Germany without Bismarck: The Crisis of Government in the Second Reich, 1890 - 1900

By J. C. G. Rohl

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520321984

J. C. G. Rohl

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

GERMANY WITHOUT BISMARCK

Germany

without Bismarck

The Crisis of Government

in the Second Reich, 1890-1900

J. C. G. RÖHL

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles • 1967

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

© J. C. G. Röhl 1967

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-26960

Printed in Great Britain

To My Parents

Contents

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1886-90 Dropping the Pilot

1890-92 Collective Leadership

1892-94 The Chancellor Loses Control

1894-95 Ministers Against the Crown

1895-96 The Failure of a Conspiracy

1896-97 The Capitulation

1897-1900 The Personal Rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II

Conclusion

Appendix

Suggestions for Further Reading

Sources

Index

Preface

Bismarck wielded supreme power for the best part of thirty years. Since the French Revolution, only two non-hereditary rulers— Metternich and Stalin—have held high office for that length of time in Europe. When Bismarck was dismissed in 1890, it was widely believed that the system could not continue without him. Some observers expected that Germany would revert to the loose federation which had existed until 1866, others that she would become a parliamentary republic, and others again that Bismarck would return to establish a kind of dictatorship. In fact, the system survived until 1918. But for seven years after Bismarck’s fall, it underwent a severe crisis. This crisis—its causes, its course and its solution in 1897—is the subject of this book.

The German Government was faced in 1890 with two distinct but related problems. First, there was the problem of the distribution of power within the Executive itself. The aim of Bismarck’s successors was to govern collectively; the power which had been concentrated in the hands of Bismarck was shared out among the new Chancellor, the Ministers and State Secretaries. However, these men were soon quarrelling and intriguing against one another and all sense of common purpose was lost. By early 1894, Kaiser Wilhelm II had decided that it was his duty to restore unity to the Government. Over the next three years, he met with considerable resistance from the responsible statesmen, but eventually he managed to unseat the ringleaders of the opposition to his personal rule, and to replace them with men who were sworn to obey his orders. By 1897, the Kaiser had emerged as the decisive figure within the Government, and the crisis on that level was over.

The second problem concerned the relationship between the Executive and the Legislature and, on a wider plane, between the State and society. Far from being solved in 1897, this problem was only aggravated by the Kaiser’s assumption of personal power. Bismarck had put the Second Reich together by fighting three wars; he had ridden roughshod over the wishes and interests of large sections of the community, with the result that hardly anyone was completely satisfied with the State he had created. He himself managed to rule only by constantly resorting to unscrupulous methods. His successors tried to break with this tradition. They sought to gain the genuine support of all ‘honest men’, regardless of party allegiance. Eventually they realised that they had miscalculated and that no genuine consensus of opinion could be arrived at in Germany. In some ways, then, the Kaiser’s victory over the responsible statesmen in 1897 also brought about a return to Bismarckian methods of dealing with the parliaments and public opinion. The new men set out to satisfy the economic ambitions of the large landowners and industrialists. And in the hope of making this rightward shift in domestic policy acceptable to the man in the street, the Government decided quite deliberately to pursue a spectacular foreign and colonial policy, and to whip up enthusiasm for the Grand Fleet. That there were dangers— both domestic and foreign—in such policies is obvious. In 1897, Germany’s new leaders exported the internal crisis and so took the road which led to diplomatic isolation, war and the collapse of the monarchy.

In the following pages I have placed the main emphasis on the first problem, the crisis within the Government. The documentary evidence which is indispensable for a satisfactory study of this subject has recently become accessible for the first time, and I have drawn heavily upon it. On a three months’ visit to eastern Germany in the summer of 1963,1 was able to examine the files of the Reich Chancellery, where the Chancellor worked, and of the Kaiser’s Civil Cabinet. Of great importance, too, were the excellent minutes of the Prussian Ministry of State, the council of Ministers which discussed German as well as just Prussian affairs. In the West German archives in Koblenz and Bonn I inspected the private papers of some of the leading statesmen of the 1890s. The most valuable of these was the vast collection—there are over 8,000 typescript pages—of the papers of Philipp Eulenburg, the Kaiser’s friend. These documents have rightly been described as ‘probably the richest existing source for the domestic history of the early part of Wilhelm Il’s reign’.1 The diaries of the Foreign Secretary, Marschall von Bieberstein, and of the Prussian Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs, Dr Bosse, were often of considerable interest. Of the other private collections used, those of Boetticher, Bülow and Dr Karl Bachem (the Reichstag deputy) were probably the most useful. Finally, the sometimes daily reports of the Baden ambassador in Berlin provided an intelligent commentary on the more general issues which those actively engaged in governing regarded as too axiomatic to mention. A complete list of the original sources as well as of the memoir and secondary literature will be found in the bibliography at the end of the book.

