REVIEW ARTICLE

Society and Politics in Bismarckian

Germany
Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. I, The Period of Un8cation
1815-1871 (2nd edition); vol. 11, The Period of Consolidation 1871-1880; vol.
111, The Period of Fortification 1880-1898. By Otto Pflanze. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press. 1990. xxx + 518 + xvii + 554 + xi + 474 pp. $95.00 set
/ $39.50 + $39.50 + $35.00.
Bismarck: The White Revolutionary. vol. I, 1815-1871; vol. 11, 1871-1898. By
Lothar Gall. Translated by J . A. Underwood. London: Allen and Unwin. 1986.
xix + 402 + x + 274 pp. Each volume E30.00.
The Year of the Three Kaisers: Bismarck and the G e m n Succession, 1887-8.
By J . Aldon Nichols. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1987.
xii + 413 pp. $34.95.
Bismarck and Mitteleuropa. By Bascom Bany Hayes. London and Toronto:
Associated University Presses. 1994. 623 pp. $65.00.
Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Conference 1884-1885 and the Onset
of Partition. Edited by Stig Forster, Wolfgang Mommsen and Ronald Robin-
son. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press and German Historical Insti-
tute. 1988. xx + 569 pp. f55.00.
Junker and burgerliche GroJgrundbesitzer im Kaiserreich: Landwirt-
schaftlicher GroJbetrieb, Groggrundbesitz und Familien.deikomm$ in
PreuJen, 1867/71-1914. By Klaus HeB. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 1990.
345 pp. DM 74.
Urban Planning and Civic Order 1860-1914. By Brian Ladd. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1990. xiii + 326 pp. E29.95.
Grenzenloses Wachstum? Das rheinische WirtschafCsburgerturn und seine
Industrialisierungsdebatte 1814-1857. By Rudolf Boch. Burgertum: Beitrage
zur europaischen Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht. 1991. 443 pp. DM 89.
Der Militarismus der kleinen Lat e : Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiser-
reich, 1871-1914. By Thomas Rohkramer. Munich: Oldenbourg. 1990. 301 pp.
DM 78.
German History Vol. 15 No. I 0 1997 The German History Society

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102 Geoff Eley
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict. Culture, Ideology, Politics 1870-
1914. By Helmut Walser Smith. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1995.
271 pp. $39.50 I S33.50.
Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Burgerturn im Rheinland, 1 794-
1914. By Thomas Mergel. Burgerturn: Beitrage zur europaischen Gesell-
schaftsgeschichte, vol. 9. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1994. xiv +
460 pp. DM 112.
I
The Bismarckian period of German history presents a perplexing aspect. Thirty years
ago, the turning to social history among a sizeable cohort of West German historians
seemed likely to relativize Bismarcks importance in the making of the German empire,
if not to displace him altogether. A variety of foundational works laid the ground for
a new kind of interpretation. Hans Rosenberg shifted our attention to the socio-economic
context of the so-called Great Depression of 1873-96, relating the key political develop-
ments of the post-unification decades to the pressures exerted by a Kondratiev down-
swing of the economy. Hans-Ulrich Wehler elaborated on this framework by charting
the growth of a social-imperialist consensus among the ruling elites, which stabilized an
authoritarian governing system by diverting popular energies into the drive for colonies
overseas, and established a lasting pattern of manipulative techniques of rule. Finally,
Helmut Bohme re-narrated the history of unification as the consequence of an economic
struggle between Prussia and Austria for supremacy in Germany, in which Bismarcks
wars of unification were exchanged for an economic logic of state-making and develop-
ment as the prime mover.
But even to venture this summary description is to obscure the richness of the new
departures. It is worth staying for a moment with Bohrnes work in particular, because
over the past two decades it has faded so much from the scene. Bohme challenged the
political, diplomatic, and military cast of the older interpretations head-on. He
approached German unification as a case study in the political economy of development,
focusing less on the formal act of the empires foundation than on the political logic
of securing a national market amidst the fragmented sovereignties of German-speaking
central Europe, where Austria and Prussia were also in active competition. From this
perspective, the Zollverein was the key arena., and during the 1850s and 1860s Austria
was decisively edged out of the emergent national economy. In this perspective, 1858
and the opening of the New Era in Prussian politics became less important than 1857
and the economic downturn, which widened the gap between the Prussian and the Aus-
trian economies; 1862 was important less For Bismarcks appointment as Prussian
Minister-President than for the Prussian free trade treaty with France; and Austrias
Hans Rosenberg, GroJe Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschajisahlauj Gesellschaji und
Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus
(Cologne and Berlin, 1969); Helmut Bohme, Deutschlands Weg zur GroJtnncht. Sfudien zum
Verhdltnis von Wirtschaji und Staat wiihrend der Reichsgriindungszeit 1848-1881 (Cologne and
Berlin, 1966).

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 103
military defeat in 1866 became the corollary of its prior economic defeat in the Zoll-
verein two years before.?
Bohme applied this analysis to the years after unification too. Here 1879 replaces
1871 as the end date of unification, attaching the effective completion of the latter to
the new economic and political settlement of 1878-9, when Bismarck turned decisively
to the right. The structural foundations of German government became reconfigured:
the parliamentary coalition of 1871-3, based on National Liberals and Free Conserva-
tives, and linked to a free-trading constellation of merchant capital, light manufactures,
and east Elbian agriculture, subsided before a new protectionist front of Free Conserva-
tives, Conservatives, National Liberals, and the Catholic Centre. Using the tariffs of
1879, and the ideological scare tactics of the Anti-Socialist Law from the previous year,
Bismarck harnessed the demands of heavy industry, textiles, and big agriculture for a
protected home market, and shaped these convergent protectionisms into the socio-polit-
ical foundations of a new governing coalition, which then lasted, Bohme argued, until
the collapse of the empire in 1918. This decisive departure amounted to a refounding
of the German Empire. Thus in 1879-81, the first terminal point was reached in the
thirty-year creation of the German Empire.
Bohmes basic analytical move, which resituated the events of German unification in
an argument about the movements of the national economy and their effects on society,
was common to the other influential works of the late 1960s. Both Rosenberg and
Wehler emphasized the impact of the depression after 1873 on government priorities,
where not only the tariffs of 1879, but also the turning to colonies during the 1880s,
bespoke the search for effective anti-cyclical therapy to handle the problems of over-
production and declining prices threatening the optimistic scenario of Germanys con-
tinuing economic growth. In this view, the depression brought a sea change in German
politics, shifting the ground of policy for business, the parties and government, mobiliz-
ing wide sections of the populace into activity, from workers to Mittelstand and farmers,
and generally re-centring national politics around matters of economic policy. Liberalism
was the casualty of this process. Its free-trading and universalist ideals lost ground to
the new politics based on national protectionism and sectional economic interests. More
fundamentally, this approach has argued, liberalism became overshadowed by an emerg-
ing anti-modern ideological complex containing romantic, corporatist, and anti-Semitic
forms of belief. Rosenberg formulated this argument as an all-encompassing key to the
history of the Bismarckian era, and Wehler repeated the construction, making the Great
Depression the explanation for all manner of social, cultural and intellectual develop-
ments, from Bismarcks colonial policy and political anti-Semitism, to social darwinism
and psychoanalysis. A new atmosphere of uncertainty and crisis resulted from the post-
unification economic situation, in this view, so that a generalized mood of foreboding,
See also Helmut Bohme (ed.), Probleme der Reichsgriindungszeit 1848-1879 (Cologne and
Berlin, 1968); Prolegomena zu einer Soziul- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Deutschlunds im 19. und
20. Juhrhundert (Frankfurthlain, 1968); (ed:), The Foundation of the Germun Empire: Select
Documents (Oxford, 197 1); Politik und Okonomie in der Reichsgriindungs- und spaten
Bismarckzeit, in Michael Stunner (ed.), Dus kuiserliche Deutschlund. Politik und Gese//schuji
1870-IYI8 (Dusseldorf, 1970). pp. 26-50.
Bohme, Deutschlands Weg, p. 15; Bohme (ed.), Probleme der Reichsgriindungszeit, p. 14;
Bohme, Deutschlunds Weg, p. 9.

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104 Geoff Eley
tension and insecurity (a Kartell der Angst) pervaded the new German society. Anxiety
became the well-spring of politics?
At the most general level, this approach to the Bismarckian era entailed a very basic
kind of materialism, which highlights the analytical and causal priority of economic
factors in the movement of history-the objective conditions and cyclical fluctuations
of the national and local economies, the organized representation of economic interests,
and the consequences of a particular social structure. In effect, this was an economizing
of the approach to German unification, bringing a shift of emphasis from Bismarck
and Prussian militarism to the rise of a national market and the political economy of
industrialization. In this respect, it was no accident that Bohme was a senior pupil of
Fritz Fischer, whose work on Germanys expansionism in the First World War was
concurrently emphasizing the primacy of an interest-based politics in the dynamics of
German foreign p~l i cy. ~ In summarizing the significance of the breakthrough of the late
1960s, therefore, we might make the following points:
1 . Most fundamentally, the new historiography entailed the perspective I have called
economization-a view of the political process as being constituted primarily from
the interaction of organized interests in the economy. This was partly produced by
certain structural characteristics of the German situation, including the much higher
levels of organization and capital concentration in industry, the ease of direct access
to the government bureaucracy, the growth of extra-parliamentary and corporative
forms of political representation, and so on. But the turn to protection after 1873
also had its own dynamic. By the end of the 1870s a pattern had been established
giving business associations and pressure groups exceptional influence in the con-
duct of government affairs.6
Apart from GroJe Depression und Bismarckzeit, see also Hans Rosenberg, Political and
Social Consequences of the Great Depression of 1873-1 896 in Central Europe, Economic His-
tory Review, 13 (1943), 58-73, where his argument originated, and his Die Weltwirtschajiskrise
von 1857-1859 (Gottingen, 1974, first published in 1934). which builds a similar structure of
explanation for an earlier pre-unification moment. Wehlers totalized construction of the Great
Depression is tendentiously presented in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Aufstieg des Organisierten
Kapitalismus und Interventionsstaates in Deutschland , in Heinrich August Winkler (ed.), Orga-
nisierter Kapitalismus. Voraussetzungen und Anfange (Gottingen, 1974), p. 5 I . I have discussed
the problems with Rosenbergs Great Depression thesis in Geoff Eley, Hans Rosenberg and
the Great Depression of 1873-96: Politics and Economics in Recent German Historiography,
1960-1980, in Eley, From Unification to Nazism. Reinterpreting the German Past (London,
1986), pp. 2341.
See Fritz Fischer, Germanys Aims in the Firsi World War (London, 1967, originally pub-
lished in Germany in 1961). For a detailed narrative of the Fischer controversy, see John A.
Moses, The Politics of Illusion. The Fischer Controversy in German Historiography (London,
1975).
A number of important essays elaborated this corporative interpretation of German politics
under the empire during the 1960s. See especially Thomas Nipperdey, Interessenverbande und
Parteien in Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, in Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Moderne
deutsche Sozialgeschichte (Cologne, 1966). pp. 369-88; Gerhard Schulz, Uber Entstehung und
Formen von Interessengruppen in Deutschland seit Beginn der Industrialisierung, in Hans J.
Varain (ed.), Interessenverbande in Deutschland (Cologne, 1973). pp. 25-54; Wolfram Fischer,
Staatsvenvaltung und Interessenverbande imDeutschen Reich 187 1-19 14, in Fisher, Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (Gottingen, 1972), pp. 194-2 13; Hans-
Jurgen Puhle, Parlament, Parteien und Interessenverbiinde 1890-1914, in Stunner (ed.), Das
kaiserliche Deutschland, pp. 340-77; Hans-JUrgen Puhle, Von der Agrarkrise zurn Prdfasch-
ismus. Thesen zum Stellenwert der agrarischen Interessenverbdnde in der deutschen Politik am

