Wilhelmine Germany - article from HISTORY TODAY
Wilhelmine Germany
The decline of liberalism was also due to the rapid pace of industrialisation and modernisation. Developments that were stretched over many generations in Britain, were compressed into a short space of time in Germany, and were therefore more difficult to adjust to. Groups that felt themselves to be losers, mainly the lower middle classes, for instance craftsmen, artisans and small traders displaced by the factory system or department stores, sought scapegoats, such as Jews or socialists. They became a breeding ground for extreme nationalist, racist and anti-Semitic doctrines. The rapidly growing numbers of factory workers gave rise to a mass socialist party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The German Reichstag was elected by universal male suffrage, a franchise much wider than that existing in Britain before 1918. Bismarck hoped that it would work against the middle-class liberals, but in fact it facilitated the growth of the SPD. All efforts by Bismarck and his successors to suppress this party failed. An anti-socialist law in force from 1878 to 1890 prevented the socialist party from functioning freely, but could not stop it from fighting elections. Oppression merely served to turn the party towards radical opposition to the existing political system and towards the adoption of a revolutionary Marxist ideology and rhetoric. This in turn alarmed most of the rest of society and made them more receptive to right-wing nationalist and racist ideologies. Germany never had a party like the British Gladstonian Liberal party, a coalition of working and middle-class supporters.
The political situation in Wilhelmine Germany, the period between Bismarck's fall in 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, became polarised. This contributed to the bellicose nature of German foreign policy, as governments sought to divert internal tensions by successes abroad. No progress was made before 1914 in what became the two most obvious features of German political backwardness, compared with the West. First, there was no full parliamentarisation of the system: the German chancellor, head of the executive, continued to be appointed and dismissed by the monarch, not by parliament, as in Britain. Second, in Prussia, two-thirds of Germany, the parliament, the Landtag, was still elected on a very restricted franchise. It controlled many important areas of domestic policy, as similar parliaments did in other parts of Germany. While the universal male suffrage applied in Reichstag elections made the socialists into the largest party in the federal parliament by 1912, they had only a handful of seats in the Prussian Landtag. Some on the Right wanted to do away with parliaments altogether and they were often the same people who believed that a successful war would solve Germany's problems.
Nevertheless, the weakness of liberalism and penetration of the middle classes by feudal-militaristic values, factors emphasised by historians like Wehler in their earlier work, is not the whole story. Even in the narrow sense of political parties calling themselves liberal, these remained vigorous at the municipal level. In the federal, devolved German system, city government was of great importance. At the national level a liberal party uniting various previously divided sections experienced something of a revival immediately before 1914. Many such liberals wanted to do away with anomalies like the Prussian restricted franchise. The Reichstag, although never achieving a breakthrough to full control of the executive, became increasingly powerful and no chancellor could survive for long if he was unable to work with it. The rule of law prevailed, even if imperfectly. The upper echelons of the German middle classes were self-confident and in many respects superior in wealth and influence to the old aristocracy surrounding the Emperor and his Court. Culturally Germany was a country where experimentalism in the visual arts and music flourished and where there was a strong vein of social criticism in literature. All this limits the ability of an over-arching theory of a German Sonderweg to explain the situation. It was more a case of great tension between modernising and backward-looking tendencies.
War and the Republic
German domestic tensions were temporarily overcome by an upsurge of patriotic fervour on the outbreak of war. Even the socialist party supported the war and without that support it could not have been fought. The 'spirit of 1914' was always invoked by the nationalist, right-wing section of opinion in their efforts to obliterate the deep divisions in German society, not least by the Nazis when they came to power 20 years later. Yet this spirit was short-lived and perhaps never as widely shared as was made out. As the war caused growing hardships the old divisions broke into the open again. The German semi-authoritarian system proved less successful than the Western parliamentary systems in mobilising the nation for war; and, when defeat came, it collapsed very swiftly. Monarchies that had existed for the better part of a millennium were thrown into the dustbin of history.
It was a tragedy that a fully parliamentary, democratic system, the Weimar Republic, came into existence only as a result of defeat and national humiliation. We can never now know whether a model more akin to those prevailing in the West could have evolved in Germany if there had been no war. We do know that the Weimar Republic was born in adversity and in the early 1920s and again after 1929 encountered further extreme turbulence. It managed to survive the troubles of hyperinflation in its early years, but it succumbed to the Great Depression a few years later. By the 1932 a majority of the German electorate had turned against parliamentary democracy, more than a third voting for the Nazis and a sixth for the Communists. It had become very difficult to save democracy and the rule of law, the latter in particular being an essential component of liberalism. Therefore it cannot be denied that at this point liberalism was weak in Germany, whereas in Britain, the USA and France, countries scarcely less exposed to economic hardship than Germany, it was robust enough to keep the existing political systems going. However, even at that late stage it was by no means certain that the German crisis would be resolved by giving power to Hitler.
After Hitler
After the total collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, something the Germans often call 'zero hour', some of the obstacles that had inhibited the development of the liberal state in Germany finally disappeared. Elements of the feudal-military complex that had survived the defeat of 1918 and had made life difficult for democracy in the Weimar period were now also consigned to the dustbin of history. An obvious example was the Prussian landed aristocracy, known as the Junkers, in the areas east of the river Elbe. They had been the backbone of monarchical power before 1914 and were still influential after 1918. They were now driven out by the Russian occupation and their estates confiscated. Few Germans felt after 1945 that their Sonderweg, if there was one, had many positive features. The inclination to despise western democracy as disorderly and greedy all but disappeared and Germans were now keen to see themselves as an integral part of the West. Such were the ideas and values in the ascendant in West Germany. The reunification of 1990 all but swept away what had existed in the East and, for good or ill, extended the West German system over the rest of the country.
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