History of Germany
The history of Germany is, in places, extremely complicated and depends much on how one defines "Germany".
As a nation state, Germany did not exist until 1871. Before, Germany can only be looked at as a cultural region where many territories, with greatly varying independence, each had their own historical events and it was not entirely clear what area was part of Germany in the first place.
This article thus focuses on Germany's history after 1945. Earlier periods are only briefly outlined and presented in detail in separate articles (see the links below).
Struggle against Rome
One of the most significant battles of the Roman period was the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest 9 AD, in which Germanic tribes led by Arminius of the Cherusci ambushed and wiped out three Roman Legions. After that the Romans never again seriously tried to expand their empire east of the Rhine.
The Frankish realm
For details, see the main Franks article.
Following a century and a half of growing pressure on the Roman frontier, the tribes (Vandals, Burgundians, Alans and Suevi) along the Rhine crossed the river in 407, subsequently establishing various short-lived Germanic kingdoms in parts of modern-day France and Spain.
The kingdom of the Franks however would endure, in varying shape and form, over several centuries under the dynasties of the Merovingians and Carolingians. Under Charlemagne, who subjugated Bavaria in 788 and Lower Saxony in 804 and was crowned Emperor in 800, the kingdom would span over most what is today France and Germany, forming the nucleus for both future countries.
Holy Roman Empire
For details, see the main Holy Roman Empire article.
After the death of Frankish king Louis the Pious, the Frankish lands were divided in the Treaty of Verdun (843) into a western part, the basis of later France, an eastern part, the future Holy Roman Empire, and a central region (northern Italy, the Low Countries and Burgundy), which was to form the focus of subsequent Franco-German rivalry.
With the death of the last eastern ruler of Charlemagne's line 911, kingship passed first to Conrad of Franconia and then 919 to Henry the Fowler, founder of the Saxon dynasty, whose son Otto I the Great reclaimed the title of Emperor in 962. This strange empire, later called the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" (Heiliges Römisches Reich deutscher Nation), was to survive under its Kaiser (emperor, the German form of "Caesar") until its dissolution in 1806 after the military successes of Napoleon I of France.
Unification, the Rise of Prussia, and the German Confederation (1806-1866)
The late eighteenth century was a period of political, economic, intellectual, and cultural reform, the Enlightenment (represented by figures such as Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith), but also involving early Romanticism, climaxed in the French Revolution, where freedom of the individual and nation was asserted against privilege and custom. Composed of a great variety of types and theories, they largely respond to the disintegration of previous cultural patters, coupled with new patterns of production, specifically the rise of industrial capitalism.
However, the defeat of Napoleon, enabled reactionary states such as Prussia and Austria to survive, laying the for groundwork for the Congress of Vienna,the alliance that strove to oppose radical demands for change ushered in by the French Revolution. The Great Powers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 aimed to restore Europe (as far as possible) to its pre-war conditions by combating both liberalism and nationalism and by creating a barrier around France. With Austria's position on the continent now intact and ostensibly secure under its reactionary premier Klemens von Metternich, the Habsburg empire would serve as a barrier to contain the emergence of Italian and German nation-states as well, aside from containing France. But this reactionary balance of power aimed at blocking German and Italian nationalism on the continent was precarious.
After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the German states joined to form the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) - a rather loose organisation, especially because the two great rivals, the Austrian empire and the Prussian kingdom, each feared domination by the other.
To contemporary observers, a post-Napoleon revolutionary upheaval in Prussia, however, would seem unlikely. Later to emerge as the dominant German state, the political base of a united Germany, and a power that would vie for global preeminence toward the end of the nineteenth century, Prussia was seemingly backward. Under Prussia, manorial reaction dates back to fall of the Teutonic Knights. Although agricultural structures has been very decentralized in form under the Teutonic Order, the Prussian nobility would later expand their holdings at the expense of the peasantry under territories once held by the Teutonic Order, reducing them to quiescent serfdom. Under Prussia, the rise of urban burgers was also greatly impeded. The Junkers sought to reduce the towns to dependence by short-circuiting them with their exports, leaving little revolutionary potential for free labor—urban and rural—from feudal obligation. In England and France, which proved far more hospitable to Western democracy from the Enlightenment to Germany's defeat in World War II, the decline of feudal obligations had been connected development of the urban burgers in The Hohenzollerns instead would forge a centralized state, explaining the weak development of parliamentary government under Prussia. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was a backward state, grounded in the virtues of its established military-aristocracy stratified by rigid hierarchical lines.
Apart from Prussia, Germany as a whole—or more precisely the many Germanies—political disunity, conflicts of interests between nobles and merchants, and the guild system, which discouraged competition and innovation, retarded the progress of industrialism in Germany. While this kept the middle class small, affording the old order a measure of stability not seen in France, Prussia’s vulnerability to Napoleon's military proved to many perceptive reactionaries among the old order that a weak, divided, and backward Germany could very well have been prey to its united and industrializing neighbor.
After 1815, Prussia's initial defeats by Napoleonic France highlighted the need for administrative, economic, and social reforms to improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy and encourage practical merit-based education. Inspired by the Napoleonic organization of German and Italian principalities, the ostensibly liberal reforms of Karl August von Hardenberg and Count Stein were thoroughly conservative, enacted to preserve aristocratic privilege and institutions during an era of reform, reaction, and revolution opened up by the French Revolution by forging a competent national army.
The reforms laid the foundation for Prussia's future military might by professionalizing the military, decreeing universal military conscription. To industrialize within the framework of Prussian aristocratic institutions, land reforms ended the Junkers' monopoly on landownership, thereby abolishing serfdom and many other feudal practices.
