Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)
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Any theoretical propositions on how best to contain Russia had therefore to be balanced by consideration of the diplomatic and political prices she set on her friendship. Russia might hypothetically have responded positively to a systematic German policy that was conciliatory, self-effacing, and deferential. Such behavior corresponded neither to political and economic realities nor to the personality of Otto von Bismarck. The “white revolutionary” may have regarded Germany as a sated power whose interests were best served by maintaining the status quo. He saw that process, however, as dynamic rather than static, achieved only by constant, positive action initiated from Berlin.
In particular, Bismarck’s policy of “balanced tension” reflected his increasing concern with Russia’s dynamism, the pattern of Russian challenges to the European structure that he saw developing in the aftermath of the Peace of Frankfurt. Even the limited Three Emperors’ League of 1873 with Germany and Austria-Hungary, an agreement for mutual consultation rather than a formal treaty, was described as a threat to Russia’s security and a brake on Russia’s mission by diplomats who made no secret of their conviction that Germany was not being properly appreciative of Russia’s moderation. From St. Petersburg’s perspective, the Congress of Berlin in 1878 was ultimate proof of German perfidy. Bismarck’s self-appointed role of “honest broker” seemed a mere mask for his real intention: the isolation and humiliation of Russia. A massive outburst of hostility in the press was accompanied by significant increases in the military establishment. The latter process survived the immediate crisis. It also confirmed and focussed a broad structure of anti-Russian suspicions and hostilities in Germany.12
German Russophobia existed on two levels. Throughout the nineteenth century the Left was hostile to its neighbor’s form of government. After 1815, liberals and democrats saw Russia as a principal bulwark of reaction. Herder’s nationalist disciples sympathized with the Poles rather than their Russian conquerors. Romantic poets and essayists described the coming conflict of West and East. In the Prussian Landtag and the German Reichstag alike, Russia was a familiar symbol of benighted oppression. Zentrum deputies expressing solidarity with Catholic Poles, Progressives and National Liberals disgusted by increasingly overt anti-Semitism, contributed their voices to a negative chorus that maintained strong intellectual links to the Russian opposition.13
German socialism’s stand on Russia was strongly influenced by the views of its founders. Karl Marx’s implacable hostility to tsarist despotism was matched by his attacks on a Russian character allegedly molded by centuries of subservience to oriental tyranny. Friedrich Engels, while usually exempting the Russian people from his general characterizations of Slavs as dogs, gypsies, bandits, and brigands, was even more critical than Marx of the aggressive behavior of a Russian government he described as dominated by alien adventurers.14
To theorists like Karl Kautsky or Eduard Bernstein, the Russian Marxists were intellectual country cousins, approaching the master’s doctrine with the sophistication of a locomotive, unable to grasp its subtleties, yet correspondingly concerned with provincial hair-splitting. To practical politicians, the Wilhelm Liebknechts and the August Bebels, their Russian comrades were poor relations, eating the bread of charity in exile or sustaining a hole-and-corner existence one step ahead of the Okhrana. Russia’s masses of unlettered peasants, her small number of brutalized factory workers, were at best the remotest kind of raw material for socialism, particularly when compared to the increasingly literate, increasingly politically conscious proletariat of a Germany whose urbanization and industrialization seemed to be fulfilling the essence of Marx’s predictions.15
Where the tsarist political order was concerned, patronization gave way to implacable hostility. Social Democrats lost no opportunity in or out of the Reichstag to attack the tsarist system’s legitimacy—an approach culminating in 1905, when the news of Bloody Sunday vitalized activists throughout Germany. With Vorwärts running a front-page box score of events, with local party groups collecting and dispatching funds for the revolution, Russian conservatives might well be pardoned for entertaining however briefly the suspicion that, for all the intimacy of the Willy-Nicky letters, Germany’s true feelings were best expressed by its political opposition.16
