bismarck

GERMANY UNITED

The first German constitution was ratified in April 1871. Designed by Otto von Bismarck to preserve the old regime, it would eventually help bring about its downfall.

Katja Hoyer

When the freshly elected members of parliament met on 14 April 1871, at their temporary home of the Palais Hardenberg in the centre of Berlin, there was an air of excitement that engulfed all of those present, as well as the assembled masses outside the building. This was it: the culmination of a struggle for national unification that had stretched over six decades. The German Empire would finally become a political reality. It had taken wars, revolutions, philosophy, capitalism and a great deal of clever manoeuvring from the Prussian minister-president, Otto von Bismarck, to make it happen. Finally, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 had provided a concrete reason for the 38 German states to join forces. Their swift victory bound them together in a union of ‘blood and iron’, as Bismarck had predicted in an infamous speech eight years earlier.

Seizing the moment, while the warm afterglow of shared military glory still filled the hearts and minds of the leaders of the German states, Bismarck had convinced them that it was time to lay down their differences. United, they would overnight become the largest of the European states, one of the continental greats on a par in status and recognition with Britain and France. The German princes agreed: some, like the Bavarian king Ludwig II, reluctantly, others with fervent enthusiasm for the national idea. Thus, at least on paper, Germany began to exist as a nation state on 1 January 1871. The official proclamation took place on 18 January in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

The individual states had also agreed that there would be a federal parliament and it seemed appropriate that its members would be allowed to vote on the new constitution. The document would then come into force as a contract between the kaiser and his people – signed by both sides. The first ever all-German elections were held on 3 March 1871 and, unsurprisingly, returned a parliament dominated by liberals. Due to the slow speed of urbanisation and politicisation, voter turnout was relatively low by German standards, at just 50 per cent. The election drew primarily the growing middle classes into the polling stations and the results were reflective of their desire for democracy, liberalism and nationalism.

Wilhelm II, 1888 © Ullstein Bild/Getty Images.

The newly dubbed Reichstag demanded a few changes to the text that Bismarck had proposed. The name of the union was to be changed to the German Reich rather than the German Bund. The latter carries connotations of federalism (hence its use in the modern German context), which Bismarck had hoped would reassure the reluctant southern states, Bavaria and Württemberg, that their sovereignty would be preserved within the union. Reich, on the other hand, conjured up the image of a much more centralised political system, with Berlin as the beating heart of a national body. They also demanded that the title of the head of state be changed to ‘German Kaiser’. Wilhelm I, the Prussian king, had eventually accepted the German crown after much cajoling from Bismarck. He had still asserted, however, some authority in January by insisting he would simply be called ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’: he was Prussian through and through and had no desire to become a ‘German Kaiser’. By March, he had lost the energy for further tantrums and, resigned to his fate, gave in. The Reichstag had got its way and not for the last time. Pleased with its amendments to Bismarck’s text, an overwhelming majority of deputies passed the constitution. A wave of cheers and jubilation spread from the hall of the Palais, through its corridors and out onto the enthusiastic masses waiting anxiously in the streets.

Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founding members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and father of the communist Karl Liebknecht, did not share the enthusiasm of many of his fellow countrymen. Where others saw the constitution as a means to bind the monarch to the rule of law, Liebknecht remarked cynically that it was nothing more than a ‘figleaf to cover the nakedness of absolutism’. He looked with suspicion and anger at the liberals who now promised to prop up the Bismarckian system in exchange for token political influence. In Liebknecht’s eyes, they had already betrayed the ideals of the revolutions of 1848 and had now gone on to sell their souls entirely. An early socialist, Liebknecht had joined the General German Workers’ Association in 1862. Then a small group of activists under Ferdinand Lassalle’s leadership, it was the ideological seed out of which the SPD would grow to become the largest Marxist organisation in Europe. Despite the relatively tame ‘Gotha’ manifesto of 1875, in which members pledged to bring about socialism by ‘all lawful means’, Marxism remained – at least rhetorically – at the heart of their ideology. The open realpolitik of their liberal contemporaries was anathema to them; the new constitution a sham.