I am greatly indebted to the Directors and archivists of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, the Politisches Archiv in Bonn, the Generallandesarchiv in Karlsruhe, the Deutsches Zentralarchiv in Potsdam and Merseburg, the archives in Oranienbaum and Cologne, and the Foreign Office Library in London. My thanks are also due to Mr Heinrich Fraenkel for supporting my application to visit East Germany, to Wend Graf zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld for permission to use and publish extracts from the papers of his grandfather, to Dr Walter Freiherr von Marschall, Sven Freiherr von Marschall and Frau von Seyfried of Oberkirch in Baden for permission to see the diaries of Marschall von Bieberstein, and to Fraulein Dorothea von Caprivi for her kindness in lending me a collection of pamphlets. I have received the most valuable encouragement and advice from Professor Dr Rudolf Morsey, Professor Dr Theodor Schieder, Dr Helmut Böhme, and Mr Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann. Mr James Joli, Dr Z. S. Steiner and Dr Jonathan Steinberg were kind enough to read through all or parts of the manuscript and suggest many improvements. Above all, I am deeply grateful to my teacher in Cambridge, Mr F. H. Hinsley, for, without his original suggestion and his gentle guidance over the last six years, this book would never have been written.

John Röhl Sussex

January 1967

1 Norman Rich, Friedrich von Holstein, I, 229 note 4.

Introduction

Revolution from Above

For ten years after the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848 the twin causes of Liberalism and Nationalism made little headway in the States of the German Confederation. But in 1858 a new era dawned. The accession of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and his decision to appoint a Liberal-Conservative Government roused the hope in Liberal hearts that Prussia would reform herself and then proceed to unify Germany. Events in Italy during the next two years seemed to provide a good omen. The elections to the Prussian Diet, or Landtag, produced sweeping victories for the Liberals. But Prince Wilhelm’s intentions had been misjudged. General Roon, the War Minister, introduced an Army Reform Bill which, whatever its technical merits, would have established a Junker monopoly over the officer corps. ‘If the Liberals permit this measure to pass, they will be without real power’, a Conservative leader wrote.¹ The Bill was an open challenge to the Liberals, and they voted against it. Parliament was dissolved and new elections held, but the Liberal and Progressive parties were returned with their numbers enhanced. In a parliamentary system like England’s, these results would have necessitated the Bill’s withdrawal and the appointment of a more Liberal Ministry. In Prussia, the reverse occurred. The Liberal Ministers were dismissed, Conservatives appointed in their place, and the Landtag dissolved a second time. Despite considerable Government pressure, the Liberals won an overwhelming victory and the Conservatives were reduced to fifteen seats. King and Parliament faced each other in deadlock, much as in England in the reign of Charles I. King Wilhelm I was prepared to abdicate rather than hack down on the Army Bill. Had he done so, the power of the Prussian monarchy, the Army and the Junker landowners would have suffered irreparable damage; parliamentary government would have come to Prussia before very long.

Instead, the King summoned Otto von Bismarck from Paris. The Liberals reacted as if the new Minister-President had the words coup d’état stamped across his forehead; even Treitschke was horrified. Bismarck sent the deputies home, ruled for the next four years without a parliament, and collected taxes unconstitutionally. But Bismarck was not content with mere repression. He realised that, despite the deep political differences, the economic interests of the Liberal opposition coincided exactly with those of the Prussian Government.2 He realised too that their enthusiasm for national unity could be harnessed to serve the interests of the Prussian State. The national- democratic movement could, however, also be used against the Liberals.

