by Jack Beatty
Bethmann Hollweg was cross-pressured, and it showed in his performance. Before he began speaking, his Social Democratic opponents lacked the votes to censure his government for failing to check militarism in Zabern. After he finished, the rout was on. Censure passed the next day by 5 to 1, with the Center, National Liberal, and Progressive parties merging with the Social Democratic tide.
Bethmann Hollweg. If Germany’s chancellor, its highest civilian official, wore his saber in the Reichstag, that would complete the symbolism of “an army with a state.”
Gesturing now to the army, now to public outrage at it, the chancellor, “his tall figure as melancholy as a leafless trunk,” tried to straddle a widening gulf. It was proper for Lieutenant Forstner to instruct recruits to defend themselves if attacked, improper to put a bounty on Alsatians. Wackes was perhaps improper—hisses from the Alsatian deputies. Warning recruits against deserting to the Foreign Legion was proper, insulting the flag of a country “we met in honorable battle forty years ago” decidedly improper. Regarding Reuter’s Saturday-night roundup, Bethmann observed, the military took one view and the civilian authorities in Zabern another. Which “was absolutely in the right” was “impossible” for him to say. At this, from all quarters of the House except the Right came cries of disapproval. “I ask the gentlemen not to forget,” Bethmann declared into the din, “even in this serious and in many respects very sad case, that the military has the right to protect itself against direct attacks.” The translation of the stenographic transcript continues:
(Shout from the Social Democrats: Children attacked!)
And it has not only the right; it also has the duty to do so.
(Commotion among the Social Democrats.)
Otherwise no army in the world can survive.
(Very true! from the Right.)
The uniform must be respected in all circumstances.
With that, amid the “angriest hisses ever heard in the Reichstag,” the chancellor sat down.
The Prussian minister of war, General von Falkenhayn, his brindle-colored hair cut en brosse, spoke next. A stranger to ambiguity, he blamed “noisy agitators and newspaper campaigns” for the events in Zabern. He got no further. For five minutes the Social Democrats assailed him, shouting, among other things, the deadly accurate, “You are Forstner in the flesh!” Falkenhayn stood at attention throughout his fiery rain. When it subsided he counterattacked. Without the army, “there would not be a stone in its place in Germany today—including in this proud building!” It was no joy doing the job of the police in Zabern—why, a German soldier was safer in the “Congo”—but the German army was “a terrible instrument” and woe to any evening strollers standing in its awful way! In vain did the president of the Reichstag ring his bell for quiet.40
A Center Party member from Alsace replied to Falkenhayn at the next session. The army had built the Reichstag. It had conquered Alsace: “But I tell him today that it is also the German army that has lost Alsace-Lorraine to the German Empire.”
That was only half the story. By treating Alsatians as if they were enemies, not Germans, the army caused what the Times called “a grave constitutional crisis.” Alsace was that important to Germany. And many Alsatians were moved by the discovery. After sampling local opinion in the days following the censure vote, a correspondent identifying himself as “Old Alsatian Hand,” wrote to Bethmann: “Rarely has Alsace felt itself so German as when the Reichstag supported it with all its force.”41
Erich von Falkenhayn. The War Minister (and general) reminded the Reichstag what it owed to the German army, which had forged Germany.
