German Culture Past and Present

by Ernest Belfort Bax

But at the same time the curse of Prussia—militarism—was riveted on the people through the reorganization of the Prussian army by those two able military bureaucrats, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. In 1813 Prussia concluded at Kalicsh an alliance with Russia, which Austria joined. In the war which followed Prussia was severely strained by losses in men and money. But at the Congress of Vienna the Prussian kingdom received back nearly, but not quite, all it lost in 1807. The acquirement, however, of new and valuable territories in Westphalia and along the Rhine, besides Thuringia and the province of Saxony, more than compensated for the loss of certain Slav districts in the east, as thereby the way was prepared for the ultimate despotism of the Prussian King over all Germany. The success of Prussian diplomacy in enslaving these erstwhile independent German lands in 1815 was crucial for the subsequent direction of Prussian policy.

It is time now to return once more to the internal conditions in the Prussian State now dominant over a large part of Northern Germany. A Constitution had been more than once talked of, but the despotism with its bureaucratic machinery had remained. Now, after the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars and the re-drawing of the Prussian frontier lines by the peace of 1815, the matter assumed an urgency it had not had before. Following upon proclamations and promises, a patent was addressed to the new Saxon provinces granting a national Landtag, or Diet, for the whole country. The drawing up of the Constitution thus proclaimed in principle gave rise to heated conflicts. There was, as yet, no proletariat proper in Prussia, and for that matter hardly any in the rest of Germany. The handicraft system of production, and even the mediæval guild system, slightly modified, prevailed throughout the country. The middle class proper was small and unimportant, and hence Liberalism, the theoretical expression of that class, only found articulate utterance through men of the professions.

The new Prussian territories in the west were largely tinctured with progressive ideas originating in the French Revolution, while the east was dominated by reactionary feudal landowners, the notorious Junker class—a class special to East Prussian territories, including the eastern portion of the Mark of Brandenburg—whom the moderate Conservative Minister Stein himself characterized as "heartless, wooden, half-educated people, only good to turn into corporals or calculating-machines." This class then, as ever since, opposed an increase of popular control and the progress of free institutions with might and main. Friction arose between the Government and Liberal gymnastic societies and students' clubs. This culminated in the festival on the Wartburg in October 1818, when a bonfire was made of a book of police laws and Uhlan stays and a corporal's stick. It was followed the next year by the assassination of the dramatist and political spy Kotzebue by the student Sand.

Panic seized the reactionists, and the Austrian Minister Metternich, one of the chief pillars of absolutist principles in Europe, induced the King to commit himself to the Austrian system of repression. In 1821 the Reactionary party succeeded in getting the projected Constitution abandoned and the bureaucratic system of provincial estates established by royal warrant two years later (1823). The Prussian police with their spies then became omnipotent, and a remorseless persecution of all holding Liberal or democratic views ensued, the best-known writers on the popular side no less than the rank and file being arbitrarily arrested and kept in prison on any or no pretext. The amalgamation of the new districts into the Prussian bureaucratic system was not accomplished without resistance. The Rhine provinces especially, accustomed to easy-going government and light taxation under the old ecclesiastical princes, kicked vigorously against the Prussian jack-boot. The discontent was so widespread indeed that some concessions had to be made, such as the retention of the Code Napoléon. What created most resentment, however, was the enactment of 1814, which enforced compulsory universal military service throughout the monarchy. Friedrich Wilhelm also undertook to dragoon his subjects in the matter of religion, amalgamating the Lutherans with other reformed bodies, under the name of the "Evangelical Church."

In foreign politics, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic wars, Prussia, as yet hardly recovered from her defeats under Buonaparte, almost entirely followed the lead of Austria. But perhaps the most important measure of the Prussian Government at this time was the foundation of the famous Zollverein or Customs Union of various North German States in 1834. The far-reaching character of this measure was only shown later, being, in fact, the means and basis by and on which the political and military ascendancy of Prussia over all Germany was assured. Friedrich Wilhelm III, who died on June 7, 1840, was succeeded by his son, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The new reign began with an appearance of Liberalism by a general amnesty for political offences. Reaction, however, soon raised its head again, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in spite of his varnish of philosophical and literary tastes, was soon seen to be au fond as reactionary as his predecessors. The conflict between the reaction of the Government and the now widely spread Liberal and democratic aspirations of the people resulted in Prussia (as it did under similar circumstances in other countries) in the outbreak of the revolution of 1848.

