the political parties and change horses to secure
the majorities he needed to pass bills. It worked
after a fashion, though corruptly under Bismarck.
He was first a free trader, then a protectionist; he
persecuted the Catholic Church and its political
Centre party, then made his peace with them; he
tried to destroy the Social Democratic Party, but
failed. Bismarck was the pilot, the old emperor
placed his trust in him. With his death and the
accession of his volatile grandson Wilhelm II the
strains of Bismarck’s system were beginning to
show. By 1912 the Social Democratic Party had
won a majority in the Reichstag.
The Social Democratic Party was denounced
as revolutionary, its members as ‘enemies of the
state’ – an extraordinary and unwarranted attack
on a party operating fully within the law. The
defeat of social democracy was the main purpose
of the Conservatives and the men surrounding
the kaiser. They could not conceive of including
the Social Democrats within the fabric of the
political state. This was more understandable
while the Social Democratic Party was indeed
Marxist and revolutionary. But as the twentieth
century advanced the great majority of the party
members in 1913, led by the pragmatic Friedrich
Ebert, had become democratic socialists working
for gradual reform; their Marxist revolutionary
doctrine was becoming more a declaration of
outward faith than actual practice, or immediate
expectation. In a number of the state parliaments,
Social Democrats had already joined coalitions
with Liberals to form a responsible base for gov-
ernments, thus abandoning their revolutionary
role. But in Prussia this was unthinkable.
One consequence of the narrow outlook of the
Conservatives was that they would never consent
to constitutional change that would have made
the chancellor and his ministers responsible to the
Reichstag as the government in Britain was to
Parliament. The Conservatives thus had no alter-
native but to leave power, in theory at least,
ultimately in the hands of the kaiser. The kaiser’s
pose as the ‘All Highest’ was ridiculous, and even
the fiction could not be maintained when, after
the kaiser’s tactless Daily Telegraph interview in
1908, he claimed that he had helped Britain
during the Boer War.
Kaiser Wilhelm II did not have the strength to
lead Germany in the right direction. He was an
intelligent man of warm and generous impulse at
times, but he was also highly emotional and
unpredictable. He felt unsure of his fitness for his
‘divine calling’, and posed and play-acted. This
was a pity as his judgement was often intuitively
sound. He did not act unconstitutionally, leaving
control of policy to his ministers and military
men. But when, in an impasse or conflict between
them, the decision was thrust back to him, he
occasionally played a decisive role. More usually
he was manipulated by others, his vanity making
him an easy victim of such tactics. He wanted
to be known as the people’s kaiser and as the
kaiser of peace; also as the emperor during whose
reign the German Empire became an equal of the
world’s greatest powers. His contradictory aims
mirrored a personality whose principal traits were
not in harmony with each other.
The kaiser, and the Conservative–industrial
alliance, were most to blame for the divisiveness of
German society and politics. There was constant
talk of crisis, revolution or pre-emptive action by
the Crown to demolish the democratic institutions
of the Reich. Much of this was hysterical.
But the Wilhelmine age in German develop-
ment was not entirely bleak. The judiciary
remained substantially independent and guaran-
teed the civil rights of the population and a free
press; there was a growing understanding among
the population as a whole that Kaiser Wilhelm’s
pose as the God-ordained absolute ruler was just
play-acting. Rising prosperity was coupled with
the increasing moderation of the left and the
growth of trade unions. The political education
of the German people proceeded steadily, even if
inhibited by the narrowly chauvinistic outlook
of so many of the schoolmasters and university
professors, by the patronage of the state as an
employer, and by the Crown as a fount of titles,
decorations and privileges. Significantly, the anti-
Conservative political parties on the eve of 1914
commanded a substantial majority, even though
they could not work together.
The deep political and social divisions never
really threatened Germany with violence and civil
war in the pre-war era. Over and above the
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