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 105
2. A second key theme has been protectionism as an organizing political motif. The
tariffs of 1879 crystallized a new protectionist bloc, whose goals extended past the
immediate measures to a more general defence of the social order, from the privi-
leges of aristocratic landowners east of the Elbe and all they entailed, to the
viability of traditional small business in trade, shopkeeping and handicrafts, and
paternalistic social relations of authority in industry. The language of social protec-
tionism in this sense-Schutz der nationalen Arbeit (protection of the national
labour)-was always inscribed in the demands for tariffs, especially during the
conservative backlash against the export-oriented trading treaties of the Caprivi
government of 1890-4, and in the new high tariff settlement that eventually fol-
lowed (negotiated between the interests and the government between 1897 and
1902). I n other words, the refoundation of the empire in 1879 inaugurated a
continuity of economic policy attached to a broader conservative social and polit-
ical agenda, which lasted down to the First World War and beyond.
3. Anti-socialism was a vital part of this protectionist agenda. Produced by the social
anxieties and dislocations of the depression, and made into government policy by
the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878, this was a further constant of the history of the
empire. Although the Law itself was abolished in 1890, the search for equivalent
measures of restriction and repression against the labour movement continued,
reaching its height during the peak demands for protectionism (in 1897-1902, and
again on the eve of the war in 1912-14).
4. Social imperialism was Hans-Ulrich Wehlers distinctive contribution to this edifice
of interpretation. Meaning partly a set of structural and intended linkages between
an aggressive foreign policy and the achievement of patriotic consensus at home,
and partly the manipulation of popular sentiments in the interests of a conservative
status quo, this was pioneered by Bismarcks colonial policy, and then became
extended after 1896 into Weltpolitik, the big navy policy, and the general pursuit
of German power and prestige in the wider world. Pressure for reform was con-
tained or silenced, the argument runs, by emphasizing nationalist priorities-
defence and security issues, armaments, threats from abroad, building Germanys
strength in the world economy, and securing Germanys rightful place in the
sun-and by inflaming popular hostilities against socialists, ultramontanes, Poles,
and J ews. Like protectionism and anti-socialism, moreover, social imperialism was
produced by the depression: it simultaneously answered the need for anti-cyclical
therapy, and played on popular insecurities to equip the government with much-
needed popular support.
5. The political coalition sustaining Bismarcks turn to the right in 1879, known sub-
Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1972); Heinrich August Winkler, Pluralismus oder Pro-
tektionismus? Verfnssungspolitische Probleme des Verhandswesens im Deutschen Kuiserreich
(Wiesbaden, 1972). Hans Rosenberg also contributed to this perspective: see his essays collected
as Machteliten und Wi rtschafrskonj unkturen. Zur neueren deutschen Soiial-und Wirtschafrsge-
schichte (Gottingen, 1978). Finally, the other key influence on this analytical perspective was
Eckart Kehr, whose works of the 1920s were rediscovered during this same period of the 1960s:
Schluchtjiottenha~i und Purteipolitik 1894-1901 (Berlin, 1930). and Der Primat der Innenpolitik
(West Berlin, 1965), translated respectively as Buttleship Building and Parry Politics in Germany
1894-1901. A Cross-Section of the Political. Social, and Ideological Preconditions of German
Imperialism (Chicago and London, 1973). and Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy
(Berkeley, 1977).

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106 Geoff Eley
sequently as Sammlungspolitik-the convergent protectionisms of industry and
agriculture, united by fears of foreign competition and domestic revolution-
becomes another constant of German politics before the First World War. As a
defensive interest-based coalition, cemented by anti-socialist resistance against
democracy, this provided the core of the governments governing base in the Reich-
stag in Bismarcks second decade. After the Caprivi interlude, it was the main
focus of government thinking once again during the ascendancy of J ohannes von
Miquel and Bernhard von Biilow in 1897--1902, remaining so for the duration of
the empire, it is claimed, peaking in the Karrell der schuflenden Stunde (Cartel
of the Productive Estates) launched in summer 1913, and the annexationist war
aims coalition of the First World War.
6. These patterns of politics are thought to have expressed the continuing societal
dominance of pre-industrial elites. In other words, inside the Prusso-German states
institutional framework was lodged a more specific social interest, namely, the
preservation of the predominance of the feudal aristocracy.x The social basis of
Germanys constitutional authoritarianism, in this view, and of the Bismarckian
system of politics itemized rather schematically above, was the ability of a pre-
industrial elite of landowners to preserve the essentials of its power. Institutionally,
the mechanisms of this dominance included the monarchy and its traditions of
military and bureaucratic independence; the relative freedom of the executive from
parliamentary controls; a privileged position in the Prussian Landtug and Prussias
special status in the empire; a restricted franchise in most of the individual states;
the socially weighted tax system in Prussia and elsewhere; fiscal immunities and
transmuted seigneurial authority over a dependent rural population east of the Elbe;
and so on. To these continuing structural factors may be added the preferential
economic treatment that emerged from the tariff settlement of 1879. In other words,
despite the capitalist transformation of German society and industrys growing pre-
dominance in the economy, it is argued, political power remained in the hands of
the economically weakened pre-capitalist ruling strata (J unkers, bureaucracy,
military).9
Thus the politics laid down in the Bismarckian era are thought to have cast a long and
dark shadow. They established powerful continuities reaching through the imperial per-
iod to the Weimar Republic, and played the key part in rendering German society vulner-
The main treatment of this structure of politics after Bismarck is Dirk Stegrnann, Die Erben
Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbande in der Spatphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands.
Summlungspolitik 1897-1918 (Cologne, 1970). which concentrates exhaustively on the years
1909-1913, with a more schematic treatment of the 1890s and early 1900s. For the 1890s see
Stegmann, Wirtschaft und Politik nach Bismarcks Sturz. Zur Genesis der Miquelschen
Sammlungspolitik I 8961 897. in Imanuel Geiss and Bernd-Jurgen Wendt (eds.), Deurschland
in der Weltpolitik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Fritz Fischer zum 65. Geburtstag (Dusseldorf,
1973), pp. 161-84. I have developed a detailed critique of this usage of the idea of Sammlungspo-
litik in Geoff Eley, Sammlungspolirik, Social Imperialism and the Navy Law of 1898. in Eley,
Unification to Nazism, pp. 110-53.
This phrase is taken from a chapter heading of a leading second-generation monograph
within this school of interpretation, Siegfried Mielke. Der Hansa-Bund fur Gewerbe. Hundel und
lndustrie 1909-1914. Der gescheiterte Versuch einer antifeudden Sammlungspolitik (Gottingen,
1976). p. 17: The political system: preservation of the predominance of the feudal aristocracy.
Ibid., p. 181.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 107
able to Nazism. The deep origins of the latter-and the factor distinguishing Germany
from other western European societies in this respect-are deemed to have lain in the
persistent authoritarianism of the Bismarckian empires political culture, the efforts of
its ruling elites to stave off the potentially democratizing (and destabilizing) effects of
industrialization, and the political strategies and techniques they devised for neutralizing
the challenge of the liberal and socialist oppositions. We can let Hans-Ulrich Wehler
speak for this larger body of interpretation, and in specifying the continuity between
the Second and Third Reichs, he itemizes a long catalogue of historical handicaps that
burdened the Weimar Republic, including the susceptibility to authoritarian politics; the
hostility to democracy in education and party politics; the influence of pre-industrial
leadership groups, norms and ideals; the tenacity of the German ideology of the state
and the mystique of the bureaucracy; and the manipulation of political anti-Semitism
and other crisis ideologies. In other words, the revisionist interpretation of the
Bismarckian era which emerged during the 1960s also anchors a larger interpretation
of the German past focused on the origins of Nazism.
In the intervening quarter century, an enormous amount of work has been produced
under the sign of this interpretation. Interestingly, though, the monographic scholarship
on the political history of the Bismarckian era itself has remained rather thin on the
ground. The deepening of the perspectives laid out above-an archivally grounded litera-
ture on parties, pressure groups, elections, issues, and crises-has occurred mainly for
the later periods of imperial history between the 1890s and 1914, although even here
the coverage is less than ideal. Neither of the key newcomers of the 1960s-Bohme
and Wehler-have produced any subsequent research on the empires first two decades,
while the book on the Great Depression proved to be Hans Rosenbergs last substantial
work. There are some exceptions-notably labour history and the social history of the
working class-but on the whole this is a separately constituted tradition of scholarship,
driven by a very different dynamic, and with little direct relationship to the body of
interpretation 1 have been discussing. I The most important works on the political history
of the Bismarckian period until recently have been Michael Stunners study of the
1870s, and Margaret Andersons biography of Ludwig Windthorst.12 The aim of this
review article is to explore some of the ways in which this neglect of the Bismarckian
era might begin to change.
( Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871-1918 (Gottingen, 1973). pp. 238ff.
(translated as The German Empire 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985)).
I One important exception to this generalization has been the career-long contribution of Ger-
hard A. Ritter, which from Die Arbeirerbewegung i m Wilhelminischen Reich 1890-1900 (West
Berlin, 1959) to Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871 bis 1914, with Klaus Tenfelde (Bonn,
1992), has always keyed the interpretation of labour history to an argument about the Kaiser-
reichs political culture. For some reflections on Ritters work, see Geoff Eley, Class, Culture,
and Politics in the Kaiserreich, Central European Hisrory, 27, 3 (1994). 355-60.
Michael Stiirmer, Regierung und Reichstag im Bismarckstaat, 1871-1880. Casarismus oder
Parlumentarismus (Dusseldorf, 1974); Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Windthorst: A Political
Biography (Oxford, I98 I ). See also the excellent article by Margaret L. Anderson and Kenneth
Barkin, The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampj Some Reflections
on the Historiography of Imperial Germany, Journul uf Modern Histoty, 54 (1982), 647-86.