Original sin

Liebknecht’s damning assessment of the constitution as a ‘figleaf’ for a despotic regime rang through the ages. The Second Reich has never been able to shake off the shadow that its dramatic fall in 1918 cast over the five decades of its political existence. It has been convenient to blame both the catastrophe of the First World War as well as the even darker history that followed on the failings and missed chances of 1871, on Germany’s ‘original sin’. This notion grew deep roots in the European psyche over the course of the 20th century; indeed it was the starting point of discussions at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The French president Poincaré opened proceedings on 18 January 1919, exactly 48 years after Germany had been declared a nation state at the same spot. He reminded the assembled victors of the First World War that, as the German Empire was ‘born in injustice, it has ended in opprobrium’. The Second Reich was incapable of reform and, therefore, he and his prime minister proposed the dismemberment of the Reich as the only way to deal with ‘the evil that it has done’.

In much the same vein, the abolition of Prussia in 1947 promised a seemingly neat solution to Germany’s ‘root problem’ of militarism. Europeans were keen to find explanations as to why devastating wars had emanated from German soil twice and again they looked back to its origins in 1871. It was Prussian dominance within the German union, brought about by the nature of its creation and reinforced by Bismarck’s constitution, that tainted the nation’s heart. Exorcise the spirit of Prussia from the German body and a peaceful country would emerge.

Proclamation of Wilhelm I as kaiser on 18 January 1871 (detail), by Anton Alexander von Werner, 1885 © Bridgeman Images.

More recently, neo-Nazi groups have begun to use the Imperial Tricolore to represent their political outlook, unwittingly drawing the same conclusion about the German Empire: there is continuity from its black, red and white colours all the way through to the Nazi regime.

Liebknecht seems to have been in agreement with many 20th-century observers that German democracy, liberalism and peace never stood a chance in the face of the despotism and militarism that had been forced into the constitution by the Prussian elite. A first glance at the document itself seems to confirm this. The text begins:

We Wilhelm, by the Grace of God, German Kaiser, King of Prussia etc. order herewith in the name of the German Empire, having obtained the assent of Bundesrat and Reichstag, the following.

Not only is Wilhelm’s name written first and in much larger letters but, strikingly, the German people are not even mentioned. This was a conscious attempt to reassure the old regime that their system had not been fundamentally altered. The Reichstag would play a role, but it was last on the list: confirmation of its subordinate position. Conscious of this, the 1949 preamble of the Basic Law for West Germany states that ‘The German people have given themselves this constitution.’

Urgent necessity

The Reichstag, however, had no inclination to act as a democratic facade for the crumbling ancien régime. The ink on the new constitution had barely dried when, on 19 April 1871, they declared confidently: ‘The creation of a parliament building which is suited to the tasks of the German Reichstag and worthy of the representatives of the German people is an urgent necessity.’ It would take 23 years for this vision to become a reality. The biggest problem was to find a suitable place for it. Wilhelm I and the Reichstag deputies quickly agreed that the Königsplatz, west of the Brandenburg Gate, was ideal: close to the centre of Berlin but, importantly, outside the square mile of Prussian power around the Royal Palace on the Spree Island to the east. While the kaiser and Bismarck may have approved of this as a symbolic exclusion of the Reichstag from the inner circles of power, the deputies asserted that it now provided the counterbalance to aristocratic rule. The location stood for a conscious attempt to distance the German parliament from the Prussian monarchy. Due to resistance from the Polish-Prussian count Atanazy Raczyński, whose residence stood on the spot where the new parliament building was to be erected, proceedings ground to a halt. Wilhelm was reluctant to force the count to sell. At the same time, Bismarck and conservative MPs opposed a new proposal to find a site closer to the city centre as, in their eyes, this would have symbolically lifted the status of the Reichstag within the political system. A resolution only came about when Raczyński died in 1874 and his son sold the property to the Prussian state. The Reichstag finally bought the site in 1881.

Ferdinand Lassalle. Coloured lithograph, 19th century © Bridgeman Images.

