Iron Kingdom

by Clark, Christopher

The primacy of Prussia was further assured by the relative weakness of imperial administrative institutions. A Reich administration of sorts did emerge during the 1870s as new departments were established to deal with the growing pressure of Reich business, but it remained dependent upon the Prussian administrative structure. The heads of the Reich offices (foreign affairs, interior, justice, postal services, railways, treasury) were not ministers properly speaking, but state secretaries of subordinate rank who answered directly to the imperial chancellor. The Prussian bureaucracy was larger than the Reich’s and remained so until the outbreak of the First World War. Most of the officials employed in the imperial administration were Prussians, but this was not a one-way process in which Prussians swarmed on to the commanding heights of the new German state. It would be truer to say Prussian and German national institutions grew together, intertwining their branches. It became increasingly common, for example, for non-Prussians to serve as imperial officials and even as Prussian ministers. The personnel of the Prussian ministries and the imperial secretariats grew ever more enmeshed.4 By 1914, some 25 per cent of ‘Prussian’ army officers did not possess Prussian citizenship.5

  Yet even as the membranes between Prussia and the other German states became more permeable, the residual federalism of the German system ensured that Prussia retained its distinctive political institutions. Of these, the most important in constitutional terms was Prussia’s bicameral legislature. The German Reichstag was elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. By contrast, the lower house of the Prussian Landtag, as we have seen, was saddled with a three-class franchise whose powerful inbuilt bias in favour of property-owners ensured the predominance of conservative and right-liberal forces. Whereas elections to the national parliament were based on direct and secret ballots, the Prussian Landtag was constituted using a system of public ballots and an indirect franchise (voters elected a college of representatives, who in turn chose deputies).

  This system had seemed a reasonable enough answer to the problems facing the administration in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, and it did not prevent the liberals from mounting a formidable campaign against Bismarck during the constitutional crisis of the early 1860s, but in the decades following unification it began to look increasingly problematic. The three-class system was, above all, notoriously open to manipulation, because the colleges of representatives with their public ballots were much more transparent and manageable than the general public.6 In the 1870s, liberal grandees in the provinces exploited this system to great effect, using their control over local patronage to ensure that rural constituencies returned liberal deputies. But things changed from the late 1870s, when the Bismarck administration began systematically manipulating the electoral process in favour of conservative candidates: local bureaucracies were purged of politically unreliable elements and opened to conservative aspirants who were encouraged to play an active role in pro-government agitation; electoral boundaries were gerrymandered to safeguard conservative majorities; polling places were moved to conservative areas within swinging rural constituencies, so that voters from opposition strongholds had to trudge across kilometres of open country to place their votes.

  The conservatives also benefited from a sea-change in political attitudes, as country voters, unnerved by the economic slump of the mid-seventies, abandoned liberalism to embrace protectionist, pro-agrarian sectoral politics. In rural areas the result was an almost seamless continuity between conservative landed elites, Prussian officialdom and the conservative contingent in the Landtag. The cohesion of this network was further reinforced by the Prussian upper house, an even more conservative body than the Landtag, in which hereditary peers and representatives of the landed interest sat beside ex officio delegates from the cities, the clergy and universities. Established in 1854 by Frederick William IV (on the model of the British House of Lords) with a view to strengthening the corporate element in the new constitution, the upper house had helped to block liberal bills during the ‘New Era’ and remained thereafter – until its dissolution in 1918–a weighty conservative ‘ballast’ within the system.7

