Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (96 page)

His Majesty the King of Prussia in the name of the North German Confederation, His Majesty the King of Bavaria, His Majesty the King of Württemberg, His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Baden, His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Hesse [… ] for those parts of the Duchy of Hesse that are south of the River Main, conclude an everlasting federation [
Bund
] for the protection of the territory of the federation and the rights thereof – as well as to care for the welfare of the German people.

In accordance with the notion that the new Empire was a confederation of sovereign principalities (
Fürstenbund
), the member states continued to operate their own parliamentary legislatures and constitutions. The power to set and raise direct taxes rested exclusively with the member states, not with the Reich, whose revenues derived chiefly from indirect levies. There remained a plurality of German crowns and courts, all of which still enjoyed various privileges and traditional dignities. The larger German states even continued to exchange ambassadors with one another, as they had within the old German Confederation. Foreign powers, by the same logic, sent envoys not only to Berlin, but also to Dresden and Munich. There was no reference to the German nation and as yet no official German nationality, though the constitution also obliged the federal states to concede equal citizenship rights to all members of the new Empire.
²

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the new political order – as the constitution defined it – was the weakness of the central authority. This aspect is cast more sharply into relief if we compare it with the abortive imperial constitution drawn up by the liberal lawyers of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848–9. Whereas the Frankfurt constitution set down uniform political principles for the governments of all the individual states, the later document did not. Whereas the Frankfurt constitution envisaged the formation of a ‘Reich Authority’ distinct from those of the member states, the constitution of 16 April 1871 stated that the sovereign German authority was the Federal Council, consisting of ‘representatives of the members of the Federation’.
³
The council determined
what bills were to be brought before the Reichstag, its assent was required before bills could become law, and it was responsible for overseeing the execution of Reich legislation. Every member of the Federation had the right to propose bills and to have them debated in the council. The constitution of 1871 even announced (art. 8) that the Federal Council would form from its own members a range of ‘permanent committees’ with responsibility for a variety of spheres, including foreign affairs, the army and fortresses, and naval matters. An uninitiated reader of the constitution could thus be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that the Federal Council was the true seat, not only of sovereignty, but of political power in the German Empire. This fastidious accommodation of federal rights appeared to leave little room for the exercise of Prussian hegemony.

But constitutions are often unreliable guides to political reality – one thinks of the ‘constitutions’ of the Soviet-bloc states after 1945 with their pious allusions to freedom of the press and opinion. The
Reichsverfassung
of 1871 was no exception. The practical evolution of German politics over the following decades undermined the authority vested in the Federal Council. Although Chancellor Bismarck always insisted that Germany was and remained a ‘confederation of principalities’ (
Fürstenbund
), the constitutional promise of the Council was never fulfilled. The most important reason for this was simply the overwhelming primacy, in military and territorial terms, of Prussia. Within the federation, the state of Prussia, with 65 per cent of the surface area and 62 per cent of the population, enjoyed de facto hegemony. The Prussian army dwarfed the south German military establishments. The King of Prussia was also, as German Emperor under article 63 of the constitution, the supreme commander of the imperial armed forces, and article 61 stipulated that the ‘whole Prussian military code’ was to be ‘introduced throughout the Reich without delay’.

This made a nonsense of any federal pretensions to regulate military affairs through a ‘permanent committee’. Prussia’s dominance also made itself felt within the Federal Council. With the exception of the Hanseatic city-states of Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen, the lesser principalities in central and northern Germany formed a Prussian clientele upon whom pressure could always be applied if necessary. Prussia in its own right possessed only seventeen of the fifty-eight votes on the Council, a smaller portion than its size justified, but since only fourteen votes were needed
to veto draft laws, Prussia was in a position to block unwelcome initiatives from other states. As Prussian minister-president, Prussian foreign minister and imperial chancellor, Bismarck ensured that the federal Committee for Foreign Affairs remained a dead letter, despite the provisions of the constitution under article 8. As a result, the Prussian foreign ministry became in effect the foreign ministry of the German Empire. In the sphere of domestic politics, the Federal Council lacked the bureaucratic machinery necessary for the drafting of laws. This left it dependent upon the large and well-trained Prussian bureaucracy, with the result that the Council came increasingly to function as a body of review for bills which had been formulated and debated by the Prussian ministry of state. The subordinate role of the Federal Council was reflected even in the political architecture of Berlin; lacking a building of its own, it was housed in the imperial chancellery.

The primacy of Prussia was further assured by the relative weakness of imperial administrative institutions. A Reich administration of sorts did emerge during the 1870s as new departments were established to deal with the growing pressure of Reich business, but it remained dependent upon the Prussian administrative structure. The heads of the Reich offices (foreign affairs, interior, justice, postal services, railways, treasury) were not ministers properly speaking, but state secretaries of subordinate rank who answered directly to the imperial chancellor. The Prussian bureaucracy was larger than the Reich’s and remained so until the outbreak of the First World War. Most of the officials employed in the imperial administration were Prussians, but this was not a one-way process in which Prussians swarmed on to the commanding heights of the new German state. It would be truer to say Prussian and German national institutions grew together, intertwining their branches. It became increasingly common, for example, for non-Prussians to serve as imperial officials and even as Prussian ministers. The personnel of the Prussian ministries and the imperial secretariats grew ever more enmeshed.
⁴
By 1914, some 25 per cent of ‘Prussian’ army officers did not possess Prussian citizenship.
⁵

Yet even as the membranes between Prussia and the other German states became more permeable, the residual federalism of the German system ensured that Prussia retained its distinctive political institutions. Of these, the most important in constitutional terms was Prussia’s bicameral legislature. The German Reichstag was elected on the basis of
universal manhood suffrage. By contrast, the lower house of the Prussian Landtag, as we have seen, was saddled with a three-class franchise whose powerful inbuilt bias in favour of property-owners ensured the predominance of conservative and right-liberal forces. Whereas elections to the national parliament were based on direct and secret ballots, the Prussian Landtag was constituted using a system of public ballots and an indirect franchise (voters elected a college of representatives, who in turn chose deputies).

