A Fragile Union: The Political Weakness of Bismarck’s German Empire

Note: This article is taken from my college history paper.

On the chilly afternoon of January 18th, 1871, as the sound of hurrahs echoed through the Palace of Versailles, King Wilhelm I stood solemnly before the ranks of German princes, still in mourning over the burial of a fully independent Prussia, and reluctantly accepted the title of German Kaiser. Despite the extraordinary power with which he was being invested as the leader of an advanced, industrialized nation 41-million strong, it all seemed like a shoddy tradeoff for the Prussian crown. Wilhelm’s ambivalence arose from his devotion to the ancestral Hohenzollern lands of Brandenburg/Prussia, which was now to be submerged within the borders of greater Germany. The sentimental pull of German particularism was so strong that Wilhelm had to be begged and cajoled into accepting the union by Bavarian King Ludwig II, who in turn received a hefty payment from Bismarck for his promise to genuflect before the German throne. Even the choice to hold the ceremony in the opulent venue of the Hall of Mirrors, built to commemorate the Sun King’s heroic triumph over his Dutch and German enemies two century earlier, was driven largely by the fear that holding it on German soil, in the words of historian Katja Hoyer, would have raised “one state above the others, compromising the fragile moment of unity.” (61)

For all its military and economic strength, the German Empire would remain a fragile confection in the decades following the ceremony at Versailles. Because unification was partially the result of the opportunistic realpolitik of a single man rather than the culmination of a well-planned nation-building scheme based on consensus and cooperation, the political system struggled to achieve coherence and cooperation, leaving it mired in paralysis and dysfunction in the years leading up to World War I. Otto von Bismarck, the chief architect of unification, shares a significant portion of blame for this state of affairs. The conservative Junker was appointed to the chancellorship in 1862 during a particularly bitter and rancorous fight with parliament over a military reform bill that would’ve subordinated the army to the Prussian crown (Hoyer 43–46). In the process of subverting parliamentary authority to enact the legislation, Bismarck proved to be exceptionally adroit though amoral at transmuting a crisis of government into an opportunity that advanced both his personal interests and the cause of wider German unification under Prussian leadership. In 1866, he engineered a brief war against Austria that replaced the decrepit German Confederation (an aristocratic talk shop hastily assembled in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat) with the Prussian-led North German Confederation. Then, calculating that the threat of an external enemy would rouse the nationalist sentiment of the ordinary citizen and activate the defensive alliances that Prussia shared with Southern Germany, he seized the rare opportunity to goad Napoleon III into a fatal declaration of war that culminated in the unification ceremony at Versailles. While most of German society rallied around the banner, some liberals had good reason to feel ambivalent about the old Junker’s ruthless application of realpolitik. The young crown prince Frederick William, to whom his father nearly abdicated in 1862, was particularly dismayed. “I maintain even today that Germany could have been conquered morally, without blood and iron… It will be our noble but immensely difficult task in the future to free the dear German Fatherland from the unfounded suspicions with which the World looks upon it today.” (303)

Bismarck is remembered correctly as the architect of the modern German nation. Compared to its historical status as a fractured and fissiparous polity in which he found it, the bonds of nationhood still remain strong; to this day it has never been seriously threatened with a secessionist movement. But there are good reasons why Margaret MacMillan referred to the government as a “gimcrack system” that largely served to perpetuate Bismarck’s own power even as it facilely claimed to represent the interests of the people (73). According to the terms laid out by the German constitution of 1871, which was written in large part by Bismarck himself, the empire was notionally considered to be a confederation of sovereign principalities in which each individual German state theoretically maintained its own legislature and constitution and even exchanged ambassadors with each other. The German Bundesrat, a kind of federal council which brought together representatives from individual member states, likewise ensured that everyone was invested with some power on the national level. In practice, however, nothing could be passed without Prussia’s explicit approval. Given that it represented some 62 percent of the population, Prussian hegemony might have seemed like a natural state of affairs, but in reality it held just 17 votes out of the 58 and later 61 that constituted the Bundesrat (Clark, Iron Kingdom 558). Instead, Prussia drew strength from the ability to single-handedly muster the 14 votes necessary to exercise a veto over all legislation. Due to Prussia’s unique three-class franchise and public ballot system that effectively gave richest upper class citizens an equivalent number of votes as the middle and lower classes, representation tilted toward the interest of the property owners and businessmen over liberal urbanites, workers, and reformers. Prussia thus became the “conservative anchor within the German system,” imposing a bulwark against liberal reform (561). Another important limitation on the council’s power was found in the bureaucracy itself. Because the council lacked the necessary internal machinery to draft bills of its own, the Prussian bureaucracy made itself indispensable to the legislative process.

While the council never fulfilled its promise, a great deal of power was conveniently concentrated in the person of the imperial chancellor, who answered only to the emperor himself. In theory, this system favored a strong unitary leader, but it also wasn’t always clear where decisions should originate from and who should bear responsibility for which duty (MacMillan 74). There was no permanent cabinet, no clear delineation between offices, and no guarantee of unity and harmonization. A source of friction over the national budget frequently arose between the administration and the Reichstag, the only body in the government elected directly by the people — surprisingly, with the guarantee of universal male suffrage through free and fair elections. This diffusion of responsibility posed few problems as long as the conservatives remained in charge as Bismarck had initially intended, but the growing popularity of socialists and progressives ensured a measure of conflict between parliament and the central administration was baked into politics.