  The effects of this partial merging of the conservative rural interest with the organs of government and representation were far-reaching. The Prussian electoral system favoured the consolidation of a powerful agrarian lobby. This in turn meant that a substantial part of the rural population, which accounted for the great majority of mandates, came to see the three-class system as the best guarantor of agrarian interests. It was reasonable to assume that the introduction of a direct, secret and equal franchise in Prussia would undermine the conservative and national-liberal fractions and thereby jeopardize the fiscal privileges of the agrarian sector, which benefited from preferential tax rates and protectionist tariffs on imported foodstuffs. After 1890, when the Social Democrats emerged as the largest polling party in the German national (Reichstag) elections, it became possible to argue that the three-class system was the only bulwark protecting Prussia, its institutions and traditions, against revolutionary socialism. This was an argument that not only conservatives, but also many right-wing liberals and some rural Catholics found persuasive.8 The three-class franchise thus had the baleful effect of reinforcing the influence of the conservative rural interest to the point where far-reaching reform of the system became impossible. Chancellors – or even a Kaiser – who attempted to tamper with the special entitlements of the rural sector risked vociferous and well-coordinated opposition from the agrarian fronde. Learning this lesson cost two chancellors (Caprivi and Bülow) their posts.9

  The Prussian system thus immobilized itself; it became in constitutional terms the conservative anchor within the German system, just as Bismarck had intended.10 There was nothing especially nefarious about the egotistical sector-politics of the agrarians – the left liberals were just as frank about their pro-business, low-tax policies, and the Social Democrats claimed to speak only for the German ‘proletariat’, whose future ‘dictatorship’ – in the raw Marxist rhetoric still favoured by the party – was assured. But it was the agrarians and their conservative allies who succeeded in imprinting their interests and, to an extent, their political culture, on the system itself, laying claim in the process to ownership of the very idea of a unique and independent Prussia. Between 1899 and 1911, while virtually every other German territory (excepting the Mecklenburgs and the tiny principality of Waldeck) underwent substantial electoral reform, Prussia remained ensnared in its increasingly anomalous electoral arrangements.11 On the eve of the First World War, Prussian citizens were still being denied an equal, direct and secret ballot. Only in the summer of 1917, under the pressure of war and a growing domestic opposition, did the Prussian administration relinquish its commitment to the old franchise. But before there was a chance to find out how the monarchical system would fare under more progressive electoral arrangements, it was swallowed up in the defeat and revolution of 1918.

  POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE

  While the Prussian constitution remained frozen in time, Prussian political culture did not. The hegemony of the conservatives was impressive, but it was also limited in important ways. There was a fraught polarity between the Prussia whose deputies – many of them socialists and left liberals – sat in the Reichstag, and the rural Prussia whose representatives dominated the Landtag. Reichstag elections enjoyed remarkably high rates of voter participation – from 67.7 per cent in 1898 to a staggering 84.5 per cent in 1912, the last election before the end of the war, when the Social Democrats captured more than a third of all German votes. By contrast, Prussian voters in the poorer income brackets showed their contempt for the three-class system by simply staying away from the polls during Prussian state elections – in the elections of 1893, only 15.2 per cent of the third class of voters (encompassing the overwhelming majority of the population) actually bothered to cast their votes.

  The extreme regional diversity of the Prussian lands also limited the scope of conservative politics.
On the eve of the First World War, Prussian conservatism was almost exclusively an East-Elbian phenomenon. Of 147 conservative deputies in the Prussian Landtag of 1913, 124 were from the old provinces of Prussia; only one conservative deputy was returned from the Prussian Rhineland.12 In this sense, the three-class system accentuated the divide between east and west, widening the emotional distance between the politically progressive industrial, commercialized, urban and substantially Catholic west and the ‘Asiatic steppe’ of Prussian East-Elbia.13 And this socio-geographical separateness in turn hindered the emergence of the kind of bourgeois-noble ‘composite elite’ that set the tone in the south German states, ensuring that the politics of the Junker milieu acquired a flavour of intransigence and extremism that set it apart.14

  Outside the conservative heartlands, however, and especially in the western provinces and the major cities, there flourished a robust and predominantly middle-class political culture. In many large towns, liberal oligarchies, sustained by limited urban franchises, oversaw progressive programmes of infrastructural rationalization and social provision.15 Especially in the years after 1890, the dramatic expansion in the variety and mass consumption of newspapers across the Prussian cities released formidable critical energies, confronting successive administrations with an image problem they found impossible to resolve. This was, as one senior political figure observed in 1893, ‘an era of limitless publicity, where countless threads run here and there and no bell can be rung without everyone forming a judgement about its tone’.16