Russia also faced increasing thunder from the German Right. As early as 1853 Paul de Lagarde advocated colonization of the East, with Germans as an aristocracy of talent among brutish or degenerate Slavs.17 Under the empire an expanding historical profession generated learned articles and journals devoted to Germany’s eastward expansion. Gymnasium textbooks and university lecturers hammered home the point to generations of students. The Second Reich’s best-known and most visible scholar of Russian history was Professor Theodor Schiemann. A Baltic German who emigrated at the relatively mature age of forty, he insisted on the inferiority of Slavic Russian culture, presenting the Russians as primitive, indifferent to beauty, lacking a sense of law. He described the need to destroy as part of the Russian nature, and argued that only force held the empire together.18
In 1892, Schiemann edited De moribus Ruthenorum, a collection of diary entries made at midcentury by Victor Hehn, a Baltic German scientist. Its 250 misanthropic pages amount to one long indictment of a people with neither pride nor conscience, destroying itself through vodka and syphilis. The Slavic national animal, according to Hehn, was the louse. A cultivated Russian was a contradiction in terms. Their intelligentsia used Western ideas to destroy rather than construct. The lesser types were able to do nothing, whether make a watch, bake a cake, or drive a locomotive, without German models. Among prostitutes it was a known fact that the most famous were Baltic Germans; Russian ladies of the evening lacked the endurance, the inner nobility, to sustain such an unconventional life. Russian men could not even use modern plumbing correctly—a point made clear to anyone unfortunate enough to have recourse to public toilets in the tsar’s empire.19
The impact of such ideas was exacerbated by the ambiguous nature of nationalism in the new German Empire. Its roots at best were shallow, its symbols meager—a flag without a history, a monarchy without a heritage, an army without a common identity. The chauvinism that so offended Germany’s neighbors in good part reflected deliberate government efforts to legitimate itself by creating a national self-consciousness.20 At the same time, exponential improvements in transportation and communication were shrinking the map of Europe. Space and spatial relationships grew correspondingly important. Time itself seemed to grow more compact. In this context the new Reich seemed for all its surface strength to be “a mollusc without a shell,” vulnerable physically and psychically from all directions.21
From this perspective it was a short step to visions of stabilization by expansion. Certain liberals, Friedrich Naumann, Lujo Brentano, and Gustav Schmoller, saw a partial solution to Germany’s social problems in terms of a Mitteleuropa. Dominated culturally, politically, and economically by Germans, this entity would also secure the traditional heartland of the West against the threat posed by the emerging world empires: America, Britain, and above all Russia. The concept was, in the minds of its creators, a defensive reaction. Its advocates staunchly denied any interest in an Ostimperium of Slavic helots under German rule. In this they stood in sharp contrast to those nationalists whose praise for the Germanizing of Slavic territory in the Middle Ages increasingly combined with fear of Panslavic expansionism to generate advocacy of a Drang nach Osten—the eastward expansion of German power.
Benign considerations of this process described Russia’s quick defeat and permanent withdrawal into the wastes of Asia, then hurried on to discuss how the Danube and Vistula basins would become Edens under German hands. Other writers dwelt more lovingly on the prospect of Russian troops fleeing before German bayonets, of villages razed and peasants deported to make room for the younger, fitter race. Yet it seems worth noting that even the most extreme ideologues of the Pan-German League focussed before 1914 on “internal colonization”—the resettleme
nt of German peasants on German soil misused by Poles or Junkers. Their visions of conquest and resettlement were presented as reactions: consequences of Russia’s unfortunate policies of aggression.22
Even a fire-eater like Heinrich Class denied as late as 1912 any real grounds for war between Russia and Germany. Should the tsar be foolish enough to start trouble, Germany would fight. But her war aims would involve no more than territorial adjustments to create a more defensible frontier and some room for colonization. Class conceded that the latter process would involve displacing the present inhabitants. But at least before 1914, he expressed himself in such a circumlocutory passive construction that the point is almost lost—“woher die Evakuierung sich nicht umgehen lassen wird.”23
The increasing anxiety Germans of all ranks and classes felt toward Russia and her ultimate intentions was reinforced during the 1890s from a previously unlikely source. In 1879, Bismarck’s growing hostility to domestic supporters of free trade had resulted in a new and comprehensive structure of tariffs including a schedule of duties on imported Russian grain.