In 1866, shortly before the war against Austria, Bismarck announced that a Lesser German parliament was to be elected by universal manhood suffrage. It was a momentous decision, and one which Bismarck’s successors consistently regarded as the greatest blunder he made in his entire career. Yet his motives are not difficult to reconstruct. The three-class franchise in Prussia, which later worked to the advantage of the Conservative Junkers, had produced a House dominated by Liberal notables. In neighbouring France, the introduction of universal suffrage had resulted in a tremendous victory for Louis Napoleon. In Germany, thought Bismarck, it would probably assist the Conservatives; it would certainly not help the Liberals. They would soon stop agitating for parliamentarism once they saw that not they but some other party would control the Government. Besides, the existence of two parliaments in Berlin, each with a different majority, would enable the Executive to play off one against the other. The war against Austria, a direct consequence of Bismarck’s appeal to the national-democratic principle, also had a deep effect on the Liberal opposition. Bismarck had said before the war ‘that the domestic situation does not make a foreign war necessary, but it is an additional factor making one seem desirable’. 3 It was no coincidence that the elections for a new Landtag were held on the very day of the battle of Königgrätz. The Liberals, elected on a ‘high-tide of national enthusiasm’ (Delbrück), dropped their hostility to the Army Bill and retrospectively approved Bismarck’s illegal taxation. They were too excited by Bismarck’s contribution to the cause of unification to worry now about Liberalism.

It was not only Austria and the Prussian Liberals who were defeated at Königgrätz, but virtually all the other German States as well. The kingdoms of Hanover, Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg, the Grand Duchies of Baden and North and South Hesse, the Free City of Frankfurt and a host of smaller States had opted for the Austrians against Prussia. Bismarck spared Austria territorially, but she was excluded from German affairs and turned round to face the South-east, and her loss of prestige was quickly exploited by the Hungarians. Prussia’s other enemies suffered a harsher fate. Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, North Hesse, Nassau and Frankfurt were annexed to Prussia. Saxony, the Mecklenburgs and the smaller northern States were forced to join the North German Confederation, whose ‘federal’ constitution could in the circumstances be little more than a cover for Prussian domination.

The four remaining States south of the River Main—Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt—retained their independence for the time being. Bismarck expected that the political and economic pull of the north would be strong enough to induce them to join the Confederation voluntarily. He was only partly right. The South organised its armies on Prussian lines, and made secret defensive alliances with Prussia. A united Customs Parliament and Customs Bundesrat were agreed to. But the elections in southern Germany to the Customs Parliament in the winter of 1867-68 resulted in a clear rejection of union with the North. Once more, Bismarck had to resort to foreign war to attain his domestic ends. After the victory over France in 1870, the Governments of the South were pressed by their own people to join the new Reich without demanding significant concessions. The reservations of the King of Bavaria were overcome by a handsome secret subsidy with which he built his fairy castles. He was soon up to his neck in debt to the Prussian State.4 The Reich was further extended to include the valuable French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine after public opinion had been carefully prepared for the annexation on Bismarck’s orders.5

Bismarck’s ‘iron and blood’ methods were thus a great success. He achieved what the men of 1848, with their resolutions and majority votes, had failed to achieve. The effect on the ‘ mind of Germany ’ was disconcerting, however. In the uneasy affiance between nationality and liberty, the balance shifted heavily in favour of the former. And alongside the nationalism of the industrialists, professors and journalists there grew up a nationalist movement of a different sort, borne by the veterans of Bismarck’s wars. As a Swiss historian has put it,

The Prussian ideal of the State retained its moderate and purposeful character so long as its supporters were upper class cosmopolitans. It was unsuitable for the masses. As the age of the masses dawned, it automatically grew vulgar, narrow-minded, brutal, immoderate, aimless. … As their numbers grew, as they won the admiration of politicians and public opinion and came to dominate even the officer corps, the basically decent statesmen of the Reich came ever more under massive pressure. … It was the triumph of Bismarck’s blood and iron policy which caused Germany to take the wrong road and rudely interrupted the political education of the masses in the virtues of self-reliance, caution, moderation and ‘friendship in freedom’.⁶

Bismarck himself was sometimes embarrassed by this movement, but he allied with it and encouraged it as often. Very few of the Reichstag elections in the period 1871-90 passed without an appeal to support the Reich against its enemies without and within; war-scares and revolutionary dangers were fabricated deliberately to heighten nationalist feeling. In Government and Army circles, the lessons of the Prussian conflict were never forgotten. If the parliament made difficulties, the right course was not to appease it but to dissolve it and hold new elections in an artificially generated atmosphere of patriotism. If that failed, the moderate Ministers must be replaced by the statesman with the mailed fist who would dissolve the House anew, proclaim a new electoral law and hold new elections on that basis. There were some—though Bismarck was no longer among them—who advocated foreign adventures as a means of winning over public opinion. At all events, ‘enemies of the Reich’ like the Catholics and the Social Democrats should be suppressed before they became too powerful. Other large parties like the National Liberals should be split whenever they became over-confident. The Government must stand at some Archimedean point ‘above the parties’, dealing out blows when one of the parties dared to raise its head.

