Roon was the most competent of my colleagues. He could not get along with others. He treated them as a regiment which he marched too long. The colleagues in due course complained about this and I had to take over the Ministry of State again.58
So much for the adieu to the most loyal and far-sighted of Bismarck’s companions.
On 7 February 1879 Bismarck announced that the government intended ‘to make it a goal to complete the system of state railways, which was outlined in the draft of 1876, as far as the main trunk lines are concerned’.59 The retreat from private enterprise had become a rout. On 24 February 1879 the Congress of German Landowners, the pressure group of the 250 largest landowners, adopted protectionism.
There remained a problem about what to do with the customs receipts which would flow to the central authorities from the new tariffs. The German Reich was a federal state. When ministers addressed the Reichstag, they spoke in the name of ‘The Allied Governments’ not ‘the Reich’ let alone ‘Germany’. If the income from tariffs went exclusively to the federal government, the federal balance would tilt against the Allied Governments. The Roman Catholic Centre Party had its power base in Bavaria, the Catholic districts of Württemberg and Baden, and the Catholic Rhineland, areas very unwilling to see the Prussian-dominated Reich grow. When the Reichstag opened on 12 February it became increasingly clear that the Centre with its 94 votes could give Bismarck his majority or withhold it.
The immediate result was that Bismarck had to learn to be nice to Windthorst. On 31 March he had a conversation with Windthorst and granted a pension to the Dowager Queen of Hanover, a convenient gesture since Windthorst, as a lawyer, represented the exiled Hanoverian royal family.60 Bismarck then told him that he had proposed diplomatic recognition of the Curia in exchange for maintenance of the Anzeigepflicht, the obligation of the Vatican to get the approval from the state for the appointment of bishops. Windthorst replied that he and his friends had ‘received no communication at all from the curia over the content of the negotiations, and were therefore not in a position to express a view of them’. Bismarck and Windthorst agreed on the need for tariffs.61
In the midst of these complicated negotiations, on 8 April 1879, the French ambassador, Saint-Vallier, wrote to the French Foreign Secretary Waddington about the reality of the power of parliament in Bismarck’s Reich:
it is a common enough error among newcomers and superficial observers here in Berlin to take for real the parliamentary system as it exists here: with more experience and reflection, one quickly realizes that Germany is endowed with a fine and beautiful façade, finely embellished on the surface, faithfully representing a picture of a parliamentary and constitutional system; the rules are correctly applied; the play of parties, turmoil in the corridors, lively debates, stormy sessions, defeats inflicted on the government and even on the powerful Chancellor (only in matters of course that he considers of secondary importance), in short everything is done that can give the illusion and make one believe in the gravity of the debates and importance of the votes; but behind this scenery, at the back of the stage, intervening always at the decisive hour and always having their way, appear Emperor and Chancellor, supported by the vital forces of the nation—the army dedicated to the point of fanaticism, the bureaucracy disciplined by the master’s hand, the bench no less obedient, and the population, skeptical occasionally of their judgements, quick to criticize but quicker still to bow to the supreme will.62
This view of Germany, the authoritarian state, finds easy assent but is too simple. Parliamentary government twisted and turned to free itself from Bismarck’s control. There was nothing inevitable about the longevity of King/Emperor William I. His death almost any time before 1887 would have ushered in the era of parliamentary sovereignty in Germany. The combination of the reactionary Emperor and the brilliance of Bismarck managed to prevent it but only just.