Retaliation was swift and enduring. In the eleven years after Bismarck’s initiative, Russia’s import duties on manufactured goods, already high, were increased four times. The direct economic impact of this escalation on German industry must not be exaggerated. As Walther Kirchner argues, we should expect to find industrialists complaining of high customs duties whenever they deal with their governments. Practical men proceeded to find ways around the barriers—improving production or marketing techniques, securing Russian patents, seeking purchase contracts from state agencies. These, however, were second-best solutions in a German business community regarding Russia as a virtually inexhaustible reservoir of potential customers, private and official, all the more attractive for being difficult of access. By the time Leo von Caprivi succeeded Bismarck as chancellor, the chorus of grievances encouraged the negotiation of a new set of commercial agreements with Russia—agreements the German chamber of commerce described as incorporating “unprecedented” reductions in tariffs on manufactured goods in return for significantly lower taxes on grain. A wave of protest from the agricultural East, including many letters from peasants and small farmers, was not enough to keep the Reichstag from approving the treaty on March 10, 1894.24
This change in government policy contributed significantly to increase Russophobia on the agrarian right. Where businessmen saw markets, farmers saw competitors: a golden tide of cheap foodstuffs that would bankrupt estate owners and peasants alike. The anxieties generated by the Treaty of 1894 were further exacerbated as Russia embarked on a major program of railway construction. Its principal sponsor, Sergei Witte, made no secret of the fact that one of the main purposes of the improved transportation network was to enhance the marketability of Russian grain by reducing its delivery costs. The landowners of Germany’s eastern provinces historically tended to identify with Russia’s social and political order. But as more and more acres in previously isolated regions began contributing to the export pool, even the least imaginative of Junkers found no difficulty in seeing an economic threat from the East that could not be indefinitely conjured away by manipulating votes in the Reichstag.25
The old order was changing. Nevertheless the impact of popular antagonisms must not be overstated. The proverbial lieutenant and ten men could not really have closed the Reichstag, but parliament’s role in German foreign policy involved far more pointing with pride and viewing with alarm than systematic participation in decision making. Russia’s foreign affairs were even more firmly in the hands of an elite—an elite not necessarily susceptible to journalistic attacks on German intentions and literary suspicions of German good will.
This was demonstrated in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin. Tsar Alexander III, who succeeded his assassinated father in 1881, viscerally distrusted the bumptious industrial empire on his western border, a distrust in no way diminished by his love match with a Danish princess brought up on memories of 1864. But his choice as foreign minister was N. A. Giers, who argued that Russia had too many internal problems to sustain overt antagonism with any of her neighbors. Bismarck for his part wished as far as possible to reknit the Russian connection. His Dual Alliance of 1879 was intended more to strengthen Germany’s position vis-à-vis Russia than to underwrite either Austria’s place among the great powers or any ambitions she might entertain in the Balkans.
The Second Three Emperors’ League of 1881, renewed in 1884, marked on one level a triumph of common sense. The league linked the eastern powers in an agreement to remain “benevolently neutral” should any of them go to war with a fourth power. It secured Russia’s European flank. It precluded the possibility of a Franco-Russian alliance and of Russo-Austrian rapprochement at Germany’s expense. The league, however, also encouraged the bureaucratization of tension. Its very existence combined with Germany’s insistence on playing a mediator’s role to make Russia and Austria-Hungary aware on an ongoing basis of the problems in their relationship, and their fundamental insolubility within existing parameters.
For Bismarck this temporary stability was enough. He was confident of his ability to solve the tactical problems of diplomacy as they arose—a confidence exacerbated by his often-expressed contempt for the skills of his Russian and Austrian counterparts. But if Metternich had been the coachman of Europe, Bismarck was fast becoming its circus rider, standing with one foot on each of two galloping horses, hoping somehow to keep them moving in the same direction at the same pace. And the focus of tension between them, the Balkan Peninsula, was far too tempting a hunting ground for diplomats with delusions of genius, soldiers with illusions of glory, and businessmen with hopes of profit.
