-concerning the nature of the bourgeoisie as a socio-cultural formation and the meanings of bourgeois virtue-focused on the middle of the nineteenth century. But there are other ways of telling the story, which pay more attention to the forms of bourgeois societal power and self-representation in the different phases of the twentieth century, where there are powerful continuities between the Kaiserreich and the Federal Republic which the form of Galls account tends to hide. The claim that German liberal- ism, or true bourgeois culture, was essentially pre-industrial in origins, and that its fundamental structures were necessarily undermined by industrialization, tends to deny the authenticity of liberalisms (and bourgeois interests and representations) that came later, defining themselves consciously with the new conditions of industrial capitalism. Here it is important to move the discussion on to more concrete terrain, in ways that Galls contribution helps to suggest. We need to free the histories of the Bismarckian era from the overarching normative and dehistoricized scenarios, the grand teleologies of bourgeois success and failure, in which they are all too easily embedded-yet without surrendering the commitment to theorizing and comparison. The material groundedness of bourgeois achievements is one important direction, and not the least of the contri- butions of Klaus HeR, in a technically dour and relentless survey of landholding east of the Elbe: for instance, is his evidence concerning patterns of agricultural profitability and the social heterogeneity of landownership, which complicates the meanings of the formal distinction between bourgeois and aristocratic status during the period after uni- fication. Using a daunting array of legal, fiscal, actuarial, statistical, and demographic sources, which provide access to the legal status of large estates and their geographical distribution, their structures of indebtedness, their forms and degree of market inte- gration, and their profit margins and tax liabilities, with particular attention to the phenomenon of entailment, HeR lays to rest two important myths of recent historiogra- phy, each of which has its part in the argument about the primacy of pre-industrial traditions. On the one hand, large estates were not proportionately commoner in the east than in the west of Prussia, and on the contrary larger-scale landownership not only predominated in the west but also turned more of a profit. There was far more variation in the dimensions of estate-holding east of the Elbe than the simpler stereotypes of Junkers and lurifundiu would presume, and the former were less grandiose, the latter less numerous, than we suppose. On the other hand, east Elbian agriculture was certainly not in permanent structural crisis, as Rosenberg and his followers have claimed, but remained generally profitable. HeR demonstrates these points very well, and succeeds in freeing large-estate agricul- ture from the over-simplifications entrenched so deeply in the literature. How these revised facts affect our understanding of Bismarckian Germanys changing class struc- ture is less apparent. What is clear is that non-noble bourgeois property-owners bought their way into the land market with great alacrity in the new capitalist Germany, in the east no less than the west of Prussia, while conversely the aristocratic estate-owners of the east behaved economically in ways indistinguishable from aggressive and profit- maximizing capitalist farmers. Even the device of entailment-the institution of the 42 Junker und biirgerliche GroJlgrundbesitzer im Kaiserreich (Stuttgart, 1990).
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 121 FamilienjdeikommiJI that forms a core theme of the book-turns out to be freshly deployed during the Kaiserreich, reinvented in that sense, across the full landscape of commercialized landownership, despite its connotations of pre-bourgeois traditionalism. At the same time, He13 barely explicates this blurring of bourgeois/aristocratic class boundaries, and the thematics of class formation discussed above are absent from his pages. At one level, his evidence leaves the orthodoxy of the older account intact: the very largest estates east of the Elbe were still owned by nobles, forming an aristocratic bloc with a privileged political position, given its fiscal immunities and the special fea- tures of the Prussian constitution. But his insistence that big estate-owners cannot be treated as a unitary group in class or political terms, whether east or west of the Elbe, or across the regional divide, because of the wide variation of landholding patterns, is salutary. At the very least, Junker survival required a far more arduous process of polit- ical construction-the winning of popular support and the building of coalitions across regions and divisions of status, until a unified agrarian interest could be shaped-than the classic accounts allow, with their stress on manipulation and special access to the state. It is a pity that He0 does not venture some thoughts on this aspect of his subject? Given the degree to which the political dominance of the National Liberals in the new Bismarckian empire, and the hegemony of a variegated liberalism more generally in the 1860s and 187Os, depended on the countryside (essentially a mosaic of regional cultures of liberalism, extending from Schleswig-Holstein and Oldenburg in the north, through Rhineland-Westphalia and Hanover, to the smaller central German states, and Baden, Wiirttemberg, and large parts of Bavaria in the south), some careful study of attitudes towards urban and rural property-owning in the unification period would be very illuminating, and might go some way to clarifying the question HeR only obliquely raises, namely, the relationship of agrarian capitalism to bourgeois class formation (the bourgeois who buys into land, the aristocrat who behaves like a capitalist). As a result of the agrarian popular mobilizations of the 189Os, at the centre of which was the new driving energy of the Bund der Landwirte (Agrarian League) formed in 1893, and the political concentration around the tariffs of 1902, a unitary agrarian interest was forged with brutal success in Wilhelmine politics. But the Agrarian League was distinct from the more traditional aristocratic conservatism of east Elbia; the main weight of its agi- tation (and eventually membership) was located west of the Elbe; it was a political construct of the period after Bismarck; and its creation was predicated on the destruction of the countrysides earlier liberal affiliations. That being so, the Bismarckian period, when rural society was stamped so impressively by the self-confidently bourgeois com- I The classic accounts of the power of the landed interest in German politics-as the main bearers of authoritarian and pre-industrial traditions i n the tiaiserreich-are Hans Rosenberg, Probleme der deurschen Sozialgeschichte (FrankfudMain, I969), esp. Die Pseudodemokrati- sierung der Rittergutsbesitzerklasse, pp. 7-49; and Hans-Jiirgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpo- litik und preiij3ischer tionservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich 1893-1914. Ein Beitrag zur Anulyse des Nationalismus in Deutschland am Beispiel des Bundes der Landwirte und der Deutsch-tionservativen fartei (Hanover, 1966). For a critique, see Geoff Eley, Antisemitism, Agrarian Mobilization, and the Conservative Party: Radicalism and Containment in the Founding of the Agrarian League, 1890-1893. in Larry E. Jones and James Retallack (eds.), Berween Reform, Reaction. and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Oxford and Providence, 1993). pp. 187-227. I have tried to specify the political impor- tance of the landed interest i n Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right. Radical Nationalism and Political Chunge after Bismarck (Ann Arbor, 1991). esp. pp. 349-61.
