Europe's Last Summer

by David Fromkin

As noted before, farming interests still demanded protective tariffs in order to survive, while industry now pushed for the free trade it needed in order to thrive. This was but one of the many contradictions that made Kaiser Wilhelm II's Reich so difficult to fathom— and to govern. At the cutting edge of the modern world in some respects, Germany was obsolete in politics, and therefore unable to reconcile the diverse trends to which modernism gave rise.

  According to Volker R. Berghahn, "the salient feature of German domestic politics before 1914 was . . . an almost total impasse." He quotes Gustav Schmidt to explain: "The notion of several groups blocking each other and hence blocking a way out of the deadlock offers 'the key to an understanding of German politics in the last years before the war.'" Some, under the spell of Nietzsche, believed that the solution was to dynamite society. It was not easy to identify an alternative that did not involve violence.

  Until the nineteenth century the German peoples of Europe had been fragmented. In the former Holy Roman Empire alone, they dwelt in hundreds of principalities, cities, and other quasi-sovereignties. Napoleon restructured them. The Allies who defeated Napoleon tried their hand at restructuring too. In the end, unification came from within the German-speaking world.

  The country we know today as Germany derives from the German Empire, which was created through a series of wars culminating in 1870–71 by militarist, Protestant Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck's new unified Germany contained less than half the German peoples of Europe. It consisted of the kingdom of Prussia, three other kingdoms, eighteen duchies, and three free cities. But Bismarck deliberately excluded Austria, which had led the German states of Europe. He did so, of course, in order to secure Prussia's own leadership in German Europe. This also had the effect of ensuring a Protestant majority in the German federation. A later Chancellor of Germany, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, reminded his government's representatives abroad in 1906 that if the German-speaking Austrians were to be incorporated into Germany, "We shall thereby receive an increase of about fifteen million Catholics so that the Protestants would become a minority . . . the proportion of strength between the Protestants and the Catholics would become similar to that which at the time led to the Thirty Years War, i.e., a virtual dissolution of the German empire." In Germany, Bismarck had chosen to bring into the political world a smaller country that he and his fellow Prussians could control rather than a larger one that they could not, and that continued to be Berlin's preference.

  Yet it became Germany's belief that, in case of war, Austria would be indispensable as an ally, even though Austria was weaker than Germany. The continued existence of the Hapsburg Empire was viewed in Berlin as a vital German interest, indeed, perhaps as Germany's main vital interest in international politics.

  Prussia, undemocratic and militaristic in its culture, was controlled by its army and the largely impoverished landowning Junker class that led its officer corps. In turn, Prussia exerted considerable control, and in time of war almost total control, over the rest of Germany. Germany, by industrializing rapidly, made itself into the economic leader of the Continent, but in doing so necessarily converted much of its population into an industrial proletariat. The workers could not be admitted into the officer corps of the army without diluting the aristocratic Prussian character of the corps—and the regime it supported. So Germany, despite harboring ambitions to dominate Europe and perhaps even the world, deliberately chose not to increase the size of its army to the extent that would be required to realize such expansionist dreams.

  Admiral Alfred Tirpitz explained in 1896 that in the end the armed forces existed "to suppress internal revolutions." The very industrial revolution that was making Germany the greatest country on the Continent was at the same time generating forces that were threatening the regime. It was only one of the many contradictions in Germany's policies.

  Driving Germany's industrial growth was the country's educational system. Here, too, was a contradiction. The best-educated general public in Europe was unlikely in the long run to tolerate an archaic government structure or a leadership drawn exclusively from a narrow pool.