Several speakers in the Zabern debate had “plainly intimated” that absent immediate disciplinary action against Forstner and Reuter the army budget might not pass. That threat penetrated the kaiser’s cocoon. Bowing to public opinion, the Supreme War Lord announced that Forstner and Reuter would soon face court-martials. Across Berlin, seventeen “huge” socialist meetings cheered that news. Zaberners greeted the kaiser’s decision to move the Ninety-ninth infantry out of town with ambivalence; the economy depended on soldiers’ spending. Over the subsequent announcement that Lieutenant Forstner would be transferred to a regiment on the Polish frontier, as far from Alsace as he could go and still be in Germany, their happiness was unalloyed.42
The papers speculated that the chancellor, “no longer taken seriously abroad since six-sevenths of the [Reichstag] disavowed him,” would not survive the year. The politicians had bearded the army, forced the kaiser’s hand, and discredited the chancellor. All in three days. “The Reichstag has risen to its full stature as the mouthpiece of the people,” the Times exclaimed.43
Foreign observers wondered if the Reichstag would use the censure vote to oust Bethmann, a revolutionary step. Under Bismarck’s constitution, the Reichstag could not change the government. If the Reichstag nevertheless successfully asserted such power by holding up the army bill until the kaiser removed the chancellor, de facto parliamentary government would have come to Germany, a political check, potentially, on the kaiser’s power to make war. “We on the left favor parliamentary government,” a Social Democrat declared. “The Reichstag cannot remain forever in its present state as [an] insignificant organ of control.” The Saxon representative in Berlin predicted that “we are heading toward another domestic crisis and I fear that Bethmann will no longer be able to master it.”44
With censure, however, the Reichstag had exhausted the available political courage. The Center Party and National Liberal press, while critical of Bethmann, deprecated any idea of provoking a “Chancellor crisis.” Betraying reluctance within their ranks, the Social Democrats took a week to submit a resolution calling on Bethmann to resign “like a French or English prime minister.” Meanwhile, the socialist press was framing Zabern in terms repugnant to the middle-class parties. “We will make clear to every member of the working class that every day this system of militarism continues to exist is an outrage and a danger,” the Düsseldorf Volkzeitung editorialized. “However, this system can only be eliminated when the existing capitalist state with all its horrors is eliminated.” Deputies who voted censure to defend civil liberties or from pique with Bethmann no doubt wondered what they were doing in this company.45
Bethmann could take satisfaction in the isolation of the Social Democrats. He had no intention of resigning, he declared to a Reichstag sobered by a week of second thoughts, adding, to applause, “The majority of the German people have no intention of subjecting the Imperial authority to the coercion of the Social Democrats.” Neither did a majority of the Reichstag. Germany, Bethmann reminded the Socialists, was not England.46
But it was not a military dictatorship either, and hopes for an official repudiation of saber rule now focused on the trials of Lieutenant Forstner and Colonel Reuter. In late December, a military court sitting in Strasburg found Forstner guilty of assault on the shoe worker, Karl Blank, sentencing the lieutenant to forty-three days imprisonment, usually a prelude to discharge from the army. Forstner argued that he was carrying out the orders of Colonel Reuter, who had told his men to “bring down” threatening civilians. Forstner’s secondary defense that a dangerous Blank was about to attack him collapsed when Blank walked across the courtroom, and it was seen that he dragged a clubfoot.47
In a vertiginous turn of events, on January 10, 1914, a military appeals court overturned Forstner’s conviction. Sabering Blank was “putative self-defense.” Seated in a Strasburg courtroom behind their spiked helmets lined up along a table separating them from the civilian public, a second panel of officers acquitted Reuter of the charges against him. The civilian authority having failed, Reuter had acted properly in restoring order in Zabern.48
The Berlin dailies broke this bombshell in special editions, which were “snatched from the hands of news dealers” as if they carried reports of “a great battle.” There had been a great battle, and the good Germany had lost it: MILITARY MEN OPENLY EXULT, LIBERALS DENOUNCE THE OVERTHR
OW OF CIVIL LAW read a representative headline.
Outside the Strasburg courthouse, mounted gendarmes and hussars carrying sabers and carbines kept local citizens at bay while the verdicts were announced. The crowd displayed “sullen submission,” a reporter noted, as if these Alsatians were afraid “the machine guns could be used on them.” Still, fists were shaken at Forstner as he was hustled out of the building and into a waiting carriage.
Liberal editors greeted the Strasburg verdicts with resigned dismay, the Frankfurt Zeitung concluding that “militarism on the Bench” had pardoned “militarism in the dock.” The Berliner Tagenblatt quoted a May 1912 threat of the kaiser’s provoked by demonstrations surrounding his visit to Strasburg—“If this keeps up, I shall smash the constitution of Alsace-Lorraine to atoms”—and tartly added, “Today’s events at Strasburg have saved the Supreme War Lord the trouble, as the work of years of reconciliation in the conquered provinces is now destroyed.”