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122 Geoff Eley mitments (in the doubled meaning of sociology and values) of a liberal notability, is ripe for investigation. If HeB shows us a countryside not quite as traditionalist or pre-bourgeois as we thought, Brian Ladd takes us to the opposite end of the spectrum, into the enlightened city contexts of modem urban planning and municipal progressivism, to the cutting edge of bourgeois reform. Basing his account on Cologne, Dlisseldorf, and Frankfurt, with additional materials from Berlin and the relevant national discussions, Ladd builds up a valuable picture of the German response to urban growth between the 1860s and 1914, which by any standards was staggering, with Berlin growing from 800,000 inhabitants to just over 2 million, Hamburg from 300,000 to over 1 million, Munich from 169,000 to 646,000, and so on.u He introduces the deeper context of nineteenth-century munici- pal self-administration, followed by five chapters on different aspects of the public engagement with the rise of the city-what he calls the collection of German municipal activities that by 1914 had come to be known as city planning, which provided excellent evidence of municipal enterprise and civic pride in action, and a clear general picture of the kind of order the reformers tried to create out of the changing social, economic, and geographic structure of their cities.4J Throughout, the discourse of reform is treated as a distinctively bourgeois affair, although the SPD contribution to the pre-1914 debates is also considered. But this familiar elision of social and political categories (namely, bourgeois . . . SPD) is significant, because Ladd allows his political descrip- tions-principally the hegemonic liberalism of the unification decades, followed by the emergent formations of professional and administrative expertise-to stand in for the social interests and groupings he wants them to represent, and in the book there is no explicit discussion of bourgeois class formation in Kockas sense. Ladds account is mainly concerned with the citys physical and built environment, and the way its public regulation came to dominate notions of social improvement. The main transition here was from a concern with public health and the quality of life, stressing clean air, clean water, efficient waste disposal, access to green space, and so on (waterworks, sewers, street cleaning, public baths, parks), to a different administrative focus on ordering the urban space, via regulation of the land market and land use, street planning, new construction, the need for working-class housing, mass transit, annexation and incorporation, commercial and residential zoning, and so on. The fulcrum is the books central chapter on Urban Aesthetics and the New Planning of the 1890s (pp. 11 1-38), which charts the incursion of a specific moral-political ambivalence into the discourse of urban planning, in which the goals of city rationalization and social well- being became mapped onto a definite spatial aesthetic, stressing not only historic preser- vation, the value of older non-utilitarian urban models, and the integration of the urban landscape, but also an implicit valorizing of the countryside and the emergence of the garden city ideal and other celebrations of the single detached dwelling. Moreover, this shift in the 1880s from public health to town planning as the leading edge of urban reform was paralleled by the transition from the classic liberal mayors of the Bismarck- ian period to the new public officials of the Wilhelmine era-from J ohannes Miquel Between 1871 and 1914, Colognes population grew from129,233 to 640,371 (becoming Germanys fourth largest city; Frankfurts from 91,040 to 449,724; and Diisseldorfs froman even lower starting point (Ladd doesnt provide the figure) to 417,994. See Urbun Plunning und Civic Order (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 14. Ibid., p. 35.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 123 ( 1 880-90) to Franz Adickes ( 189 1-1 9 12) in Frankfurt, or Hermann Becker ( I 875-85) to Wilhelm Becker (1886-1907) in Cologne. As new groups began demanding partici- pation, principally the labour movement, this centring of municipal politics around lang- uages of non-partisanship and expertise became all the more marked. Some major themes which feature in comparable urban histories of Britain or North America, like urban schooling, the employment and welfare aspects of municipalization and the growth of an urban public sector, and the rise of commercialized entertainment, are ignored by Ladd. But he is to be commended for an excellent survey of bourgeois achievement within the public domain, even though this social quality of Biirgerlichkeit remains very under-explicated in his account. Even though its focus is an earlier period-strictly speaking the 1830s to the 1850s- Rudolf Bochs study of the Rhineland entrepreneurial elite has much to offer in this respect. He combines a densely grounded explication of the economic outlook of the industrialists with a broad-gauged intellectual and political history of the wider context of the industrialization debate, and shows how the expectation of a permanently expanding industrial economy took shape. Until the 1830s, Rhineland merchants and manufacturers had largely accepted the social ideal Gall and others have attributed to the German liberals--of a classless society of citizens of the middling sort (klassenlose Biirgergesellscha@ rnittlerer ExistenZen)-stressing a balance of trade, industry, and agriculture as the desirable condition of the economy, rather than the unfettered dyna- mism of an industrial transformation that dissolved civil society and its existing forms of cohesion.