by Jack Beatty
“An incident experienced by my father as a student visiting Berlin in 1913 aptly illustrates the militarization of German society,” an Irish historian writes:
He had come to Berlin to meet and bring the greetings of Irish colleagues to Kuno Meyer, the renowned professor of Gaelic, at the Humboldt University. Walking together along the Kurfürstendamm, they were approached by a young officer with a crimson stripe on his trousers, denoting membership of the General Staff. Meyer stepped down onto the roadway as he passed; my father, protected by his ignorance of the language and the history of the country, walked on … The young blood [was furious]. The professor had to explain … that my father was a foreigner and knew no better.3
Americans snicker at this parody of “militarism.” Soldiers are respected, not worshipped, here. Yet on a comparative scale of militarization, defined as the degree of the state’s organization for war, the United States—which “by some calculations, spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together” without a great rival power and with oceans between it and any future invader—today ranks as far more militarized than Imperial Germany, ringed by a hostile alliance rivers, not oceans, away.4
In 1888, when a colonial enthusiast lobbied Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (from 1862 to 1890, “master of Germany in all but name,” in his own words) to enter the race for spoils in Africa, he replied with a lesson in strategic geography: “Your map of Africa is very nice. But there is France, and here is Russia, and we are in the middle, and that is my map of Africa.” On the eve of war, France and Russia invested 10 percent of net national income in defense and fielded armies of 2.5 million compared to 7 percent (of a larger economy) and 1.2 million for Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary. Yet the map of Europe reveals that France and Russia were not surrounded by Germany and Austria. With sound reason George F. Kennan, the American diplomat and historian, traced the fuse of the war behind Prussian militarism to its geostrategic justification—the Franco-Russian military alliance of the early 1890s.5
“Our enemies are arming more vigorously than we, because we are strapped for cash,” Helmuth von Moltke, the great thinker’s nephew, and the army’s chief of staff, complained in 1912. With a booming industrial economy based on applying science to production, Germany had the cash but spent it on the wrong priorities. In a country that could repel an invasion, or mount one, without so much as a dinghy, millions of marks were diverted from the army to the navy, a fatal enthusiasm of the German emperor.6
Whereas his ancestors had expanded the German Empire by conquests on land, Wilhelm II would take Germany out to sea. It would be a world power like Britain. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the navy’s salesman, knew his kaiser, catering to his whims in ship design—his ships had to have extra smokestacks to make them look more powerful. Tirpitz would have done as well consulting Germany’s tailors, Wilhelm was an admiral of the fleet of the Royal Navy, as well as an admiral in the Imperial Russian, the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian navies, and an honorary admiral of the Royal Greek Navy; and he sought out even remotely nautical occasions, like visiting Berlin’s Zoo-Aquarium or attending a performance of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, to dress up in their uniforms. So when Tirpitz told him, “Your Majesty can now be your own Admiral,” that closed the sale on the Tirpitz Plan of 1897.7
The Tirpitz big-gun “battle fleet,” the Social Democratic leader August Bebel predicted in 1900, would provoke a naval arms race with England, drive England to join France and Russia in an anti-German alliance, and drain resources from the army, which held Germany’s life in its hands. Bebel was right about all of this, especially the last. In September 1914, after the army was forced to retreat from the River Marne east of Paris, General von Falkenhayn exploded at Tirpitz: “If we did not have the Navy, we would have had two more army corps and would not have lost the Marne battle!” He was undoubtedly right: Three battleships could have paid for five new army corps. In losing that battle, Falkenhayn told a Reichstag deputy, Germany had lost the war. Besides defeat, what did Germany get for the 855,890,000 marks it sunk into the navy? When the High Sea Fleet wasn’t running from Britain’s Grand Fleet (as it did even on May 31–June 1, 1916, at Jutland, the one fleet-against-fleet battle), it spent the war in port, rusting.8
The navy drained marks from the army, not men. Germany had the men, just not enough of the right sort. Fearing contamination of its rural recruits, the army was loathe to conscript urban workingmen, carriers of the socialist bacillus, leaving about half its eligible young men untouched by the draft.9