It is necessary at this stage to take a brief survey of the political history of the Germanic States of Europe generally from the time of the Peace of Vienna, in 1815, onwards, in order to understand fully the rôle played by the Prussian monarchy in German history since 1848; for from this time the history of Prussia becomes more and more bound up with that of the German peoples as a whole. During the Napoleonic wars Germany, as every one knows, was, generally speaking, in the grip of the French Imperial power. To follow the vicissitudes and fluctuations of fortune throughout Central Europe during these years lies outside our present purpose. We are here chiefly concerned with the political development from the Treaty of Vienna, as signed on June 9, 1815, onward. The Treaty of Vienna completed the work begun by Napoleon—represented by the extinction of the mediæval "Holy Roman Empire of the German nation" in 1806—in making an end of the political configuration of the German peoples which had grown up during the Middle Ages and survived, in a more or less decayed condition, since the Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the Thirty Years' War. The three hundred separate States of which Germany had originally consisted were now reduced to thirty-nine, a number which, by the extinction of sundry minor governing lines, was before long further reduced to thirty-five. These States constituted themselves into a new German Confederation, with a Federal Assembly, meeting at Frankfurt-on-the-Main. The new Federal Council, or Assembly, however, soon revealed itself as but the tool of the princes and a bulwark of reaction.

The revolution of 1848 was throughout Germany an expression of popular discontent and of democratic and even, to a large extent, of republican aspirations. The princely authorities endeavoured to stem the wave of popular indignation and revolutionary enthusiasm by recognizing a provisional self-constituted body, and sanctioning the election of a national representative Parliament at Frankfurt in place of the effete Federal Council. The Archduke of Austria, who was elected head of the new, hastily organized National Government, was not slow to use his newly acquired power in the interests of reaction, thereby exciting the hostility of all the progressive elements in the Parliament of Frankfurt. When after some months it became obvious that the anti-Progressive parties had gained the upper hand alike in Austria and Prussia, the friction between the Democratic and Constitutional parties became increasingly bitter.

The Prussian Government meanwhile took advantage of the state of affairs to stir up the Schleswig-Holstein question, so-called, driving the Danes out of Schleswig, an insurrectionary movement in Holstein having been already suppressed by the Danish King. Prussia, alarmed by the attitude of the Powers, agreed to withdraw her troops from the occupied territories without consulting the Frankfurt Parliament, an act which involved Friedrich Wilhelm in conflict with the latter. The issues arising out of this dispute made it plain to every one that the Parliament of all Germany was impotent to enforce its decrees against one of the German Powers possessed of a preponderating military strength. By the end of 1848 the revolution in Vienna was completely crushed and a strongly reactionary Government appointed by the new Emperor. Meanwhile in Berlin the Junkers and the reactionaries generally had already again come into power, a crisis having been caused by the attempt of the democratic section of the Prussian National Assembly, convened by the King in March, to reorganize the army on a popular democratic basis. We need scarcely say the Prussian army has been the tool of Junkerdom and reaction ever since.

The last despairing attempt of the Frankfurt Parliament to give effect to the national Germanic unity, which all patriotic Germans professed to be eager for, was the offer of the Imperial crown to the King of Prussia. Against this act, however, nearly half the members—i.e. all the advanced parties in the Assembly—protested by refusing to take any part in it They had also declined to be associated with a previous motion for the exclusion of German Austria from the new national unity, in the interest of Prussian ascendancy. Both these reactionary proposals, as we all know, at a later date became the corner-stones of the new Prusso-German unity of Bismark's creation. On this occasion, however, the Prussian King refused to accept the office at the hands of the impotent Frankfurt Assembly, which latter soon afterwards broke up and eventually "petered out." Meanwhile Prussian troops, led by the reactionary military caste, were employed in the congenial task of suppressing popular movements with the sword in Baden, Saxony, and Prussia itself.

The two rival bulwarks of reaction, Prussia and Austria, were now so alarmed at the revolutionary dangers they had passed through that, for the nonce forgetting their rivalry, they cordially joined together in reviving, in the interests of the counter-revolution, the old reactionary Federal Assembly, which had never been formally dissolved, as it ought to have been on the election of the Frankfurt Parliament. Reaction now went on apace. Liberties were curtailed and rights gained in 1848 were abolished in most of the smaller States. Henceforth the Federal Assembly became the theatre of the two great rival powers of the Germanic Confederation. Both alike strove desperately for the hegemony of Germany. The strength of Prussia, of course, lay generally in the north, that of Austria in the south. Austria had the advantage of Prussia in the matter of prestige. Prussia, on the other hand, had the pull of Austria in the possession of the machinery of the Customs Union. In general, however, the dual control of the Germanic Confederation was grudgingly recognized by either party, and on occasion they acted together. This was notably the case in the Schleswig-Holstein question, which had been smouldering ever since 1848, and which came to a crisis in the Danish war of 1864, in which Austria and Prussia jointly took part.