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108 Geoff Eley
I1
While the main logic of the 1960s was to shift the causal narrative away from
Bismarcks person to the role of institutional traditions, organized interests, and imper-
sonal forces, the Iron Chancellor remained surprisingly central to the resulting rein-
terpretation. In both Bohmes and Wehlers accounts the crucial element of political
agency was reserved for Bismarck. If not exactly a spider at the centre of a web-more
the technician at the control panel of a huge and elaborate moving machine-he is
certainly presented as the main political arbiter, skilfully managing his relations with
the Kaiser, deploying his political authority with and against the Bundesrat and the
Reichstag, orchestrating public opinion, gauging the climate of the business world, mani-
pulating the mass electorate, and of course paying close attention to the conduct of
foreign affairs. Wehlers imposing account of Germanys colonial expansion in the
1870s and 1880s is a case in point. Bismarck und der Imperialismus is divided into six
sections: a theoretical and historiographical introduction; the structural context of Ger-
man economic growth and its unevenness; the formation of an ideological consensus
behind the need for colonies; the tentative overseas expansion of the 1870s; the acceler-
ation of the 1880s and the drive for direct colonial rule; and finally the formation of
Bismarcks policies per se. But the translation of the structural analysis into a dynamic
history of politics depends purely on the chancellors directive role.
This is a persistent problem for the advocates of structural history.I3 Their ability
to conceptualize the relationship between the conduct of government and the impersonal
social and economic forces they see as shaping German historical development is ham-
pered by a profound disbelief in the effectiveness of the Bismarckian parliamentary
system, and a severe underestimation of its capacities for representing the interests of
the economy and society. Because the parliamentary constitution of 1871 failed to
correspond to what is thought to have been the Anglo-American podel of representative
democracy, ips0 fact0 the representation, competition and management of organized
interests must have taken some other form, and hence the turning to concepts of caesar-
ism, bonapartism, and social imperialism to express Bismarcks approach to the
political process. Bismarck necessarily emerges as the arch manipulator, as the instigator
and manager of the political process, because the intermediate zone of the parliamentary
arena, the parties, and the public sphere have been given so little credibility in the
established views of the 1871 constitution and the political system of the Kaiserreich.
In fact, the alleged instabilities of post-Bismarckian German government between the
1890s and 1914 once the guiding authority of the Iron Chancellor was gone, including
the crisis that produced the First World War, are explained by the absence of an adequate
l 3 Various terms have been used to describe the grouping that arrived on the West German
historical scene during the 1960s as the advocates of a modernized social-science practice within
the discipline, including the Kehrites, after their indebtedness to the influence of Eckart Kehr,
and theBielefelder, after the relationship of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, JUrgen Kocka, and others to
the University of Bielefeld. No termis completely satisfactory, not least because the composition
and orientations of the grouping have changed over time, being fairly broad and heterogeneous
in the late 1960s, when certain progressive commitments (both to methodological self-conscious-
ness and to a pedagogy of coming to terms with the past) concealed considerable diversity of
approach, and rather morespecific by the 1980s. The flagship journal of the cohort, Geschichre
und Gesellschufi, launched in 1975, has retained its character as a broadly based forum.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 109
mediation between society and the state in that sense, so that Germanys rulers were
thrown constantly back onto forms of manipulation and plebiscitary mobilization-onto
secondary integration-in order to achieve the linkage. Narratively speaking,
Bismarcks presence is required in Wehlers and Bohmes account precisely because
the normal political circuit of interests, parties, parliament and government is missing.
His colossal dominance of these political histories is the measure of Germanys differ-
ence from the liberal democracies of western Europe in the same period, as such
accounts see it.
Paradoxically, this simultaneously elevated Bismarck in the accounts, without produc-
ing any interest in his biography. This becomes all the more accentuated in Wehlers
general textbook account of the Kaiserreich, where even Bismarcks agency fades back
into the incidental workings of the structural-functional edifice. There is no place in
Wehlers elaborate architecture of chapter thematics for any biographical discussion, the
closest being a brief sub-chapter a quarter of the way into the book on The Bonapartist
Dictatorship up to 1890, buried in a discussion of The Ruling System and Politics.14
This same pattern is also replicated in Volker Berghahns recent textbook, which builds
up its account of imperial Germany from the structural ground of the economy and
society-the long-term trends of agricultural and industrial change; demography, family,
and social stratification; social conflict, socialization, and social inequality; cultural life,
education, and the press; and the political system-deliberately foregoing the tradition
of a grand chronological narrative. Any dynamic account of Bismarckian politics is
consigned to an extremely brief treatment at the very end of the book, after the sections
on Economy, Society, Culture, and the structural characteristics of The Realm of
Politics have established the analytical pri ~ri ty. ~
The growth of a strong biographical interest in Bismarck at the end of the 1970s in
Germany was thus a noteworthy historiographical development, and one certainly keyed
to a broader public interest in the older nineteenth-century past.I6 Undoubtedly the most
important publication was Lothar Galls Bismarck. Der we g e Revofutionur
(FrankfudMain, 1980), which appeared in translation in 1986. To this may be added
l 4 See Wehler, The German Empire, pp. 55-62. This form of structural-functional narrative is
repeated in the latest volume of Wehlers Gesellschafsgeschichte (History of Society), where
Bismarck is dealt with biographically in two short sections (The Rise of Bismarck, and
Bismarcks Chancellor Regime: Coordination at the Ruling Center), in a volume of over 1,500
pages. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschafsgeschichte, vol. 111, Von der Deutschen
Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849-1914 (Munich, 1995), pp. 264-
I s See Volker R. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 187/-19/4. Economy, Society, Culture, and
Politics (Providence and Oxford, 1994). pp. xvi, 267-70.
I The most important manifestation in this public sphere of historical interest wa3 the highly
prestigious Prussia exhibition in West Berlin from August to November 1981, Prussia: Attempt
at a Balance. See Manfred Schlenke, Peter Brandt, H. Kiihn, A. Marquardt, and H. Rathsack
(eds.), PreuJen: Versuch einer Bilanz: Ausstellung Berlin, 1981, 5 vols. (Reinbek bei Hamburg,
1981); together with the critical report by Christine Lattek, in History Workshop Journal, 13
(Spring 1982). 174-80.
Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, tr. J . A. Underwood (2 vols., London, 1986). See also
Andreas Hillgruber, Otto von Bismarck. Griinder der europdischen GroJmacht Deutsches Reich
(Gottingen, 1978); and the reissue of a conservative biography of the 1950s, Ludwig Reiners,
Bismarcks Aufstieg 1815-1864, and Bismarck griinder d a s Reich 1864-1871 (both Munich,
1980). In English there was also Edward Crankshaw, Bismarck (London, 1981). For a reflection
on this earlier moment of the early 1980s, see David Blackbourn, Bismarck: the Sorcerers
80, 849-54.

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110 Geoff Eley
Ernst Engelbergs two-volume biography, Bismarck: UrpreuJe und Reichsgriinder (East
Berlin, 1985) and Bismarck: Das Reich in der iMitte Europas (Berlin, 1990) (reviewed
in Gennan History, 9, 2 (199 I) ) , while Otto Pflanzt: also brought to a conclusion his
own long-awaited study of Bismarck and the Development of Germany, begun in the
1960s.* Finally, this activity was crowned by a major exhibition in Berlin during the
period August to November 1990, whose representation of Bismarcks Prussian, Ger-
man, and European contexts coincided symbolically with the return of a united Germany
to the map.
All three major biographers take a resolutely traditional approach to their subject,
eschewing structural analysis, extended historiographical discussion or any elaboration
of theory, and consistently harnessing the times to the life. The approach in each
case is also monumental, although by comparison with the 1,600 pages offered by both
Engelberg and Pflanze, Galls 700 pages seem positively self-denying. All three treat
the life as a whole, and devote great detail to Bismarcks early career. Both Engelberg
and Gall divide their studies in 1871, but while the former distributes the attention
roughly evenly on either side of that year, Gall weights his work strongly towards the
pre-unification time, devoting only 274 pages to Bismarcks chancellorship, as opposed
to 402 to the earlier career. Only Pflanze seems to have the career in proportion, devoting
roughly 60 per cent of his text to the years between 1871 and 1890, when the shaping
of the new German state increased the range and complexity of the contexts in which
Bismarck has to be understood, arguably requiring more analytical and narrative space
rather than less. On the other hand, more of the later story has been told before, facing
the biographer with the need for synthesis rather than for generating large amounts of
fresh research. In this respect we have more to learn about Bismarcks family and youth,
his social place, his outlook, and early career.
Galls first chapter (on home, school and choice of profession) is a model of succinct
biographical scene-setting, broadening out into a discussion of Bismarcks entry into
politics during the Revolution of 1848 in chapter 2, where the crisis of 1848-50 is used
to enframe the inception of Bismarcks main political orientations, including his early
conservative identification, his capacity for a creative and sometimes radical pragmatism,
and his relationship to the emerging national question. This establishes the formal pattern
for Galls first volume-a seamless analytical narrative moving continuously back and
forth between his protagonist and the unfolding Prussian, national, and international
contexts, always modulated by the specific institutional setting of the monarchy and its
policies.2 Pflanze adopts a similar strategy for his first four chapters, following a brief
introduction to Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century with a presentation
Apprentice, i n Blackbourn, P opulisfs and Patricians. Essays in Modern German Hisroty
(London, 1987). pp. 33-44.
I * The first of Pflanzes volumes was originally published in 1963, and was revised and
expanded for this new edition: Bismarck and the Development of Germany (3 vols., Prince-
ton, 1990).
See the Catalogue for the Exhibition, for which Lothar Gall was the historical director:
Bismarck-PreuJen, Deurschland und Europa (Berlin, 1990). The exhibition was originally con-
ceived in 1987 to herald the coming into force of the Single European Act at the end of 1992,
by presenting Germanys contribution to an earlier transformation of Europe in the nineteenth
century.
2o The seamlessness is also formal, and the detailed outline of topics and events provided in
the table of contents for the progression of each chapter is not keyed by page numbers to the
actual text, an omission that is extremely frustrating.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 111
of Bismarcks origins and outlook (oddly titled The Internal Functions of Power) and
a description of his early political career, culminating in his appointment as Prussian
envoy to the German Confederation in Frankfurt in April 185 1 (The External Functions
of Power), while the 1850s are telescoped into a more discursive treatment of his polit-
ical credo (The Strategy of Realpolirik). In the second part of this first volume, Pflanze
opts for more of a formal counterpoint, with the evolving political context and the
biographically centred narrative in alternating chapters, until Bismarck is appointed Min-
ister-President of Prussia, whereupon a continuous narrative takes over for the remainder
of the book, tracking Bismarck through the process of unification. Both authors provide
excellent guides to the complex history of the latter, from the perspective of the Prussian
governing centre.
After the foundation of the empire, the life and times are almost completely merged
into a continuous high-political narrative, for which Bismarck provides the active centre.
By now, the main lines of such an account are well established, and these three bio-
graphies push very little on the existing framework of assumptions. The parallelism of
domestic politics and foreign affairs in the chapter organization is one predictable fea-
ture, as is the fulcrum of 1878-9, universally taken as the main turning point of
Bismarcks chancellorship. But the main framing is supplied by the two descriptions
chosen by Gall for Bismarcks career-on the one hand, the white revolutionary, on
the other hand the sorcerers apprentice-and i t is worth pausing for a moment with
the meanings of these images.
In the course of the manoeuvring against Austria in 1866, Bismarck remarked to
Friedrich von Beust that, For all your courage and spirit, you would not know how to
place yourself at the head of the revolutionary party i n Germany. As for me, I could at
any time become its chief.2 The bravado of this claim was the measure of Bismarcks
new distance from his traditionalist conservative mentors, the brothers Ludwig and Leo-
pold von Gerlach, for whom the revolution (meaning here the party of movement,
or the principle of progress and change) was a kind of virus, or conspiracy of dema-
gogues and marginal intellectuals, which was unconnected to larger social forces or
legitimate popular support. To Leopold von Gerlach, Bismarck had written in 1857 that
1 also recognize as my own the principle of struggle against revolution, but . . . in
politics 1 do not believe it possible to follow principle in such a way that its most
extreme implications always take precedence over every other consideration. On this
basis, Bismarck could break out of the immobilism that threatened to isolate the Prussian
monarchy during the constitutional conflict of the 186Os, refusing to be trapped into
counter-revolutionary adventures no longer sustainable in the more complex bourgeois
society Germany was becoming. The form in which the king exercises his rule in Ger-
many has never been of special importance to me, he said in a letter of 1869; I have
devoted all the energies God gave me to strive for the substance of his His
willingness to pick up the standard of a united Germany expressed a sociological judge-
ment in this sense: Every great community in which the careful and restraining influence
of the propertied classes is lost on material or intellectual grounds will always develop
a pace that will cause the ship of state to founder, as happened in the case of the French
I Pflan7e. Ri.smurck and the Development of Germany. vol. I, pp. 308f.
22 /hid., p. 78.
Ernst Nolte, Germany, in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber (eds.), The European Right
(London, 1965). p. 286.

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112 Geoff Eley
Rev~lution.~ Thus for the Gerlachs German unification may have been Bismarcks
godless deed, but for Bismarck himself it signified the necessary conciliation of the
propertied classes, for whom liberalism, with its desire for the nation and the consti-
tutional state, was now a principal voice. He was in this sense the Hohenzollern mon-
archys best advocate. As Pflanze says: Previously its supporting pillars had been dyn-
astic loyalty, Prussian patriotism, Protestantism, Junker nobility, and the Prussian army
and bureaucracy. To these were now added it new and eventually massive column:
German nati~nalism.~
This is Bismarck the white revolutionary, who squared the circle of Prussian politics
in the 1860s, appropriated the momentum of the German nationalist movement, dished
the liberals, transformed the map of central Europe, and presided over the creation of
a constitutional nation-state. The two biographers handle this idea somewhat differently.
For instance, while Gall sees Bismarcks pragmatism as a radical departure from existing
conservative practice, Pflanze assimilates it less persuasively to a longer 200-year pattern
of revolution from above in Prussian history, going back to 1640, and presaged most
recently in the Stein-Hardenberg reforms. But the basic trope is the same. After the
1870s, on the other hand, the imagery shifts. Bismarck is now the sorcerers apprentice
(the sub-title of Galls second volume), calling into life forces he could never ultimately
control. This was true both of specific phenomena initially promoted by Bismarck for
his own purposes, but then sustaining an unruly and disruptive life of their own (such
as the Kulturkumpf, the repression of the labour movement, the Germanization measures
against the Poles, and the social-imperialist play for colonies), and of the structural
complexity of the political system of the Kuiserreich as such. This is an argument about
the entailments of creating a German nation-state to begin with, given its restless and
uncontainable energies. By the end, when Bismarck fell from office in 1890, the diffi-
culties of managing either his international policy or the domestic situation were requir-
ing ever more contorted and convoluted manoeuvres. Moreover, beyond this technical
complexity is the more general underlying assumption that Germanys social transform-
ation was unleashing a dynamism (via the dualism of capitalist economy and bourgeois
society), whose tasks and tensions exceeded even Bismarcks formidable capacity for
damage control. One part of this end phase of Bismarcks chancellorship is exhaustively
presented in J. Aldon Nichols study of the imperial succession, which does a valuable
service to the field with its meticulously composed high-political analytical narrative.26
How do we assess the relationship of this biographical scholarship to the historio-
graphical departures outlined at the start of this essay? Most obviously, it is conceived
24 Otto von Bismarck, Gednnken und Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1898). vol. 11, p. 59, cited by
Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic, 1871-1918 (New York, 1931). p. 27.
Compare this statement of traditionalist conservatism by Ludwig von Gerlach from 1851. which
refused the ecumenical construction of the propertied classes used by Bismarck: Having done
its work of corrosion . . . money alone will survive to grind into dust our lands. our corporate
social order and, long before that, the life of our cities. By means of laws which will dissolve . . .
all that is firm and substantial, money will subvert marriage and school, the family and the
Sabbath, State and Church , . . the pillars and the fundamentals of our fatherland, and finally
the army and the throne. . . . Only mechanical foims of government and justice will remain
possible . . . until the cultured peoples, ripe for their downfall, give way to the barbarians
. . .. It is impossible to imagine such a tirade on Bismarcks lips, although he delivered plenty
of tirades of other kinds. See Nolte, Germany, p. 278.
Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. I, p. 306.
The Year of the Three Kaisers (Urbana and Chicago, 1987).