Politics, too, crimped the army’s growth. While the kaiser answered only to a reliably teutonic God, Reichstag deputies faced a tax-averse electorate. Numerical superiority was vital to the army’s victory over France in 1870. Yet the Reichstag rejected General Staff demands to grow the army to approximate the French and Russian numbers. In 1893, a coalition of parties rebelled against the one hundred-million-mark price tag of the 115,000 more men sought. In 1913, in an atmosphere of international crisis, the army wanted 300,000; it got 117,000. “Under the inexorable restraints of the tightness of funds,” the kaiser acknowledged, “justified demands of the ‘Front’ had to be left unfulfilled.”10
Germans liked the image of a strong army. They were unwilling to pay for the reality. Prussian conservatives championed a bigger army but would not tax their East Elbian estates to pay for it. Under Germany’s federal constitution, income taxes were the prerogative of the states, which balked at revenue sharing with the central government. Fear of “adding grist to the mill of the Social Democrats,” a War Ministry official noted in 1913, inhibited raising taxes on the workingman’s beer and tobacco. Considering its security dilemma, Germany’s martial bluster was an unfunded bluff.11
Bluster was the kaiser’s department. The first “media monarch” specialized in frightening the world. In 1900, speaking in a moment of unguarded ferocity on a Bremerhaven dock, the kaiser adjured soldiers headed to China to lift the Boxer siege of Peking to conduct themselves “like the Huns under their king Attila a thousand years ago.” That is, to give no pardon, take no prisoners—“Whoever falls into your hands will fall to your sword”—and by these barbarous acts make “the name of Germany … known to such effect that no Chinaman will ever again dare so much as look askance at a German.”*12
This French cartoon from 1900 accurately conveys the kaiser’s orders to his soldiers regarding the Chinese. From his Bremerhaven speech dates the use of “Hun” for German soldiers in two world wars.
If the kaiser was the voice of German militarism, the Prussian lieutenant, “the unbearable prig of the Wilhelmine era,” was its symbol. To the novelist Theodor Fontane he was Imperial Germany’s “Vitliptutzli”—“the warrior sun-god and idol of popular devotion.” Even those bellicose professors classified by the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus as “a cross between a university chair and a submarine” resented his status. Socialists condemned his politics, cartoonists caricatured his monocle, writers satirized his fetish. In The Sleepwalkers (1932), Hermann Broch depicts a morally attractive nobleman transformed into a “military robot” by “his second and denser skin,” his uniform, which he wears to bed on his wedding night: “She said softly, ‘Joachim, we are not intimate enough yet …’ Through his position his military coat had become disordered, the lapels falling apart left his black trousers visible, and when Joachim noticed this he hastily set things right again and covered the place.” At the spectacle of her sleeping lieutenant, “Elizabeth could not help smiling.”13
The smile, harbinger of the mystique-killing laugh, was the nemesis of the Prussian officer. The bluff of German militarism depended on Germany’s enemies taking his aptitude for war seriously. He was the totem of contemporary “bellicism,” Michael Howard’s term for that “frank and even glad acceptance of war as a supreme experience of life” that along with the “unquestioning acceptance of war as an instrument of international politics” makes the world of 1914 so alien to us.* It weakened deter
rence if foreigners found the Prussian officer funny.14
A 1906 incident illustrating the fetish of the uniform in Germany regaled newspaper readers the world over. To the socialist journalist Franz Mehring, the mockery brought down on the army by the “Captain from Köpenick” equaled a “second Jena,” the 1806 battle in which Napoleon defeated Prussia. The captain led the first of our four conspiracies to rule Germans by the saber. At stake in the third, a late 1913 plot against the Reichstag, was peace in 1914.15
Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt was an itinerant cobbler down and out in Berlin after completing a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery. Exercising the power “to exclude released prisoners from certain localities” granted them by an 1842 law, the Berlin police ordered him to leave the city. Prevented from earning a living, in a flight of criminal anthropology, Voigt planned a sting conceivable only in Germany. Assembling pieces from uniforms and equipment found in used-clothing stores, the ex-soldier dressed as a captain in the First Foot Guards, “the premier regiment of the Prussian Army.” In this character “in the name of the Emperor” he commandeered two armed detachments of enlisted men returning to barracks from guard duty, marched them to the nearby Putlizstrasse station, treated them to a beer, and boarded a train to Köpenick, a Berlin suburb.