  The 1890s were a turning point for the socialists too, whose most important strongholds lay in the industrial zone around Berlin and the growing conurbations of the Ruhr area. In the elections of 1890, the socialists emerged from a period of draconian repression as the largest-polling German party. A socialist sub-culture evolved, with specialist clubs and venues catering to an emergent constituency of industrial workers, labourers, tradesmen and low-wage employees. By the turn of the century, Prussia was the stamping ground of Europe’s largest and best-organized socialist movement, a fitting tribute to its two Prussian grandfathers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

  The strife and polarization so characteristic of European cultural life in the findesiècle also left their mark on Prussia. Here was another world that quickly slipped beyond the control of the conservative elites. The biggest theatrical sensation of the early 1890s in Berlin was Gerhard Hauptmann’s Die Weber, a sympathetic dramatization of the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844. Conservatives denounced the play on political grounds as a socialist manifesto, but they were also appalled by the harsh naturalism of its idiom, which was seen as negating the essential values of theatre. The interior ministry in Berlin imposed a ban on public performances of the play, but could not prevent it from appearing before enthusiastic audiences in large private venues such as the Freie Bühne and the Neue Freie Volksbühne, a theatre with links to the Social Democrats. Further bans in the Prussian provinces failed to prevent Die Weber from becoming a huge public success. Even more worrying, from the government’s standpoint, was the fact that a debate over the bans in the lower house of the Prussian Landtag revealed deep divisions around the question of whether the tradition of state theatre censorship was still legitimate in an era of ‘artistic freedom’. Even within the ministry itself, there were doubts about the wisdom of the interior minister’s heavy-handed approach.17

  A gap opened up between the official culture of the court and the experimentation and anti-traditionalism of an increasingly fragmented cultural sphere. It can be seen, for example, in the divergence of courtly and popular dance cultures. Around the turn of the century, new North American and Argentinian steps flooded into the dance locales of the larger cities. The fashionable shelf life of individual styles grew shorter and shorter as the jeunesse dorée welcomed the Cakewalk, the Two-Step, the Bunny Hug, the Judy Walk, the Turkey and the Grizzly Bear. But while an increasingly broad public consumed these transatlantic imports, the court of William II saw a revival of pomp and old-world ceremony. All court balls were organized so as not to upstage members of the royal family: ‘if a princess is participating in the dance,’ the journal Der Bazar noted in 1900, ‘only two other pairs apart from the one in which the princess finds herself may dance at the same time.’ William II explicitly forbade members of the armed forces to perform the new steps in public: ‘The Gentlemen of the Army and the Navy are hereby requested to dance neither Tango nor One-Step or Two-Step in uniform, and to avoid families in which these dances are performed.’18

  The same widening cultural gap could be seen in architecture and the visual arts. Consider, for example, the contrast between the heavy, neo-baroque megalomania of the new Berlin Cathedral, completed in 1905 after ten years of construction works, and the graceful, austere proto-modernism of the new architects – such as Alfred Messel, Hans Poelzig and Peter Behrens, among others – whose works between 1896 and 1912 were emphatic rejections of the eclectic ‘historical style’ favoured by official Prussia.19 The arbiters of public taste – from Emperor William II to the rectors and professors of the state-funded academies – held that art should edify by drawing its subject matter from medieval legend, mythology or stirring historical episodes, while remaining true to the eternal canons of the ancients. But in 1892 there was bitter controversy in Berlin over an exhibition staged by eleven artists who wanted to free themselves from the strictures of the official salon. The ‘bleak and wild naturalism’ (thus the words of one outraged critic) of Max Liebermann, Walter Leistikow and their associates ran directly against the grain of officially sanctioned art practice. By 1898, the rebellion had broadened and diversified into the ‘Berlin Secession’, whose first exhibition, held in 1898, showcased the wide range of styles and perspectives taking shape within the non-official art world and was a huge public success.