* A complex conjuncture of factors forced a change, extending from the Zollverein of 1834 to the seventh Rhineland Provincial Diet in 1843, including the dynamics of market protection and the challenge of British manufacturing supremacy, the impetus of railway building, and the impact of pauperism and the social question. The discourse of the economy shifted from the limited early nineteenth-century vision of social equilibrium to a programmatic belief in the necessity of unlimited production, i n which the unrestricted expansion of industry, including the permanent existence of a propertiless wage-earning population, became an increasingly compelling description of an inevitable future. The detailed mechanics of this transition, in the trade and commer- cial press, and in particular contexts like the Chambers of Commerce and the Provincial Diet, are meticulously captured by Bochs account, via the intensive debates around tariffs and free trade, mechanization, railway construction, and the growth of heavy industry. The massive public discussion of the social question was pivotal, for continu- ously expanding industrialization now came to be seen as the best means for addressing the ills of mass poverty. In these terms, Bochs account is exactly the kind of work we need, which grounds the debate about bourgeois class formation in a densely researched and argued study of a particular bourgeoisie, concentrating on the latters actual histories rather than the history it failed to produce. At the same time, Boch stays within the exceptionalism frame, holding the Rhineland entrepreneurial elite accountable for the defeat of demo- cracy in 1848-9 and the failure to generate significant social reform. They lacked a social vision, he argues, missed the chance for a decisive political breakthrough, and consequently made their contribution to the modernization deficit of German historical Boch uses this phrase of Galls as one of his sub-chapter headings, outlining the Rhineland equivalent of the southwest German situation: Grenzenloses Wnchsturn? (Gottingen, 1991), pp. 85-8.
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124 Geoff Eley development-what he calls the fateful disparity between economic strength and inad- equate political modernity under the Kaiserreiclr. It is unclear why this political cau- tion in the face of democracy, or even of a particularly forthright liberalism, should be so surprising, and Boch neglects to show where such advanced entrepreneurial fractions of the bourgeoisie behaved any differently elsewhere-certainly not in Britain or France. Moreover, it is also not clear why the Rhineland bourgeoisie should be considered quite so atypical (another under-explicated dimension of Bochs argument): while hardly representative in some all-German statistical sense, the Rhineland was clearly typical of a certain set of regional examples, in which an economic bourgeoisie displayed com- parable primacy and dynamism during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, thereby constituting itself as a powerful political force in the process of unification and German state formation after the 1860s and 1870s. Hamburg and the other Hanse cities, Frankfurt, parts of the central German industrial region south of Berlin towards Saxony, and of course greater Berlin itself are all cases in point. In this respect, there are two major flaws in Bochs approach, which reflect weak- nesses in the larger literature on the nineteenth-century German bourgeoisie. On the one hand, Boch stops short of a social history of the Rhineland bourgeoisie in the fuller sense proposed by the critics of the Sonderwrg thesis and embraced by Kocka and Wehler in their more programmatic moments. Within the terms of Kockas conceptual framework for the rise of the German bourgeoisie, Boch confines himself to the econ- omic bourgeoisie alone, and ignores both the Bildungsburgerturn of the region and the older antecedents of the traditional burgher estate of the towns, while failing to address the wider social arena of bourgeois class formation, whether in the private domain of the family, or the public sphere of associational But on the other hand, the claim that after 1848 the bourgeoisie was no longer a politically competent class seems quite wrong, for in the 1850s and 1860s the Rliineland bourgeoisie continued to exert vital political influence, not to speak of its organization into the powerful economic lobbies of the 1870s and beyond, whether or not these articulations occurred through