86 PREUSSEN
of all sorts, from lowly journalists like Karl Marx to lofty clerics such as the
Archbishops of Cologne or Breslau. Marx's own revolutionary tendencies were
undoubtedly strengthened by the knowledge that his father-in-law, Ferdinand
Henning von Westphalen, was Minister of the Interior in mid-century Berlin.
The Prussian army and administration rested on the support of a traditional
caste of service aristocrats. The Junkers had enabled the Hohenzollerns to
impose their rule on the multifarious cities and regions of the realm, and con-
tinued to fill the core of the 'military-authoritarian citadel'. From the old army
of von Moltke to the new Reichswehr of von Seeckt in the 1920s, they acted as
the guardians of conservative values, and successfully resisted the challenge of
Liberalism and Socialism. In Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schonhausen,
Prussian Premier from 1862 and Chancellor of the Reich from 1871 to 1890, they
found the most genial exponent of their traditions. In the later nineteenth
century, their diminishing influence in Germany as a whole was shored up by
the appearance of a group of industrial aristocrats - the 'smokestack barons',
families such as the Donnersmarck, Hohenlohe, Lichnowski, or Schaffgotsch,
whose vast wealth grew from industrial enterprise. In so far as the power-base
of both groups was concentrated in the eastern provinces, in Pomerania, East
Prussia, or Silesia, the influence of the loyalist aristocracy acted as a powerful
brake on Polish aspirations.
Many features of life in Prussia, however, differed fundamentally from those in
the neighbouring empires. For one thing, Prussia was a Rechtstaat - a political
community which operated within the framework of law. Although the political
institutions never amounted to more than a 'Facade Democracy', none the less the
authoritarian system operated through regular procedures, and by legal means. It
possessed a solid, well-oiled, and efficient bureaucratic machine, whose design
and operation were publicly known and widely admired. But it was a machine
which could be used equally effectively for the purposes of sound administration
or for the suppression of minority or opposition elements. Thus, whereas in
Russia the Poles recognized oppression in the irrational and arbitrary whims of
the Tsarist authorities, in Prussia they encountered it in the all too predictable
pedantry of petty officials supported by the letter and the majesty of the law.
Religious toleration was generally observed. Although it is not incorrect to
talk of a Protestant Establishment, especially after the creation in 1817 of a
National Church, religious conformity was not an essential criterion for social
or political advancement. Ever since the influx of French Huguenots in the sev-
enteenth century, Calvinism had prospered no less than Lutheranism. The Jews
may have lost the communal autonomy which they had enjoyed under the Polish
Republic; but many of them rose to prominence, and the rate of voluntary
assimilation was high. Until the 1870s, the obstacles placed in the path of
Roman Catholics were, at the most, informal. Bismarck's notorious
Kulturkampf (Culture Struggle) was launched in 1873 in response to the advent
of Rhineland and Bavarian Catholics to the Empire, and had no precedent in the
Prussian past.