On the continent, especially in Germany, conflict was still occurring between conservative forces and liberal nationalists. In the Vormärz era preceding the Revolutions of 1848, this competition entailed the forces of the old order competing with those inspired by the French Revolution and the Rights of Man. The sociological breakdown of the competition was roughly one side engaged mostly in commerce, trade and industry and the other associated with landowning aristocracy or military aristocracy (the Junkers) in Prussia, the forces behind the Habsburg empire in Austria, and the conservative backers of the particularist, small princely states and city-states in Germany.
Meanwhile, demands for change from below had been fermenting since the influence of the French Revolution. Throughout the German Confederation, Austrian influence was paramount, drawing the ire of the nationalist movements. Austria’s arch-reactionary premier Prince Klemens von Metternich considered nationalism, especially the nationalist youth movement, was his most pressing danger, which might not only repudiate Austrian preponderance of the Confederation, but also stimulate nationalist sentiment within the Austrian Empire itself. As a multi-national polyglot in which Slavs and Magyars outnumbered the Germans, the prospects of having to Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Serb, or Croatian sentiment along with middle class liberalism was certainly horrifying.
The Vormärz era saw figures like Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Gottfried von Herder promulgate Romantic nationalism. Others promulgated these ideas among the youth. Father Friedrich Jahn's gymnastic associations exposed middle class German youth to nationalist ideas, which were took the form of the nationalistic college fraternities known as the burschenschaften. The Wartburg Festival in 1817 celebrated Martin Luther as a proto-German nationalist, linking Lutheranism to German nationalism, helping to arouse religious sentiments for the cause of German nationhood. The festival culminated in the murder of a spy in the secrete service of imperial Russia, another multi-national empire desperately trying to hang on to the old order as it existed before the French Revolution. Metternich swiftly and harshly reacted, using this pretext to persuade the Confederation Diet to issue the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which dissolved the burschenschaften, cracked down against the liberal press, and seriously restricted academic freedom.
Meanwhile, Prussia would continue to repress liberalism and continue with reform from above. Further efforts to improve the confederation began in 1834 with the establishment of a customs union, the Zollverein. In 1834 Prussia’s regime would stimulate wider trade advantages and industrialism by decree—a logical continuation of the program embarked upon by Stein and Hardenburg less than two decades earlier. Inadvertently, these reforms would spark the unification movement augment a middle class demanding further political rights, but at the time backwardness and Prussia’s fears of its stronger neighbors was the larger threat. The customs-union opened up a common market and ended local tariffs between states and standardized weights, measures, and currencies within member states (excluding Austria), forming the basis of a proto-national economy.
By 1842 the Zollverein included most German states. Within the next twenty years the output of German furnaces increased fourfold. Coal production grew rapidly as well. In turn, German industrialists, especially the Krupp works, established by Alfred Krupp, would introduce the invention of the steel gun, cast-steel axles, and a breech loading rifle, would exemplify Germany’s successful application of technology to weaponry. Germany’s security was greatly enhanced, leaving the Prussian state and the landowning aristocracy secure from outside threat. German manufactures also produced heavily for the non-defense sector. Nor longer would Britain be able to supply half Germany’s needs in manufactured goods, as it did beforehand.
However, by developing a strong industrial base, the Prussian state strengthened the middle class and the nationalist movement. Economic integration especially increased national consciousness among the German states, making political unity a far likelier scenario. After all, Germany was exhibiting all the features of a proto-nation.
The crucial factor enabling Prussia's conservative regime to survive the Vormärz era was a rough coalition between leading sectors of the landed upper class and the emerging commercial and manufacturing interests. Marx and Engels, in their analysis of the abortive 1848 Revolutions came to terms with such a coalition: "a commercial and industrial class which is too weak and dependent to take power and rule in its own right and which therefore throws itself into the arms of the landed aristocracy and the royal bureaucracy, exchanging the right to rule fore the right to make money". It is necessary to add that, even if the commercial and industrial element is weak, it must be strong enough (or soon become strong enough) to become worthy of co-optation, and the French Revolution terrified enough perceptive elements of Prussia's Junkers for the state to be sufficiently accommodating.
While relative stability was maintained until 1848, with enough bourgeois elements still content to exchange the "right to rule fore the right to make money", the landed upper class found its economic base sinking. While the Zollverein brought economic progress and helped to keep the bourgeoisie at bay for a while, it would only increase the ranks of the middle class swiftly—the very social base for the nationalism and liberalism that the Prussian state sought to stem.
The Zollverein represented a move toward economic integration and modern industrial capitalism and the victory of centralism over localism, quickly bringing the era of guilds in the small German princely states to an end. This would take the form of the revolt of the Sileasian Weavers in 1844, who witnessed their livelihood destroyed from the floodgates of new manufactures. Unable to compete with industrial efficiency, textile weavers quickly saw their economic base vanish. This base of small artisans, textile weavers, journeymen, guildsmen, and small businessmen would later pose a threat to the Second Reich, dominated by an emerging coalition of the landed upper class and industrialists, posing problems the Second Reich later on. These sharp class conflicts, the weakness of democratic traditions, and the narrow a social base of the landowning and military aristocracy, would be later quelled by authoritarian means of rule under the Second Reich, especially during Bismarck's suppression of Catholics and Socialists.
The Zollverein also weakened Austrian domination of the Confederation as economic unity increased the desire for political unity and nationalism. In the following years, the other German states began to regard Prussia, not Austria, as their leader.
However, the Zollverein, at this point, still did not suffice to eliminate the desires of the German middle class to attain the right to rule. News of the 1848 Revolution in Paris quickly reached discontented bourgeois liberals and more radical workingmen, only leaving the most reactionary regimes of the Romanovs and Ottomans unscathed.