the expected liberal forms. In fact, it is exactly these highly complicated reconfigurings of the possible forms of a relationship between business interests and liberalism (economics and politics), in which sometimes liberalism itself became reoriented or redesigned, and sometimes the interests of the economy and the liberal political pro- gramme simply became decoupled, that require our attention during the process of uni- fication. Between 1858 and 1861, for instance, the Wirtschafsburgertum in Prussia secured very much the economic legislation it required, and the unification settlement of 1867-71 then translated these gains onto a plane of constitution-making and legal codification. Theorizing this dynamic, between the logics of capitalist development and the construction of economic interests into central priorities of state on the one hand, and the political discourse of German liberalism on the other-between the coalescence of the bourgeoisie into a dominant class and the aspiration for the constitutional state- 47 /bid., p. 289. 48 For Kockas general framework, see Jiirgen Kocka, The European Pattern and the German Case, in Kocka and Mitchell (eds.), Bourgeois Society in Ninereenrh-Cenrury Europe, pp. 8ff., and Kocka, Middle Classes in Europe.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 125 in ways that go beyond the tired routines of the Sondenveg, is still the central issue, and Boch sidesteps the que~tion.~ It is precisely these political dimensions of class formation-the organization of the bourgeois voice, and the complex universe of particular bourgeois interests, into a collec- tive political agency with national ambition during the struggle for German unification- that receive such poor recognition in the current wave of publication, because even to formulate this question is to vitiate the Sondenueg thesis to which so many German historians still adhere. In this respect, the translation of liberal politics from the regional and local bases of the earlier nineteenth century onto the national stage of the 1860s is crying out for serious attenti ~n.~ We are still waiting for an integrated account of the German bourgeoisies social and political history in the Bismarckian years-one that grounds the argument in locally specified studies of particular experiences (a particular geographical locality, or a particular class fraction, or a particular type of organization and activity), but simultaneously explores the articulations between the local and the national and vice versa. IV After the recent Bismarck biographies and the steady flood of works on the bourgeoisie, the scholarly literature on the Bismarckian period proper is thin indeed. One area of remarkable neglect, given the degree to which the extreme nationalisms of the twentieth century are explained by the flawed development and missing modernization of the Bismarckian unification, with the resulting need for secondary integration and the pathologies of social imperialism, is that of nationalism. The creation of national loy- alty in a newly unified state, within perspectives of state formation and cultural history, might seem an obvious priority for research, but surprisingly little has appeared. The main published interest has focused on the Wilhelmine era after 1890, where there is now a sizeable literature, for instance, on forms of radical nationalism and the political significance of the so-called nationale Verbande, including the Colonial Society, the Navy League, the anti-Polish agitations, the German language movements, the Defence League, and of course the self-styled ideological vanguard, the Pan-German L eag~e. ~ For the period of German unification itself, there is very little on the dynamics of 4y See Boch, Grenzenloses Wachstum?, p. 268. See here the work of J ames M. Brophy, Salus publicu suprema /ex: Prussian Businessmen in the New Era and Constitutional Conflict, Central European History. 28. 2 ( 1 995), 122-5 1 ; and his forthcoming book on capitalist entrepreneurship and the Prussian state during unification. ) See here especially Andreas Biefangs excellent study of the Nationalverein, which har- nessed the local and regional energies of the bourgeois advocates of a united Germany for the first time into a single national organization. Andreas Biefang, Politisches Biirgertum in Deutschlund, 1857-1868: Nationale Organisationen und Eliten (Diisseldorf, 1994); also Shlorno Naarnan, Der Deutsche Nutionulverein (Diisseldorf, 1987). I For my own work on the nationale Verbiinde. see Eley, Reshaping, and Geoff Eley, Some Thoughts on the Nationalist Pressure Groups in Imperial Germany, in Paul Kennedy and Anthony J . Nicholls (eds.), Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914 (London. 1981). pp. 40-67. Recent monographs include: Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886-1914 (London, 1984); Marilyn Shevin Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism i n Wilhelniine Ger- many (New York, 1990); and Stig Forster, Der doppelte Militarismus: Die deutsche Heeresriis- tungspolitik ;wischen Slutus-quo-Sicherung und Aggression, 189G1913 (Stuttgart, 1985).