In periodically advocating a division of the peninsula into spheres of influence, Bismarck was by no means naive enough to assume that either Russia or Austria would be permanently satisfied with a half share. But such a division would buy time, and as Bismarck grew older even short periods of time became ever more important to him. The chancellor had no desire to see Russia expand her influence anywhere in Europe. Such aggrandizement would mean both a direct threat to Germany and Austria and a significant disturbance of the territorial status quo Bismarck was committed to preserving. At the same time he had no will even to risk war with the tsar’s empire. Apart from the golden opportunities this would offer France, Russia’s very size mitigated against anything like the kind of total victory won against France in 1871—a victory which itself seemed increasingly anomalous.26
From the inception of the German Empire, its military plans for the East were formulated in the context of a worst-case contingency: a two-front war against France and Russia. In such circumstances, Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke strongly favored seeking an operational decision in the east. While Russia was not likely to be overthrown in a brief campaign, the chances of knocking her out of a general war in a relatively short time were good—if the war was conceived as one of limited aims. A battle of annihilation was not a reasonable possibility. However, a series of theater-level victories might well disorganize her war effort to the point where the government would be amenable to negotiations if Germany offered reasonable terms.27
The alternatives were hardly promising. In 1885 a general staff exercise projected a two-front war against France and Russia, with Austria initially remaining neutral and the bulk of Germany’s army concentrated in the West. Four active corps, supported by a mixed bag of reserve and garrison troops, were left to hold the eastern theater against twenty Russian divisions—a reasonable evaluation of Russia’s capacities in the context of the problem. The best the Germans could manage was a fighting retreat across the Vistula. Four corps, Moltke sourly observed, could not hold East Prussia or protect Berlin against ten Russian corps no matter how cleverly they were maneuvered.28
On the other hand, the long, open frontier between Germany and Russia offered correspondingly wide scope for offensive operations. The East Prussian salient might be threate
ned with immediate strangulation by a Russian blow at its base, but it provided an excellent sally-port against a Russian concentration in Poland. Moltke believed the best way for the Dual Alliance to defend the Eastern frontier was to attack, with Germans from the north and Austrians from the south meeting somewhere on enemy soil. This conviction, tested successfully in a staff exercise of 1886, was strong enough to lead the chief of staff increasingly to consider the possibility of a preventive war—a first strike, in cooperation with Austria, against the Russian garrisons in Poland and Galicia.29
But what could Germany hope to gain from such a conflict? Intellectuals might dream of population shifts on a scale unseen since Genghis Khan. Bismarck was a practical statesman. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine could be justified on the grounds of generating national identity while securing natural resources defended by Metz and the line of the Vosges. No such geographic barriers existed in the East. As for an economic equivalent to the iron mines of Lorraine, German agriculture was already alarmed at the prospects of competition from Russian grain. Territorial gains in the east would only mean an increase in the number of Poles, Baits, and Russians under German rule. Bismarck’s distaste for the Poles of Posen and Silesia was already too marked for him to welcome that possibility.
Bismarck was, in short, not enthusiastic about challenging Russia for any reason, much less for the sake of Austria-Hungary’s beaux yeux. He was unsympathetic alike to Cisleithanian businessmen’s dreams of Balkan markets and to the Hungarian parliament’s Russophobic rhodo-montade. He spent much effort after 1878 warning Austria that Germany would not support her directly in the Balkans, particularly when it came to defending economic interests.30 The exact degree of Bismarck’s acceptance of specific Russian claims and positions in the Near East remains debatable. In general, however, he seems to have regarded Russia’s territorial ambitions as part of that stream of time human beings could neither create nor, ultimately, direct. His frequent references to Russia as an elemental force, no more to be changed than bad weather, strengthen images of inevitability subject, perhaps, to judicious guidance, but beyond anyone’s power to terminate or modify.