Germany’s ungainly system worked reasonably for the first few decades following unification because political power was concentrated in the office of the chancellor. Though he was a widely respected figure during his time, Wilhelm I mostly abjured his responsibilities as German emperor and allowed Bismarck to have absolute free reign over the state. The iron chancellor was a relentless micromanager who ran international policy directly from the Prussian Foreign Ministry (MacMillan 74). But after his latest attempt to influence the Reichstag failed, Bismarck was forced to submit his resignation in 1890, leaving the state to the unsteady hand of the new emperor, Wilhelm II. The last reigning member of the Hohenzollern dynasty is often remembered as a mercurial personality who “picked up ideas, enthused over them, grew bored or discouraged, and dropped them again.” (Clark, Sleepwalkers 180) Bismarck compared him to a balloon: “If you don’t keep fast hold of the string, you never know where he will be off to.” More than his grandfather he conceived of himself as a true German Kaiser and had no qualms about stoking a toxic kind of nationalism with a cult of personality at its center. However, despite all his turbulent protestations to the contrary, his range of political movement was extremely limited. “Had Wilhelm tried to force a more centralized, personal regime on Germany,” writes Katja Hoyer, “the fragile union of states would have fallen apart, and a very real possibility of civil war would have emerged.” (154) Stymied by the socialist-dominated Reichstag and unable to break free from the international isolation Germany had accidentally stumbled into, Wilhelm surrounded himself with a cabal of militarists and advisers who were unencumbered by Bismarck’s sense of restraint in foreign affairs. A strange artifact of Germany’s jerry-rigged system is that his advisers frequently acted without Wilhelm’s consent due to the unclear separations of power and the relatively large degree of autonomy they wielded.

The pre-war years were thus marked by a series of political crises and a sense of malaise that seemed to be reaching a breaking point. Although it’s unfair to describe the political situation as a cause of the war — Wilhelm had no desire for a local Balkan conflict to become a wider European conflagration — the growing July Crisis “seemed indeed to be the only way out for a nation stuck in a political cul-de-sac.” (Hoyer 185) Blood and iron, the Kaiser hoped, would once again forge a stronger, more united Germany from the fires of combat. In this sense he badly miscalculated. By 1918, the war tore deeply at the fragile bonds of unity that had initially prevailed; both socialists and conservatives had become deeply radicalized, intransigent, and uncompromising under the weight of immense suffering. It might be too deterministic to draw a direct teleological line between Bismarck’s appointment and the later crises that followed, but there seemed to be no realistic prospect of political transformation before 1914. The only reform figure with any serious clout was crown prince Frederick III, who ruled for a mere 99 days in 1888 but might have taken over earlier from his aging father in an alternate scenario. Because he held far more sympathy for the liberal cause than his father Wilhelm I and his son Wilhelm II, it’s worth speculating whether he would have sought, in conjunction with his English wife, Victoria, to create a British-style cabinet system that could empower the nationalist liberal movement at the expense of the old monarchs and elites by enacting liberal reforms such as free expression. However, given his previous vacillation toward liberalism and his fondness for strengthening the Hohenzollern crown over investing powers in the parliament, there are serious doubts about whether Frederick was strong and dedicated enough to defy the old guard and transcend the conservative milieu he lived in (Kollander 50). The only other figure to seek serious reform was Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who suggested in 1910 a mere reweighting of Prussia’s three-class franchise system rather than abolishing it outright (Hoyer 176).

Ultimately, Bismarck himself must bear an enormous amount of responsibility for this state of affairs. His pursuit of unification via outright coercion and mutual antipathy with France, rather than organic long-term nation building, left Germany with weak political institutions. The constitution he wrote secured his own power even as it ensnared the different organs of government in conflict and chaos and made a mockery of the federal council. Although the growing antipathy between left and right was hardly unique to Germany, his system amplified those conflicts greatly and led to an open breach under the duress of war. His domination of politics, writes Clark, also impeded the development of the Prussian crown into its imperial role (Iron Kingdom 588). Finally, he was the only reasonable politician with the power, clout, and freedom of movement to reform the system. Perhaps a British-style constitutional monarchy was beyond the mental horizons of a stalwart traditionalist who conceived of politics as a balance of forces with a single indomitable leader at its center, but it was negligent to leave this system in the hands of Wilhelm II and his successors at the chancellery. If war hadn’t intervened, maybe this untenable system might have been reformed at some inflection point in the future. But instead, according to Hoyer, the German Empire ended exactly where it began, in the opulent Hall of Mirrors, undone by the very forces that had built it.

Works Cited

Clark, Christopher. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. HarperCollins, 2012.

Hohenzollern, Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71, Volume 2. K. F. Koehler, 1926.

Hoyer, Katja. Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, 1871–1918.The History Press, 2021.

Kollander, Patricia. “Empress Frederick: The Last Hope for a Liberal Germany?” The Historian, vol. 62, no. 1, 1999, pp. 47–62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24450537

MacMillan, Margaret. The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. Random House, 2013.