James Retallack

Germany in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II

List of Figures and Map - A Note on References - Preface - Introduction - Interpretive Turning Points - The Birth of the Modern Age - Rattling the Sabre: Weltpolitik and the Great War - The Many Germanies of Wilhelm II - Conclusion - Select Bibliography

Mapping the Red Threat: The Politics of Exclusion in Leipzig Before 1914

Long before Adolf Hitler’s appearance clouded democracy’s prospects in Germany, election battles had provided a means to disadvantage “enemies of the Reich” in the polling booth. Such battles were waged not only during election campaigns but also when new voting laws were legislated and district boundaries were redrawn. Maps produced during the Imperial era informed voters, statesmen, and social scientists how the principle of the fair and equal vote was compromised at the subnational level, and new maps offer historians an opportunity to consider struggles for influence and power in visual terms. This article argues that local, regional, and national suffrages need to be considered together and in terms of their reciprocal effects. On the one hand, focusing on overlaps and spillovers between electoral politics at different tiers of governance can illuminate the perceptions and attitudes that are constitutive of electoral culture. On the other hand, using cartography to supplement statistical analysis can make election battles more accessible to nonspecialist audiences. Combining these approaches allows us to rethink strategies of political exclusion in Imperial Germany’s coexisting suffrage regimes. Focusing on Leipzig and its powerful Social Democratic organization opens a window on larger issues about how Germans conceived questions of political fairness in a democratizing age.

‘Something Magical in the Name of Prussia…’ British Perceptions of German Nation Building in the 1860s

In 1816, the Gottingen historian Arnold Heeren described the new German Confederation as the most peaceable territorial unit in Europe. He wrote: ‘He who knows history cannot doubt that the rise of a single, unconstrained monarchy in Germany would soon prove to be the grave of liberty in Europe. ‘1 In 1859, at the dawn of Germany’s unification era, a newspaper published not far from Gottingen gave voice to much the same particularist sentiment. It declared that the typical German wants his own customs at home, his own traditions in his towns, and his own law in his own country. These customs, these traditions, and this law have become deeply rooted over many centuries in the soil of the individual tribes [Stamme]; they have reached their zenith in the dynasties and constitutions [that exist today]. History, in its bloody course, has erected boundary walls whose levelling could be accomplished only through a kind of biblical flood, a destruction of everything that exists, in which the rights of the German tribes would be trampled as quickly as would the rights of the princes.2 As Abigail Green has recently argued in her important book, Fatherlands,3 an awareness of cultural difference and respect for local distinctiveness within Germany were important and hitherto neglected aspects of small-state patriotism in the mid-19th century.

‘To My Loyal Saxons!’ King Johann in Exile, 1866

This chapter addresses Saxon King Johann’s period of exile — just over four months — during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.1 How did the Kingdom of Saxony and the Wettin dynasty avoid extinction? This question requires us to consider King Johann’s thoughts and actions, and those of his subjects, in war, in defeat, in exile. How close did Johann come to losing his throne? Despite having entered the conflict in mid-June 1866 with dubious prospects, did it matter that Saxony suffered a devastating military defeat less than three weeks later? As the kingdom fell under the control of rapacious occupiers and unforgiving peacemakers, how did Saxon negotiators and their Prussian counterparts in Berlin keep open the door to a postwar reconciliation? Saxony’s ruling house escaped the worst. But it did not rise like a phoenix from the ashes of Germany’s fratricidal war. Nor did Saxony disavow its distinctive identity to become Prussia’s junior partner in the emerging Reich. Eventually, as a vastly diminished power, it paid homage to the ascendant Prussian eagle with artificial displays of power. But is the story of Saxony’s survival properly cast as a morality tale — a retelling of Paradise Lost perhaps? That is certainly how some Saxons chose to lament the absence of their beloved king. Others prayed he would never return.

Conservatives and Antisemites in Baden and Saxony

‘There are two words that cannot be uttered without causing a Saxon to become greatly agitated: Jesuit and Jew.’ This observation by the arch-reactionary Saxon minister Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust provides an intriguing definition of Saxon identity. It is especially remarkable that Saxons should have become ‘greatly agitated’ on either score, because so few Catholics and Jews actually lived in the kingdom. Did Beust put his finger on the so-called ‘antisemitism-without-Jews’ syndrome and its less well-known corollary, ‘antiultramontanism-without-Catholics’? If so, how did different regional environments condition the search on the German Right for a popular leader, a ‘great agitator’ capable of rousing the masses? Did Conservative antagonism towards the Jews condition the Conservatives’ strategies for political success as they (also) defined themselves in opposition to liberals, democrats, and socialists? These questions provide a starting point for the following reflections on the interpenetration of Conservatism and antisemitism in Germany between the 1860s and 1914. Charges of demagoguery were hurled back and forth between antisemites and Conservatives in almost all German states. Yet ‘authoritarian’ and ‘demagogic’ solutions to the ‘Jewish question’ were not defined the same way everywhere. Certainly much work remains to be done on the microand macro planes before the Alltag of German antisemitism in the countryside or the role of political violence in shaping Imperial Germany’s electoral culture will come into focus. However, these desiderata hint at the usefulness of reconsidering evidence on the meso-level, that is, drawn from the region. We now have some excellent studies of regional antisemitic movements. Building on this body of work, the following analysis attempts to demonstrate that the lines between Conservatism and antisemitism became—for a time—so indistinct as to virtually disappear