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 113
as a somewhat defiant rejoinder to the latter. The pity is that neither Gall nor Pflanze
engage explicitly with the methodological or even the substantive arguments in play,
and the unsuspecting reader could be forgiven for missing the point. While Pflanze slips
occasionally into attenuated and ill-considered polemics, Gall is forever studied and
urbane, telling his story with acuteness and elegance, but never with reference to the
historiographical issues at stake. This comment should not be misunderstood: their
respective contributions are very impressive, and provide excellent summations of the
Bismarckian era. Pflanzes second and third volumes are now the indispensable general
account in English of Bismarcks governmental politics in the 1870s and 1880s. But
neither author is self-conscious or open about what it means to indulge biographical
monumentalism at this juncture in the life of the discipline-whether in relation to the
controversies raging in the 1960s and 1970s around the reinterpretation of the history
of the Kuiserreich, or in relation to the other strategies now available for writing history
in the biographical mode.27 Moreover, although both Pflanze and Gall are actually
extremely sceptical about the main concepts advanced by Wehler and his co-thinkers-
from social imperialism and Summlungspolitik, to Bonapartism as a way of characteriz-
ing the kind of political regime constructed by Bismarck, and the associated state-society
relationships-there is never any explicit citation of the opposing views, and sometimes
there is little distinguishing Galls argument from the latter beyond the aversion to the
project of theorizing per se.28 As well as omission of historiographical discussion and
avoidance of debate, Pflanzes three volumes contain no consolidated listing of archives
or bibliography, which is an astonishing omission for a work of this size and length.
Abstaining from historiographical discussion is all the more damaging because Pflanze
and Gall actually adopt tendentious and partisan positions, notably on one of the primary
commitments of the revisionist literature, namely, the Primat der Innenpolitik, or pri-
macy of domestic policy. The counterpoint to this idea, the Primat der AuJeripolitili
(primacy of foreign policy), was always one of conservatisms strongest cards, for i t
placed German (and Prussian) history in a story of foreign perils and pressures, in a
logic of foreign endangerment beyond the responsible statesmans control, basing it on
geopolitics, on the absence of natural frontiers (for Prussia in general, for Germany to
? I am thinking here of the ways in which post-structuralist theory of various kinds, the ques-
tioning of grand narratives, the growing self-consciousness of cultural historians about the
consequences of specific narrative strategies, and the decentring of subjectivity-all those con-
temporary intellectual tendencies often misleadingly summarized (and demonized) as postmod-
emism-have complicated the conventional production of biographies, while opening up new
possibilities for experimental and innovative writing. One perceptive, but ultimately disap-
pointing and overly polemical, discussion of this situation is Kenneth Barkin, Bismarck in a
Postmodern World, with a rejoinder by Michael Geyer and Konrad J arausch, Great Men and
Postmodern Ruptures: Overcoming the Belatedness of German Historiography, German Stud-
ies Review, 18 (May 1995), 241-51 and 253-73.
This is notably true of the argument about Bonapartism, where Gall dismisses the concept
while continuing to describe what was tantamount to a Bonapartist system of rule. See Lothar
Gall, Bismarck und der Bonapartismus, Historische Zeitschrif, 223 (1976). 619-37; and Alan
Mitchell, Bonapartism as a Model for Bismarckian Politics, with comments by Otto Pflanze,
Claude Fohlen, and Michael Stiirmer, and a Reply by Mitchell, Journal of Modern History, 49
(l977), 181-209. For a similar dismissal of Summlungspolitik, social imperialism, and other
concepts of the 1960s revisionism, see Otto Pflanze, Bismarcks Herrschaftstechnik als Problem
der gegenwartigen Historiographie, Historische Zeitschrif, 234 (1982), 561-99; and
Samrnlungspolitik 1875-1 886. Kritische Bemerkungen zu einem Modell, in Otto Pflanze
(ed.), lnnenpolitische Probleme des Bismarck-Reiches (Munich, 1983). pp. 155-93.

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114 Geoff Eley
the east), on the priority accorded to military defence, war readiness and foreign affairs,
and generally on the consequences of Germanys central European location, which exer-
cised a powerful, even determining, influence on the structure of domestic political
options. Pflanze in particular provides excellent accounts of the key moments in
Bismarcks foreign policy, from the War in Sight Crisis of February to May 1875
(the greatest diplomatic defeat of his career, vol. 11, p. 272), and the context of the
Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, to the ever more complex balancing act
which kept Russia and Britain simultaneously interested in Germanys friendship during
the 188Os, not to speak of countless smaller episodes. There is a way in which foreign
affairs, with its still-intact and well-functioning self-regulated and self-contained world
of diplomacy, is the ideal site of Pflanzes preferred history, which sticks resolutely to
its own high-political script. Foreign policy is i3 completely legitimate specialism; how-
ever, it does not need to be analysed in isolation from the domestic political context.
Bascom Barry Hayes in Bismarck and Mitteleiiropa provides an exhaustive account of
particular domains of Germanys international interests under Bismarck, grounding his
work in a necessary acknowledgement of broader domestic consideration^.^^Hayes is
good on the broader context of public opinion in the press and the academic world of
historians and economists, and provides a solid account of the Austro-Hungarian context,
with much valuable material for an understanding of the multivariate German national-
ism of the period. In the light of this work, and of the valuable work published in the
volume Bismarck, Europe and Africa, the bluntness of Pflanzes dismissal of the Primat
der Innenpolitik appears all the less persuasive, substituting a talismanic affirmation of
the autonomy of statecraft and the mutual separation of the foreign and domestic arenas
for a more extensive exploration of the complicated field of interests and relations in
which foreign policies are necessarily made.
2y London and Toronto, 1994. The conference volume on the centenary of the Berlin Africa
Conference (Bismarck, Europe and Africa (Oxford and London, 1988)) provides terrific access
to the African histories involved, as well as the broader European diplomatic, commercial and
imperial interests (including Belgium, Portugal and Spain, as well Britain and France), although
interestingly there is no essay on Bismarck himself, unless we count Wolfgang Mommsens on
Bismarck, the Concert of Europe, and the Future of West Africa, 1883-1885 (pp. 151-70).
Otherwise, Bismarcks centrality has to be inferred from the detail of the thirty essays in the
volume. To that extent, the latter belongs more wi1.h the tendencies of the revisionist literature
of the 1960s than with the biographical counter-reaction represented by Pflanze and Gall.
The prerequisite for showing the relationship between domestic factors (whether economic,
bocial, cultural, or more contingently political) and foreign affairs is set simplistically high, and
evidence thereby sought in the intentions and motivations of the diplomats and foreign policy
makers, with predictably meagre results. E.g. Actually each arena contained a largely auton-
omous system of competing forces, whose dynamic relationships and interactions were affected
but not necessarily determined by those occurring in the other. Each system had requirements
that did not necessarily coincide with and at times even contradicted those of the other (p. 96).
This and a few other short and anodyne statements (e.g. pp. 246f.) are the sum of Pflanzes
contribution to this debate. The complex articulation between economics and commercial policy
with the central European diplomatic initiative in the conjuncture of 1879 is not an issue that
particularly exercises his analytical imagination. His account of Bismarcks colonial policy in
the early 1880s is similarly disappointing, barely scratching the surface of the extremely rich
scholarly literature, and ignoring for instance Hartmut Pogge von Strandmanns important article
on The Domestic Origin of Germanys Colonial Expansion under Bismarck, Past and Present,
42 (1969). 140-50, and for that matter the various contributions now accessible through the
Bismarck, Europe and Africa volume (including a more recent essay by Pogge von Strandmann).

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 115
Much of the discussion of German politics in the Bismarckian era is driven by a set of
assumptions about the political weaknesses of the German middle class or bourgeoisie.
Of course, such assumptions have been central to the idea of the German special path
or Sonderweg, which provided the main framing for the revisionist historiography of
Hans-Ulrich Wehler and his supporters, forming a kind of generational credo for this
progressive grouping inside the West German profession. This was itself brought into
question by a major debate beginning in the late 1970s, where both the degree of Ger-
manys difference from the West and the prevailing forms of its social explanation
became challenged.3 In response, a huge amount of attention became focused on the
social history of the German bourgeoisie and its emergence during the nineteenth century
as a source of collective identification. Werner Conze, the patriarch of West German
social history, sponsored a project on the Bildungsburgerturn via the Arbeitskreis f u r
Sozialgeschichte, while in Frankfurt Lothar Gall launched a city-by-city investigation
of the urban bourgeoisie. Most grandiosely of all, J iirgen Kocka, an indefatigable
exponent of the Sonderweg thesis, and second only to Wehler in the strength of his
advocacy, conceived a comparative study of Burgerturn und Biirgerlichkeit in the nine-
teenth century as an annual theme of the Zentrurn f u r interdisziplinare Forschung at
Bielefeld in 1986-7, preceded by a similar project at the Munich Historisches Kolleg
the year before. A massive and continuing fl ow of publication has been the result, with
collaborative volumes of essays presaging a steady stream of research monographs on
the different facets of nineteenth-century bourgeois class formation.
The main thrust of the resulting work has been to revisit the claims of the Sonderweg.
I See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung. Die ge-
scheiterte biirgerliche Revolution von 1848 (FrankfurtlMain, 1980), which initiated the debate
and was reissued in a revised and expanded English-language edition as The Peculiarities of
German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984).
* See Werner Conze and Jiirgen Kocka (eds.), Bildungsbiirgertum im 19. Juhrhundert, vol.
I , Bildungssystem und Professionalisierung im internationalen Vergleich (Stuttgart, 1985);
Kocka (ed.), Das Bildungsbiirgertum in GeselBchuji und Politik (Stuttgart, 1989); Lothar Gall
(ed.), Stadt und Burgerturn im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990); Gall, Burgerturn in Deutschland
(Berlin, 1989); Franz J. Bauer, Biirgenvege und Burgerwelten. Familienbiographische Untersu-
chungen zum deutschen Biirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1991); Kocka (ed.), Arbeiter
und Burger im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1986); Kocka (ed.), Burger und Biirgerlichkeit im 19.
Juhrhundert (Gottingen, 1987); Ute Frevert, Biirgerinnen und Biirger. Geschlechtenterhdltnisse
im 19. Jahrhundert (GSttingen, 1988); Hannes Siegrist, Biirgerliche Berufe. Zur Sozialgeschichte
der freien und akademischen Berufe im internationalen Vergleich (Gottingen, 1988); Dieter Lan-
gewiesche (ed.), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europaischen Vergleich
(Gottingen, 1988); Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad Jarausch (eds.), German Professions, 18W1950
(New York, 1988); Adolf M. Birke and Lothar Kettenacker (eds.), Biirgertum, Adel und Mon-
archie. Wandel der Lebensformen im Zuitulter des biirgerlichen Nationalismus (Munich, 1989);
Kocka (ed.), Biirgertum in 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europaischen Vergleich, 3 vols.
(Munich, 1988). also available as a one-volume selected translation, Kocka and Alan Mitchell
(eds.), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford and Providence, 1993); Lutz
Niethammer et al., Biirgerliche Gesellschaji in Deutschland. Historische Einblicke, Fragen, Per-
spektiven (FrankfurtlMain, 1990). See also the series Biirgertum: Beitruge zur europaischen
Gesellschafsgeschichte, edited by Wolfgang Mager, Klaus Schreiner, Hans-JUrgen Puhle, and
Hans-Ukch Wehler, inaugurated by Hans-Jurgen Puhle (ed.), Burger in der Gesellschaji der
Neuzeit. Wirtschaji-Politik-Kultur (Gottingen, 1991 ;.