  Long after the Great War, sympathetic foreign observers were to make the argument that Germany's increasing greatness should have been peacefully accommodated by the other powers: that they should have appeased Berlin. Put this way, the responsibility for the outbreak of war falls on the shoulders of the main countries—Britain, France, Russia, and the United States—that eventually stood in the way of Germany's rise to world power. They gave Germany, the argument runs, no way to assert itself other than through war. As the French historian Elie Halévy understandingly put it in the 1930s: "But suppose that, presently, one nation is found to have gained immensely in military or economic strength at the expense of one or many of the others . . . for such a disturbance of equilibrium man has not yet discovered any method of peaceful adjustment. . . . it can be rectified only by an outburst of violence—a war."

  Again, however, one arrives at a contradiction. As will be shown presently, the Kaiser and other German leaders in 1912 and 1913 believed that their country was becoming weaker, not stronger, relative to the other powers. As will be seen, the chief of the general staff felt that Germany ought to launch a war as soon as possible precisely because the chances of winning it would be less every year. War was necessary, in other words, not to accommodate German strength, but to accommodate German weakness.

  For a time, the arms race seemed to offer a way out. Germany, in the process of overtaking Britain as Europe's leading economy, ought therefore to have been able to outspend its rivals for military purposes. But an archaic constitutional structure and the consequent lack of a progressive tax system kept Germany from translating a growing economy into growing government revenues. By the start of the twentieth century Germany had reached the limits, spending all that it could, and more than it should, on the military. In his authoritative study of pre–World War I Germany, Berghahn writes: "German armaments policy was almost exclusively responsible for the Reich's financial plight. Over the years a relatively constant figure of about 90 per cent of the Reich budget had been spent on the Army and Navy" (emphasis added).

  A leader like Franklin D. Roosevelt might have lifted the eyes of Germans to some higher vision, and brought people together through sheer charisma. Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II seemed to aspire to play such a role. He wore glittering uniforms and mounted noble chargers, and, at times, uttered dramatic pronouncements. But he fell short: he had no aptitude for the role.

  Through the many years of his reign his support dwindled among the German people, and plunged during several public scandals of which more will be said later. It is curious that in foreign countries he was taken as the embodiment of the Prussian Junker military tradition, when his popularity was so low among Prussian military Junkers.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II was half English; his mother was Queen Victoria's daughter. He exhibited strange attitudes toward England—a kaleidoscope of love, hate, envy, admiration, and a desire to be accepted as at least an equal—and these contradictions are explained by many biographers on the basis of his feelings for either his mother or his grandmother.

  At birth he was found to be in a breech position in his mother's body. The attending physicians were not fully capable of dealing with this: at the time less than 2 percent of breech babies were born alive. Wilhelm survived—barely—but with permanent injuries.

  It seems likely that Wilhelm II was emotionally unbalanced because of the various injuries suffered in childbirth. It remains an open and controversial question whether he suffered brain damage. His left arm remained permanently paralyzed, and the reactions of others to his withered limb may have affected him in one way or another. John Röhl, the leading student of his life and times, has concluded, on the basis of considerable medical evidence, that Wilhelm was deprived of oxygen during childbirth and suffered all his life from the results: personality defects such as a lack of objectivity and excessive sensi
tivity. This, in Röhl's view, was aggravated by the rigors of his childhood, including the treatments of his twisted neck by such methods as the use of a "headstretching machine" and the treatment of his arm by inserting it into a freshly slaughtered hare. His love of military uniforms, his devotion to hunting, and his identification with Achilles suggest that he yearned for a martial glory that he could never achieve.

  In 1888, Wilhelm ascended the throne as King of Prussia and German Emperor. By 1913, at the age of fifty-four, he therefore had reigned for a quarter century. During that time he had presided over affairs in a number of international crises that had threatened to bring about a European war, and in all of them war had been avoided, with Wilhelm himself in each case eventually coming down on the side of peace. The decision was his to make. The constitution of the German federation gave him the power to declare war. He often toyed with the idea of doing so.

  His was a disturbing influence. He was nervous, high-strung, and mercurial. Caught up in the excitement of the moment, he would threaten and posture, playing the warlord who would lead his nation into battle; later he would take it all back. Military and civilian officials who worked with him learned never to rely on the decisions he announced off the cuff; there had been too many false alarms.