In April Windthorst travelled to Vienna to see his Hanoverian clients and while there had a meeting on 20 April 1879 with the nuncio Archbishop Ludovico Jacobini, who had been acting as the intermediary between Bismarck and the Vatican. Windthorst told the nuncio ‘Bismarck is more powerful than King William and the dynasty. No one is able to do anything against him. “A second Wallenstein,” the historian Klopp inserted eagerly. “More than that”, was Windthorst’s laconic reply.’63
When Windthorst returned to Berlin at the end of April 1879 he had a surprise awaiting him. For the first time Bismarck invited him on 3 May to a parliamentary soirée at 76 Wilhelmstrasse. Centre deputies had been rigorously excluded from such convivial occasions and the press gathered outside the palace to hear what happened. Bismarck received Windthorst with extra cordiality but spilled punch over his white waistcoat and tried—to the amusement of Windthorst and the bystanders—to dry him off with a tablecloth. It might, in view of Bismarck’s deep loathing for Windthorst, be considered a ‘Freudian slip’. When the tiny little man emerged on the steps, the journalists asked him how he had been received and he replied with his usual quick wit ‘extra Centrum nulla salus’ which for those less familiar with Catholic dogma may need a gloss.64 In traditional Catholic doctrine, the church taught ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’—outside the church, no salvation. Windthorst’s pun played on the fact that Bismarck could accomplish nothing in the Reichstag without the Centre; there would be no ‘salvation without the Centre’. Canon Franz Christoph Ignaz Moufang (1817–90), an intransigent ultramontane and rigorous theological conservative,65 was horrified at the spectacle of Windthorst and the Antichrist Bismarck in polite conversation:
the exiled and harassed bishops and the punished and harried priests, and the zealous Catholics who listen and read in the newspapers that Herr Bismarck and Herr Windthorst have met together very amiably, do not understand how one is able to be a persecutor of the Church and a friend of Herr Windthorst at one and the same time.66
Apparently the pious Canon had not heard that to eat with the devil one needs a long spoon.
On 9 May 1879 Eduard Lasker accused Bismarck in the Reichstag of pursuing ‘the finance policy of the propertied’. Bismarck replied in a rage,
I can say with just as much justice that the Herr Deputy Lasker pursues the finance policy of the property-less. He belongs among those gentlemen, who at all stages in the promulgation of our legislation form the majority of whom scripture says ‘they sew not, the harvest not, they spin not, they weave not, and still are clothed.’67
The real quote reads very differently. It is from the Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 6, verse 26: ‘Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?’ Bismarck continued by personal attacks on Lasker so sharp that the president of the Reichstag rang the bell to warn the Chancellor to use parliamentary language. Bismarck in a rage (wütend) created an ‘embarrassing scene’:
what’s the meaning of that bell? It’s perfectly quiet in the house … I am the highest official in the Reich, and am here as President of the Bundesrat. I am not subject to the discipline of the president. He may not interrupt me nor warn me with the bell, as he did today. At the end he may criticize my speech or those of the members of the Bundesrat. He may even complain to their superiors, but if he tries to exercise discipline in this way, it will be one step closer to a dissolution.68
The heated debates continued. Over 155 speakers took part in the debates in the Reichstag alone, let alone in the committees. The special interests swarmed round the chamber pressing for protection for this or that product, haggling over rates and conditions. One condition became essential and the Centre took it to the floor, proposed by its parliamentary leader, Georg Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein (1825–90). Franckenstein chaired the committee which drafted the legislation for protective tariffs, and included a clause, which came to be called the ‘Franckenstein clause’, which limited the amount of customs revenue and tobacco duty payable to the Reich to 130 million m
arks. Everything beyond that would go to the federal states. On 9 July 1879 the Franckenstein clause was adopted by 211 (Conservatives, Free Conservatives, Centre) and 122 against (National Liberals, Progressives, Poles, Guelphs, and SPD).69 It had long-term and important effects. By limiting the Reich to a fixed amount of customs revenue, the Centre and the Franckenstein clause prevented the central government from profiting from the great economic boom and the staggering growth in imports after the end of the great depression in 1896. Niall Ferguson argues that the squeeze on the budget in the years before 1914 made the General Staff and the War Ministry so nervous about Russian and French growth in military strength that they resolved to act in July 1914 before Germany with its constant budget crises was overrun by them.70 Another example of Burke’s principle of unintended consequences.
On 26 May 1879 the Reichstag completed the committee stage of its debates on the tariff and on 25 June 1879 Bismarck accepted the Franckenstein Clause as the precondition of passage of the tariff bill. On 9 July Bismarck gave his last speech to the Reichstag on tariffs: ‘Since becoming a minister, I have belonged to no party; nor could I have belonged to any. I have been successively hated by all parties and loved by few. The roles have continually changed.’71 Windthorst replied for the Centre: ‘What we are doing, we do on grounds inherent in the matter itself, and for no other reason.’ To the charge that Bismarck had duped him into support for the bill, ‘In any case, I want to say to you that whoever wants to dupe me must get up a little bit early.’ (Universal, stormy laughter.)72 On 12 July 1879 the protective tariff bill passed with a majority of 100.