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116 Geoff Eley
Was the German bourgeoisie really so supine and self-abnegating? Was it quite as
beholden to the pre-industrial elites as recent interpretations have claimed? The answer
is mixed. Thus the power of the critique is acknowledged, and the main outcome of
Kockas Bielefeld project seems to be that the old canard of the feudalization of the
German bourgeoisie has been abandoned. In their general writings both Kocka and
Wehler now speak of the suffusion and even the dominance of bourgeois values in
German society after unification. Wehler now acknowledges both the growing inte-
gration of the bourgeoisie as a separate class arid the wider resonance of its distinctive
cultural formation in society. Such a combination of internal cohesiveness and societal
prestige, founded in the remarkable expansiveness and self-confidence of the unfolding
success story of modem capitalist economic growth, produced something resembling
bourgeois hegemony: in the law and in the public sphere; in associational life and styles
of living; in literature and the arts; in sexuality and the intimate sphere of the nuclear
family; in the work ethic, and ideals of efficiency and productivity; in the valuing of
science and expertise; and in the general celebration of the autonomous and rationally
acting individual. This normative claim to leadership in the emergent society made late
nineteenth-century Germany fully comparable, Wehler now argues, to the other western
European lands: In the German empire too the power of the fascination for bourgeois
values [Burgerlichkeir] among the non-bourgeois classes went so deep that they acceded,
step by step, to the hegemonic claim.33
But on the other hand, in the political sphere proper (Wehler and Kocka argue) bour-
geois dominance was not attained. There are certainly ways in which the Kaiserreich
may be viewed institutionally as the classical embodiment of bourgeois values in the
above sense. We might cite the constitutionalizing of public authority via the parliamen-
tary institutions of 1867-71 ; the recodifications of commercial, civil, and criminal law;
the reigning models of administrative efficiency, particularly at the level of the city; and
the growth and elaboration of public opinion in the form of an institutionally complex
and legally guaranteed public sphere. In all sorts of ways the dynamism of Bismarckian
Germanys capitalist transformation set tasks for the new state, which required an
extremely close interaction between public authority and bourgeois economic and social
interests in a functional sense. Wehler goes some distance in acknowledging the bour-
geois character of the imperial German polity, in fact. Thus: As a constitutional state
the empire also embodied the triumph of bourgeois liberals, despite its compromise
character; and a range of practical advances, in areas like the progressive expansion of
the rule of law, the governance of cities, and the strengthening of public opinion, must
actually have nourished the feeling that the Kaiserreich was still capable of further
modernization, and with a lot of patience could be further reformed in the sense of
bourgeois
Yet what these revisions leave avowedly intact is the Sonderwegs central argument
about the backwardness of the Kaiserreichs core political structures (involving the mon-
archy, the military, aristocratic privilege, Prussian predominance in Germany, more
ambivalently the bureaucracy-in general, the institutionally secured primacy of pre-
industrial interests and elites), which are always already counterposed to the ideal of
These are major concessions to the critique.
33 See Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschafsgeschichre, vol. 111, pp. 763-72. The quotations are taken
34 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wie biirgerlich war das Deutsche Kaiserreich?, in Wehler, Aus der
frompp. 763, 766, 767 respectively.
Geschichre lemen? Essays (Munich, 1988). pp. 206, 208.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 117
the modernity that in Germany was not attained. After the recession of powerful bour-
geois politics since the 1870s, Wehler still argues, the bourgeoisie in Germany accom-
modated itself to a subordinate political position, or at most to co-partnership with the
old elites, pushed further in this same direction by the rising pressure from the labour
movement from below. Even the most acute bourgeois observers made this accommo-
dation. Thus the vital signs of political maturity-including civic self-assurance, confi-
dence in victory, freedom from self-doubt, political experience, resistance against the
new dangers from the right-were missing from the political culture of the German
bourgeoisie, whether before 1914 or in the prelude to 1933. In this way, the master
narrative of the Sondenueg, the deep structuralism of the account of the origins of Na-
zism, still persists. The bourgeoisies march into history stopped at the gates of the
political system. This was what distinguished German histdry in the nineteenth century
from the successful modernizations of the West. And of course, the long-term fall-out
was immense: i t was Nazism that provided the bill for bourgeois conservatism and
nationalism, for bourgeois timidity before the risky trial of strength, for the deficit of
liberal-bourgeois political culture, of successful bourgeois politics, of the bourgeois
stamp on state and society in general.35
The repeated implication is that the weakness of liberalism profoundly compromised
the victory of bourgeois values in Germany before 1914, blocking their translation into
the kind of politics associated with a Gladstone or a Lloyd George, or the republican
tradition in France, and distorting their effects on German public life. Moreover, Kocka
argues very strongly that the bourgeoisies specific constellation-one resting on the
tradition of Enlightenment and a specific separation between countryside and town,
making a small but coherent and highly influential social formation defined by common
opponents and a shared culture-was dealt a death blow by the First World War and
the accompanying revolutionary upheaval.36 The resulting dissolution of bourgeois social
cohesion and cultural dominance was common to western Europe as a whole. But in
the West in the strict sense-Britain, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia-the
strength of liberal political goods outlived the specifically bourgeois aspirations that
originally gave them life. After 1918 democracy in the West became strengthened and
secured, resisting the rise of fascism until the military diblcle of 1940. But in Germany,
bourgeois political culture closed itself bitterly against the forces of the left before 1914,
and so the democratic consolidation never had the chance to occur. Moreover, where
instances of bourgeois political assertiveness under the Kaiserreich can be found-in
the industrial tariffs of 1879 and 1902, the successful containment of trade unions in
heavy industry and most of the leading sectors of the economy, the naval armaments
drive after 1897, and so on-they were co-opted by the pre-industrial elites, it is argued,
rather than opening the way for the brave new bourgeois world.
Given that liberalism failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough in the political culture,
therefore, the transition to a fully democratic society (or the ideal of a bourgeois society
in Wehlers utopian sense, in which all groups gain access to emancipation through the
victory of universal values) was ~tillborn.~ In the West this breakthrough already came
34 Ibid., pp. 216f.
36 J iirgen Kocka, The Middle Classes in Europe, Journal of Modern History, 67 (Dec.
1995). 785f.
37 See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Geschichte und Zielutopie der deutschen biirgerlichen Gesell-
schaft, in Wehler, Aus der Geschichte lernen?, pp. 241-55.

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118 Geoff Eley
before 1914; in Germany the persistence of illiberalism during that period (as the
entrenched authoritarianism of pre-industrial elites) paralysed the opportunities. Situat-
ing the bourgeois era before the First World War in this way has two crucial effects.
On the one hand, it denies bourgeois character in Kockas and Wehlers terms to those
political actions of bourgeois social groups that subsequently opened the way for fas-
cism, making the latter the pathology of an un-modernized polity in which bourgeois
social and political interests were perverted and undermined, rather than something such
interests played a part (directly and indirectly) in producing. For the current historians,
the heyday of European bourgeois culture was over by 1914: if by that time the bour-
geoisie had penetrated to the core of the state, the future of democracy could be assured;
if it was held at bay (as in Germany, by the power of pre-industrial elites), the future
was damaged and flawed.
On the other hand, historians like Lothar Gall place bourgeois authenticity even ear-
lier. Gall associates the vitality and coherence of the German liberal outlook (subtly
elided, as usual, with the bourgeois societal presence) in the middle third of the nine-
teenth century with the transitory circumstances of a partially transformed pre-industrial
society-that is, those parts of Germany energized by the economic opportunities and
advanced ideas of the dual revolution, but as yet relatively unpolarized by the conse-
quences of large-scale industrialization and class differentiation-thereby producing the
apparent paradox of a modernizing creed in a traditional society. In this argument,
the liberal ideal of a biirgerliche Gesellschufr--in that double sense of a society of
citizens organized around self-consciously bourgeois values-required particular kinds
of pre-industrial communities in which to flourish, so that the old sociological notion
of liberalism as the political expression of a rising bourgeoisie becomes mischievously
revised. From being a movement for the general emancipation of society, committed to
an ideal of a classless society of citizens of the middling sort . . . in which the
middle-class citizenry ultimately represents society as such and becomes the general
estate, Galls argument runs, liberalism then fell prey after industrialization to the
strains of social differentiation, became dominated by the class-specific interests of a
now fragmented bourgeoisie, and lost its ability to harmonize a socially mixed support.*
The problem with these views is that they severely underestimate the bourgeoisies
political dominance under the Kuiserreich, in which the foundation-laying of the
Lothar Gall, Sundenfall des liberalen Derikens oder Krise der biirgerlich-liberalen
Bewegung? Zum Verhaltnis von Liberalismus und Imperialismus in Deutschland, in Karl Holl
and GUnther List (eds.), Liberalismus und imperiulistischer Sfaat (Gottingen, 1975). pp. 149ff.;
also Gall, Liberalismus und biirgerliche Gesellschaft: Zur Charakter und Entwicklung der lib-
eralen Bewegung in Deutschland, Historische Zeirschrif, 220 (1975). pp. 324-56. In the same
direction, see James J . Sheehan, German Liberalism in fhe Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978);
Karl Rohe, Liberalismus und soziale Struktur-Uberlegungen zur politischen Gesellschaft und
zur politischen Kultur des Ruhrgebiets, Liberal, 18 (1976), 43-56, 113-21. Mack Walker, Ger-
man Home Towns: Community, Sfare, General Estate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca, 1971). is also relevant
here. More recently, see also Lothar Gall, . . . Ich wiinschte ein Biirger zu sein. Zum
Selbstversandnis des deutschen BUrgertums im 19. J ahrhundert, Historische Zeiruchrifr, 245
(1987). 60-23. For critiques of this general approach to the history of German liberalism, see
Wolfgang J . Mommsen, Der deutsche Liberalismus zwischen klassenloser Biirgergesellschaft
und organisiertem Kapitalismus: Zu einigen neueren Liberalismusinterpretationen, Geschichre
und Gesellschaf, 4 (1978). 77-90; Geoff Eley, James Sheehan and the German Liberals: A
Critical Interpretation. Central European History, 14 (I981 ), 273-88.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 119
Bismarckian period played such a vital part.39 Galls 1989 study of the Bassermann
family, intended as a microcosm of the bourgeoisies rise and fall, is an excellent case
in point. From origins in the classic pre-industrial commercial occupations of milling,
baking and innkeeping, through prosperous mercantile enterprise in a variety of regional
commodities, the Mannheim Bassermanns rose by the early nineteenth century to a
notable place among the southwest German bourgeoisie. By hard work, disciplined
acquisitiveness, clever marriages, and a culture of enlightened sobriety, the Bassermanns
became powers of the economy, organizers of the public sphere, patrons of the arts, and
arbiters of taste. With Friedrich Daniel Bassermann ( 1 8 11-55), the second-generation
beneficiary of the familys triumphal passage from the old-style burgher status into the
new class identity of the bourgeoisie, the familys fortunes were brought to a first climac-
teric: entering Baden liberal politics in the 184Os, and joining the national political stage
in 1848-9, Friedrich Daniel committed suicide amidst the post-revolutionary disappoint-
ments. A later generation saw this prominence further ratified in the leadership of the
National Liberal Party of Ernst Bassermann (1854-1917). The accumulation of econ-
omic and political power was always complemented by the amassing of cultural capital,
moreover, via connections to the academic world, support for theatre and the arts, leader-
ship of Mannheims cultural organizations, and so on. The counterpart to Ernst was
his nephew, the renowned actor Albert Bassermann (1867-1952), whose achievements
traversed the German theatrical repertoire between the 1890s and the Third Reich (which
he experienced from emigrati~n).~
It is interesting that Gall should turn to biography in making his argument about the
bourgeoisie (right after his biography of Bismarck, that is), and the relationship of the
life (or lives, in the case of the Bassermanns) to the times is again artfully and problem-
atically metonymic, standing in for complexities of bourgeois class formation and its
articulations with political history, for which a different kind of analytic is req~i red.~
Narrativizing the bourgeoisies rise and fall as an epic of family crisis and decline is
seductively appealing, for this has been a familiar way of representing the German
bourgeoisies relationship to Nazism in novels and film: such portrayals have tended to
dwell in moralizing fashion on the hubris of class power, the logics of economic and
political opportunism, and the implosion of post-Nietzschean aesthetics, invariably them-
2J Here I need to enter a vital caveat, concerning the specific ways-both theoretically and
empirically-in which the bourgeoisie could exercise political dominance. At the level of theory,
for instance, there are big problems with conceptualizing any social class as a collective subject
or agent capable of ruling in some direct and unmediated sense, whether by staffing or con-
trolling the state with its own personnel, or by manipulative mechanisms, or whatever. It makes
far more sense to see dominant classes as a complex formation, whose societal power (founded
importantly but not exclusively in production) structures and defines the arenas in which politics
and government have to take place. Empirically speaking, on the other hand, there will be
countless instances in which particular bourgeois groups or interests (in the sociological sense)
secure the implementation of particular policies or projects, whether for lucrative government
contracts. for the adoption of fiscal measures, for the pursuit of social policy legislation, for the
defence of public morality, for ideals of civic equality, and so on. When I talk in this essay
about the dominance of the bourgeoisie, it is this complex definition I have in mind. For further
discussion. see Geoff Eley, The British Model and the German Road: Rethinking the Course
of German History before 1914. i n Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German Hisfory,
especially pp. 12743.
4o Gall, Burgerturn in Deurschland.
4 For a similar, but in this case multi-family and i n my view more successful, biographical
exploration, see Bauer, Biirgcrwege und Burgerwelten.