On March 15, 1848, the subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm IV thus vented their long-repressed political aspirations in violent rioting in Berlin as barricades were erected all over the French capital to contain urban combat between Parisians and the army. As France's Louis Philippe fled to England, the Kaiser, cowed and coerced, capitulated to revolutionary demand, promising a constitution, a parliament, and support for German unification.
Meanwhile, from the point of view of Kaiser, at least his regime was standing. In France, where the conservative aristocracy was soundly pushed aside by the Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, the new Second Republic erupted into civil war between rival revolutionary groups—the bourgeois moderates who favored order and constitutional democracy and the socialists, supported by mobs the Parisian working class. In Paris unemployed workers, with the cry of "bread or lead", hoisted the red flag, the first time that the red flag emerged as a symbol of the proletariat, and erected barricades to overthrow the Second Republic. Not since the Reign of Terror had Paris seen fighting on this scale, later crushed by savage repression that left a bitter hatred between the French working class and bourgeois elements.
On May 18 the Frankfurt Parliament opened its first session from various German states and Austria proper. However, it was immediately divided between those favoring a kleindeutsche (lesser German) or grossdeutsche (grater German) solution. The former favored offering the imperial crown to Prussia. The latter favored the Hapsburg crown in Vienna, which would have integrated Austria proper and Bohemia (but not Hungary) into the new Germany.
From May to December, the Assembly eloquently debated academic topics while conservatives swiftly reacting against the reformers. Meanwhile, such competition intensified authoritarian and reactionary trends among the landed upper class, as it did under Metternich's Austria and Russia under staunch reactionary Nicholas I, as it found its economic basis sinking. Thus, it would turn to political levers to preserve its rule. As the Prussian army proved to be loyal, and peasants proved to be uninterested, Kaiser Fredrick Wilhelm regained his confidence. While the Assembly issued its Declaration of the Rights of the German people, and a constitution was draw (excluding Austria since it downright refused the offer), the leadership of the Reich was offered to Fredrick Wilhelm, who refused to "pick up a crown from the gutter". Most delegates returned home, and the Prussian army responded to quell some rioting. Thousands of middle class liberals fled abroad, especially to the United States.
In 1850 the Prussian king issued his own constitution, responding to the failed revolution from below. His document sponsored a confederation of North German states and concentrated real power in the hands of the Kaiser and the upper classes. However, Prussia responded to Austrian and Russian pressure, fearing a strong, Prussian-dominated Germany, at the conference of Olmütz, known as the "humilation of Olmütz".
Shortly after the "humilation of Olmütz", a new generation of statesmen began to respond to popular demands for national unity for their own ends not only in Germany, but in Italy and Japan as well, continuing Prussia's tradition of autocracy and reform from above. It takes very able leadership to drag along the less perceptive reactionary elements, and Italy and Germany found it to accomplish the seemingly paradoxical task of conservative modernization. Bismarck, like Stein and Hardenburg, sought to essentially preserve the position of the Junkers in a time of great changes. Bismarck, in fact, was appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm I to circumvent the liberals in the lastag who opposed the Kaiser’s military build-up because of its elitist nature. Gradually the Junkers, led by Bismarck, would win over the middle class, reacting to their revolutionary sentiments expressed in 1848 by providing them with the economic opportunities for which the urban middle sectors had been fighting.
One striking fact about the course of conservative modernization is the appearance of a galaxy of distinguished poltical leaders; Cavour in Italy; in Germany, Stein, Hardenberg, and Bismarck, the most famous of them all; in Japan the statesmen of the Meiji era. It seems unlikely that the appearance of a similar leadership in similar circumstance could be pure coincidence. All were conservatives in the political spectrum of their time and country, devoted to the monarchy, willing and able to use it as an instrument of reform, modernization, and national unification. Though all were aristocrats, they were dissidents or outsiders in relation to the old order. To the extent that their aristocratic background contribution habits of command and a flair for politics, one may perhaps detect a contribution of the agrarian ancien regimes to the construction of a new society.
German Empire (1871-1918)
In the interests of Piedmont-Sardinia, Cavour, hostile to the more revolutionary nationalism of liberal republicans such as Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, sought the unification of Italy along conservative lines. Bismarck in Prussia too wanted unification to achieve his aim of a conservative, Prussian-dominated German state. Both used diplomacy and war to achieve their objectives: Cavour allied with France before attacking Austria, securing the unification of Italy except for Venice and the Papal States by 1861. Bismarck allied with Austria in order to defeat Denmark (1864), then in concert with Italy attacked Austria (1866), and finally defeated France (1870-1), achieving in the process the unification of Germany, which would gradually win over the loyalty of most German liberals.
Under the guise of idealism giving way to realism, German nationalism rapidly shifts from its liberal and democratic character in 1848 to Bismarck's authoritarian realpolitik. The same trend is even evident in Italy, where the Italian nationalism of Garibaldi and Mazzini gives way to the conservative modernization of Cavour. These statesmen belong with period framed by the Stein-Hardenberg reforms to the end of the First World War and. Similarly, Japan would follow a course of conservative modernization from the fall of the Tokugwa Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration to 1918 along with Cavour's Italy. In fact, Japan issued a commission in 1882 to study various governmental structures throughout the world and were particularly impressed by Bismarck's Germany, issuing a constitution in 1889 that formed a premiership with powers analogous to Bismarck's position as chancellor with a cabinet responsible to the emperor alone.