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126 Geoff Eley national identity formation, whether for the broader intellectual history of the principle of German nationality and its diffusion, or the social and cultural history of a popular sense of belonging in the new nation-state. We are still disproportionately dependent on the suggestiveness of a few general essays. Thomas Rohkramers book on the German veterans organizations (Kriegervereine) is a good solid example of the kind of study that would help. At one level it provides nothing startlingly new, although as the first detailed monograph on its subject it pro- vides an invaluable The authors concern is with the mentality of the veterans clubs ordinary membership (of whom nationally by 1914 there were almost 3 million) and its identification with monarchy, army, and nation, seeing the latter as a powerful support of the Kuiserreichs given political order. Accordingly, the bulk of the study (179 of the 270 pages of text) expounds the terms of the soldierly experience and its nationalist dimensions, presenting a detailed picture of the veterans ideological outlook. Rohkramer walks us through a series of particular thematics intelligently enough- including the understanding of history, attitudes towards the state and the monarchy, the place of religion, the values of private life, the respective attractions of rural romanti- cism and industrialism, conceptions of political order and the enemy within, and the various aspects of militarism in the immediate sense-but the broader significance of this somewhat over-synthesized account remains unclear. The section on economic and social policies is very perfunctory, for instance (two pages), as is the treatment of atti- tudes towards the labour movement. The precise quality of the patriotism produced in the Kriegervereine, its boundaries and fissures, its specificities and resonance within the wider universe of nationalist discourse under the Kaiserreich, is moot. By comparison, the organizational analysis is confined to a brief 50 pages. Again, there are no big surprises. The ordinary membership was predominantly lower-class, comprising small farmers and farmworkers, workers, and Mittelstund in roughly equal measures (28.8, 27.8, and 24.9 per cent, in a statistic of 191 I ), with civil servants and white-collar personnel also significantly represented ( 1 8.5 per cent). According to these and other statistics, aristocrats and landowners, capitalists, the free professions, and higher managerial and administrative categories seem barely to have been represented at all. Workers usually composed between a quarter and a third of the membership, 52 I have tried to lay out the terms of an agenda in Geoff Eley, State Formation, Nationalism, and Political Culture: Some Thoughts on the Unification of Germany, in Eley, From Unification to Nazism, pp. 61-84. See also the following: Robert M. Berdahl, New Thoughts on German Nationalism, American Historical Review, 77 (1972). 65-80; James J . Sheehan, What is Ger- man History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981). 1-23; John Hreuilly, Sovereignty and Boundaries: Mod- em State Formation and National Identity in Germany, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), National Histor- ies and Europeun History (London, 1993). pp. 94- 140. Unfortunately, John Breuilly (ed.), The Stute of Germany. The National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and Remaking of a Modern Nation-State (London, 1992), and Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism. From Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763-1867 (Cambridge, 1991), are both disappointing i n this respect. 5 Thomas Rohkramer, Der Militarismus der kleinen Leute *: Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871-1914 (Munich, 1990). s4 See also Hansjoachim Henning, Kriegervereine in den deutschen Westprovinzen. Ein Beitrag zur preuBischen Innenpolitik zwischen 1860 und 19 14. Rheinische Vierteljahreshefe, 32 ( 1968), 430-75; Klaus Saul, Der Deutscher Kriegerbund. Zur innenpolitischen Funktion eines nationalen Verbandes im kaiserlichen Deutschland, Militurgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 6 (1969). 95-130.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 127 although in certain industrial cities like Magdeburg and Gelsenkirchen this might be over 75 per cent. In the leadership positions these patterns were reversed. By 1913 86.9 per cent of the branch chairmen had the officer rank, and the local leadership came almost exclusively from the upper echelons of society-big landowners, higher civil servants, the Bildungsbiirgertum, lawyers and the state judiciary-whereas even artisans and merchants, let alone workers, disappeared largely from view. Moreover, this socio- logy became accentuated as time went on, and in fact as the public sphere of the Kaiser- reich expanded after 1890 (with the end of the Anti-Socialist Law and the general up- swing of popular political mobilization) the top-down and socially restrictive control of the Kriegeniereine became ever more marked, driven especially by the demarcating of the legitimate political nation against the Social Democrats, for which the election cam- paigns of 1893 and 1898 set the tone. I n this way the Kriegervereine replicated the typical sociology of the nationale Verbande, although interestingly they failed to gener- ate the dissident radical nationalism that attacked the government from the right in groups like the Navy League or the Pan-Germans. Finally, the full logic of these developments post-dated the fall of Bismarck (e.g. between 1895 and 1913 the numbers of Lcrndriite chairing branches rose from 4 to 22.4 per cent of the total). The controversy surrounding the attempts of the national leadership to expel trade unionists and Social Democrats from the membership after the 1890s also implies some greater degree of tolerance earlier on---or at least a kind of patriotic consensus not yet subjected to certain forms of strain-and it is a pity Rohkramer did not provide more insight into the earlier period in this respect. This re-emphasizes the need for some serious and detailed investi- gation of the Bismarckian period proper. There is a growing body of work stressing the transformations and adaptability of German society in the nineteenth century, as against its backwardness and resistance to modernity. One important example of such work is Celia Applegates A Nation of Prov- incials. The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990) (reviewed in German History, 1 1, 3 (1993)). Helmut Smiths new study of the place of religious conflict in the dynamics of the empires emerging national polity makes a similar point.56 In this case, the politically mobilized mutual antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants in the Bismarckian Kultur- kampf were less the signs of pre-industrial continuities and traditional or premodern bases of affiliation than the characteristic stresses and strains accompanying a new process of state formation, in which the discourse of national identity was plural and mobile, appropriated by both sides of the religious conflict rather than supplying some unitary or straightforward language of society-wide political integration. The possible languages of national identification in the new German nation-state were undecided. Although liberal visions of the constitutional nation had enormous momentum behind them, despite the incipient co-optation of the movement by Bismarcks pragmatic advancement of greater-Prussian interests, there was still an enormous diversity of regional, confessional, class, and political affiliations to be fashioned into consensual form, and i n the 1870s the definition of German national belonging was very much contested ground. Rohkramer shows the importance of the army and soldiering, through the social agency of the veterans assocations, in producing one strand of patriotic consensus, For a careful discussion of the sociology and structure of membership i n the nationalist ( Genncin Nrrtionrrlism cind Religious Conflict (Princeton, 1995). pressure groups, see ch. 4, Inside the Pressure Groups, i n Eley, Reshaping, pp. 101-59.
