German Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 18th of January 1871, while German armies still besieged Paris, William I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The German Empire was born inside the palace of the enemy it had just defeated. For the next 47 years this state would call itself the Deutsches Reich, though many simply called it Germany. It welded together 25 separate states, each with its own nobility, into a single federal monarchy run from Berlin. How did a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies and free cities become the strongest army and the largest economy on the European continent? And how did a state that began in triumph at Versailles end, less than half a century later, with revolution, abdication, and a punishing peace signed in that same French town? The answers run from a chancellor who played multilateral chess to a Kaiser who picked the careful balance apart.

• 2. A Crown Built On Prussia

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  Prussia was only one of four kingdoms in the realm, yet it held about two-thirds of the Empire's population and territory. That dominance was written into the constitution itself. The King of Prussia was automatically the German Emperor, and the imperial crown stayed hereditary in the House of Hohenzollern. With 17 of the 58 votes in the Bundesrat, the federal council of the 25 states, Berlin needed only a handful of smaller states to control any decision. The Empire looked like a league of equals on paper. In practice the smaller states kept their own governments but only limited slivers of sovereignty. Postage stamps and currency were issued for the Empire as a whole, and coins up to one mark carried the Empire's name. The armies of smaller states were placed under Prussian control, while larger forces like those of Bavaria and Saxony were drilled along Prussian lines and handed to the federal government in wartime. A strange feature ran through the whole arrangement. Prussia used a three-class voting system that weighted votes by taxes paid, all but guaranteeing a conservative majority, while the Empire elected its Reichstag by universal male suffrage. The same king and chancellor therefore had to win majorities from two completely different electorates.

• 3. The Chancellor's Chess Game

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  Otto von Bismarck, Minister President of Prussia, became the Empire's first and longest-serving chancellor, holding the post from 1871 to 1890. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm judged that Bismarck remained the undisputed world champion at multilateral diplomatic chess for almost twenty years, devoting himself to keeping peace among the powers. His chief fear was France, defeated in the Franco-Prussian War and hungry for revenge. To stop France from finding allies, he signed the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, then built it into the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882, and fostered close ties with the Ottoman Empire. He layered on the League of Three Emperors in 1881 and a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia first signed in 1887. Bismarck distrusted any move that even smelled of war. In 1886 he blocked a sale of horses to France that might serve as cavalry, and he ordered an inquiry into large Russian purchases of medicine from a German chemical works. He refused to believe his own ambassador to France, Georg Herbert Münster, who reported that the French were desperate for peace. Of attacking Russia he warned that the most brilliant victories would not avail against the Russian nation because of its climate, its desert and its frugality. His successors did not keep the system. When Wilhelm II dismissed him in 1890, the new Kaiser let the Russian treaty lapse, pushing Russia and France together.

• 4. Forge Of Europe

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  By 1913 Germany was the largest economy on the European continent and the third largest in the world, behind the United States and the British Empire. The population had transformed alongside it. In 1871 some 41 million people lived in a largely rural land; by 1913 that number reached 68 million, now mostly urban. The country that had been 64% rural in 1871 had become 54% urban by 1900. Heavy industry led the charge, and the steel giant Krupp embodied it. By 1902 the Krupp factory at Essen had grown into what one description called a great city with its own police force, fire department and traffic laws, holding 150 kilometers of rail, 60 factory buildings, 8,500 machine tools and seven electrical stations. German progress came in waves: the rail wave from 1877 to 1886, the dye wave to 1896, the chemical wave to 1902 and the electrical engineering wave running to 1918. Germany overtook British steel production in 1893 and pig iron in 1903. Between 1911 and 1913 its steel and pig iron output reached a quarter of total global production. The chemical industry was the crown jewel. By 1900 German firms ruled the world market for synthetic dyes, and the three major firms BASF, Bayer and Hoechst produced several hundred dyes. With the smaller firms, eight companies produced almost 90% of the world supply of dyestuffs in 1913 and sold about 80% abroad. German chemical output ran 60% higher than that of the United States. The historian Chandler called the German dye companies the world's first truly managerial industrial enterprises.