Germany, along with the other authoritarian governments of Italy and Japan, acquired some democratic features: notably a parliament with limited powers. One factor, but only one, in the social anatomy of these governments has been the retention of a very substantial share in political power by the landed elite, due to the absence of a revolutionary breakthrough by the peasants in combination with urban areas.
In Prussia, this would be accomplished by the constitution of The North German Confederation in 1866. Prussian premier Otto von Bismarck acquired Schleswig-Holstein after defeating Denmark with the help of Austria in a short war fought during 1864. In 1866, he attacked and defeated Austria in the Battle of Königgratz, which, in the same year, allowed him to form the North German Confederation excluding Austria, the direct successor of the 1871 Empire. The 1866 North German Constitution, later the 1871 constitution of the German Empire with some adjustments, which was prepared in broad outline by Otto von Bismarck, the consummate conservative modernizer himself. Although, the confederation, when adopted by the states that had supported Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War, provided for a lower house (Reichstag) elected by direct manhood suffrage, it also included the federal council (Bundesrat) of deputies from the states. Behind the constitutional façade, Prussia exercised predominant influence in both bodies with executive power was vested in the Kaiser, appointed the federal chancellor: Otto von Bismarck. While the minor states retained their own governments, but the military forces were controlled by the federal government.
Germany's semi-parliamentary government carried out a relatively smooth economic and political revolution from above that pushed them to the along the way of becoming the world's leading industrial power. Not only German manufacturers capture German markets from English imports, by the 1870s, British manufactures in the staple industries of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to experience real competition abroad. Industrialization progressed dynamically in Germany and the United States, allowing them to clearly prevail over the old French and English capitalisms. The German textiles and metal industries, for example, had by the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War surpassed those of Britain in organization and technical efficiency and usurped British manufactures in the domestic market. By the turn of the century, the German metals and engineering industries would be producing heavily for the free trade market of Britain—what was once "workshop of the world" as well.
Carrying out many of the same tasks that would have been brought to fruition with the help of a revolution from below, the ultimate effects of conservative modernization are distinct. With real political power still in the hands of the aristocracy, Germany’s semi-parliamentary, along with those of Italy and Japan, sought preserve as much of the original social framework as they could, even as the economic base of the landowners rapidly diminished in comparison to industry, fitting large sections into the building wherever possible. The Second Reich, was followed a prolonged period of conservative and even authoritarian government. The leadership must have at hand or be able to construct a sufficiently powerful bureaucratic apparatus, including the agencies of repression, the military and the police. The rationalization of the political order was also necessary, breaking up established territorial units, such as the independent city-states and principalities in Germany and Italy. But in place a strong central government would have to establish strong authority and uniform administrative system, and a more or less uniform law code managed to create a sufficiently powerful military machine to be able to make the wishes of its rulers felt in the arena of international politics.
One of the by-products of conservative modernization was militarism. To unite the upper classes—both the military-aristocracy and industrialists; militarism offered proved necessary to continue modernization without changing socio-political structures. Each of the elites in the ruling coalition of the Second Reich found some advantages in formal, overseas expansion: mammoth monopolies wanted imperial support to secure overseas investments against competition and domestic political tensions abroad; bureaucrats wanted more occupations, military officers desired promotion, and the traditional but waning landed gentry wanted formal titles. Observing the rise of trade unionism, socialism, and other protest movements during an era of mass society in both Europe and later North America, the elite in particular was able to utilize nationalistic imperialism to co-opt the support of the industrial working class. Riding the sentiments of the late nineteenth century Romantic Age, imperialism inculcated the masses with glorious neo-aristocratic virtues and helped instill broad, nationalist sentiments. Thus, Prussia—heir to the garrison state built up by figures such as Kaiser Fredrick Wilhelm I and Fredrick the Great in the eighteenth century—managed to create a sufficiently powerful military machine not only able of challenging rivals on the continent such as Austria and France, but to make its presence known in the arena of international politics. And Prussia, of course, unlike the powers to its West had little power outside the continent in the past, lacking an overseas colonial history completely.
German imperialists, for instance, argued that Britain's world power position gave the British unfair advantages on international markets, thus limiting Germany’s economic growth and threatening its security. Many European statesmen and industrialists wanted to accelerate the Scramble for Africa, securing colonies before they strictly needed them. Their reasoning was that markets might soon become glutted, and a nation’s economic survival depend on its being able to offload its surplus products elsewhere. In response, British imperialists, such as Joseph Chamberlain, thus concluded that formal that formal imperialism was necessary for Britain because of the relative decline of its share of the world's export trade and the rise of German, American, and French economic competition.
Economic trends certainly played a major role, explaining why statesmen from Jules Ferry to Francesco Crispi sought new roles for the emerging powers that they led, especially during the Great Depression of 1873, but shifts in the European balance of power are what ultimately facilitated formal overseas expansionism. With the reactionary continental order established by the Congress of Vienna shattered, the allure of imperialism was an option beyond the traditional great powers of France and Britain. The new nation states of Germany and Italy were no longer embroiled in continental concerns and domestic disputes as they were before the Franco-Prussian War, which took the form of Cavour's attack of Austria in 1859, The Prusso-Danish War (1864), The Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). After Bismarck provoked France, the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and the southern German states, viewing France as the aggressor, joined the North German Confederation. France suffered a humiliating defeat, and Wilhelm I was crowned German Emperor in Versailles in 1871.
The modernizing nationalism of Italian figures such as Cavour, Italy's Bismarck (itself a reaction to revolution from below and the democratic nationalism of figures like Mazzini and Garibaldi) strongly favored modernization, which was associated with the British. Italian, and to a lesser extent French imperialism was often motivated by the desire to catch up with Britain economically and culturally.