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128 Geoff Eley while Applegate explores the complex imbrication of local and regional rootedness with the new project of building consciousness of nation, and both required an extensive repertoire of activities, some state generated, others emanating from civil society. Religion provides another site of creative but contested intervention in this respect, in which existing identities were worked upon by the public powers, sometimes with, and sometimes against the existing grain. As Smith shows, the liberal grand narrative of German nationhood was profoundly Protestant, reaching back to the Reformation and the historically evolving struggle against the perceived counter-national ambitions of the Catholic church during the intervening centuries, so that the Kulturkampf of the 1870s became simultaneously a demand for progress (in a socio-cultural sense) and a bid for a national culture that was confessionally enframed. Likewise, the Catholic response to the offensive launched in the 1870s was also always patriotically inscribed, and the visions of national loyalty and integration organizing the political career of a Ludwig Windthorst were hardly less securely founded than those of a Rudolf von Bennigsen. By the 1890s. when the Kulturkampf itself had long been wound down, and the Centre Party had emerged into a strategic parliamentary position, increasingly the arbiter of stable governing majorities, this national aspiration was becoming elaborated in all sorts of ways. Smith does an excellent job of delineating the interactive solidification of Protestant and Catholic identities as a result of the Kul wkampf, carefully relativizing these via some subtly managed social indicators, from the respective reading habits of the two confessions, and the differential rates of religious observance, to the changing incidence of mixed marriages and the effects of urbanization. The sources of activism also varied across the confessional divide. Among Catholics it was the combination of parish priests and popular citizenship-as Smith observes, it was not the Kulturkampf itself, but the conjuncture of the Kulturkampf with the introduction of universal manhood suffrage [that] created the condition for the formation of a politically active clergy-whereas in the Protestant sector it was far more the engagement of the Bildungsbiirgertum that provided the momentum.57 The sociology and cohesion of the confessional milieus was richly overdetermined by the social effects of the developmental process as it interacted with the specific characteristics of regions and the concrete forms of an urban-rural split: two distinct social groups formed the front lines of Catholic-Protestant antagonism. On the Prot- estant side, the educated middle classes provided the most persistent and most vociferous advocates of anti-Catholic politics. But among Catholics, rural arid small-town populations most readily gave confessional polemics a sympathetic hearing. Organized confessional antagonism was, therefore, grounded in social division: it drew its principal Clan from tension between middle-class, typically urban Protestants, on the one side, and more rural and small-town Catholics, usually of a humbler station, on the other. The clergy played an important role in the mobilization of confessional antagonism on both sides, but, because of the Catholic clergys overt involvement in politics and hi d. , pp. 104f. Smith is at his best when handling complex configurations of variables clearly and succinctly, and his chapter on Religious Conflict and Social Life (pp. 79-1 13) is a model of its kind. developing a dense analytical picture of its subject without ever burdening the text with excessive detail. See his conclusion: The two religious groups thus stood opposed, though the geography of their opposition was quite complex: in some areas conflict was strung taut by the pressures of integration, in others reinforced by social division and confessional organization (p. 113).
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 129 because of the relative abscnce of competing educated elites in rural areas, the influence of the Catholic clergy on confessional antagonism was greater.5x The bulk of Smiths political analysis, focused especially around the activities of the Protestant League, occurs after the turn of the century, whereas the Bismarckian period is used mainly for the structural analysis that sets the scene. But his general argument regarding the relationship of religious conflict to the nationalism of the unification years and its limited integrative capacities remains extremely useful. As he puts it, con- fessional conflict was dynamic, changing in content as well as in form, finely articulated with the languages of nationalist affirmation and solidarity, and an integral part of the general process of modernization. The participants in that conflict, far from possessing an archaic world view, often perceived themselves as forward-looking, and their central dilemma-national unity in a polity with a divided memory-posed, and poses, a pecu- liarly modem problem.59 The value of focusing on religion as a means of grasping the dynamics of nation- forming i n the period of unification-and of taking the history of German Catholicism away from the internalist histories of the church and the Centre Party that dominate the literature and re-locating it on the ground of social history-is further demonstrated by Thomas Mergels fine study of the Catholic bourgeoisie in the Rhineland between the French Revolution and the First World War.6o One of the strengths of Mergels approach is the combination of different research strategies and types of history-intellectual, social, political-in the same book, so that careful expositions of Catholic religiosity and its transformations between Vorm2rz and the Wilhelmine years are integrated with social analyses of the bourgeois milieu and a meticulously grounded account of the socio-religious context of city politics in Cologne and Bonn, imaginative use of family histories and archives intertwining (for instance) with a detailed sociology of the urban electorate. The most salient feature of the general argument concerns the transcendent primacy of class over confessional identification in the urban bourgeoisies emergence as a self-confident and unified urban elite in the first half of the nineteenth century. Using education, intermarriage, common political outlook, and especially the forms of urban sociability through associational life, Merge1 presents the local and regional coalescence of a distinctive bourgeois social formation, organized around the social ethic of a liberal and urbane Catholic piety. Interestingly, this periodization observes the argu- 5x Ibid., p. 109. For further discussion of the social context of the confessional divide, see especially Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 1984); Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Die neue Attraktivitat des Himmels. Kirche, Religion und industrielle Modernisierung, in Richard van Diilmen (ed.), Industriekultur an der Saar. Leben und Arbeit in einer Indusrrieregion, 1840-1914 (Munich, 198Y), pp. 248-57; Wilfried Loth (ed.), Deutscher Katholizismus im Umhruch zur Moderne (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 76-94; Karl Rohe, Konfession, Klasse und lokale Gesellschaft als Bestimmungsfaktoren des Wahlverhaltens- Uberlegungen und Problematisierungen am Beispiel des historischen Ruhrgebiets, in Lothar Albertin and Werner Link (eds.), Politische Parteien auf dem Weg zur parlamentarischen Demo- kratie in Deutschland (Diisseldorf, 1981). pp. 109-26; Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism, Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991), 681- 7 16. By far the most important sustained contribution to this question has been the work of David Blackbourn, including his earlier Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Center Party in Wiirttemberg before 1914 (London and New Haven, 1980), and now his mag- nificent Marpingen. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford, 1993). Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conjlict, p. 235. Zwischen KIasse und Konfession (Gottingen, 1994).