The fact that the first ten years of the Second Reich had passed without a purpose-built home for its parliament has often been used to argue that democracy was never taken seriously in the German Empire. The intense public interest in the shape, size and location of its new Reichstag building paints a different picture. While the acquisition and refurbishment of the Palais at Wilhelmstraße 77, which became Bismarck’s Chancellery from 1878, passed with little public notice, the future of the Reichstag building was hotly debated. In February 1882 a competition for architectural designs was launched with lucrative prize money awaiting the winner. The Frankfurt-based architect Paul Wallot eventually secured the contract, having beaten 188 rivals to it. The laying of the foundation stone on 9 June 1884 again caused much debate. The event was dominated by three Hohenzollerns: Wilhelm I, his son Crown Prince Frederick and his grandson Wilhelm, while few Reichstag deputies were present. When the old kaiser hammered the foundation stone into the ground, the ceremonial tool broke.

Despite these debacles, the Reichstag was opened in 1894 and stood as a bold and proud manifestation of democracy. At 67m, its cupola was deliberately seven metres taller than that of the Royal Palace, which had dominated Berlin’s skyline. The glass and steel structure was seen as a masterpiece of German engineering. Wilhelm II, who became kaiser in 1888 after the death of his grandfather and father in the same year, loathed it. He called it a ‘completely miserable creation’ and ‘the pinnacle of bad taste’. He even intervened to deny the architect awards for his work and boasted to a friend that he had managed to insult Wallot personally. While this has rightly been interpreted as one of many manifestations of Wilhelm II’s contempt for democracy, it also showed that he feared it. By the 1890s the Reichstag had become a political force to be reckoned with and it used the powers that Bismarck’s constitution had bestowed on it to great effect.

The Iron Chancellor

By the standards of the time, Bismarck had been bold with his constitution, especially in granting all male citizens over the age of 25 an equal vote for their Reichstag deputies, irrespective of social status, land ownership, creed or religion. An astute statesman and seasoned politician, he knew this would unleash liberal and pro-democratic forces that would pose a challenge to the establishment. But he trusted in his proven political instincts and in his kaiser’s willingness to let him handle the situation as he saw fit. The Reichstag had only a limited role to play in initiating new laws. Still, it could veto any proposals put in front of it and it held the purse strings for the Imperial budget, including military expenditure. Without its consent, the Reich could not go to war nor introduce new legislation. Bismarck factored this into his plans following his experiences with the pragmatic-minded liberals he had worked with before unification. Sure enough, the first election returned a parliament dominated by the National Liberal Party, who took 125 of the 382 seats. No liberal himself, Bismarck’s own objectives for the newly formed Reich nonetheless overlapped with those of the largest party and together they set about unifying the federal state internally. They introduced a common banking system, planned for an integrated infrastructure network and standardised legal codes, weights and measurements.

Whenever Bismarck did not get his way, he bullied, badgered or flattered his opponents as required. At six-feet-two with a barrel chest, white-blond hair, steely eyes and duelling scars on his face, the Iron Chancellor was an imposing figure. His silver tongue, sharp wit and supreme confidence complemented the picture of a man who knew what he wanted and was used to getting it. He usually appeared in front of the assembled parliamentarians in the uniform of a cuirassier, which served to remind everyone that the Reichstag only existed because of the unification wars against Denmark, Austria and France, which Bismarck had engineered and won.

The satirical magazine Kladderadatsch published a political cartoon in 1878 that showed ‘How the future Reichstag will look when … the Chancellor is able to assemble a contingent of enough “close personal associates”’. It alluded to the fact that Bismarck was a control freak who would rather have done all political work himself than delegate. He would not allow any of his ministers to meet without his presence. As he deemed foreign policy to be central to the survival of the new German state, he appointed his son Herbert to the position of Foreign Secretary in 1886; an act of nepotism criticised in the press and political circles.

‘We Germans fear God and no one else in the world!’ Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. Colour lithograph, c.1888 © Bridgeman Images.