  The accounts left to us by his associates show an undisciplined and inconsistent figure, on the childish side, emotionally taut, often on the verge of breakdown, broadly ignorant but with no hesitation about making unqualified announcements about any number of matters about which he knew nothing. Egotistical and inclined to megalomania, he often spoke and even acted as though he were an absolute ruler. This was particularly true in foreign affairs. To Britain's Prince of Wales he once boasted: "I am the sole master of German policy and my country must follow me wherever I go." He might have exercised more influence over policy had he not been so capricious and unpredictable, and had he not reversed himself so often. As it was, ministers learned to disregard what the Kaiser told them much of the time, and, as one does with a child, to "manage" him. This was made easier because he was so rarely around; most of the time he was away hunting or yacht-cruising. He was in residence in Berlin only from January to May of a normal year.

  Until Wilhelm II became the Kaiser, German policy was set largely by the Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Wilhelm, an untried young monarch, felt uncomfortable with the elderly veteran and his policies. He disagreed with Bismarck on such matters as how to deal with industrial strife: at the time Wilhelm sided with striking factory workers, Bismarck with factory owners. In 1890, Wilhelm asserted his authority by dismissing the Iron Chancellor.

  In 1890, after Bismarck had been dismissed, the Kaiser's new ministers allowed the Reinsurance Treaty, a Bismarck creation, to lapse. It had been an essential element in German policy, affirming German friendship with Russia after already having affirmed friendship with Austria-Hungary. In Bismarck's vision, it bound the three empires together in such a way as to keep the rivalry in the Balkans between Russia and Austria under control. Germany would throw its weight against whichever of its two allies threatened to upset the delicate balance between them. Berlin would keep both of them as allies, providing Germany with security on its eastern front. The treaties were kept secret: Russia did not know of Germany's treaty with Austria; Austria did not know of Germany's treaty with Russia.

  For a century historians have blamed the Kaiser for allowing the Reinsurance Treaty to lapse. Scholars now have shown that the responsibility was not entirely his. On March 21, 1890, Wilhelm assured the Russian ambassador that he planned to renew the treaty. On March 27, told that his foreign policy advisers were opposed to it, he said, "then it cannot be done. I am extremely sorry." It was typical of him, while claiming to be an absolute monarch, to allow himself to be overruled.

  From Bismarck, power passed within the German government to those who looked east: who perhaps dreamed of expanding territory, influence, or markets via the Balkans and perhaps Russia into the Middle East and on to China.

  Behind this policy vision lay their dark historical vision of a fated clash between Teutonic peoples, on the one side, and the peoples of the East, Slavs and Orientals, in which the Easterners, if defeated, were to become servants or slaves. It was the counterpart of the pan-Slav ambitions animating some of the policymakers in St. Petersburg.

  A question still debated is whether Wilhelm II played a great part in formulating policy. One area in which his judgment did have a considerable determining influence was in the shift of emphasis in grand strategy in the late 1890s: Germany's new focus on naval policy.

  The main figure with whom that strategy was associated was the state secretary of the Naval Office, the newly ennobled Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Tirpitz represented, in a sense, the rising middle classes. His plan seemed to solve several problems at once. It called for the creation of a major battleship fleet. Building it might bring high employment and prosperity, and thus buy off, as it were, a section of the hitherto socialist working class.

  This naval program consumed more and more money, and was made possible only by the peculiar order of priorities of the army ministry. According to Berghahn, "From the mid-1890s onwards, naval expenditure increased enormously while, at the same time, the expansion of the Army came to a virtual standstill. . . . There followed two decades of stagnation." The funds were available to expand the navy only because the army chose not to expand; "it was the leadership of the Army itself that had called a halt to expansion." The generals had done so in order to avoid opening the ranks of the officer corps to what they regarded as unreliable elements: persons lacking a Junker Prussian background.