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120 Geoff E1e.y
atized as decadence and sexual corruption. Gall does not exactly reproduce this scen-
ario-in his concluding discussion of Albert Bassermann aesthetics become a source of
resistance and value-but his chosen narrative is none the less partial for that. As sug-
gested above, the particular rhythm of Galls story embodies a set of rather specific
understandings-concerning the nature of the bourgeoisie as a socio-cultural formation
and the meanings of bourgeois virtue-focused on the middle of the nineteenth century.
But there are other ways of telling the story, which pay more attention to the forms of
bourgeois societal power and self-representation in the different phases of the twentieth
century, where there are powerful continuities between the Kaiserreich and the Federal
Republic which the form of Galls account tends to hide. The claim that German liberal-
ism, or true bourgeois culture, was essentially pre-industrial in origins, and that its
fundamental structures were necessarily undermined by industrialization, tends to deny
the authenticity of liberalisms (and bourgeois interests and representations) that came
later, defining themselves consciously with the new conditions of industrial capitalism.
Here it is important to move the discussion on to more concrete terrain, in ways that
Galls contribution helps to suggest. We need to free the histories of the Bismarckian
era from the overarching normative and dehistoricized scenarios, the grand teleologies
of bourgeois success and failure, in which they are all too easily embedded-yet without
surrendering the commitment to theorizing and comparison. The material groundedness
of bourgeois achievements is one important direction, and not the least of the contri-
butions of Klaus HeR, in a technically dour and relentless survey of landholding east
of the Elbe: for instance, is his evidence concerning patterns of agricultural profitability
and the social heterogeneity of landownership, which complicates the meanings of the
formal distinction between bourgeois and aristocratic status during the period after uni-
fication. Using a daunting array of legal, fiscal, actuarial, statistical, and demographic
sources, which provide access to the legal status of large estates and their geographical
distribution, their structures of indebtedness, their forms and degree of market inte-
gration, and their profit margins and tax liabilities, with particular attention to the
phenomenon of entailment, HeR lays to rest two important myths of recent historiogra-
phy, each of which has its part in the argument about the primacy of pre-industrial
traditions. On the one hand, large estates were not proportionately commoner in the east
than in the west of Prussia, and on the contrary larger-scale landownership not only
predominated in the west but also turned more of a profit. There was far more variation
in the dimensions of estate-holding east of the Elbe than the simpler stereotypes of
Junkers and lurifundiu would presume, and the former were less grandiose, the latter
less numerous, than we suppose. On the other hand, east Elbian agriculture was certainly
not in permanent structural crisis, as Rosenberg and his followers have claimed, but
remained generally profitable.
HeR demonstrates these points very well, and succeeds in freeing large-estate agricul-
ture from the over-simplifications entrenched so deeply in the literature. How these
revised facts affect our understanding of Bismarckian Germanys changing class struc-
ture is less apparent. What is clear is that non-noble bourgeois property-owners bought
their way into the land market with great alacrity in the new capitalist Germany, in the
east no less than the west of Prussia, while conversely the aristocratic estate-owners of
the east behaved economically in ways indistinguishable from aggressive and profit-
maximizing capitalist farmers. Even the device of entailment-the institution of the
42 Junker und biirgerliche GroJlgrundbesitzer im Kaiserreich (Stuttgart, 1990).

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 121
FamilienjdeikommiJI that forms a core theme of the book-turns out to be freshly
deployed during the Kaiserreich, reinvented in that sense, across the full landscape of
commercialized landownership, despite its connotations of pre-bourgeois traditionalism.
At the same time, He13 barely explicates this blurring of bourgeois/aristocratic class
boundaries, and the thematics of class formation discussed above are absent from his
pages. At one level, his evidence leaves the orthodoxy of the older account intact: the
very largest estates east of the Elbe were still owned by nobles, forming an aristocratic
bloc with a privileged political position, given its fiscal immunities and the special fea-
tures of the Prussian constitution. But his insistence that big estate-owners cannot be
treated as a unitary group in class or political terms, whether east or west of the Elbe,
or across the regional divide, because of the wide variation of landholding patterns, is
salutary. At the very least, Junker survival required a far more arduous process of polit-
ical construction-the winning of popular support and the building of coalitions across
regions and divisions of status, until a unified agrarian interest could be shaped-than
the classic accounts allow, with their stress on manipulation and special access to the
state. It is a pity that He0 does not venture some thoughts on this aspect of his subject?
Given the degree to which the political dominance of the National Liberals in the
new Bismarckian empire, and the hegemony of a variegated liberalism more generally
in the 1860s and 187Os, depended on the countryside (essentially a mosaic of regional
cultures of liberalism, extending from Schleswig-Holstein and Oldenburg in the north,
through Rhineland-Westphalia and Hanover, to the smaller central German states, and
Baden, Wiirttemberg, and large parts of Bavaria in the south), some careful study of
attitudes towards urban and rural property-owning in the unification period would be
very illuminating, and might go some way to clarifying the question HeR only obliquely
raises, namely, the relationship of agrarian capitalism to bourgeois class formation (the
bourgeois who buys into land, the aristocrat who behaves like a capitalist). As a result
of the agrarian popular mobilizations of the 189Os, at the centre of which was the new
driving energy of the Bund der Landwirte (Agrarian League) formed in 1893, and the
political concentration around the tariffs of 1902, a unitary agrarian interest was forged
with brutal success in Wilhelmine politics. But the Agrarian League was distinct from
the more traditional aristocratic conservatism of east Elbia; the main weight of its agi-
tation (and eventually membership) was located west of the Elbe; it was a political
construct of the period after Bismarck; and its creation was predicated on the destruction
of the countrysides earlier liberal affiliations. That being so, the Bismarckian period,
when rural society was stamped so impressively by the self-confidently bourgeois com-
I The classic accounts of the power of the landed interest in German politics-as the main
bearers of authoritarian and pre-industrial traditions i n the tiaiserreich-are Hans Rosenberg,
Probleme der deurschen Sozialgeschichte (FrankfudMain, I969), esp. Die Pseudodemokrati-
sierung der Rittergutsbesitzerklasse, pp. 7-49; and Hans-Jiirgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpo-
litik und preiij3ischer tionservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich 1893-1914. Ein Beitrag zur
Anulyse des Nationalismus in Deutschland am Beispiel des Bundes der Landwirte und der
Deutsch-tionservativen fartei (Hanover, 1966). For a critique, see Geoff Eley, Antisemitism,
Agrarian Mobilization, and the Conservative Party: Radicalism and Containment in the Founding
of the Agrarian League, 1890-1893. in Larry E. Jones and James Retallack (eds.), Berween
Reform, Reaction. and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789
to 1945 (Oxford and Providence, 1993). pp. 187-227. I have tried to specify the political impor-
tance of the landed interest i n Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right. Radical Nationalism
and Political Chunge after Bismarck (Ann Arbor, 1991). esp. pp. 349-61.

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122 Geoff Eley
mitments (in the doubled meaning of sociology and values) of a liberal notability, is
ripe for investigation.
If HeB shows us a countryside not quite as traditionalist or pre-bourgeois as we
thought, Brian Ladd takes us to the opposite end of the spectrum, into the enlightened
city contexts of modem urban planning and municipal progressivism, to the cutting edge
of bourgeois reform. Basing his account on Cologne, Dlisseldorf, and Frankfurt, with
additional materials from Berlin and the relevant national discussions, Ladd builds up
a valuable picture of the German response to urban growth between the 1860s and 1914,
which by any standards was staggering, with Berlin growing from 800,000 inhabitants
to just over 2 million, Hamburg from 300,000 to over 1 million, Munich from 169,000
to 646,000, and so on.u He introduces the deeper context of nineteenth-century munici-
pal self-administration, followed by five chapters on different aspects of the public
engagement with the rise of the city-what he calls the collection of German municipal
activities that by 1914 had come to be known as city planning, which provided excellent
evidence of municipal enterprise and civic pride in action, and a clear general picture
of the kind of order the reformers tried to create out of the changing social, economic,
and geographic structure of their cities.4J Throughout, the discourse of reform is treated
as a distinctively bourgeois affair, although the SPD contribution to the pre-1914
debates is also considered. But this familiar elision of social and political categories
(namely, bourgeois . . . SPD) is significant, because Ladd allows his political descrip-
tions-principally the hegemonic liberalism of the unification decades, followed by the
emergent formations of professional and administrative expertise-to stand in for the
social interests and groupings he wants them to represent, and in the book there is no
explicit discussion of bourgeois class formation in Kockas sense.
Ladds account is mainly concerned with the citys physical and built environment,
and the way its public regulation came to dominate notions of social improvement. The
main transition here was from a concern with public health and the quality of life,
stressing clean air, clean water, efficient waste disposal, access to green space, and so
on (waterworks, sewers, street cleaning, public baths, parks), to a different administrative
focus on ordering the urban space, via regulation of the land market and land use, street
planning, new construction, the need for working-class housing, mass transit, annexation
and incorporation, commercial and residential zoning, and so on. The fulcrum is the
books central chapter on Urban Aesthetics and the New Planning of the 1890s (pp.
11 1-38), which charts the incursion of a specific moral-political ambivalence into the
discourse of urban planning, in which the goals of city rationalization and social well-
being became mapped onto a definite spatial aesthetic, stressing not only historic preser-
vation, the value of older non-utilitarian urban models, and the integration of the urban
landscape, but also an implicit valorizing of the countryside and the emergence of the
garden city ideal and other celebrations of the single detached dwelling. Moreover, this
shift in the 1880s from public health to town planning as the leading edge of urban
reform was paralleled by the transition from the classic liberal mayors of the Bismarck-
ian period to the new public officials of the Wilhelmine era-from J ohannes Miquel
Between 1871 and 1914, Colognes population grew from129,233 to 640,371 (becoming
Germanys fourth largest city; Frankfurts from 91,040 to 449,724; and Diisseldorfs froman
even lower starting point (Ladd doesnt provide the figure) to 417,994. See Urbun Plunning und
Civic Order (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 14.
Ibid., p. 35.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 123
( 1 880-90) to Franz Adickes ( 189 1-1 9 12) in Frankfurt, or Hermann Becker ( I 875-85)
to Wilhelm Becker (1886-1907) in Cologne. As new groups began demanding partici-
pation, principally the labour movement, this centring of municipal politics around lang-
uages of non-partisanship and expertise became all the more marked. Some major
themes which feature in comparable urban histories of Britain or North America, like
urban schooling, the employment and welfare aspects of municipalization and the growth
of an urban public sector, and the rise of commercialized entertainment, are ignored by
Ladd. But he is to be commended for an excellent survey of bourgeois achievement
within the public domain, even though this social quality of Biirgerlichkeit remains very
under-explicated in his account.
Even though its focus is an earlier period-strictly speaking the 1830s to the 1850s-
Rudolf Bochs study of the Rhineland entrepreneurial elite has much to offer in this
respect. He combines a densely grounded explication of the economic outlook of the
industrialists with a broad-gauged intellectual and political history of the wider context
of the industrialization debate, and shows how the expectation of a permanently
expanding industrial economy took shape. Until the 1830s, Rhineland merchants and
manufacturers had largely accepted the social ideal Gall and others have attributed to
the German liberals--of a classless society of citizens of the middling sort (klassenlose
Biirgergesellscha@ rnittlerer ExistenZen)-stressing a balance of trade, industry, and
agriculture as the desirable condition of the economy, rather than the unfettered dyna-
mism of an industrial transformation that dissolved civil society and its existing forms
of cohesion.* A complex conjuncture of factors forced a change, extending from the
Zollverein of 1834 to the seventh Rhineland Provincial Diet in 1843, including the
dynamics of market protection and the challenge of British manufacturing supremacy,
the impetus of railway building, and the impact of pauperism and the social question.
The discourse of the economy shifted from the limited early nineteenth-century vision
of social equilibrium to a programmatic belief in the necessity of unlimited production,
i n which the unrestricted expansion of industry, including the permanent existence of a
propertiless wage-earning population, became an increasingly compelling description of
an inevitable future. The detailed mechanics of this transition, in the trade and commer-
cial press, and in particular contexts like the Chambers of Commerce and the Provincial
Diet, are meticulously captured by Bochs account, via the intensive debates around
tariffs and free trade, mechanization, railway construction, and the growth of heavy
industry. The massive public discussion of the social question was pivotal, for continu-
ously expanding industrialization now came to be seen as the best means for addressing
the ills of mass poverty.
In these terms, Bochs account is exactly the kind of work we need, which grounds
the debate about bourgeois class formation in a densely researched and argued study of
a particular bourgeoisie, concentrating on the latters actual histories rather than the
history it failed to produce. At the same time, Boch stays within the exceptionalism
frame, holding the Rhineland entrepreneurial elite accountable for the defeat of demo-
cracy in 1848-9 and the failure to generate significant social reform. They lacked a
social vision, he argues, missed the chance for a decisive political breakthrough, and
consequently made their contribution to the modernization deficit of German historical
Boch uses this phrase of Galls as one of his sub-chapter headings, outlining the Rhineland
equivalent of the southwest German situation: Grenzenloses Wnchsturn? (Gottingen, 1991), pp.
85-8.