This system had seemed a reasonable enough answer to the problems facing the administration in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, and it did not prevent the liberals from mounting a formidable campaign against Bismarck during the constitutional crisis of the early 1860s, but in the decades following unification it began to look increasingly problematic. The three-class system was, above all, notoriously open to manipulation, because the colleges of representatives with their public ballots were much more transparent and manageable than the general public.
⁶
In the 1870s, liberal grandees in the provinces exploited this system to great effect, using their control over local patronage to ensure that rural constituencies returned liberal deputies. But things changed from the late 1870s, when the Bismarck administration began systematically manipulating the electoral process in favour of conservative candidates: local bureaucracies were purged of politically unreliable elements and opened to conservative aspirants who were encouraged to play an active role in pro-government agitation; electoral boundaries were gerrymandered to safeguard conservative majorities; polling places were moved to conservative areas within swinging rural constituencies, so that voters from opposition strongholds had to trudge across kilometres of open country to place their votes.

The conservatives also benefited from a sea-change in political attitudes, as country voters, unnerved by the economic slump of the mid-seventies, abandoned liberalism to embrace protectionist, pro-agrarian sectoral politics. In rural areas the result was an almost seamless continuity between conservative landed elites, Prussian officialdom and the conservative contingent in the Landtag. The cohesion of this network was further reinforced by the Prussian upper house, an even more conservative body than the Landtag, in which hereditary peers and representatives of the landed interest sat beside ex officio delegates from the cities, the clergy and universities. Established in 1854 by Frederick
William IV (on the model of the British House of Lords) with a view to strengthening the corporate element in the new constitution, the upper house had helped to block liberal bills during the ‘New Era’ and remained thereafter – until its dissolution in 1918–a weighty conservative ‘ballast’ within the system.
⁷

The effects of this partial merging of the conservative rural interest with the organs of government and representation were far-reaching. The Prussian electoral system favoured the consolidation of a powerful agrarian lobby. This in turn meant that a substantial part of the rural population, which accounted for the great majority of mandates, came to see the three-class system as the best guarantor of agrarian interests. It was reasonable to assume that the introduction of a direct, secret and equal franchise in Prussia would undermine the conservative and national-liberal fractions and thereby jeopardize the fiscal privileges of the agrarian sector, which benefited from preferential tax rates and protectionist tariffs on imported foodstuffs. After 1890, when the Social Democrats emerged as the largest polling party in the German national (Reichstag) elections, it became possible to argue that the three-class system was the only bulwark protecting Prussia, its institutions and traditions, against revolutionary socialism. This was an argument that not only conservatives, but also many right-wing liberals and some rural Catholics found persuasive.
⁸
The three-class franchise thus had the baleful effect of reinforcing the influence of the conservative rural interest to the point where far-reaching reform of the system became impossible. Chancellors – or even a Kaiser – who attempted to tamper with the special entitlements of the rural sector risked vociferous and well-coordinated opposition from the agrarian
fronde
. Learning this lesson cost two chancellors (Caprivi and Bülow) their posts.
⁹

The Prussian system thus immobilized itself; it became in constitutional terms the conservative anchor within the German system, just as Bismarck had intended.
¹⁰
There was nothing especially nefarious about the egotistical sector-politics of the agrarians – the left liberals were just as frank about their pro-business, low-tax policies, and the Social Democrats claimed to speak only for the German ‘proletariat’, whose future ‘dictatorship’ – in the raw Marxist rhetoric still favoured by the party – was assured. But it was the agrarians and their conservative allies who succeeded in imprinting their interests and, to an extent, their political culture, on the system itself, laying claim in the process to
ownership of the very idea of a unique and independent Prussia. Between 1899 and 1911, while virtually every other German territory (excepting the Mecklenburgs and the tiny principality of Waldeck) underwent substantial electoral reform, Prussia remained ensnared in its increasingly anomalous electoral arrangements.
¹¹
On the eve of the First World War, Prussian citizens were still being denied an equal, direct and secret ballot. Only in the summer of 1917, under the pressure of war and a growing domestic opposition, did the Prussian administration relinquish its commitment to the old franchise. But before there was a chance to find out how the monarchical system would fare under more progressive electoral arrangements, it was swallowed up in the defeat and revolution of 1918.

While the Prussian constitution remained frozen in time, Prussian political culture did not. The hegemony of the conservatives was impressive, but it was also limited in important ways. There was a fraught polarity between the Prussia whose deputies – many of them socialists and left liberals – sat in the Reichstag, and the rural Prussia whose representatives dominated the Landtag. Reichstag elections enjoyed remarkably high rates of voter participation – from 67.7 per cent in 1898 to a staggering 84.5 per cent in 1912, the last election before the end of the war, when the Social Democrats captured more than a third of all German votes. By contrast, Prussian voters in the poorer income brackets showed their contempt for the three-class system by simply staying away from the polls during Prussian state elections – in the elections of 1893, only 15.2 per cent of the third class of voters (encompassing the overwhelming majority of the population) actually bothered to cast their votes.