The New Germany

Bismarck employed such methods not only because he preferred them: he found himself in a dilemma of his own making. The new Reich was in many respects an unnatural growth. Like some exotic plant, it had been artificially forced in the hothouse of patriotism and war. The temperature had to be kept high or it would wither away. Its potential enemies abroad and at home far outnumbered its friends. Austria had been defeated and expelled from Germany, but there was always the danger that she would try to reassert herself, especially in the South. France had been humiliated and deprived of Alsace- Lorraine, and she would certainly be looking around for allies in the hope of reversing the decision of 1870. Russia had remained neutral in gratitude for Bismarck’s silence during her suppression of the Poles, but the ‘latent hegemony’ of the new State in Central Europe caused some disquiet. Bismarck could keep Austria from stirring up trouble in Germany only by encouraging her in the Balkans, but this threatened to bring both States into conflict with Russia, so driving her into the open arms of France. Bismarck managed to avert these dangers because he happened to be the most accomplished diplomat of modern times. It was almost inevitable that they should reappear under a less versatile successor, and absolutely certain once a monarch with ambitions to assert ‘a sort of Napoleonic supremacy’ over Europe came to wield personal power.7

At home, hardly anyone felt satisfied with the Reich. The Prussian Conservatives should have been grateful to Bismarck for preserving their power. Instead they complained unceasingly about the concessions he was making to the more progressive West and South. To them, ‘ Bismarck [was] ruining the entire Prussian State ’.⁸ The newly-founded National Liberal party led by Rudolf von Bennigsen and Johannes Miquel still pressed for a centralised State with parliamentary responsibility. The Catholics, united in the Centre party, resented their inclusion in a largely Protestant empire. They albed with the South German particularists, the Poles, Alsatians, Danes and Guelphs (the Hanoverian particularists) against both Prussian domination and Liberal centralisation. They won the sympathy of some of the ancient non-Prussian royal families who also wanted less control from Berlin. It was Bismarck’s nightmare that these oppositional forces within the Reich might ally with Catholic Austria and Catholic France and seek, with the Pope’s blessing, to undo his work. Moreover, as industrialisation proceeded, an entirely new threat appeared on the Left in the shape of the Marxist Social Democratic party. By the time Bismarck fell, this movement had become the largest political body in the Reich, in spite of the Government’s repressive measure. When the First World War began, the SPD possessed the allegiance of no less than one-third of the German electorate. The growth of this party was another reason for the formation of patriotic, anti-parliamentary and anti-Socialist movements like the Pan-German League, the Agrarian League, the Navy League and the ‘League to combat Social Democracy’.

In view of this absence of agreement on fundamentals, there was only one viable political grouping in the Second Reich, and this was the alliance between the Prussian Conservatives and the National Liberals. The Conservatives were too entrenched in Prussia to be ignored for long. They were prepared to use demagogy and the terrible weapon of social boycott to attain their ends, and could usually persuade the King to support them. The Prussian Ministers often had political and family ties with the Junkers, who dominated both the Prussian House of Lords and (because of the plutocratic three- class franchise) the House of Deputies through which the Ministers’ bills had to pass. The Prussian administration in the provinces was overwhelmingly in Junker hands, as was the officer corps of the Army.⁹ It was impossible to rule without the Conservatives. The attempt to do so would lead to intolerable strain within the Government. It is no accident that the period before 1880, when Bismarck ruled with the National Liberals in the Reichstag, was a critical one in the Government , whereas the following decade, when Bismarck pursued a more conservative policy, was one of harmony and stability.