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124 Geoff Eley
development-what he calls the fateful disparity between economic strength and inad-
equate political modernity under the Kaiserreiclr. It is unclear why this political cau-
tion in the face of democracy, or even of a particularly forthright liberalism, should be
so surprising, and Boch neglects to show where such advanced entrepreneurial fractions
of the bourgeoisie behaved any differently elsewhere-certainly not in Britain or France.
Moreover, it is also not clear why the Rhineland bourgeoisie should be considered quite
so atypical (another under-explicated dimension of Bochs argument): while hardly
representative in some all-German statistical sense, the Rhineland was clearly typical
of a certain set of regional examples, in which an economic bourgeoisie displayed com-
parable primacy and dynamism during the middle decades of the nineteenth century,
thereby constituting itself as a powerful political force in the process of unification and
German state formation after the 1860s and 1870s. Hamburg and the other Hanse cities,
Frankfurt, parts of the central German industrial region south of Berlin towards Saxony,
and of course greater Berlin itself are all cases in point.
In this respect, there are two major flaws in Bochs approach, which reflect weak-
nesses in the larger literature on the nineteenth-century German bourgeoisie. On the one
hand, Boch stops short of a social history of the Rhineland bourgeoisie in the fuller
sense proposed by the critics of the Sonderwrg thesis and embraced by Kocka and
Wehler in their more programmatic moments. Within the terms of Kockas conceptual
framework for the rise of the German bourgeoisie, Boch confines himself to the econ-
omic bourgeoisie alone, and ignores both the Bildungsburgerturn of the region and the
older antecedents of the traditional burgher estate of the towns, while failing to address
the wider social arena of bourgeois class formation, whether in the private domain of
the family, or the public sphere of associational But on the other hand, the
claim that after 1848 the bourgeoisie was no longer a politically competent class seems
quite wrong, for in the 1850s and 1860s the Rliineland bourgeoisie continued to exert
vital political influence, not to speak of its organization into the powerful economic
lobbies of the 1870s and beyond, whether or not these articulations occurred through
the expected liberal forms. In fact, it is exactly these highly complicated reconfigurings
of the possible forms of a relationship between business interests and liberalism
(economics and politics), in which sometimes liberalism itself became reoriented or
redesigned, and sometimes the interests of the economy and the liberal political pro-
gramme simply became decoupled, that require our attention during the process of uni-
fication. Between 1858 and 1861, for instance, the Wirtschafsburgertum in Prussia
secured very much the economic legislation it required, and the unification settlement
of 1867-71 then translated these gains onto a plane of constitution-making and legal
codification. Theorizing this dynamic, between the logics of capitalist development and
the construction of economic interests into central priorities of state on the one hand,
and the political discourse of German liberalism on the other-between the coalescence
of the bourgeoisie into a dominant class and the aspiration for the constitutional state-
47 /bid., p. 289.
48 For Kockas general framework, see Jiirgen Kocka, The European Pattern and the German
Case, in Kocka and Mitchell (eds.), Bourgeois Society in Ninereenrh-Cenrury Europe, pp. 8ff.,
and Kocka, Middle Classes in Europe.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 125
in ways that go beyond the tired routines of the Sondenveg, is still the central issue,
and Boch sidesteps the que~tion.~
It is precisely these political dimensions of class formation-the organization of the
bourgeois voice, and the complex universe of particular bourgeois interests, into a collec-
tive political agency with national ambition during the struggle for German unification-
that receive such poor recognition in the current wave of publication, because even to
formulate this question is to vitiate the Sondenueg thesis to which so many German
historians still adhere. In this respect, the translation of liberal politics from the regional
and local bases of the earlier nineteenth century onto the national stage of the 1860s is
crying out for serious attenti ~n.~ We are still waiting for an integrated account of the
German bourgeoisies social and political history in the Bismarckian years-one that
grounds the argument in locally specified studies of particular experiences (a particular
geographical locality, or a particular class fraction, or a particular type of organization
and activity), but simultaneously explores the articulations between the local and the
national and vice versa.
IV
After the recent Bismarck biographies and the steady flood of works on the bourgeoisie,
the scholarly literature on the Bismarckian period proper is thin indeed. One area of
remarkable neglect, given the degree to which the extreme nationalisms of the twentieth
century are explained by the flawed development and missing modernization of the
Bismarckian unification, with the resulting need for secondary integration and the
pathologies of social imperialism, is that of nationalism. The creation of national loy-
alty in a newly unified state, within perspectives of state formation and cultural history,
might seem an obvious priority for research, but surprisingly little has appeared. The
main published interest has focused on the Wilhelmine era after 1890, where there is
now a sizeable literature, for instance, on forms of radical nationalism and the political
significance of the so-called nationale Verbande, including the Colonial Society, the
Navy League, the anti-Polish agitations, the German language movements, the Defence
League, and of course the self-styled ideological vanguard, the Pan-German L eag~e. ~
For the period of German unification itself, there is very little on the dynamics of
4y See Boch, Grenzenloses Wachstum?, p. 268. See here the work of J ames M. Brophy, Salus
publicu suprema /ex: Prussian Businessmen in the New Era and Constitutional Conflict, Central
European History. 28. 2 ( 1 995), 122-5 1 ; and his forthcoming book on capitalist entrepreneurship
and the Prussian state during unification.
) See here especially Andreas Biefangs excellent study of the Nationalverein, which har-
nessed the local and regional energies of the bourgeois advocates of a united Germany for
the first time into a single national organization. Andreas Biefang, Politisches Biirgertum in
Deutschlund, 1857-1868: Nationale Organisationen und Eliten (Diisseldorf, 1994); also Shlorno
Naarnan, Der Deutsche Nutionulverein (Diisseldorf, 1987).
I For my own work on the nationale Verbiinde. see Eley, Reshaping, and Geoff Eley, Some
Thoughts on the Nationalist Pressure Groups in Imperial Germany, in Paul Kennedy and
Anthony J . Nicholls (eds.), Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before
1914 (London. 1981). pp. 40-67. Recent monographs include: Roger Chickering, We Men Who
Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886-1914 (London, 1984);
Marilyn Shevin Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism i n Wilhelniine Ger-
many (New York, 1990); and Stig Forster, Der doppelte Militarismus: Die deutsche Heeresriis-
tungspolitik ;wischen Slutus-quo-Sicherung und Aggression, 189G1913 (Stuttgart, 1985).