Wilhelm Voigt leaving prison in 1908. This photograph documents the transformation required by the captain’s overcoat to make Voigt into a plausible Prussian officer.
At the Köpenick town hall, the mayor, a reserve officer, stood at attention and saluted the captain. On “all-highest command,” the captain told him that he was under arrest. Dumbstruck, the mayor asked to see the captain’s authorization. Voigt signaled two grenadiers, bayonets fixed, to step forward. “My authorization are these soldiers,” he said, a plausible Prussian officer. “Anything more that you may want to see will be shown at the New Guard House in Berlin to which you are now to be conveyed.” Locating the city treasurer, Voigt demanded that he hand over the contents of his safe and dispatched him under armed guard to the same place.
That afternoon the local Landrath, the agent of the Prussian central government, received an emergency telegram: “Town hall occupied by the military. We urgently desire information as to the reasons in order to reassure the excited citizenry.” But Voigt had already seen to that, directing the police to preserve order in the town while the army overthrew its civil government.
Traveling by himself, Voigt took a fast train back to Berlin. He had a curtain to make. Stopping first at a clothing store in Friedrichstrasse, where he spent one thousand marks on a new suit and hat, he made his way to a café across from the New Guard House. He was in time to watch the mayor being delivered to the gate, the dumb show when his guards could not name the captain who had ordered the mayor’s arrest under what charge they were at a loss to say, the unexpected arrival of a disaster-scenting General von Moltke, and the advent of a second carriage carrying the treasurer and a second dumb show.
Voigt was not alone in enjoying the travesty he had stage-managed. The Metropol Theater put on a lampoon of the crime mere days after its commission. Postcards depicting Voigt as cobbler and captain sold briskly. The popular press embraced this “robber’s tale as adventurous and romantic as a novel,” celebrating Voigt’s “hero’s deed” and his “unheard-of trickster’s exploit.” While in prison, Voigt had talked over his sting with his accomplice in the armed robbery, who betrayed him to the police. Ten days after Voigt left the Köpenick town hall carrying two sacks of cash, he was arrested. Halfway through his four-year sentence, Voigt was pardoned by the kaiser, said to have been amused at his stunt. Voigt wrote an autobiography, toured Germany, Britain, Canada, and the United States, retelling his story in nightclubs, restaurants, and state fairs. Madame Tussauds gallery in London celebrated him in wax. He bought a house in Luxembourg, where he stayed throughout the war. Ruined by the postwar inflation, he died broke in 1922, his saga having long since “established itself as one of the most beloved and enduring fables of modern Prussia.”
Democratic and autocratic Germany submitted clashing interpretations of the fable. “Immeasurable laughter convulses Berlin and is spreading beyond the confines of our city, beyond the frontiers of Germany, beyond the ocean,” commented the liberal National-Zeitung. “The boldest and most biting satirist could not make our vaulting militarism … stand comparison with this comic opera transferred from the boards into real life.”