  What was interesting about the Secessionists was not simply their oppositional relationship to the prevailing cultural authorities, but the specifically Prussian and local content of much of their work. Walter Leistikow, who hailed from Bromberg in West Prussia, was well known for his haunting images of the Mark Brandenburg: trees brooding in shadow beside lakes, flat landscapes pocked with still, luminous water. His painting Der Grunewaldsee, a dark, atmospheric view of a lake on the leafy south-western outskirts of Berlin, was rejected for exhibition by the official Berlin Salon in 1898 – indeed, it was the controversy over this decision that prompted the Secessionists to create their own forum in the following year. Leistikow’s paintings and etchings disturbed contemporary sensibilities in part because they took possession of the Brandenburg landscape in the name of a new and potentially subversive sensibility. William II, who loathed Leistikow’s work, registered this sense of displacement when he complained that the artist had ‘ruined the entire Grunewald’ for him (‘er hat mir den ganzen Grunewald versaut’).20 Käthe Kollwitz laid claim to a specifically Prussian tradition in a different sense: in a widely praised cycle of etchings inspired by Hauptmann’s play, she invoked the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844. These were scenes of bitter conflict and suffering, in which the epic canvas of history painting was subverted to serve a socialist vision of the past. Even the proto-modernist architects Messel, Poelzig and Behrens were engaged in a dialogue with the specificity of the Prussian setting: their airy and technically innovative architectural designs responded at many levels with the spare neo-classicism of the ‘Prussian style’ associated with Gilly and Schinkel.21

  The last decades before the war witnessed a dramatic proliferation in the erection of public monuments and statues. In Prussia, as across much of Europe, the public statuary of this era tended towards weightiness and magniloquence. Patriotic themes loomed large. A study published in 1904 found that in recent years, 372 monuments had been erected to Emperor William I alone, most of them in the Prussian provinces. Some of these were financed from state funds, but local ‘monument committees’ also played a role in many areas, securing the necessary permissions and
raising donations. By the turn of the century, however, the public echo of such objects was ambivalent. A telling moment was the opening in 1901 of the Siegesallee (Avenue of Victory), a chain of monumental statues extending for 750 metres along one of the axial roads of the capital. Set into a long sequence of spacious alcoves lined with stone balustrades were freestanding figures on lofty pedestals representing the rulers of the House of Brandenburg, flanked by busts of generals and senior statesmen from the reign. Already at the time of its opening, this gargantuan project appeared out of touch with the times. In his hurry to complete the avenue on schedule, Emperor William II had commissioned sculptors of varied distinction to execute the statues – all were conventional and bombastic, many were clumsy and lifeless as well. The result was an expensive exercise in pomposity and monotony. With their usual irreverence, the Berliners dubbed the avenue the Puppenallee, or ‘puppet alley’, and numerous contemporary visual satires mocked the project as the Emperor’s megalomaniacal folly. The coup de grâce was administered in 1903 when a famous advertisement for a brand of mouthwash featured the Avenue of Victory lined with gigantic bottles of Odol.

  48. The Avenue of Victory (Siegesallee), Berlin

  49. Advertisement for Odol mouthwash

  The increasingly polarized relationship between official and dissenting political cultures was – even in the German context – a specifically Prussian phenomenon. It was far less marked in the southern German states, where progressive coalitions succeeded in pushing through programmes of constitutional reform. The relationship between the ‘governmental’ parties and the Social Democrats was also less fraught in the south, partly because the established partisan groups were more open to collaboration with the left and partly because south German socialists were more moderate and less confrontational than their Prussian counterparts. In high-cultural terms, too, the polarization was less pronounced. By contrast with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who publicly denounced cultural modernism of all kinds, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt was a well-known connoisseur and sponsor of modern art and sculpture. In this small federal state, the court was still an important centre of cultural innovation.