Thus, Bismarck, once openly uninterested in overseas adventurism, was eventually brought to realize the value of colonies for securing (in his words) "new markets for German industry, the expansion of trade, and a new field for German, activity, civilization, and capital". The absolutist Central Powers, led by a newly unified, dynamically industrializing Germany, with its expanding navy, doubling in size between the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War, were strategic threats to the markets and security more established Allied powers and Russia. German colonial efforts from 1884 brought only a small overseas empire compared to those of Britain and France. The subsequent German foreign policy initiatives (notably the initiation of a large battle fleet under the naval laws of 1898 and 1900) drove Britain into diplomatic alignment (the Entente) with a Franco-Russian alliance already in the offing at the time of Bismarck's fall.
Bismarck's rule, of reactionary co-optation and coercion, and his perpetuation of Junker virtues of militarism, hierarchy, and autocracy—intensified by and the reign of far more militaristic Kaiser Wilhelm II—would contribute to the political culture in which Nazism found significant support-bases. This should raise questions over their true roles in history, despite the era of progress and prosperity over which they presided. Under Bismarck, much of this entails his strategies to suppress Catholic and socialist opposition while promoting militaristic Prussianism. As a result, in Germany, as in Japan and Italy, later attempts to extend democracy would succeed in establishing unstable democracies (the Weimar Republic, Japan in the twenties, and Italy from the end of World War I to the 1922 appointment of Mussolini as premier by Victor Emmanuel III). Each of these constitutional democracies could not to cope with the severe problems of the day and the reluctance or inability to bring about fundamental structural changes.
Bismarck's domestic policies played a great role in forging the authoritarian political culture of the Second Reich. Less preoccupied by continental power politics following unification in 1871, he devoted much of his attention afterward to the cause of national unity and achieving this under the ideology of Prussianism. Following incorporation of the Catholic states in the south, Catholicism was seemingly the principal threat to Bismarck's military-aristocratic Prussian nationalism.
The Kulturkampf and the suppression of socialism greatly paralleled each other under the autocratic state. Catholic conservatism, conceptualized by the reactionary turn of the Vatican under Pope Pius IX, and working class radicalism, conceptualized by socialism, in many ways both reacted to different types of social dislocation associated with industrialization, especially accelerated after unification. Southern Catholics, hailing from a much more agrarian base and falling under the ranks of the peasantry, artisans, guildsmen, clergy, and princely aristocracies of the small states more often than their Protestant counterparts in the North, initially had trouble competing with industrial efficiency and the opening of outside trade by the Zollverein. The reactionary turn against many Catholics in the South, such as in the Sileasian weavers revolt of 1844, paralleled those put forward by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which reacted to the appalling working conditions of industrial capitalism and the further squeezing of the working class brought by the Long Depression after 1873.
Bismarck, in his autocratic suppression of the SPD after 1878 (when began focusing his autocratic fits on the socialists rather than the Catholics) and the Kulturkampf, sought to suppress two movements that voiced the concerns of very different segments of German society concerning the dislocations brought by a rapid shift from an agrarian-based economy to modern industrial capitalism under reactionary tutelage.
In the end, the struggle against socialism would unite Bismarck with the Catholic Centre Party, bringing an end to the Kulturkampf, which led to far greater Catholic unrest than existed beforehand. But to contain the working class, Bismarck’s reluctant creation of a remarkably advanced welfare state would give the working class a stake in German nationalism as well.
Although authoritarian in many respects, the empire permitted the development of political parties, and Bismarck was credited with passing the most advanced social welfare legislation of the age. While out and out suppression failed to contain both socialists and Catholics, Bismarck's "carrot and stick" approach significantly mollified opposition from both groups.
Despite advances in industry and science under the Second Reich, Germany remained a despotism due to its militaristic inclinations and having achieved its unification by "blood and iron". The armed forces, inculcated in the militarism of the Prussian Junkers—the glorification of war, and supreme and unquestioning loyalty to the state, leader, and hierarchy—remained passionately loyal to the Hohenzollern dynasty. The values of Prussia’s repressive "garrison state", grounded in Prussia’s repressive system of agriculture since the defeat of the Teutonic Knights, would be carried to a new extreme under the Third Reich.
Prussianism caught on because prosperity satisfied the old support base of the middle class liberals, and the state was solicitous of the material welfare for many eventually won over—including the working class. German education emerged strong in vocational fields as well as propaganda. From the side of the landed aristocracy came the conceptions of inherent superiority in the ruling class and a sensitivity to matters of status, prominent traits well into the twentieth century. Fed by new sources, these conceptions could later be vulgarized and made appealing to the German population as a whole in doctrines of racial superiority. The royal bureaucracy introduced, against considerable aristocratic resistance, the ideal of complete and unreflecting obedience to an institution over and above class and individual.
Long before the Second Reich, however, Germany’s agricultural base had been dominated by repressive means rather than through the market. German peasants were not only under the repressive watch of their landowners, but grounded in village and work structures that favor solidarity, diminishing their revolutionary potential. Thus, in the realm of propaganda, the Junkers established the generally successful Agrarian League in 1894, laying the groundwork for Nazi doctrine. The league sought the support peasants in non-Junker areas of smaller farms, inculcating them in fuhrer worship, the idea of a corporative state, militarism, anti-Semitism . They would also make the distinction between "predatory" and "productive" capital used by the Nazi, which were devices used to appeal to anticapitalist sentiments among the peasantry.
This "Second Reich" flourished under Bismarck's guidance until the Kaiser's death (March 1888). His son and successor only lived 88 days, leaving the crown to a young and impetuous Wilhelm II, who forced Bismarck out of office in March 1890.