The conservative press found nothing to laugh at; rather, much to admire, spinning the credulity of the soldiers and officials as a sign of civic health. “[They] did not believe in the possibility of illegal action on the part of an officer,” the Kreuzzeitung editorialized, because “our officers are regarded as absolutely trustworthy … If the Democratic Press and the enemies of Germany abroad interpret the success of the Köpenick hoax as an exposure of Prussian absolutism and militarism, they are making themselves ridiculous.”16
The two Germanys had been arguing like this over the army’s political and social displacement since Bismarck used victories against Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866 to silence agitation in the Prussian Diet for democratic control of the army. For liberals, arguing for change against this record of success proved an unequal struggle. Then, by conquering France in 1870–71, Bismarck overcame resistance among the South German states to unification in the German empire under the Prussian king. “The three wars were waged for internal political reasons,” Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian of the Renaissance, observed in 1871.17
Bismarck’s cardinal goal was to solidify a feudal Hohenzollern dynasty shaken by the revolutionary surge of 1848. To that end, he sought to preserve the power and privileges of the “forces of order”—the Junkers (the great landed barons of Prussia), the industrialists, the higher bureaucracy, and the army—propping up the monarchy against the “forces of change” represented by liberalism and socialism. War was Bismarck’s answer to reform, his formula for state building, and his preventive for revolution. War worked, as did war scares. By playing up tensions with France or Russia, Bismarck won Reichstag majorities for regime-supporting parties. “Reactionary governments” always attempt “to divert the internal struggle to the foreign sphere,” reflected the éminence grise of the Foreign Office, Friedrich von Holstein.18
War worked. In a prophetic 1871 appeal to the king of Prussia a liberal publicist saw that as an ominous message for Europe. Bismarck’s victorious wars “had revived and magnified … the danger to this part of the world and the entire epoch from a social and political order one had believed was dying out. After five centuries of desiring, striving, and hoping to outgrow the military system of earlier times … a power based on the permanent use of war has emerged with a frightening superiority of which the military states of previous centuries, bent on conquest and expansion, could never remotely have conceived.”19
In the memory of the German governing elite, Bismarck planted the idea of war as an “escape forwards” from domestic crisis. Historians still debate how much that memory influenced Germany’s decision for war in July 1914. In the alarmed view of the American ambassador to Berlin, James W. Gerard, writing in 1917 at the height of the American propaganda campaign against Prussian militarism, the bad Germany provoked the war to escape from a political challenge to the status quo.20
In February 1914, a British observer predicated that war would flow from the same crisis singled out by Gerard, a national political showdown between the Reichstag and the monarchy, sparked by a military incident in a provincial backwater: “Possibly the two great forces of German public opinion which have clashed at Zabern will clash again and again, and Germany may go through a period similar to that through which England went in the time of Charles the First,” J. Ellis Barker wrote in The Nineteenth Century and After. “It seems more likely that the powers of feudalism and absolutism, which, under the cloak of parliamentarianism at present govern the country, will try to avoid a domestic conflict by provoking a foreign on
e.” In April, the Duke of Ratibor, close to the kaiser, remarked to the French ambassador that just as Bismarck’s “wars of 64, 66, and 70 … had strengthened the position of the military” and the forces of order, so now, in 1914, war “would be necessary to put things back on the right track.” In July, the German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, oppressed by a “deep sense of malaise over the domestic situation in Germany,” “fatalistically decided to reverse [it] in one bold stroke” by handing Vienna a “blank check” to attack Serbia over its suspected role in the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand. An influential school of German historians cites evidence like this to highlight the long-overlooked domestic political causes of World War I. Strong enough to make the leaders of Germany want war, they were strong enough to deny them that deliverance.21
The crisis from which Ellis Barker feared Germany would escape in war was triggered by a real Köpenick with real soldiers mounting a real coup. It happened not in a Berlin suburb but in Zabern, a small town in Alsace, one of two French provinces Bismarck annexed in 1871 as the spoils of victory in the Franco-Prussian War, and because of its French connection the worst place in Germany for the army to run amok. In the “Zabern Affair” the two Germanys confronted each other over the basic “skirted decision” of the Kaiserreich—whether Germany was to be “a state with an army or an army with a state.” The good Germany strode out from under the spiked helmet and, for the first time since 1871, found its voice before, divided by appeals to remember Germany’s place on Bismarck’s map of Africa, losing its nerve.22
To Léon Gambetta, the tribune of nineteenth-century French republicanism, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was “the death-germ of [Bismarck’s] work.” In a sensational book published early in 1914, Bernhard von Bülow, Germany’s chancellor from 1900 to 1909, warned his countrymen that “France is given up to its ideal of revanche … We must take this into account, and consider that we ourselves should be the opponent against whom France would first turn if she thought she could carry out a victorious campaign against Germany.” In the 1920s, the diplomatic historian C. P. Gooch ranked France’s enmity toward Germany over Alsace-Lorraine the first of the “three antagonisms that produced the war of 1914,” the others being Germany’s challenge to Britain’s naval supremacy and Russia’s Balkan rivalry with Austria.23