In France the socialist press urged Frenchmen not to let their anger at the Germany of the Strasburg verdicts eclipse their admiration for the Germany of the Reichstag censure vote. The semiofficial Temps jibbed at that: “French Radicals and Socialists find comfort in the reflection that there are ‘two Germanies’… From the political and practical point of view, the Germany to which the French Socialists appeal in order to reassure us simply does not exist.” Anticipating the anticlimax of the Zabern affair, the London Daily News observed, “If the Reichstag accepts this, we shall conclude that the sabre and not the law rules in Germany.”49
The Reichstag did accept it, the leader of the Center Party agreeing with the chancellor that it was time to “heal not probe” the wound of Zabern. Progressive and Social Democratic bills calling for the army to obtain permission from the civil government before it went to Zabern and for prosecuting soldiers in civilian courts for offenses “other than military crimes” were referred to committee, where they disappeared. “The middle-class parties, which were composed of people who admired the military and imitated its values, could not be moved to more than momentary irritation over its faults, and a Reichstag that had voted the biggest peacetime military budget in history in October 1913 was not a body that was capable of disciplining the army three months later.” Bethmann’s tribute to the army as the guarantor of Germany’s “place in the world” resonated: “We won’t let them [the SPD] take that away from us, gentlemen, just because—well, gentlemen, because in one certain place in the great German Empire certain things happened that no one wants to see repeated.”50
The deputies acted under the spell of the Staatsstreich—the coup—that had hung over the Reichstag, a democratic beachhead in an authoritarian state, since Bismarck’s time. Germany enjoyed universal male suffrage because Bismarck hoped the peasant vote would prove a dependable support to the regime, a counterweight to liberalism. But he had not reckoned with the rapidity of Germany’s industrialization, which powered the growth of an urban working class and the rise of its political party, the Social Democrats, to near-majority status. Alive to the danger of a socialist Reichstag, he waged domestic war on the SPD, forcing the party underground.51
Bismarck throwing a tactical tantrum in the Reichstag. To keep the Social Democrats from winning seats, he threatened saber rule. Along with “social imperialism”—the playing up of international tensions to silence domestic dissent—Bismarck bequeathed the Staatsstreich to the German future.
Yet with each election the SPD vote rose. In 1887, Bismarck contemplated a Staatsstreich if his war-scare campaign failed to produce a conservative majority. Two years later, in a letter to one of his ambassadors, he laid out the scenario that would trigger a coup: “With the eventuality of a hostile majority we must always reckon. You can dissolve [the Reichstag] three or four times but in the end you have to smash the crockery. These questions—like that of Social Democracy and that of the relationship between Parliament and the separate states—will not be solved without a blood-bath, just as the question of German unity was not.”52
When, in 1890, the still-underground SPD won an “astonishing” 1,427,298 votes, Bismarck signaled the War Ministry to sharpen the sabers. A Bavarian political observer reported that the chancellor wanted to provoke the Reichstag “into a position in which it could be destroyed.” But the new emperor, Wilhelm II, shied from beginning his reign with violence. “No one would ever forget that I did that, and all the expectations that have perhaps been placed on me would be converted into their opposite,” he expostulated in a tense meeting with Bismarck. “Then we may have a conflict,” Bismarck responded, and resigned under pressure.