Within Germany, the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) rose to become for a time the strongest socialist party in the world, winning a third of the votes in the January 1912 elections to the Reichstag (imperial parliament). Government nevertheless remained in the hands of a succession of conservative coalitions supported by right-wing liberals or Catholic clericals and heavily dependent on the Kaiser's favour.
The shaky European balance of power broke down when Austria-Hungary, Germany's ally since 1879, declared war on Serbia (July 1914) after the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne. Serbia was supported by Russia, which in turn was allied with France. Following Russia's decision for general mobilisation (i.e. against both Austria-Hungary and Germany) Germany declared war on both Russia and France in what it called a preventive strike.
This was the beginning of World War I. Despite early successes, Germany and its allies suffered military defeat in the face of an enemy strengthened after 1917 by the intervention of the United States. The Kaiser Wilhelm II was driven into exile (November 1918) by a revolution led by elements of the opposition SPD and communist groups, who later organised their own abortive bid for power (January 1919).
In June 1919, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended the war. It was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the same place where the Second Reich had been proclaimed nearly half a century before. Germany lost territories to France, Belgium, and the reinstated nation of Poland, and elsewhere, and was required to pay reparations for its alleged responsibility for the war.
Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
For details, see the main Weimar Republic article.
The postwar Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was an attempt to establish a peaceful, liberal democratic regime in Germany. However, government was severely handicapped and eventually doomed by economic problems and the inherent weakness of the Weimar state.
In the early years, successive revolts from both left and right (1919-1923) and hyperinflation in 1923 had to be defeated. Over the following years conditions improved with the relaxation of reparation payments and improved relations with Germany's former enemies. A succession of coalition governments restored a substantial degree of order and prosperity until the onset of the Great Depression in 1930.
The new economic decline combined with memories of the 1923 hyperinflation and nationalist opposition stemming from the draconian conditions of the Treaty of Versailles undermined the Weimar government from inside and out. Adolf Hitler and his "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (NSDAP, or Nazis) capitalized on this and on the growing unemployment. Stressing nationalist and racial themes and promising to put the unemployed back to work, the Nazis blamed many of Germany's ills on alleged Jewish conspiracies, even claiming that the first World War was lost because of treason from within (the so-called Dolchstoßlegende).
Nazism's Rise and Defeat (1933-1945)
For details, see the main Nazi Germany article.
After the NSDAP had gained the relative majority of the popular vote in two 1932 general elections, Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler (Chancellor) by President Paul von Hindenburg on January 30, 1933, with the help of monarchists, industrial magnats and conservatives like the Nationalist Party (DNVP). After Hindenburg's death (August 1934), Hitler combined the presidency and chancellorship as Führer (leader) of Germany. Once in power, Hitler and his party first undermined then abolished democratic institutions and opposition parties as they established their "Third Reich"; see Gleichschaltung for details.
In six years, the Nazi regime prepared the country (see Nazi Germany) for World War II and enforced discriminatory laws against Jews and others of alleged non-German origin. The Nazi leadership attempted to remove or subjugate the Jewish population in Germany and later in the occupied countries through forced deportation and, ultimately, genocide known as the Holocaust. A similar policy applied to the Roma and Sinti.
After annexing first Austria (March 1938) and then the Sudeten border country of Czechoslovakia (October 1938), and taking over the rest of the Czech lands as a "Reich protectorate") (March 1939), Germany in September 1939 invaded Danzig Harbor Westerplatte, by then a military point of Poland, initiating World War II.
By 1945, Germany and its Axis partners (Italy and Japan) were defeated by the Allied forces of the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Much of Europe lay in ruins, tens of millions of people had been killed, the majority of them civilians, like the six million Jews killed in concentration camps and the countless millions of Russians in conquered territories. World War II resulted in the destruction of Germany's political and economic infrastructures, led to its division, considerable loss of territory in the East and left a humiliating legacy.
Post-war Germany (1945-1949)
At the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, after Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, the Allies divided Germany into four military occupation zones -- French in the southwest, British in the northwest, United States in the south, and Soviet in the east. The intended governing body was called the Allied Control Council. The commanders-in-chief exercised supreme authority in their respective zones and acted in concert on questions affecting the whole country. France was later given a separate zone of occupation. Berlin, which lay in the Soviet sector, was also divided into four sectors.
As another result of the Potsdam Conference, territories east of the Oder-Neisse line (East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia) were removed from Germany and put under Soviet and Polish administration; this administration was originally intended to last until a final peace treaty was to be signed, which however did not happen until 1990. A transfer of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary was agreed on, but the countries were urged to stop the expulsions of these Heimatvertriebene.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union had agreed at Potsdam to a broad program of decentralization, treating Germany as a single economic unit with some central administrative departments. These plans broke down in 1948 with the emergence of the Cold War. The Western powers were concerned about the deterioating economic situation in their zones; the American Marshall Plan economic aid was extended to Western Germany and a currency reform introduced the Deutsche Mark and halted rampant inflation there. The Soviets had not agreed to this currency reform and withdrew in March 1948 from the four-power governing bodies and initiated the Berlin blockade in June 1948, blocking all ground transport routes between the FRG and Berlin. The western allies replied with a continuous airlift of supplies to the western half of the city. The Soviets ended the blockade after 15 months.
In 1949, the Western occupied zones were established as the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or West Germany). The Soviet Zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany).
West Germany was allied with the United States of America, the UK and France. A western capitalist country with a so-called social market economy, the country enjoyed prolonged economic growth following the currency reform of June 1948 and US assistance through Marshall Aid (1948-1951).