The next stage was to get rid of superfluous ministers. On 29 July 1879 Adalbert Falk resigned and was replaced by the arch-conservative Robert Freiherr von Puttkamer, a member of one of the largest and most influential Pomeranian Junker families and a relative of Bismarck’s wife. By 1880 fifteen Puttkamers had the rank of general in the Prussian Army, and another 250 officers of various ranks, even more than the Kleists.73 Robert Puttkamer had a very large and handsome full beard. Bismarck later said, ‘Had I known that he spent half an hour every day combing his beard, I would never have made him a minister.’74 Puttkamer loved to hear the sound of his own voice, to which Bismarck remarked, ‘He is an excellent swimmer; too bad, he swims in every puddle.’75
The dismissal of Karl Rudolf Friedenthal was much nastier. Friedenthal was one of the founders of the Bismarckian Reich Party in 1867 and became Minister of Agriculture on 19 April 1874.76 In 1874 and for some years afterwards Bismarck had been delighted with Friedenthal because as an estate owner he lived as Bismarck did in the real world. By the summer of 1879 he wanted to be rid of all the remaining Liberal members of his cabinet. On 3 June 1879 he wrote to the Kaiser, who had a high opinion of Friedenthal in his usual dismissive way about the ministers in the Prussian State Ministry:
He (Friedenthal) is ambitious and his wife perhaps even more so, but his ambition rests on the future. He keeps in touch with a tiny group of ‘future ministers’, who reckon with their expectation that when God calls His Royal Highness to the throne, he will name a liberal ministry. Among the five or six minister candidates who make this calculation, Friedenthal is by far the cleverest.77
At a parliamentary soirée toward the end of June, Bismarck called Friedenthal, who was a Lutheran convert married to a Catholic, a ‘jüdischen Hosenscheisser’ (a Jew who shits his trousers, i.e. a coward) and this got to Friedenthal. On 4 July Lucius went to see Friedenthal and recorded what Friedenthal said to him. He was:
Not willing to be trodden under foot. Under no circumstances would he allow himself to be talked into staying. He was now packing and prepared to be expelled from the country etc. The grounds of his anger are remarks of Bismarck at the last soirée at which he called Friedenthal ‘a semitic pantsshitter [Hosensch——] which with certain circumlocutions got into all the newspapers.78
Bismarck appointed the loyal Lucius to be Friedenthal’s successor and on 14 July Lucius received important post, the large blue envelope from the palace with his appointment to the ministry of agriculture and forestry.
I went to Friedenthal at once and found him in great distress. He had heard nothing and apparently feared that he would receive his dismissal in an ungracious form. While I was there, two blue envelopes were delivered, in one he found confirmation of his resignation but with the rank and title of Minister of State; the other contained a patent of nobility. He gave me the impression that the latter was unwelcome to him. Later he refused the ennoblement.79
Friedenthal’s treatment at Bismarck’s hands shows again his inability to recognize service given him by others. Hans-Joachim Schoeps, who spent his career as a Jewish apologist for the Prussians,80 claims that Bismarck called him a ‘jüdischen Hosenscheisser’ because Friendenthal refused to become Minister of the Interior, for which nobody else offers any evidence. But even if the story had been true, what gentleman insults a valued colleague in that vulgar and disgusting way? Friedenthal’s real crime lay in the fact that he had the nerve to resign at a time of his choosing, not Bismarck’s.