• 5. Iron Roads And Nobel Glory

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  In 1880 Germany had 9,400 locomotives, each pulling 43,000 passengers and 30,000 tons of freight a year, and its rail network had pushed ahead of France. The country had started without a base, importing engineering and hardware from Britain, yet by 1850 it was self-sufficient in railroad construction. Lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and connected the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen, deliberately serving industry rather than mere passenger traffic. Track length swelled from 21,000 kilometers in 1871 to 63,000 by 1913, the second largest network in the world after the United States. The same hunger for knowledge showed in the laboratories. German dominance in physics and chemistry was such that one-third of all Nobel Prizes went to German inventors and researchers. By 1913 German electricity production exceeded the combined output of Britain, France, Italy and Sweden. The Kaiser even shaped the page itself. Largely thanks to Wilhelm's influence, most printed material in Germany used blackletter rather than the Roman type common across the rest of Western Europe.

• 6. Enemies Of The Reich

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  Prussia in 1871 held 16 million Protestants and 8 million Catholics, who lived in largely separate worlds with little intermarriage. Bismarck, denouncing liberals and socialists as enemies of the Reich, turned his suspicion on the Catholic Church in a campaign called the Kulturkampf, waged from 1871 to 1880. He abolished the Catholic section of the Prussian education ministry in July 1871. The May laws of 1873 went further, requiring priests to attend a German university rather than a seminary and to pass an examination in German culture before a state board. The Vatican's jurisdiction over the Church in Prussia was stripped away and handed to a body controlled by Protestants. By 1876 every Prussian bishop was imprisoned or in exile, and a third of Catholic parishes had no priest. The campaign backfired. In the 1874 elections the Center Party doubled its popular vote and became the second-largest party in parliament, remaining a force for the next 60 years. Where Bismarck attacked, he also protected. In the 1880s he built the foundation of the modern European welfare state, introducing health care in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, and invalidity and old-age insurance in 1889. The aim was frank: bind workers to the state and slow the outflow of emigrants to America, where wages were higher but no welfare existed. He named the trade-off plainly, saying the great questions of the age are settled not by speeches and majority votes but by iron and blood.

• 7. A Place In The Sun

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  Germans had dreamed of overseas empire since 1848, though Bismarck dismissed colonialism with contempt and preferred a Eurocentric policy. By 1884 he had nonetheless acquired German New Guinea, and by the 1890s expansion in Asia and the Pacific brought friction with Britain, Russia, Japan and the United States. Germany built the world's third-largest colonial empire, behind the British and French, with holdings in German Southwest Africa, German Kamerun, Togoland and German East Africa. Only Togoland and German Samoa after 1908 turned a profit; the rest needed subsidies from the Berlin treasury. Wilhelm II wanted Germany to have its place in the sun, like the Britain he constantly wished to rival. The pursuit turned monstrous in Southwest Africa. After settlers were pushed onto Herero and Nama land, the two peoples revolted in 1904, and the response became the Herero and Nama genocide. Some 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population, and 10,000 Nama, half their number, perished in 1906 and 1907. The commander, General Lothar von Trotha, was eventually relieved and reprimanded for exceeding his orders and for the cruelties he inflicted. The episode has been called the first genocide of the 20th century. The United Nations condemned it in 1985, and a German government minister offered a formal apology in 2004.

• 8. Encircled By Its Own Making

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  Berlin grew convinced it was being systematically surrounded by Russia, France and Britain, a fear that the historian Gordon A. Craig traced to the diplomatic setback in Morocco in 1905. Few outsiders agreed. The English historian G. M. Trevelyan argued the encirclement was of Germany's own making, that she had alienated France over Alsace-Lorraine, Russia over the Balkans, and England by building a rival fleet. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, Wilhelm II offered Austria-Hungary the unconditional support that historians, including Fritz Fischer, called the blank check. Germany struck first at France through the Schlieffen Plan, invading neutral Belgium and Luxembourg to encircle Paris. The plan unraveled at the First Battle of the Marne, where French and British forces struck the exposed German right flank, and a Race to the Sea froze the front into trench warfare from Alsace to Flanders. In February 1916 Erich von Falkenhayn opened the Battle of Verdun, hoping to bleed the French Army white, but both sides took heavy losses and the Germans pulled out in December. The east told a different story. After the German government let the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin travel through Germany from Switzerland in 1917, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 handed Germany the Baltic countries, Belarus and Ukraine. The triumph did not save the Empire. About 750,000 German civilians died of malnutrition under the Allied blockade, and the winter of 1916-17 was remembered as the turnip winter. Revolution broke out at Kiel at the end of October 1918 when sailors refused to set sail. On the 9th of November the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic, Wilhelm II abdicated, and the armistice came on the 11th of November. The Treaty of Versailles then demanded 132 billion gold marks in reparations, capped the army at 100,000 men, and banned conscription, submarines, aircraft and all but six battleships, sowing the grievance that helped lift Adolf Hitler to power.