Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (106 page)

The influence of this exalted conception of the state was felt so widely that it bestowed a distinctive flavour on Prussian political and social thought. In his
Proletariat and Society
(1848), Lorenz Stein, one of Hegel’s most gifted pupils, observed that Prussia, unlike either France or Britain, possessed a state that was sufficiently independent and authoritative to intervene in the interest-conflicts of civil society, thereby preventing revolution and safeguarding all the members of society from the ‘dictatorship’ of any one interest. It was thus incumbent upon Prussia to fulfil its mission as a ‘monarchy of social reform’. A closely affiliated position was that of the influential conservative ‘state socialist’ Carl Rodbertus, who argued in the 1830s and 1840s that a society based upon the property principle alone would always exclude the propertyless from true membership – only a collectivized authoritarian state could weld the members of society into an inclusive and meaningful whole.
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Rodbertus’s arguments influenced in turn the thinking of Hermann Wagener, editor of the ultra-conservative
Neue Preussische Zeitung
(known as the
Kreuzzeitung
because it bore a large black iron cross on its banner). Even that most romantic of conservatives, Ludwig von Gerlach, viewed the state as the only institution capable of bestowing a sense of purpose and identity upon the masses of the population.
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For many protagonists of this tradition, it appeared self-evident that the state must take a more or less limited responsibility for the material welfare of the governed. Among the most influential later nineteenth-century readers of Lorenz Stein was the historian Gustav Schmoller, who coined the term ‘social policy’ (
Sozialpolitik
) to convey the right and obligation of the state to intervene in support of the most vulnerable members of society; to leave society to regulate its own affairs, Schmoller argued, was to invite chaos.
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Schmoller was closely associated with the economist and ‘state socialist’ Adolph Wagner, who took up a professorial chair at the University of Berlin in 1870. Wagner, a keen student of Rodbertus’s writings, was among the founding members of
the Association for Social Policy founded in 1872, an important early forum for debate on the social obligations of the state. Wagner and Schmoller exemplified the outlook of the ‘young historical school’ that flourished in the soil of the Hegelian-Prussian tradition.
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Their belief in the redemptive social mission of the state resonated widely in a political environment troubled by the pains of the recession that set in from 1873 and looking for alternatives to a liberal doctrine of laissezfaire that appeared to have exhausted its credibility. So strong was the intellectual pull of social policy that it attracted a highly diverse constituency, including National Liberals, Centre Party leaders, state socialists and conservative figures close to Bismarck, including the
Kreuzzeitung
editor Hermann Wagener, who advised Bismarck on social matters in the 1860s and 1870s.
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The scene was thus set long in advance for the pioneering Bismarckian social legislation of the 1880s. The medical insurance law of 15 June 1883 created a network of local insurance providers who dispensed funds from income generated by a combination of worker and employer contributions. The accident insurance law of 1884 made arrangements for the administration of insurance in cases of illness and work-related injury. The last of the three foundational pillars of German social legislation came in 1889, with the age and invalidity insurance law. These provisions were quantitatively small by present-day standards, the payments involved extremely modest, and the scope of the new provisions far from comprehensive – the law of 1883, for example, did not apply to rural workers. At no point did the social legislation of the Empire come close to reversing the trend towards increased economic inequality in Prussian or German society. It is clear, moreover, that Bismarck’s motives were narrowly manipulative and pragmatic. His chief concern was to win the working classes back to the Prussian-German ‘social monarchy’ and thereby cripple the growing Social Democratic movement.

But to personalize the issue is to miss the point. Bismarck’s support for social insurance was, after all, merely one articulation of a broader ‘discourse coalition’ with deep cultural and historical roots. In this congenial ideological setting, the provisions available under the state insurance laws swiftly expanded, to the point where they did begin to have an appreciable impact on the welfare of workers, and perhaps even, as Bismarck had hoped, a mollifying effect on their politics.
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The
momentum of reform continued into the early 1890s, when the new administration under William II and Chancellor Caprivi enacted labour laws that brought progress in the areas of industrial safety, working conditions, youth protection and arbitration. The principle they embodied, namely that ‘entrepreneurial forces must respect the state-endorsed interests of all groups’, remained a dominant theme in imperial and Prussian social policy during the following decades.
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By the eve of the First World War, the Prussian state was big. Between the 1880s and 1913, it expanded to encompass over 1 million employees. According to an assessment published in 1913, the Prussian ministry of public works was ‘the largest employer in the world’. The Prussian railways administration alone employed 310,000 workers and the state-controlled mining sector a further 180,000. Across all sectors, the Prussian state offered cutting-edge social services, including unemployment and accident insurance and medical protection schemes. In a speech of 1904, the Prussian minister of public works, Hermann Friedrich von Budde, a former cadet and staff officer, declared before the Prussian Chamber of Deputies that a large part of his work was devoted to the welfare of his public workers. The ultimate purpose of Prussia’s public sector employers, he added, was ‘to solve the social question by means of social provision [
Fürsorge
]’.
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Here was a Prussia that might survive the débâcle of the Hohenzollern monarchy with its legitimacy intact.

At the end of October 1918, sailors in Kiel harbour (Schleswig-Holstein) mutinied when they were ordered to put to sea for a futile attack on the British Grand Fleet. As the sailors took control of the naval base, the commander, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, was forced to flee in disguise. A wave of strikes and military rebellions spread across the country, engulfing all the major cities. The revolution quickly acquired its own novel political organizations –‘councils’ elected locally by workers and servicemen across the country to articulate the demands of those broad sectors of the population that had withdrawn their allegiance from the monarchical system and its doomed war effort. This was not, as one contemporary observer noted, an upheaval of the French type, in which the capital city visits revolution upon the provinces; it was more like a Viking invasion spreading inwards ‘like a patch of oil’ from the coast.
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One after another, the local and provincial Prussian administrations capitulated without complaint to the insurgents.

