Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  7 One special path: modern industry, politics, and bourgeois life in Germany

  Of all European countries the one most strikingly transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century was Germany. A region hitherto devoid of both an integrated market that could foster and reward the development of productive resources, and of a national state able to draw on and give direction to the wealth they generated, suddenly acquired both. The results were especially momentous because the population and resources linked together by railroads and telegraphs were large in scale and because the state that emerged was subject to few of the constitutional restraints that elsewhere mitigated the pure pursuit of power. Supporters of the National Society founded in 1859 had hoped to give a more liberal quality to a united Germany by resting it on a foundation of expanded connections, both commercial and cultural, between its regions, overcoming the long-established fragmentation by multiplying the means through which individuals could independently become what Christoph Wieland had called “actual men of the nation,” and thus increasing both their numbers and their influence. But the liberals’ inability to bring about unification on this basis, and Bismarck’s success in effecting it instead as part of his strategy to preserve the militaristic and authoritarian character of the Prussian state, demonstrated the dependency of Bürger politicians on the very monarchical authority whose character they had hoped to transform. Instead of yielding some of its power to social forces outside it, the Bismarckian Empire raised the traditional domination of the state over society to a higher level, keeping effective power in the hands of ministers and officials and severely limiting the influence of the organized national parties that in Germany as elsewhere now became a significant feature of public life. One result was that the social and political modernization that in France underpinned Gambetta’s faith in the country’s ability to manage its affairs through parliamentary give-and-take and without recourse to violence took very different forms in Germany, with results that would play a role in the country’s later susceptibility to authoritarian appeals. Pace many eminent historians, there was indeed a German Sonderweg, a special path to and within modernity – just as there was an English and a French one too.1

  Railroad building and economic transformation

  As in France, the integration effected by railway networks provided the essential ground for economic modernization in Germany. Railroads by themselves did not create the modern industrial economy, but the new tracks and lines constituted its indispensable foundation, making possible the development of a national market that no previously available means of transport could bring to life. The sheer economic weight of railroad building in the period when modern industry was finding its footing is indicated by some figures: in 1870 almost half of the capital invested in joint-stock companies of all kinds in Germany belonged to railroads, making the aggregate worth of their shares roughly four times that of the stock-market value of mines and foundries, and forty times that of investment in machine-making firms. One thing that drew these funds was the shares’ high rate of return, some of them paying yearly dividends of 18 or even 25 percent (although the average was much lower, around 6.25 percent). As Theodore Hamerow noted, “only government bonds could hold their own on the money market against rail shares.”2 One thing that made the activity these investments supported so valuable was the demand for all kinds of other products it generated, but this stimulus could be effective only because, as Knut Borchardt notes, the more rapid and economical connections between producers, consumers, and resources “meant that people who had never before been within reach of one another now entered into specific economic relationships. This is not merely incidental to the great advance of productivity in the nineteenth century. It can equally be described as one of its prerequisites.”3

  There were several reasons why the German railroad network advanced more rapidly than the French one, and why it took on a different shape, less rational in an a priori way but more broadly efficacious. Government action was important in getting building projects under way in both countries, but the plurality of German states meant that work was planned and undertaken simultaneously at a number of different points on the map, so that no single locale could claim to be the focus of all efforts. Several states had sought to foster economic growth in their territories by improving roads, canals, and harbor facilities in the immediate post-Napoleonic period, and railroads extended and magnified these efforts. Since there was no central government to impose a general plan, the role of states varied from place to place, some only aiding in capital formation, others building or running the lines themselves. The relative absence in most German territories of the kinds of tensions between government and citizens that turned French visions into a réseau impossible for a time also meant that building could get underway with less delay. By 1850 Germany had over 3,600 kilometers of track, while France possessed only half that number (at the end of the 1860s, however, the two totals would be nearly the same, just less than 11,000 kilometers). Some of the lines put in service in the 1840s were short but others were longer and more important, including one from Aachen in the west to Breslau (now Wroclaw) in the east, and one from Kiel in the north to Munich in the south (although political divisions meant that train changes were required along the way).

  Private companies were responsible for most of the early building, but they were often aided by states, as illustrated by the Railway Fund established by Prussia in 1842; it purchased shares in companies, made loans, and guaranteed interest on some investments. In 1847 the state itself constructed a line in the Saar coalfield. Other German governments also built lines in the 1840s.4 After 1848 Prussia turned more to direct government ownership, so that by 1860 about half the 5,700 kilometers of rail lines there were either owned or run by the state. In Germany as a whole at the same date there were some 4,600 kilometers owned and administered by private companies, 1,400 owned privately but managed by governments, and 5,200 kilometers of state-owned lines.5 As the century went on, the economy, now stimulated by market integration and the new industries, picked up speed on its own, and the direct role of the state contracted. But the German states, like the French, retained their connection to those economic activities that were most directly concerned with their traditional aim of building up the unity of their territories, taking over general management of the railroads, even on some lines originally constructed by private companies. In the years before 1914 the Prussian state railway would be the largest employer in the world.6