East Germany was at first occupied by and later (May 1955) allied with the Soviet Union. An authoritarian country with a Soviet-style economy, East Germany soon became the richest, most advanced country in the Soviet bloc, but many of its citizens looked to the West for political freedoms and economic prosperity.
Political Developments in West Germany
The United States and the United Kingdom moved to establish a nucleus for a future German government by creating a central Economic Council for their two zones. The program later provided for a West German constituent assembly, an occupation statute governing relations between the Allies and the German authorities, and the political and economic merger of the French with the British and American zones.
On May 23, 1949, the Basic Law, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, was promulgated. Following elections in August, the first federal government was formed on September 20, 1949, by Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Party. The next day, the occupation statute came into force, granting powers of self-government with certain exceptions.
The FRG quickly progressed toward fuller sovereignty and association with its European neighbors and the Atlantic community. The London and Paris agreements of 1954 restored full sovereignty (with some exceptions) to the FRG in May 1955 and opened the way for German membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In April 1951 the FRG joined with France, Italy and the Benelux countries in the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union first established as the European Economic Community in March 1957
West German Rearmament
The outbreak of war in Korea (June 1950) led to U.S. calls for the rearmanent of West Germany in order to defend western Europe from the perceived Soviet threat. But the memory of German aggression led other European states to seek tight control over the West German military. Germany's partners in the Coal and Steel Community decided to establish a European Defence Commuity (EDC), with an integrated army, navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of its member states. The West German military would be subject to complete EDC control, but the other EDC member states (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) would cooperate in the EDC while maintaining independent control of their own armed forces.
Though the EDC treaty was signed (May 1952), it never entered into force. France's Gaullists it on the grounds that it threatened national sovereignty, and when the French National Assembly refused to ratify it (August 1954), the treaty died. Other means then had to be found to allow West German rearmament. In response, the Brussels Treaty was modified to include West Germany, and to form the Western European Union (WEU). West Germany was to be permitted to rearm, and have full sovereign control of its military; the WEU would however regulate the size of the armed forces permitted to each of its member states. Fears of a return to Nazism, however, soon receded, and as a consequence these provisions of the WEU treaty have little effect today.
The three Western Allies retained occupation powers in Berlin and certain responsibilities for Germany as a whole. Under the new arrangements, the Allies stationed troops within the FRG for NATO defense, pursuant to stationing and status-of-forces agreements. With the exception of 45,000 French troops, Allied forces were under NATO's joint defense command. (France withdrew from the collective military command structure of NATO in 1966.)
Political life in the FRG was remarkably stable and orderly. The Adenauer era (1949-63) was followed by a brief period under Ludwig Erhard (1963-66) who, in turn, was replaced by Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1966-69). All governments between 1949 and 1966 were formed by the united caucus of the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU), either alone or in coalition with the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP).
Kiesinger's 1966-69 "Grand Coalition" included the FRG's two largest parties, CDU/CSU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the 1969 election, the SPD -- headed by Willy Brandt -- gained enough votes to form a coalition government with the FDP. Chancellor Brandt remained head of government until May 1974, when he resigned after a senior member of his staff was uncovered as a spy for the East German intelligence service.
Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt (SPD) formed a government and received the unanimous support of coalition members. He served as Chancellor from 1974 to 1982. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a leading FDP official, became Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Schmidt, a strong supporter of the European Community (EC) and the Atlantic alliance, emphasized his commitment to "the political unification of Europe in partnership with the USA".
In October 1982, the SPD-FDP coalition fell apart when the FDP joined forces with the CDU/CSU to elect CDU Chairman Helmut Kohl as Chancellor in a Constructive Vote of No Confidence. Following national elections in March 1983, Kohl emerged in firm control of both the government and the CDU. The CDU/CSU fell just short of an absolute majority, due to the entry into the Bundestag of the Greens, who received 5.6% of the vote.
In January 1987, the Kohl-Genscher government was returned to office, but the FDP and the Greens gained at the expense of the larger parties. Kohl's CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, slipped from 48.8% of the vote in 1983 to 44.3%. The SPD fell to 37%; long-time SPD Chairman Brandt subsequently resigned in April 1987 and was succeeded by Hans-Jochen Vogel. The FDP's share rose from 7% to 9.1%, its best showing since 1980. The Greens' share rose to 8.3% from their 1983 share of 5.6%.
Political Developments in East Germany
In the Soviet zone, the Social Democratic Party was forced to merge with the Communist Party in April 1946 to form a new party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The October 1946 elections resulted in coalition governments in the five Land (state) parliaments with the SED as the undisputed leader.
A series of people's congresses were called in 1948 and early 1949 by the SED. Under Soviet direction, a constitution was drafted on May 30, 1949, and adopted on October 7, which was celebrated as the day when the German Democratic Republic was proclaimed. The People's Chamber (Volkskammer)--the lower house of the GDR Parliament--and an upper house--the States Chamber (Laenderkammer)--were created. (The Laenderkammer was abolished in 1958.) On October 11, 1949, the two houses elected Wilhelm Pieck as President, and a SED government was set up. The Soviet Union and its East European allies immediately recognized the GDR, although it remained largely unrecognized by noncommunist countries until 1972-73.
The GDR established the structures of a single-party, centralized, communist state. On July 23, 1952, the traditional Laender were abolished and, in their place, 14 Bezirke (districts) were established. Effectively, all government control was in the hands of the SED, and almost all important government positions were held by SED members.
The National Front was an umbrella organization nominally consisting of the SED, four other political parties controlled and directed by the SED, and the four principal mass organizations-- youth, trade unions, women, and culture. However, control was clearly and solely in the hands of the SED. Balloting in GDR elections was not secret. As in other Soviet bloc countries, electoral participation was consistently high, with nearly unanimous candidate approval.