If the Conservatives were indispensable in Prussia, they were a liability in ‘the Reich’, where there was a profound popular dislike of reaction. Since the Conservatives could only win about a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag (elected by universal suffrage), the Government had to look around for other support. Apart from the small but influential party of Free Conservatives there were only two possible allies, for the Social Democrats and Radicals were obviously excluded. These were the National Liberals and the Centre party. The Conservatives themselves were divided on this issue. The extreme right wing of the party, consisting of devout Protestant aristocrats, preferred a coalition with the Centre, with whom they shared certain religious, hierarchic and agrarian assumptions. But such an alliance was anathema to all the other parties in Germany, including the Free Conservatives and some of the left or ‘national’ wing of the Conservative party itself. A Conservative-Centre coalition was also opposed by the entire bureaucracy of Berlin, which was recruited on a moderate Conservative basis.¹⁰ Moreover, it was widely assumed that a Conservative-Catholic alliance would have far- reaching consequences both at home and abroad. The Liberal Government of Bavaria would fall to the Catholic opposition if Berlin seemed to favour the latter. The new Catholic Government might then inaugurate an anti-Prussian policy and incite the smaller States against the domination of Berlin. A Catholic Government in Munich could be sure of receiving every encouragement from Vienna, Paris, the Vatican and Petersburg. There was the added danger that concessions to the Catholics in Germany might offend anti-papal Italy and drive her out of the Triple Alliance. For all these reasons, then, a Conservative-Centre coalition was ruled out in Berlin.

There remained only the alliance between the Conservative, Free Conservative and National Liberal parties. The National Liberals were the only substantial group outside Prussia to accept Bismarck’s Reich. The major obstacle initially was the demand of the left wing of this party for parliamentary government. At the end of the 1870s, Bismarck used the Anti-Socialist Law and the issue of protective tariffs to split this doctrinaire wing of the party from the right wing, which comprised the industrialists and bankers. These classes were rising rapidly with the massive industrial expansion following the unification: it would have been dangerous to have excluded them from political influence for much longer. In 1878-79 Bismarck rested his State on this second pillar of industry alongside the pillar of the Junker landowners, whose economic strength was on the decline. This alliance of the so-called ‘middle parties’ was henceforth the only conceivable coalition in the minds of most statesmen. As one influential diplomat put it, ‘the gradually somewhat worn phrase that the King must stand above the parties means, when translated into practical terms, nothing more, surely, than that he must depend on the middle parties’.11 However, even this alignment was not without its drawbacks. There were serious tensions within the coalition between the left wing of the National Liberals and the extreme right wing of the Conservatives. Worse still, the coalition could not, except for the period 1887-90, command a majority in the Reichstag. Though an alliance with the Centre party was ruled out, its support was nevertheless indispensable. In this simple fact lay the seeds of unending trouble for the Governments of the post-Bismarck era. The moderates argued that extreme measures must be avoided so as not to offend the Centre; the protagonists of a ‘hard’ course maintained that the Centre party would not dare to make serious trouble, and that, if it did, the Government had enough Bismarckian recipes up its sleeve to deal with it.

How Bismarck Ruled

The confusion in the country as a whole was necessarily reflected in the unfinished structure of its Government. That there could be no Cabinet with parliamentary responsibility is obvious. Not only had the Reich been founded in direct opposition to the parliamentary movement, but the number and character of the parties in the Reichstag precluded closer links between Executive and Legislature. That there could be no Reich Cabinet of any sort is equally clear. There were twenty-five Governments in Germany, most of them with their own monarchs and parliaments, their own loyalties and traditions. In 1866 and 1870-71 they had been forced, tricked and even bribed into joining the Reich. They looked to Berlin with utmost suspicion, watching for signs of further encroachments. A Reich Cabinet with real powers could only have ruled over them, and this was totally unacceptable. The German States continued to exchange ambassadors with one another; foreign powers sent envoys to Munich and Dresden as well as to Berlin; and Bavaria had her own ambassador at the Vatican. The Constitution of 1871 gave the German Kaiser only the rights of a primus inter pares and declared sovereignty to reside in the Bundesrat or Federal Council, to which each State sent its representative. This was quite plainly a fiction, for the delegates to the Bundesrat could only act on instruction from their home Governments. These in turn were more or less dependent on the support of their monarchs and parliaments. In this way, the Reichstag faced not a responsible Government but a nebulous, anonymous and faceless body which simply faded away under attack.