  Certainly the new network’s effect on German life was rapid and remarkable. As David Blackbourn notes, the 1850s saw Germany’s real breakthrough to industrialization, and at a pace that justifies the old term “industrial revolution” against the various doubts raised against it. In this transformation the railway was “at the center of everything,” stimulating the production of metals, widening the circle of consumers, giving a boost to the chemical industry by creating a national market for clothing and thus for dyes to color it, “helping to spread the market culture into previously virgin land,” and giving a new mobility to people of all kinds, beginning with the thousands of workers required to construct it. In industry itself, metals showed the most remarkable upswing: “The use of coke in iron smelting was virtually unknown in the 1830s, and in 1850 it still accounted for only 25 percent of iron output. By 1853, in just three years, the figure had risen to 63 percent.” The famous Krupp metals firm employed 60 men in 1836, over 1,000 in 1858, 8,000 in 1865 and twice that number by 1873. Equally remarkable was the expansion of the building industry. “Over a million new buildings went up in Prussia alone during the years 1852–67, the fastest growth coming in factory plant and public buildings.” There was a “mushroom-like appearance of new factories, gasworks, waterworks and railway workshops.” Cities were reshaped as people drawn into them occupied new dwellings, for the first time built on a large scale for renting. Other forms of government action also contributed to this transformation. The Prus
sian government set up local chambers of commerce to encourage industry, partly financed by the state, and railroads made the stimulative effects of the Zollverein more important than before, with more states joining it from 1850.7

  Many traditional patterns of life were disrupted and many immigrants to the expanding cities were thrown into confusion by the conditions they encountered there, but unprecedented quantities of energy and vitality were released at the same time. The conditions that had made the 1830s and 1840s decades of widespread anxiety, and suffering faded from view as industrial advance “broke the cycles of dearth and starvation, boosted output and demand, and provided employment for the underemployed of the Vormärz” (as the period before 1848 is known to German historians). Real wages began a rise that continued through most of the century, and when economic crises came in 1857 and 1873, they produced neither the widespread hunger and unemployment nor the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1840s. The overpopulation of the countryside that had been responsible for much of the crisis of Pauperismus that preoccupied observers now receded with remarkable speed, as immigration both to cities and to foreign lands, principally the United States, provided outlets. With rural labor no longer in oversupply the downward pressure on wages in country areas diminished at the same time that growing urban markets provided profitable outlets for rural goods of all kinds. The results were favorable both to small producers and to big landowners such as the Junkers, who were by no means turned into an economically declining class by the growth of industry. (To be sure, they pressed for tariff protection in the 1870s, as international competition in agriculture grew sharper, but so did industrialists.) The contrast with the rural world of a few years earlier was profound: “The countryside had never been so wealthy and stable.”8

  Bürgertum, state, and industry

  As in every country, many individual and uncoordinated decisions and actions combined to produce this transformation, but it is impossible to escape the sense that the German case was marked by an unusually high degree of self-consciousness, a recognition that historical conditions required that the country remake itself both in order to keep up with its neighbors and rivals and to respond to its internal problems. Such awareness was by no means novel, since various German states had taken on a role as engines of economic, social, and cultural advance from the eighteenth century; even then, as Isabel Hull points out, the idea of a bürgerliche Gesellschaft was a future-oriented one. In the post-Napoleonic period the impact of the new industrial techniques in England led to public discussions about how and whether Germany should follow the British example, with some participants seeking ways to catch up (through tariff protections, for instance), while others were moved by a desire to avoid the negative consequences famously evident in Manchester.

  This debate took a new turn in the 1840s, in the writings of a group of young and visionary businessmen whose most articulate spokesman was the well-known Cologne manufacturer, railroad builder, and banker Gustav Mevissen. Against those who preferred to see Germany expand manufacture on traditional lines the group argued that old-fashioned Industrie could not survive competition with the new kind of Fabrikwesen, and that only the latter could provide sufficient employment to sustain a growing population and provide the country with a stable and prosperous future; modern industry had to become the basis for a determined and thorough make over of the whole economy. Mevissen and his friends did not shrink from recognizing the negative effects of so sweeping a transformation: suffering and disruption were bound to accompany it. Just for this reason both officials and private people had to prepare to provide aid to those whose jobs or skills would be threatened. The group split over how large a directing role the state should be assigned, and how much distress could be avoided, with Mevissen himself (an intellectual as well as a businessman, and who later went on to a distinguished career in state service) resigned to a pessimistic assessment of the immediate future, for the sake of longer-term benefits.9