Inter-German Relations
The constant stream of East Germans fleeing to West Germany placed great strains on FRG-GDR relations in the 1950s. The GDR sealed the borders to the FRG in 1952, but people continued to flee from East to West Berlin. On August 13, 1961, the GDR began building the Berlin Wall through the center of the city to slow the flood of refugees to a trickle. The Berlin Wall became the symbol of the cold war and the division of Europe.
In 1969, Chancellor Brandt announced that the FRG would remain firmly rooted in the Atlantic alliance but would intensify efforts to improve relations with Eastern Europe and the GDR. The FRG commenced this Ostpolitik by negotiating nonaggression treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
The FRG's relations with the GDR posed particularly difficult questions. Though anxious to relieve serious hardships for divided families and to reduce friction, the FRG under Brandt was intent on holding to its concept of "two German states in one German nation." Relations improved, however, and in September 1973, the FRG and the GDR were admitted to the United Nations. The two Germanys exchanged permanent representatives in 1974, and, in 1987, GDR head of state Erich Honecker paid an official visit to the FRG.
German Unification
During the summer of 1989, rapid changes took place in the GDR, which ultimately led to German unification. Growing numbers of East Germans emigrated to the FRG via Hungary after the Hungarians decided not to use force to stop them. Thousands of East Germans also tried to reach the West by staging sit-ins at FRG diplomatic facilities in other East European capitals. The exodus generated demands within the GDR for political change, and mass demonstrations in several cities--particularly in Leipzig--continued to grow. On October 7, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Berlin to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the GDR and urged the East German leadership to pursue reform.
On October 18, Erich Honecker resigned as head of the SED and as head of state and was replaced by Egon Krenz. But the exodus continued unabated, and pressure for political reform mounted. On November 4, a demonstration in East Berlin drew as many as 1 million East Germans. Finally, on November 9, the Berlin Wall was opened, and East Germans were allowed to travel freely. Thousands poured through the wall into the western sectors of Berlin, and on November 12, the GDR began dismantling it.
On November 28, FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl outlined a 10-point plan for the peaceful unification of the two Germanys based on free elections in the GDR and a unification of their two economies. In December, the GDR Volkskammer eliminated the SED monopoly on power, and the entire Politburo and Central Committee--including Krenz--resigned. The SED changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the formation and growth of numerous political groups and parties marked the end of the communist system. Prime Minister Hans Modrow headed a caretaker government which shared power with the new, democratically oriented parties. On December 7, 1989, agreement was reached to hold free elections in May 1990 and rewrite the GDR constitution. On January 28, all the parties agreed to advance the elections to March 18, primarily because of an erosion of state authority and because the East German exodus was continuing apace; more than 117,000 left in January and February 1990.
In early February 1990, the Modrow government's proposal for a unified, neutral German state was rejected by Chancellor Kohl, who affirmed that a unified Germany must be a member of NATO. Finally, on March 18, the first free elections were held in the GDR, and a government led by Lothar de Maizière (CDU) was formed under a policy of expeditious unification with the FRG. The freely elected representatives of the Volkskammer held their first session on April 5, and the GDR peacefully evolved from a communist to a democratically elected government. Free and secret communal (local) elections were held in the GDR on May 6, and the CDU again won. On July 1, the two Germanys entered into an economic and monetary union.
Four Power Control Ends
During 1990, in parallel with internal German developments, the Four Powers--the United States, U.K., France, and the Soviet Union--together with the two German states negotiated to end Four Power reserved rights for Berlin and Germany as a whole. These "Two-plus-Four" negotiations were mandated at the Ottawa Open Skies conference on February 13, 1990. The six foreign ministers met four times in the ensuing months in Bonn (May 5), Berlin (June 22), Paris (July 17), and Moscow (September 12). The Polish Foreign Minister participated in the part of the Paris meeting that dealt with the Polish-German borders.
Of key importance was overcoming Soviet objections to a united Germany's membership in NATO. This was accomplished in July when the alliance, led by President Bush, issued the London Declaration on a transformed NATO. On July 16, President Gorbachev and Chancellor Kohl announced agreement in principle on a united Germany in NATO. This cleared the way for the signing in Moscow on September 12 of the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany. In addition to terminating Four Power rights, the treaty mandated the withdrawal of all Soviet forces from Germany by the end of 1994, made clear that the current borders were final and definitive, and specified the right of a united Germany to belong to NATO. It also provided for the continued presence of British, French, and American troops in Berlin during the interim period of the Soviet withdrawal. In the treaty, the Germans renounced nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and stated their intention to reduce German armed forces to 370,000 within 3 to 4 years after the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, signed in Paris on November 19, 1990, entered into force.
Conclusion of the final settlement cleared the way for unification of the FRG and GDR. Formal political union occurred on October 3, 1990, with the accession (in accordance with Article 23 of the FRG's Basic Law) of the five Laender which had been reestablished in the GDR. On December 2, 1990, all-German elections were held for the first time since 1933. In fact, accession meant that East Germany was annexed by West Germany, as the new country kept the name Bundesrepublik Deutschland, used the West German "Deutsche Mark" for currency, and the capital remained at Bonn for the time being. Around 1994 it was moved back to Berlin, where it had been before World War II. Now the main administrative bodies are situated in Berlin.
Today Germany is doing fairly well economically, being the world's third-largest economy (behind the USA and Japan). It is among the top 5 countries in Internet access worldwide. Many Germans speak English and/or French, in addition to High German and their local dialect of German (of which there are many).