Europe in the Belle Époque, 1871–1914507gave the Social Democratic Party (SPD) nearly 10 per-
cent of the vote. An Anti-Socialist Law of 1878 prohib-
ited socialist meetings, closed socialist newspapers,
restricted socialist fund-raising, and permitted the ha-
rassment of the leaders of the SPD. Because the Second
Reich had no bill of rights, this was all legal under Ger-
man law. When trade union membership and socialist
votes continued to increase, Bismarck changed his tac-
tics. Concluding that “[s]omething positive should be
done to remove the causes for socialism,” he borrowed
some of the legislative ideas that made socialism ap-
pealing. The deeply conservative Bismarck became one
of the founders of the welfare state, telling the Reich-
stag that the state had “the duty of caring for its help-
less fellow-citizens,” adding that “[i]f someone objects
that this is socialism, I do not shrink from it in the
least.” German health insurance began in 1883, workers’
accident compensation insurance in 1884, and old age
and disability pensions in 1889. These programs were
kept small by granting pensions at age sixty-five when
the average life expectancy at birth was forty-one. (Life
expectancy did not reach sixty-five until the 1940s.)
The death of Kaiser William I in 1888 nearly led to
the liberalization of Germany, a course favored by his
son, Frederick III. Frederick reigned for only a few
weeks, however, before dying of throat cancer at age
fifty-seven, and his son, Kaiser William II, led Germany
in a different direction. William II (often known by the
German form of his name, Wilhelm) came to the
throne at twenty-nine. He had no links to the dreams
of 1848, the constitutional crisis of the 1850s, or the
wars of the 1860s. Born with a deformed arm as the
consequence of a forceps delivery, he was aggressive
and arrogant to hide his insecurity. Bismarck tried to re-
strain the impulsive young emperor: “The Kaiser is like
a balloon. If you don’t hold fast to the string, you never
know where he’ll be off to.” William II, however, de-
cided in 1890 to retire the aging old chancellor. This
episode, known as “the dropping of the pilot” (see illus-
tration 26.1) clearly reflected the young emperor’s in-
tention to rule personally. In William’s words, “If
Frederick the Great had had such a chancellor, he
would not have been Frederick the Great.”
The leaders of Wilhelmine Germany were con-
sequently men of less ability than Bismarck. They
attempted to set a new course in the 1890s but accom-
plished little change in domestic affairs. Their greatest
task was often to restrain the undemocratic instincts of
the kaiser. William summarized his political sentiments
when he attended a colonial exposition and observed a
crude display of an African king’s hut with the skulls of
his rivals posted outside: “If only I could see the Reich-
stag stuck up like that!”
The strongest chancellor of Wilhelmine Germany,
Count Bernhard von Bülow, maintained the Bismarck-
ian conservative coalition by giving higher agricultural
tariffs to the Junkers and larger military contracts toIllustration 26.1
The End of the Bismarckian Era.Otto von Bismarck was
the dominant statesman in Europe for nearly thirty years. In 1890
the thirty-one-year-old Kaiser William II ended that era by dis-
missing the seventy-five-year-old Bismarck; the German chancel-
lor served at the pleasure of the monarch, not the Parliament.
The cartoon shown here, from the British magazine Punch,sum-
marized that event with a famous nautical metaphor, “the drop-
ping of the pilot.” During the next generation, the German ship
of state lacked such a skilled hand at the helm.