  Mevissen’s combination of visionary determination to foster industrialism with a hard-nosed acknowledgment that its damaging consequences could not be avoided deserves to be highlighted; it is difficult to think of a similar mix in either England, where change occurred largely on its own, or France, where the great champions of industrial advance, the Saint-Simonians, envisioned it as a remedy for the country’s many and longstanding social antagonisms. Mevissen’s views seem akin at once to the attitude of bureaucrats who thought effective modernization required guidance from some central point, and to the dialectical linkage of history’s dark underside with its ability to realize human potential developed by both Hegel and Marx. The latter connection was not merely theoretical, since Mevissen was one of the founders of the liberal newspaper the Rheinische Zeitung, in which some of these ideas were put forward, and of which the young Marx became the editor for a time in 1842. Marx was then a radical Hegelian who looked to the state to “fulfill its concept” by directing society so as to defend the general interest and protect the poor against selfish individualism, a program akin to the ideas of Mevissen and his friends. In the event, the process by which Germany became industrialized would be more haphazard and less self-consciously directed than the Rhenish liberals envisioned, but their sense that it had to occur at a rapid rate, and that it would simultaneously disrupt many established patterns of life and resolve many of the problems that rendered the 1840s so dark, turned out to be very much on the mark.

  Mevissen’s career as both a businessman and a state official, alongside his ties to Hegel and Marx, should remind us that the kind of determined, even brutal realism he countenanced provided a not-always-remembered link between German bourgeois and the state that did much to shape their lives, after 1850 no less than before. Something of what tied them together can be illuminated by recalling that the idea of Realpolitik for which Bismarck provided the classic and most enduring realization actually made its entry into the political lexikon when a young liberal publicist, Ludwig August von Rochau, published a book about its “basic principles” in 1853. Asserting that “it is power alone which can rule,” Rochau added that “the spoken and written word can accomplish nothing in the face of physical facts,” which can only be altered by “other facts.” This declaration reflected a widespread disillusionment with the idealistic hopes that inspired liberals in 1848, when for a moment it seemed that governments might remake themselves along the lines proposed by the representatives assembled in Frankfurt. But as other historians have noted, Rochau’s views gave Geist a place in history alongside Macht. His manner of putting power at the core of politics included the recognition that no political program could succeed which did not accord with the Zeitgeist, a spirit still animated in the 1850s by principles that included “civic consciousness, the idea of freedom, national sentiment [and] the idea of equal human entitlements.” Bismarck did not share von Rochau’s commitment to all these values to be sure, but he was precisely trying to appeal to some of them when in a famous speech he sought to gain support for his program of strengthening the Prussian army by telling liberal nationalists that only “blood and iron” could realize the vision of unity they so cherished.10

  That many middle-class liberals who had seen Bismarck as an enemy before 1871 became his supporters once the miracle of unification stood before their eyes was only one of many signs that large segments of the Bürgertum could not fail to acknowledge their closeness to, even dependency on state power. Such dependency was particularly evident in the case of the officials who constituted the kernel of the Bildungsbürgertum, for all the reasons noted in Chapter 4, and the Wirtschaftsbürger who assumed increasing prominence after 1850 inherited it in some degree by virtue of the role the state played in creating the conditions for industrial growth and innovation. One way in which they testified to it was through their often-remarked penchant for seeking and accepting official titles and honors. Although not unique to Germany, the phenomenon was far more extensive there, which is one reason why it has been a p
oint of contention in debates about the so-called “feudalization” of the German bourgeoisie. Some historians have argued that accepting such honors testified to the desire of business people to turn their backs on their own identifies and inheritance, a penchant that reduced their ability to engage in the struggle against the aristocracy assigned to them by classic historical scenarios, both Marxist and liberal. But other scholars have offered good reasons to reject such a reading. Few Bürger received actual titles of nobility (Gustav Mevissen, late in his life was one exception), the most common distinction being “Commercial Councillor” (Kommerzienrat), a title that recalled no-longer functional bodies once set up to advise officials on business matters. What recent studies show is that the families who accepted the honor (it seems hardly ever to have been refused when offered) did not abandon business, but continued to be active, even in succeeding generations. The so-called “Buddenbrooks phenomenon,” in which some offspring of business people abandoned commerce for cultural or aesthetic pursuits, affected some individuals, but few families as a whole (Thomas Mann had his own reasons for attributing it to his). Not only did most of them remain in mercantile occupations, they largely continued to socialize and to marry inside business circles too. Rather than providing any kind of escape from entrepreneurial life, the titles seem to have appeared to Bürger as aids in pursuing it, providing a sign of respect and recognition typical of the society they inhabited. All the same, as Karin Kaudelka-Hanisch, one of the critics of the “feudalization” thesis concludes, the importance of titles “indicates a peculiarity of the German bourgeoisie, namely its strongly marked statism … Closeness to the state and bourgeois self-confidence seem to have gone together.” To this it should be added that the peculiarly military nature of the German state literally left its marks on prominent members of the Bürgertum (at least those who attended universities) in the form of the dueling scars many of them bore from their student years (Max Weber, no less tough-minded than Mevissen, was one); the wounds were the price of membership in student fraternities whose aggressive and even brutal tone provided a vehicle for bourgeois to inherit the combative spirit embodied by Prussia, and which Bismarck represented so well. English observers, as Peter Gay colorfully shows, were shocked by the display of violence in German student life, even when they recognized that watching it in action put them in touch with aggressive feelings of their own for which their kind of gentlemanly education provided only sublimated outlets.11