Despite his political acumen, not even Bismarck could foresee the immense upheaval that the Industrial Revolution would bring. As people flocked to the cities and swelled the ranks of the urban proletariat, compulsory education made literacy near universal. Berlin alone grew from around 800,000 inhabitants in 1871 to over two million by 1905 and contained a considerable number of educated, politicised and confident workers who wanted to make their voices heard. As a result, the SPD grew from its humble beginnings and a mere nine Reichstag seats in 1874 to become the largest party by 1912. From the early 1890s, it began to emerge as a mass movement with close links to the trade unions, which in turn counted three million members at the outbreak of war in 1914. Neither Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws nor Wilhelm II’s rants were able to stem this tide. Bismarck had grown so frustrated with the Reichstag that he had proposed to replace it with a council of German aristocrats by 1890 and Wilhelm proposed an aristocratic coup in the late 1890s, which his advisers had to talk him out of. Such ideas, however, found few supporters as even the most conservative forces in the Reich understood that times were changing: forceful suppression would lead to a forceful response.

When Wilhelm II took the throne in 1888, he had romanticised visions of himself as the people’s kaiser. ‘Je veux être un Roi des gueux’ (I wish to be king of the rabble) was the maxim he adopted from his hero Frederick the Great. But like Bismarck, Wilhelm quickly lost patience with the working classes and their demands for better pay and conditions, which they voiced through their Reichstag deputies in the SPD. There was particular hostility when it came to the vast amounts of money Wilhelm’s army and navy plans were beginning to devour. The costly naval arms race with Britain drew particular ire from the growing ranks of the SPD deputies. By 1912 they and their liberal allies made up roughly half of the Reichstag, and the raucous verbal confrontations with the conservatives on the other side became increasingly volatile. The law-making process ground to a halt. The tense stalemate frustrated the kaiser so much that he kept referring to the Reichstag as the ‘Imperial Ape House’, alluding to the glass cupola as well as the chaotic verbal fights underneath it, both of which reminded him of scenes at Berlin Zoo. It shows both the contempt that the kaiser had developed for the democratic process and his frustration with his inability to alter or abolish it. Irritating as it may have been to the elites, democracy had become a fact.

The self-destruction of German democracy, such as it was, at the beginning of the First World War has perhaps contributed more than anything else to the longstanding belief that it was doomed to fail from the outset. Having declared war on Russia, Belgium and France before receiving a British declaration of war in return on 4 August 1914, the kaiser bombastically proclaimed: ‘I know no more political parties, only Germans.’ In response, the leaders of all the political parties in the Reichstag shook hands with Wilhelm II and pledged their support. An Enabling Act was passed on the same day to hand over powers to the imperial regime, which sidelined the Reichstag for much of the war. Furthermore, the SPD promised to hold the trade unions on a tight leash and to undertake self-censorship, banning all criticism of the regime, the war and the kaiser from their publications. This became known as Burgfrieden – ‘Fortress Peace’ – a temporary truce of all Germans while they were supposedly holding the fort against foreign aggression. The kaiser, in turn, was sidelined by the military leadership, who set up a ‘Silent Dictatorship’.

Root of the problem?

It is this complete, sudden and largely voluntary dismantling of the 1871 constitution, as well as the horrors that followed, that made it easy to claim afterwards that the root problem lay in 1871, not 1914. There is some truth in that. The refusal of the political elites to accept democracy as part and parcel of a modern constitutional monarchy certainly played a role. But equally this notion carelessly brushes aside the long and partially successful struggle of the Reichstag and, by extension, the people to make their voices heard. The temporary lid that the war put on such ideas did not stop them from simmering. Demands to abolish undemocratic elements of the constitution and to put the Reichstag at the centre of politics resurfaced in 1917 and chimed with calls for peace. They helped to put mounting pressure on an increasingly unpopular regime. When Bismarck’s constitution finally collapsed, with Wilhelm’s abdication on 9 November 1918, it was the institution of the Reichstag that survived it. It not only re-emerged intact but strengthened: the centrepiece of a new and ambitious democracy.

Though profoundly flawed and created by Bismarck to preserve the old order rather than to create a new one, the 1871 Constitution sowed democratic seeds on German soil, which neither the wars nor the dictatorships that followed were able to eradicate. The beginnings of German democracy do not lie in 1989, 1949 or 1919 – they are found in 1871.

Katja Hoyer is the author of Blood and Iron: the Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 (The History Press, 2021).