Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 303
row seas. Instead, Tirpitz proclaimed a “risk” theory, to the effect that
when the German fleet became sufficiently formidable to constitute a
real risk to British naval supremacy, then Great Britain would have to
respect Germany’s interests as a world power. Then, and only then,
would the danger of being cut off by the British from access to over
seas markets and raw materials cease to hang over German busi
nessmen and strategists.^76
In 1898, Tirpitz had difficulty in rallying the necessary votes in the
Reichstag and had to promise that the naval building program would
not require new taxation. Then, in 1906, Fisher’s Dreadnought upset
everything, since if they were to keep up, the Germans would have to
build far more expensive ships than had been contemplated before. In
addition, widening the Kiel Canal (opened 1885) to permit bigger
warships to move freely between the Baltic and the North Sea became
necessary, and dredging to assure access to Wilhelmshafen and other
North Sea ports had also to be undertaken.
To go before the Reichstag and ask for new taxes threatened to
upset the delicate alliance between conservative agrarian interests and
those urban elements that provided the main support for Tirpitz’
plans. Even with the protection of high tariffs on imported grain, the
estate-owners of Prussia—the class from which army officers tradi
tionally came—were hard pressed to make ends meet, and they were
resolutely opposed to paying heavier taxes in any form. The fact that
three battleships cost as much as five army corps was not lost upon the
agrarians; and yet the public support that Tirpitz and his assistants had
mobilized behind the naval program was too great to be checked, even
by representatives of Prussia’s old ruling class.^77
When the German Admiralty had first begun to aspire towards
building a fleet to rival Britain’s, Tirpitz knew he would have to
- A convenient, and I think judicious, summary of the German naval program is
offered by Volker R. Berghahn, Die Tirpitzplan: Genesis und Verfall einer innerpoliti
schen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II (Düsseldorf, 1971). Berghahn also published a
summary of his views in Geoffrey Best and Anthony Wheatcroft, eds., War, Economy
and the Military Mind (London, 1976), pp. 61–88. Holger H. Herwig “Luxury Fleet”:
The Imperial German Nary, 1888–1918 (London, 1980) is excellent for the technical
side of German naval administration.
- The idea that the German naval program reflected internal political strains was
first propounded by Eckhardt Kehr, Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik, 1894–1901
(Berlin, 1930). Anathema under the Nazis, Kehr’s ideas have become normative among
German historians since World War II. But it seems to me that German scholarship,
reacting against older idealist traditions, has gone to an opposite extreme by emphasiz
ing interests more exclusively than they deserve. The belief that national greatness and
prosperity could only be won by war narrowed public choices in all European countries
before 1914. When pecuniary self-interest attached itself to such an idea, it made a
heady brew; but the idea surely continued to have a semiautonomous life of its own, and