Liberals had been expelled from the cabinet. Draconian laws against the Social Democratic Party now violated the civil and political rights of tens of thousands of citizens. Tariffs and customs duties had replaced free trade. Schemes for state ownership had multiplied but it never occurred to Bismarck to resign or explain the great changes. He had no need to do so. He was Bismarck. Quite the contrary. He wanted to revenge himself on the Liberals as is clear from the letter he wrote to King Ludwig of Bavaria on 4 August 1879:
The fiery speeches addressed to the property-less classes by Lasker and Richter have displayed the revolutionary tendencies of these deputies so clearly and nakedly that for a supporter of the monarchical form of government no political cooperation with them can be possible anymore … These are learned gentlemen without property, without industry, without a trade. These gentlemen are the ones who deliver the revolutionary ferment and who lead the Progressive National Liberal parliamentary parties. Splitting these fractions is in my most humble opinion an essential task of conservative politics.81
The Liberals merely wanted the standard protections of the rule of law, freedom of speech, protection against arbitrary arrest, freedom of religious worship, freedom of the press, and freedom of learning and research, all freedoms enshrined in the Prussian Constitution of 1850 and ruthlessly ignored by Bismarck, who had not included them in the Reich Constitution of 1870. Such persons had in his eyes become guilty of revolutionary tendencies, not against the ‘monarchical principle’ but against the tyranny of Otto von Bismarck.
In August 1879 Tsar Alexander II complained about German policy to Ambassador von Schweinitz and on 15 August wrote to the Kaiser to complain in even stronger terms. Bismarck reacted by moving toward Austria and arranged to meet the Austrian Foreign Minister, Gyula Count von Andrassy (1823–90) at Bad Gastein on 27 and 28 August. The official press noted that ‘confidential discussions’ had taken place but made no further comment.82 Andrassy represented the Westerners at the Habsburg court, a grand Hungarian magnate who had fought with Kossuth for a liberal, independent Hungary, had fled to England, which he admired, and had been an architect of the Dual Monarchy in 1867, the system under which the Hungarian Kingdom had equal status with the Austrian lands. As his biographer writes, Andrassy sought Rückendeckung (cover for his back) in Berlin83 and a glance at the structure of European politics shows why. The Magyars ruled over some 17 million people (Magyars, Germans, Slovaks, Serbs, Romanians) but never constituted a majority of the total population in the ‘Kingdom of Hungary’, as it was resurrected in 1867. They had to defend their rights both against the Austrians, especially those Austrians who favoured greater rights for the Slavic peoples of the Monarchy, and against the Slavic peoples themselves inside and outside the frontiers. Hence the Magyars of Andrassy’s persuasion looked to Berlin to counter those forces. Dualism had made Hungary a Great Power and Andrassy intended to
keep it that way. An Austro-German alliance would secure that support.
Bismarck had come to recognize that an Austrian alliance would serve German security, as he wrote after the Austro-German Alliance was signed on 7 October 1879:
I have succeeded in carrying out what I would like to call the first stage of my security policy by erecting a barrier between Austria and the western powers. In spite of the summer clouds, which in my view will blow away, I do not doubt that I can reach the second stage, that is, the restoration of the Three Emperors’ League, the only system which in my view secures the greatest prospect of European peace.84
Trouble arose when William I refused categorically to see things that way. He loved his nephew, Tsar Alexander II, the son of his favourite sister, Charlotte. He had grown up in the Napoleonic Era when the Russian Empire had destroyed Napoleon, liberated Prussia, and guaranteed the domination of genuine conservative values. On 31 August Bismarck saw the Emperor, who flatly refused to allow him to go to Vienna, and, as Bismarck wrote to von Bülow, ‘My nerves were most affected by William’s prohibition against my going to Vienna.’85 The usual psycho-drama unfolded. Bismarck always collapsed when the Kaiser disapproved or scolded him. These collapses had very real somatic consequences and he suffered sleeplessness, rage, severe indigestion, neuralgia, and facial pains. He wrote to Radowitz that ‘I have not recovered from the consequences for my health of similar frictions that occurred at Nikolsburg and Versailles; today my health is so diminished that I cannot think of attempting to do business under such circumstances.86
But, as always, he did. On 3 September, the Kaiser visited the Tsar at his hunting lodge at Alexandrovo in Russian Poland to resolve differences, while Bismarck continued to negotiate the terms of an alliance with Austria. Again, very typically, he played another option to keep his combinations flexible. On 16 September 1879 he authorized Count Münster, the German ambassador to Britain, to ask Disraeli about the possibility of an Anglo-German alliance. The sources suggest that Münster never reported sufficiently clearly Disraeli’s positive response and as a result Bismarck noted on the margins ‘sonst nichts?’ (is that all?). He gave up on the British option, which he may not have taken seriously in any case.87
Bismarck: A Life Page 52