So the door to the Reichstag stayed open, and every year more Social Democrats walked through it. After the impressive SPD success in the 1903 elections Bülow noted “the belief, now gaining ground all over Germany … that the Socialist movement [can] never be brought to a standstill, but must roll on ahead like some elemental force—like the sea or an avalanche.”53
Stopping the avalanche became an urgent preoccupation of the military. As early as 1897, Alfred von Waldersee, the army chief of staff, advocated suspending civil rights for socialists, suppressing “undesirable” publications, and curtailing the suffrage for Reichstag elections. It was understood that the socialists would resist such measures. So in 1907 the General Staff’s Second Section for Military Studies outlined a strategy for “fighting in insurgent towns,” a template for civil war against “the Fatherland’s enemy within.” The SPD-led Reichstag censure vote over Zabern gave this scenario new life.54
As it piled up votes, the SPD trimmed its Marxist sails, becoming a “revolutionary but not revolution-making party,” content to organize the working class against the day when capitalism should collapse of its own contradictions. This reformist positioning broadened the SPD’s appeal beyond the working class, and, in 1912, helped it win nearly five million votes, one of every three cast and twice as many as its nearest competitor, the Center Party.55
To achieve a Reichstag majority, the SPD helped the dying Progressives win seats. But Progressive voters rejected the SPD candidates they were supposed to support as part of the bargain, and after the election the party changed front. Instead of consummating a “shift to the left,” the Progressives and Liberals joined with the Conservatives in a shift to the right, opposing the SPD on its central issue, suffrage reform. In Prussia, a three-class property-weighted franchise converted 418,000 Conservative votes into 214 seats, and 600,000 Socialist votes into an outrageous 7. This kept the Junkers on top in Prussia, while in Germany as a whole, rural-skewed gerrymandering saw “150 Reichstag representatives of the right … able to outvote those on the left whose electors numbered almost twice as many.” The road to an SPD majority lay through fair elections. With that road blocked, the SPD succumbed to frustration and factionalism.56
The growth rate of party membership declined from 49.7 percent in 1911, the year of hope for reform through the ballot box, to 2.9 percent in 1913 and 0.4 percent in 1914. In Düsseldorf, the May Day rallies of 1910 and 1911 drew more than ten thousand people; in 1912, when barely five hundred turned out. While the union rank and file despaired of politics, the SPD leaders split over tactics and ideology.57
Bülow’s “elemental force” was played out. However, the German Right, fixated on its own political entropy with the Conservative share of the vote plummeting from 43 percent in 1874 to 25 percent in 1912, saw the red tide rising, not receding, and brooded on a putsch. Saber rule had triumphed in Köpenick and Zabern. Why not in Berlin? When a Conservative deputy, Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, declared, “The King of Prussia and the German Emperor must always be in a position to say to any lieutenant: ‘Take ten men and shoot the Reichstag!’ ” his fellow Conservatives in the Reichstag gave him a standing ovation.58
Coup fever spread to the royal family through the person of Crown Prince Wilhelm. In November 1913, he forwarded to his father a memo urging an über-Zabern—the imposition of martial law, the shutterin
g of the Reichstag, the abolition of universal suffrage, a purge of the opposition press, and a “solution of the Jewish question,” a cleansing to begin by banning Jews from teaching, the civil service, and the army and by stripping them of the right to vote. Drafted by a former cavalry general, this manifesto for saber rule echoed the views of Heinrich Class, chairman of the Pan-German League, which agitated for “living space” in the East and for a “national dictatorship.” Writing in 1946, the historian Friedrich Meinecke characterized the League as a “curtain-raiser for the rise of Hitler,” “a child of the Pan-German movement.” The führer himself seems to be foreseen in this call by a Pan-German publicist for “the greatest possible expansion of the state or, to put it another way, the concentration of all the nation’s energies for a united effort abroad to be carried out by a hero and master.”59
To such extremists, the Reichstag censure vote represented a moment of peril. In lining up with the SPD, the middle-class parties enacted “the shift to the left” feared since the socialists’ great victory in 1912. The feudalization of the German bourgeoisie—the confetti of “vons” falling on “any ass laden with money bags,” the reserve officer commissions, the cult of dueling—had miscarried. In the face of Germany’s deteriorating strategic position, with the French adopting a three-year conscription law to expand their army, the British signaling in the Morocco crisis of 1911 that they would stand with France in a war against Germany, and the Russians securing massive loans in Paris to build military railroads to the borders of East Prussia—in the face of these signs of danger the bourgeois politicians had sided with the socialists, enemies of the Reich who would paralyze Germany with a general strike while the Cossacks raped their way to Berlin. Seduction and fear failing to keep the bourgeois politicians from treasonous congress with the SPD, the men around the crown prince likely reasoned, it was time to “shoot the Reichstag.”60