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130 Geoff Eley mentation developed by Walker, Gall, Sheehan, and the Bielefeld Biirgertum project (where Mergels dissertation was produced) concerning the pre-industrial co-ordinates of the bourgeoisies formation, and in other respects too Mergel confirms an existing picture, from the importance of the elite Verein in crystallizing the system of urban governance between the early nineteenth century and the 1870s, to the bourgeois charac- ter of the Centre Partys leadership in the Rhineland. The most interesting part of Mergels account concerns the effects of the ultramontane counter-offensive against secularization in the 1850s, which in the Rhineland sought to confront bourgeois Catholics with a choice between their liberalism and their piety, a choice previously pre-empted by a version of the separation between public and private. By the determined application of clerical power and the full weight of its moral auth- ority, the church reordered the Catholic bourgeoisies sense of the world to drive a wedge between the requirements of religiosity arid continued participation in the enlight- ened bourgeois milieu. This fractured the unity of the bourgeois culture, and while the bulk of bourgeois Catholics refused the discipline of a full-scale ultramontane commit- ment, the political field of the Rhineland became nonetheless reconfigured, and the struc- ture of possibilities decisively changed.h2 Thus although Mergel properly stresses the effects of the Kulrurkumpf in disrupting the unity of the Rhineland bourgeoisie, there was a vital sense in which this damage had already been done. Mergels analysis relativ- izes the Kulturkampf in this way: not only was Catholicism embattled and mobilized before the 1870s, but some forms of the societal enmity of the confessions became institutionalized beyond the 1880s for the duration of the empire; on the other hand, the commitment to a bourgeois ethic survived the virulence of the confessional clash, and by the 1890s the Rhineland had acquired a Centre Party leadership that was impecc- ably bourgeois and conscious of the deeper nineteenth-century liberal traditions. Thus the overall picture was mixed. If in certain respects the local bourgeois identity persisted, the party-political co-ordinates of the latter were at the very least more complex, and in national terms the possibility of unitary bourgeois political agency had been lost: Politically the foundation of the empire was the long-awaited beginning of modernity, but was simultaneously the beginning of the end of the bourgeoisie as a social and cultural unity.6 61 The pioneer in this respect is David Blackbourn, whose analyses of the Centre Partys Rhine- land traditions deserved perhaps greater acknowledgement in Mergels account. See especially David Blackbourn, The Problem of Democratization: German Catholics and the Role of the Centre Party, in Richard J . Evans (ed.), Sociery and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), pp. 160-85, and Class, Religion and Local Politics. pp. 23-60. A brilliant analysis of this process in the southwest of Germany, whose importance has never been acknowledged by the mainstream of the profession in Germany, and indeed goes unmentioned in Mergels bibliography, can befound in Gert Zang (ed.), Provinziulisierung einer Region. Zur Entstehung der biirgerlichen Gesellschnfi in der Provinz (FrankfurVMain, 1978), especially the essays by Dieter Bellmann, Der Liberalismus im Seekreis (1860-1870). pp. 183- 264; Werner Trapp, Volksschulreform und liberales Biirgertum in Konstanz. Die Durchsetzung des Schulzwangs als Voraussetzung der Massendisziplinierung und -qualifikation, pp. 375-434; and Gert Zang, Die Bedeutung der Auseinandersetzung umdie Stiftungsverwaltung in Konstanz ( 1 830-1 870) fur die okonomische und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung der lokalen Gesellschaft. Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der matenellen Hintergriinde des Kulturkampfes, pp. 307-75. Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession, p. 3 18. See also Sperber, Populur Catholicism.