A Reich Cabinet was impossible for another reason. Prussia was not just a member State but covered three-fifths of the area of the Reich. Her King was always the Kaiser, and eighteen of Germany’s twenty-one Army Corps were Prussian. Berlin was the capital both of Prussia and the Reich; Prussian Ministries and Reich institutions were situated in the same street; the Prussian Landtag and the Reichstag met only a few streets apart, and those deputies who were members of both moved from one to the other as they saw fit. Prussia was where real power lay in Germany. A Reich Government beside or above the Prussian Government was unthinkable. The King of Prussia and the Prussian Ministry of State were bound to play a leading role in determining the policies of Germany as a whole.

There was, however, a strong case for a single Reich statesman, responsible for mediating between the Prussian Government and the non-Prussian Governments and for ensuring that things operated smoothly in the Bundesrat and Reichstag. This was also welcomed by the National Liberals in the Reichstag, who saw in it the beginnings of what they hoped would develop into a Reich Cabinet. In 1867, Bismarck—who already held the posts of Prussian Minister-President (Prime Minister) and Foreign Minister—had himself appointed Reich Chancellor. As such, he became President of the Bundesrat and the only man responsible for those questions (foreign policy, the Navy, customs, trade and the postal services) which the Constitution had declared to be ‘Reich matters’. In the course of the next decade, the Chancellor became the focal point for the development of seven Reich Offices under a Secretary of State. The Foreign Office and Admiralty were simply transferred from Prussia to the Reich. The other Reich matters were at first dealt with in a large Reich Chancellor’s Office, but by 1880 this had split up into a Reich Office of Interior, a Reich Treasury, a Reich Post Office, a Reich Justice Office and a Reich Railway Office.12 In 1878, Bismarck formed a small Reich Chancellery to enable him to control the increasingly complex business of the Reich. The Secretaries of State did much of the routine work in the Bundesrat and Reichstag, but they remained Bismarck’s subordinates in a very real sense. Before 1878, he insisted on signing every Reich document in person. After that date, he forbade two Secretaries to sign the same document, since this obscured the fact that they were only deputising for the Chancellor. He abhorred the idea of collective government and only twice convened a meeting of the Secretaries to discuss policy. He even stopped them from corresponding with each other without his express permission, and once reprimanded the Postmaster-General for asking the Foreign Office whether a certain measure was significant enough to require the Chancellor’s decision. All contact with the Kaiser was strictly prohibited ‘without my express consent, unless that consent is self- evident’. 13 By 1890, the Foreign Office alone possessed thirty-two volumes of his instructions on such matters as the size of blotting paper, the pagination of lengthy documents, abbreviations, and the use of red covers that would not stain.¹⁴ His marginal jottings were faithfully traced in red ink to preserve them for posterity. It was little wonder that most of the Secretaries sighed with relief when, in 1890, the Chancellor’s grip was relaxed.

If Bismarck could keep a strict eye on his subordinates in the Reich, his position in the Prussian Ministry of State was—in theory at least—quite different. The principle was upheld that ‘the real, de facto Minister-President in Prussia is and remains His Majesty the King’.15 Consequently the powers of the nominal Minister-President were virtually non-existent. As defined by a Cabinet Order of 1852, he had the right to be informed of important decisions, to add his own comments to the reports of Ministers before passing them up to the King, and—except in the War Minister’s case—to attend any audience between a Minister and the King.¹⁶ Because the King had the right to decide all matters, majority decisions were not binding in the Ministry of State. Any Minister overruled by his colleagues had the right to appeal to the King, and the Finance Minister had the duty to do so whenever he had reservations about the projects of others.¹⁷ Bismarck often complained of having ‘to ask eight donkeys for permission whenever he wished to eat a spoonful of soup’ and declared that the Ministry’s voting principle was ‘a constitutional error … from which every State should try to free itself as soon as possible’.¹⁸ After 1879, however, such complaints ceased altogether. By dismissing recalcitrant Ministers and replacing them with his own nominees, and by exercising an overwhelming influence over the aging King Wilhelm I, Bismarck achieved an unprecedented position of authority in Prussia. ‘Everything depends on Bismarck’, one observer wrote. ‘ He has the Ministers completely under control… No Minister … dares to do anything unless he knows beforehand that Bismarck agrees.’¹⁹ The danger was, of course, that under a different monarch and a different Chancellor the old disunity would reassert itself.