At around two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday 9 November, Philipp Scheidemann, speaking for the Social Democrats who had just formed a provisional national government, announced to cheering crowds from the balcony of the Reichstag building in Berlin that ‘the old rotten order, the monarchy, has collapsed. Long live the new! Long live the German Republic!’ When the art critic and diarist Harry Kessler entered the Reichstag building at ten o’clock in the evening of 9 November, he found ‘a colourful hubbub’; sailors, armed civilians, women, soldiers thronged up and down the stairways. Groups of soldiers and sailors, some standing, some lying on the thick red carpet, others
stretched out asleep on the benches that lined the walls, were scattered round the great hall. It was, Kessler recalled, like a film scene from the Russian Revolution.
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Here, as in all revolutions, the mobilized public demonstrated its prowess by the festive usurpation of formerly privileged space. The Prussian civil servant Herbert du Mesnil, a descendant of Prussian Huguenot colonists, experienced a similar sense of displacement on the evening of 8 November, when a band of insurgents invaded his club in Koblenz. Their leader, a soldier on horseback, clattered around the finely appointed ground-floor rooms of the club, while the diners, most of them officers of Prussian reserve regiments stationed in the town, looked on in astonishment.
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It seemed unlikely at first that the state of Prussia would survive the upheaval. The Hohenzollern Crown was no longer there to provide the diverse lands of the Prussian patrimony with a unifying focal point. In the Rhineland, moreover, there were calls in the Catholic press for separation from Berlin.
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In December 1918, a manifesto demanding territorial autonomy issued by the German-Hanoverian party attracted 600,000 signatures.
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In the eastern provinces, Polish demands for a national restoration erupted on Boxing Day 1918 in an insurrection against the German authorities across the province of Posen and the fighting there soon escalated into a full-scale guerrilla campaign.
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There were good reasons, moreover, to suppose that the new Germany might be better off without Prussia. Even after the territorial annexations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles,
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Prussia remained by far the largest German state. The memory of Prussian dominance within the old Empire suggested that the state’s disproportionate size might prove a burden upon the new German Republic. A report prepared by the Reich Interior Ministry under the direction of the liberal constitutional lawyer Hugo Preuss in December 1918 observed that it made no sense to retain the existing state boundaries within Germany, because these bore no relation to geography or convenience and were ‘merely the coincidental constructions of a purely dynastic policy’. The report concluded that the end of Prussian hegemony over Germany must mean the dismemberment of Prussia.
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Yet the Prussian state survived. The moderate Social Democratic leadership clung to a policy of continuity and stability. This meant, among other things, putting aside their doctrinal commitment to a unitary republican state and preserving the still functioning structures of
the Prussian administration. On 12 November 1918, the revolutionary Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Greater Berlin issued an order to the effect that all administrative offices at communal, provincial and state level were to continue operating. On the following day, the council issued a manifesto under the rubric ‘To the Prussian People!’ announcing that the new authorities intended to transform the ‘thoroughly reactionary Prussia of the past’ into a ‘completely democratic people’s republic’. And on 14 November, a coalition Prussian government was formed, comprising representatives of the SPD and the left-wing socialist Independent SPD (USPD). Civil servants facilitated this transition at the local level by assuring the workers’ and soldiers’ councils that their loyalty was not to the defunct monarchy, but to the Prussian state now under revolutionary custodianship.
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The national revolutionary leadership had no principled objection to the continued existence of the Prussian state.
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There was little support for Preuss’s proposal that Prussia be dismembered to make way for a more strictly centralized national structure. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the SPD and USPD ministers who now exercised joint control over Prussia soon acquired a sense of ownership over the state and became strong opponents of centralization. Even the national Council of People’s Representatives rejected Preuss’s view (with the exception of the leader and later president Friedrich Ebert, a native of Baden).
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Social Democrats also saw Prussian unity as the best antidote to separatist strivings in the Rhineland. They feared that secession from Prussia would ultimately mean secession from Germany itself. In view of French designs in the west and Polish annexationist objectives in the east, they argued, autonomist experiments would only play into the hands of Germany’s enemies. Germany’s security and cohesion as a federal state therefore depended on the integrity of Prussia. This break with the unitarist tradition of the German left removed one of the main threats to the state’s existence.

None of this meant that Prussia could resume the hegemonial position it had occupied within the old Empire. To be sure, the Prussian administration was still the largest in Germany; the Prussian school system remained the model for all the German states, and the Prussian police force was, after the Reichswehr, the most important power instrument in the Weimar Republic. National legislation could not be implemented without the collaboration of the Prussian state, provincial and local
bureaucracies.
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But Prussia no longer possessed the means to wield direct influence over the other German states. There was now a national German executive entirely separate from the Prussian government; the personal union between German chancellor and Prussian minister-president, so crucial to the wielding of Prussian influence in the imperial era, became a thing of the past. For the first time, moreover, Germany possessed a genuinely national army (subject to the limitations imposed by the Versailles Treaty) with a ministerial executive independent of Prussian control. The fiscal dualism of the old Empire, in which the member states held exclusive control of direct taxation and financed the Reich through a system of matricular contributions, was also done away with. What emerged in its place was a centralized administration in which taxing authority was concentrated in the Reich government and revenues were directed to the states in accordance with their needs. Prussia, along with all the other German states, thus forfeited its fiscal autonomy.
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