  As Berghahn writes, a function of the officer corps was "guaranteeing absolute loyalty to the existing order and its supreme military commander, the monarch." Rather than enlarge, the better to combat enemies abroad, the ministry of war chose to remain at current force levels in order to combat enemies at home.

  The naval expansion launched by Tirpitz supposedly would enable Germany to compete against the other powers for colonies. It would allow Germany to extend its reach anywhere in the world and not just in and around Europe. Germany would engage in world politics, not merely in continental politics. By its very nature the program posed a challenge to Great Britain, against whom, in fact, it was directed. In building a major navy, in attempting to obtain a colonial empire, and in trying to play a role on the global stage, Germany was setting out either to rival England or to take England's place.

  In retrospect, this was a self-defeating policy. Germany, along with its Austrian ally, is situated in the center of Europe. It has neighbors on all sides. Geographically it is encircled. The German nightmare has always been that of being encircled by a combination of hostile powers. It was Wilhelmine Germany itself that translated that nightmare into a reality, with its aggressive foreign policy and its unwise alliance decisions.

  To the west there was France, estranged by the loss of Alsace and parts of Lorraine to Germany in the war of 1870–71. Bismarck, in his day, distracted the French by backing their quest for empire; under Wilhelm II, Germany instead deepened the rift by opposing French imperialism, notably during the Moroccan crises of 1906 and 1911.

  To the east was Russia, which Berlin deliberately estranged by letting the Reinsurance Treaty lapse. Germany made the fateful choice to back Austria against Russia. Thus it had enemies on both sides, east and west, conjuring up the very two-front war that haunted its generals.

  To the south, Italy had territorial assertions against Austria that made it likely that Rome would rally to the other side. The German-Austrian alliance might well have to fight on a southern front, too.

  Now, in the early 1900s, the Tirpitz program estranged Great Britain as well. England, France, and Russia, which were in many ways natural enemies of one another, and had been in conflict for more than a century as rivals for empire in Asia and elsewhere, were given no choice but to band together. So the hostile encirclement that Germany so much feared
was achieved by Germany itself. But the Kaiser and his entourage, including the country's military leaders, chose instead to blame everyone else.

  Insofar as he remained steady in support of any policy, the Kaiser consistently backed Tirpitz and his naval policy. This brought the monarch into alignment with a broad segment of the middle class favoring expansion of trade, creation of a fleet to back up the drive for trade, and recognition by foreign powers of Germany's growing greatness. It was a policy that aroused fear in Germany's neighbors. On the other hand, it did not lead Germans to feel more secure.

  Given the relative consistency with which he pushed navalism, the Kaiser might well have been convicted of responsibility for the 1914 war if it had come about as a result of the naval challenge that he mounted against Great Britain. But it did not. Germany dropped out of the naval arms race several years before the war began; navalism then lost its relevance as a German world strategy.

  It was the other and rival military party, the Prussian-led army, that eventually led Germany along the road it took in 1914. To be seen clearly, German militarism at that time has to be understood not as a single phenomenon with two aspects but as two rival programs: that of the navy and that of the army. Paradoxically—a word that, along with "oddly," has to be used often in discussing Wilhelmine Germany—Tirpitz and Wilhelm, whether they knew it or not, headed the party of peace. This was because the navy, in the Tirpitz grand plan, would take years to be ready for any possible confrontation with England. And the navy did not want to fight until it was ready. So Tirpitz was for peace now and war so much later as to have little relevance to the politics of his time. To the navy, the enemy was the British Empire; to the army, it was Russia.

  The army was less than enthusiastic about the Kaiser. His backing of the navy threatened Junker control of the German Empire; among other things, it opened up paths for advancement to new men from the professional and middle classes. Moreover, his tendency to retreat from international confrontation whenever there appeared to be a real risk of war was seen as cowardly through army eyes.