One method used by Bismarck to strengthen his position in the Ministry of State was to appoint some of the State Secretaries, who were his subordinates, as Prussian Ministers without Portfolio. At first, these Ministers had the right only to speak for Bismarck in his absence, but in 1876 he gave the Secretaries of the Reich Chancellor’s Office and of the Foreign Office the right to attend and vote at all the Ministry’s meetings. In the years 1878-81 he tried another experiment. Count Stolberg was appointed Vice-Chancellor in the Reich and Vice-President of the Prussian Ministry of State. Stolberg resigned because, left without an administrative department of his own, he found his position to be ‘more like that of an undersecretary’s’.²⁰ In 1888, Boetticher, the head of the Reich Office of Interior and thus in practice Bismarck’s foremost deputy in the Reich, was made Vice-President of the Ministry. Boetticher’s position was much like Stolberg’s but with the advantage that he headed an important department. This arrangement was widely recognised to be the most successful, and survived until Boetticher’s dismissal in 1897. On the other hand, Bismarck’s constant experimentation in this field shows that even he regarded his control over the Prussian Ministers as less than complete.

Another way of exercising control was to insist that all correspondence between the Prussian departments and the Reich Offices passed through Bismarck’s hands. In the Reich he could insist on this right as Chancellor. In Prussia he argued that the Prussian Government must deal with the Reich Offices through its Foreign Minister, as all the other German Governments did, otherwise the latter would suspect ‘that the Reich institutions stand within the Prussian Ministry’.²¹ As time went on, it became increasingly difficult for Bismarck to uphold this privilege. In 1889, he severely reprimanded a minor official of the Ministry of State for sending a quite unimportant document directly to the Bundesrat. When the offence was repeated a month later, Bismarck threatened to impose a fine of thirty marks.²² Also in 1889, he reprimanded the Prussian Minister of War himself for addressing a letter to him as Reich Chancellor instead of as Prussian Minister-President.²³ He returned a draft Bill to the Postmaster-General with orders to draw up two Bills, one for Prussia and one for the Reich, because the Chancellor’s signature could not appear beside that of a Prussian Minister.²⁴ Indeed, towards the end of his rule he wrote a letter of complaint, as Prussian Foreign Minister, to himself as Reich Chancellor and President of the Bundesrat!²⁵

The post of Prussian Foreign Minister was an integral part of Bismarck’s authority as Chancellor, for the Chancellor alone had no vote in the Bundesrat and could not, strictly speaking, appear before the Reichstag. It was as Prussian Foreign Minister that he cast Prussia’s seventeen votes in the Bundesrat, and as one of Prussia’s delegates that he spoke in the Reichstag. Because he dominated the Prussian Ministry of State so completely, Bismarck had little trouble on this score. But officially he could cast the Prussian vote only ‘in accordance with the decision reached in the Ministry of State’ by the usual processes.²⁶ Any weakening of his authority in the Ministry therefore threatened his authority in the Reich.

As Bismarck grew older, the Government’s dilemma presented itself with increasing clarity. Bismarck’s autocracy was intolerable and his pedantic insistence on formal distinctions seriously hindered efficient government. There was a widespread feeling that the Government must accustom itself to take decisions collectively, as other Governments did. And yet Bismarck’s autocracy was necessary to hold the conglomerate of departments together. Without his authority, the Prussian Ministers would fall into disunity and be tempted to appeal to the King for support against their colleagues. They would tend to treat the Minister-President and Chancellor as an equal and dictate how the Prussian vote in the Bundesrat should be cast. This would raise the insoluble issue of Reich-Prussian relations. The South German Governments, who regarded a strong Chancellor as a guarantee that their wishes would be respected in Berlin, would feel that the Reich institutions were simply a front for Prussian domination. As the authority of the Government as a whole declined, the influence of the parliaments, the press and public opinion would grow. But these pressures would operate in different directions. In Prussia the influence of the Conservatives on Government policy would increase, whereas in the Reich the need to win the approval of the Centre party in the Reichstag would lead the Chancellor and the Secretaries to pursue a more moderate course. The attempt to normalise the system of government would thus lead, in a short space of time, to confusion. Consequently, when the crucial test came, the Government would prove incapable