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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 131 Despite the enormous virtues of works such as Bochs and Mergels, the stakes for the German bourgeoisie are being set implicitly too high. At one level, convicting an entire class of political failure in terms of a long-distant future outcome (the Nazi seizure of power), particularly given the now acknowledged scale of bourgeois achievement during unification in the economy, in the law, in civic and social administration, in social mores, and in the arts, design, taste and style, is frankly bizarre. In fact, in light of the necessary counter-examples-the formation of the British, French, and US-American modernities against which the German Sondenveg is always constructed and measured-the German bourgeoisie showed an exceptional degree of cohesion and collective political agency in the mid-nineteenth century rather than some peculiar l ack of political will. We search in vain for comparable evidence of such locally and nationally organized cohesion in the real, as opposed to the imaginary, histories of the national bourgeoisies elsewhere. This resulted from the positioning of German unification in the developmental meta- narrative of economic progress and nation-forming (the dual revolution of l77&1848), one might argue, in which the already constituted histories of Britain and France (and potentially the USA) showed the apostles of the bourgeoisie elsewhere (in Germany and Italy, and less powerfully situated European regions) the image of their own futures. In this sense, I would argue, the German bourgeoisie could demonstrate a remarkable degree of collective political achi evement rather than its opposite, an exceptional effec- tiveness in driving the dominant political agenda, for shaping the socio-political order of the new German national state, and for exercising hegemony, rather than for political self-abnegation in the ways more commonly claimed. Bismarck burst the collective political bubble of the drive for unification. it is true, and the greater-Prussian aspects of the resulting constitutional settlement recast the chances for a bourgeois national- political project in some important ways. But the after-effects of the latter in the Kai ser - rei ch remain enormously significant. In any case, it remains incumbent on the exponents of the Sonderweg thesis to show us the superior political efficacies of the bourgeoisie as a social and cultural unity in Britain, France, and the USA in this same time. But perhaps this squeezing of the study of German history i n the unification years into the enduring polarity of bourgeois success and failure is increasingly missing the point. This is the first of my two concluding observations. If we continue locking the study of the Kai serrei ch into this same dogmatic framework-fashioned from a mixture of social-science developmentalism and unrequited whiggishness-where the later crises of German history in the twentieth century are taken to be already inscribed, we deny ourselves the constructive and exploratory value of new questions. The moralizing insist- ence on a particularly strong notion of continuity between the Bismarckian era and the politics of the Third Reich, which has structured the agenda of the modem German field since the Fischer controversy and the revisionist initiatives of the 1960s outlined at the beginning of this essay, for which Wehlers social imperialism thesis was the most pointed example, had a powerful and inspiring place in the politics of historical knowl- edge of the time (say the 1960s and some of the 1970s), but has now surely run its course. The various monographs discussed above-from HeB on the economics of land- ownership and Boch on the entrepreneurial ideology of unlimited growth, to Ladd on the culture of civic pride, Smith on the complicated nationalist valencies of religious
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132 Geoff Eley conflict, and Merge1 on the place of religion in bourgeois life-show how the constrain- ing effects of the Sonderweg thesis may be overcome. But secondly, there remains an odd disjunction between the recent work on the bour- geoisie (which we may expect to continue rolling off the presses for some time to come) and the other two categories of work discussed in this essay, from the initial revisionism of the 1960s and 1970s, with its stress on the systemic reproduction of the primacy of pre-industrial elites in the political system of the: Kaiserreich, to the biographical studies of Bismarck and the high politics of the unification era. The current historiography makes no attempt to reflect back on the political grand narrative that still dominates our perceptions of the Kuiserreichs political history (which I summarized via the organizing concepts of economization, protectionism, anti-socialism, social imperialism, Sammlung- spolirik, and the societal dominance of pre-industrial elites), and there is no attempt to find the languages of analysis and interpretation that might allow for the fruitful inte- gration of these different sectors of scholarly research and discussion. The same is true for the biographical interest in Bismarck. In fact, the work on the bourgeoisie, as framed by Kocka and Wehler at least, makes a point of specifically mainraining the separations, insisting that the processes of bourgeois social and cultural transformation ceased at the portals of the state and the core political systetn. This is a historiographical scene that seems unnecessarily disarticulated. The thematics of the works discussed in the final sections of this essay accordingly become all the more valuable. It is on the political cultures of nation forming-n the complex co-ordinates of national identity formation in the era of Bismarck, particularly the decades of the 1860s to the 189Os, with their rich logics and counter-logics of solidarity and dissent-that future work may usefully be done.64 University of Michigan GEOFF ELEY My own attempt to lay out such an agenda may be found in State Formation. Nationalism, and Political Culture. For a more general gathering of new work and approaches, see Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996). Several general works appeared too late to be integrated into this essay, including: Lynn Abrams, Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871-1918 (Laiicaster Pamphlets) (London and New York, 1995); John Breuilly, The Formution of the First German Nation-State, 180&1871 (London, 1996); Wolfgang J . Mommsen, Imperial Germany !867-1918. Politics, Culture, and Society i n an Authoritarian Stare (London, 1995).
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