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126 Geoff Eley
national identity formation, whether for the broader intellectual history of the principle
of German nationality and its diffusion, or the social and cultural history of a popular
sense of belonging in the new nation-state. We are still disproportionately dependent
on the suggestiveness of a few general essays.
Thomas Rohkramers book on the German veterans organizations (Kriegervereine)
is a good solid example of the kind of study that would help. At one level it provides
nothing startlingly new, although as the first detailed monograph on its subject it pro-
vides an invaluable The authors concern is with the mentality of the veterans
clubs ordinary membership (of whom nationally by 1914 there were almost 3 million)
and its identification with monarchy, army, and nation, seeing the latter as a powerful
support of the Kuiserreichs given political order. Accordingly, the bulk of the study
(179 of the 270 pages of text) expounds the terms of the soldierly experience and its
nationalist dimensions, presenting a detailed picture of the veterans ideological outlook.
Rohkramer walks us through a series of particular thematics intelligently enough-
including the understanding of history, attitudes towards the state and the monarchy,
the place of religion, the values of private life, the respective attractions of rural romanti-
cism and industrialism, conceptions of political order and the enemy within, and the
various aspects of militarism in the immediate sense-but the broader significance of
this somewhat over-synthesized account remains unclear. The section on economic and
social policies is very perfunctory, for instance (two pages), as is the treatment of atti-
tudes towards the labour movement. The precise quality of the patriotism produced in
the Kriegervereine, its boundaries and fissures, its specificities and resonance within the
wider universe of nationalist discourse under the Kaiserreich, is moot.
By comparison, the organizational analysis is confined to a brief 50 pages. Again,
there are no big surprises. The ordinary membership was predominantly lower-class,
comprising small farmers and farmworkers, workers, and Mittelstund in roughly equal
measures (28.8, 27.8, and 24.9 per cent, in a statistic of 191 I ), with civil servants and
white-collar personnel also significantly represented ( 1 8.5 per cent). According to these
and other statistics, aristocrats and landowners, capitalists, the free professions, and
higher managerial and administrative categories seem barely to have been represented
at all. Workers usually composed between a quarter and a third of the membership,
52 I have tried to lay out the terms of an agenda in Geoff Eley, State Formation, Nationalism,
and Political Culture: Some Thoughts on the Unification of Germany, in Eley, From Unification
to Nazism, pp. 61-84. See also the following: Robert M. Berdahl, New Thoughts on German
Nationalism, American Historical Review, 77 (1972). 65-80; James J . Sheehan, What is Ger-
man History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography,
Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981). 1-23; John Hreuilly, Sovereignty and Boundaries: Mod-
em State Formation and National Identity in Germany, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), National Histor-
ies and Europeun History (London, 1993). pp. 94- 140. Unfortunately, John Breuilly (ed.), The
Stute of Germany. The National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and Remaking of a Modern
Nation-State (London, 1992), and Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism. From
Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763-1867 (Cambridge, 1991), are both disappointing i n
this respect.
5 Thomas Rohkramer, Der Militarismus der kleinen Leute *: Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen
Kaiserreich, 1871-1914 (Munich, 1990).
s4 See also Hansjoachim Henning, Kriegervereine in den deutschen Westprovinzen. Ein
Beitrag zur preuBischen Innenpolitik zwischen 1860 und 19 14. Rheinische Vierteljahreshefe,
32 ( 1968), 430-75; Klaus Saul, Der Deutscher Kriegerbund. Zur innenpolitischen Funktion
eines nationalen Verbandes im kaiserlichen Deutschland, Militurgeschichtliche Mitteilungen,
6 (1969). 95-130.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 127
although in certain industrial cities like Magdeburg and Gelsenkirchen this might be
over 75 per cent. In the leadership positions these patterns were reversed. By 1913 86.9
per cent of the branch chairmen had the officer rank, and the local leadership came
almost exclusively from the upper echelons of society-big landowners, higher civil
servants, the Bildungsbiirgertum, lawyers and the state judiciary-whereas even artisans
and merchants, let alone workers, disappeared largely from view. Moreover, this socio-
logy became accentuated as time went on, and in fact as the public sphere of the Kaiser-
reich expanded after 1890 (with the end of the Anti-Socialist Law and the general up-
swing of popular political mobilization) the top-down and socially restrictive control of
the Kriegeniereine became ever more marked, driven especially by the demarcating of
the legitimate political nation against the Social Democrats, for which the election cam-
paigns of 1893 and 1898 set the tone. I n this way the Kriegervereine replicated the
typical sociology of the nationale Verbande, although interestingly they failed to gener-
ate the dissident radical nationalism that attacked the government from the right in
groups like the Navy League or the Pan-Germans. Finally, the full logic of these
developments post-dated the fall of Bismarck (e.g. between 1895 and 1913 the numbers
of Lcrndriite chairing branches rose from 4 to 22.4 per cent of the total). The controversy
surrounding the attempts of the national leadership to expel trade unionists and Social
Democrats from the membership after the 1890s also implies some greater degree of
tolerance earlier on---or at least a kind of patriotic consensus not yet subjected to certain
forms of strain-and it is a pity Rohkramer did not provide more insight into the earlier
period in this respect. This re-emphasizes the need for some serious and detailed investi-
gation of the Bismarckian period proper.
There is a growing body of work stressing the transformations and adaptability of
German society in the nineteenth century, as against its backwardness and resistance to
modernity. One important example of such work is Celia Applegates A Nation of Prov-
incials. The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990) (reviewed in German History, 1 1,
3 (1993)). Helmut Smiths new study of the place of religious conflict in the dynamics of
the empires emerging national polity makes a similar point.56 In this case, the politically
mobilized mutual antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants in the Bismarckian Kultur-
kampf were less the signs of pre-industrial continuities and traditional or premodern
bases of affiliation than the characteristic stresses and strains accompanying a new
process of state formation, in which the discourse of national identity was plural and
mobile, appropriated by both sides of the religious conflict rather than supplying some
unitary or straightforward language of society-wide political integration. The possible
languages of national identification in the new German nation-state were undecided.
Although liberal visions of the constitutional nation had enormous momentum behind
them, despite the incipient co-optation of the movement by Bismarcks pragmatic
advancement of greater-Prussian interests, there was still an enormous diversity of
regional, confessional, class, and political affiliations to be fashioned into consensual
form, and i n the 1870s the definition of German national belonging was very much
contested ground.
Rohkramer shows the importance of the army and soldiering, through the social
agency of the veterans assocations, in producing one strand of patriotic consensus,
For a careful discussion of the sociology and structure of membership i n the nationalist
( Genncin Nrrtionrrlism cind Religious Conflict (Princeton, 1995).
pressure groups, see ch. 4, Inside the Pressure Groups, i n Eley, Reshaping, pp. 101-59.

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128 Geoff Eley
while Applegate explores the complex imbrication of local and regional rootedness with
the new project of building consciousness of nation, and both required an extensive
repertoire of activities, some state generated, others emanating from civil society.
Religion provides another site of creative but contested intervention in this respect, in
which existing identities were worked upon by the public powers, sometimes with, and
sometimes against the existing grain. As Smith shows, the liberal grand narrative of
German nationhood was profoundly Protestant, reaching back to the Reformation and
the historically evolving struggle against the perceived counter-national ambitions of the
Catholic church during the intervening centuries, so that the Kulturkampf of the 1870s
became simultaneously a demand for progress (in a socio-cultural sense) and a bid for
a national culture that was confessionally enframed. Likewise, the Catholic response to
the offensive launched in the 1870s was also always patriotically inscribed, and the
visions of national loyalty and integration organizing the political career of a Ludwig
Windthorst were hardly less securely founded than those of a Rudolf von Bennigsen.
By the 1890s. when the Kulturkampf itself had long been wound down, and the Centre
Party had emerged into a strategic parliamentary position, increasingly the arbiter of
stable governing majorities, this national aspiration was becoming elaborated in all sorts
of ways.
Smith does an excellent job of delineating the interactive solidification of Protestant
and Catholic identities as a result of the Kul wkampf, carefully relativizing these via
some subtly managed social indicators, from the respective reading habits of the two
confessions, and the differential rates of religious observance, to the changing incidence
of mixed marriages and the effects of urbanization. The sources of activism also varied
across the confessional divide. Among Catholics it was the combination of parish priests
and popular citizenship-as Smith observes, it was not the Kulturkampf itself, but the
conjuncture of the Kulturkampf with the introduction of universal manhood suffrage
[that] created the condition for the formation of a politically active clergy-whereas in
the Protestant sector it was far more the engagement of the Bildungsbiirgertum that
provided the momentum.57 The sociology and cohesion of the confessional milieus was
richly overdetermined by the social effects of the developmental process as it interacted
with the specific characteristics of regions and the concrete forms of an urban-rural
split:
two distinct social groups formed the front lines of Catholic-Protestant antagonism. On the Prot-
estant side, the educated middle classes provided the most persistent and most vociferous advocates
of anti-Catholic politics. But among Catholics, rural arid small-town populations most readily gave
confessional polemics a sympathetic hearing. Organized confessional antagonism was, therefore,
grounded in social division: it drew its principal Clan from tension between middle-class, typically
urban Protestants, on the one side, and more rural and small-town Catholics, usually of a humbler
station, on the other. The clergy played an important role in the mobilization of confessional
antagonism on both sides, but, because of the Catholic clergys overt involvement in politics and
hi d. , pp. 104f. Smith is at his best when handling complex configurations of variables
clearly and succinctly, and his chapter on Religious Conflict and Social Life (pp. 79-1 13) is
a model of its kind. developing a dense analytical picture of its subject without ever burdening
the text with excessive detail. See his conclusion: The two religious groups thus stood opposed,
though the geography of their opposition was quite complex: in some areas conflict was strung
taut by the pressures of integration, in others reinforced by social division and confessional
organization (p. 113).

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 129
because of the relative abscnce of competing educated elites in rural areas, the influence of the
Catholic clergy on confessional antagonism was greater.5x
The bulk of Smiths political analysis, focused especially around the activities of the
Protestant League, occurs after the turn of the century, whereas the Bismarckian period
is used mainly for the structural analysis that sets the scene. But his general argument
regarding the relationship of religious conflict to the nationalism of the unification years
and its limited integrative capacities remains extremely useful. As he puts it, con-
fessional conflict was dynamic, changing in content as well as in form, finely articulated
with the languages of nationalist affirmation and solidarity, and an integral part of the
general process of modernization. The participants in that conflict, far from possessing
an archaic world view, often perceived themselves as forward-looking, and their central
dilemma-national unity in a polity with a divided memory-posed, and poses, a pecu-
liarly modem problem.59
The value of focusing on religion as a means of grasping the dynamics of nation-
forming i n the period of unification-and of taking the history of German Catholicism
away from the internalist histories of the church and the Centre Party that dominate the
literature and re-locating it on the ground of social history-is further demonstrated by
Thomas Mergels fine study of the Catholic bourgeoisie in the Rhineland between the
French Revolution and the First World War.6o One of the strengths of Mergels approach
is the combination of different research strategies and types of history-intellectual,
social, political-in the same book, so that careful expositions of Catholic religiosity
and its transformations between Vorm2rz and the Wilhelmine years are integrated with
social analyses of the bourgeois milieu and a meticulously grounded account of the
socio-religious context of city politics in Cologne and Bonn, imaginative use of family
histories and archives intertwining (for instance) with a detailed sociology of the urban
electorate. The most salient feature of the general argument concerns the transcendent
primacy of class over confessional identification in the urban bourgeoisies emergence
as a self-confident and unified urban elite in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Using education, intermarriage, common political outlook, and especially the forms of
urban sociability through associational life, Merge1 presents the local and regional
coalescence of a distinctive bourgeois social formation, organized around the social ethic
of a liberal and urbane Catholic piety. Interestingly, this periodization observes the argu-
5x Ibid., p. 109. For further discussion of the social context of the confessional divide, see
especially Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton,
1984); Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Die neue Attraktivitat des Himmels. Kirche, Religion und
industrielle Modernisierung, in Richard van Diilmen (ed.), Industriekultur an der Saar. Leben
und Arbeit in einer Indusrrieregion, 1840-1914 (Munich, 198Y), pp. 248-57; Wilfried Loth (ed.),
Deutscher Katholizismus im Umhruch zur Moderne (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 76-94; Karl Rohe,
Konfession, Klasse und lokale Gesellschaft als Bestimmungsfaktoren des Wahlverhaltens-
Uberlegungen und Problematisierungen am Beispiel des historischen Ruhrgebiets, in Lothar
Albertin and Werner Link (eds.), Politische Parteien auf dem Weg zur parlamentarischen Demo-
kratie in Deutschland (Diisseldorf, 1981). pp. 109-26; Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Piety and
Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism, Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991), 681-
7 16. By far the most important sustained contribution to this question has been the work of David
Blackbourn, including his earlier Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The
Center Party in Wiirttemberg before 1914 (London and New Haven, 1980), and now his mag-
nificent Marpingen. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford, 1993).
Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conjlict, p. 235.
Zwischen KIasse und Konfession (Gottingen, 1994).

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130 Geoff Eley
mentation developed by Walker, Gall, Sheehan, and the Bielefeld Biirgertum project
(where Mergels dissertation was produced) concerning the pre-industrial co-ordinates
of the bourgeoisies formation, and in other respects too Mergel confirms an existing
picture, from the importance of the elite Verein in crystallizing the system of urban
governance between the early nineteenth century and the 1870s, to the bourgeois charac-
ter of the Centre Partys leadership in the Rhineland.
The most interesting part of Mergels account concerns the effects of the ultramontane
counter-offensive against secularization in the 1850s, which in the Rhineland sought to
confront bourgeois Catholics with a choice between their liberalism and their piety, a
choice previously pre-empted by a version of the separation between public and private.
By the determined application of clerical power and the full weight of its moral auth-
ority, the church reordered the Catholic bourgeoisies sense of the world to drive a
wedge between the requirements of religiosity arid continued participation in the enlight-
ened bourgeois milieu. This fractured the unity of the bourgeois culture, and while the
bulk of bourgeois Catholics refused the discipline of a full-scale ultramontane commit-
ment, the political field of the Rhineland became nonetheless reconfigured, and the struc-
ture of possibilities decisively changed.h2 Thus although Mergel properly stresses the
effects of the Kulrurkumpf in disrupting the unity of the Rhineland bourgeoisie, there
was a vital sense in which this damage had already been done. Mergels analysis relativ-
izes the Kulturkampf in this way: not only was Catholicism embattled and mobilized
before the 1870s, but some forms of the societal enmity of the confessions became
institutionalized beyond the 1880s for the duration of the empire; on the other hand,
the commitment to a bourgeois ethic survived the virulence of the confessional clash,
and by the 1890s the Rhineland had acquired a Centre Party leadership that was impecc-
ably bourgeois and conscious of the deeper nineteenth-century liberal traditions. Thus
the overall picture was mixed. If in certain respects the local bourgeois identity persisted,
the party-political co-ordinates of the latter were at the very least more complex, and
in national terms the possibility of unitary bourgeois political agency had been lost:
Politically the foundation of the empire was the long-awaited beginning of modernity,
but was simultaneously the beginning of the end of the bourgeoisie as a social and
cultural unity.6
61 The pioneer in this respect is David Blackbourn, whose analyses of the Centre Partys Rhine-
land traditions deserved perhaps greater acknowledgement in Mergels account. See especially
David Blackbourn, The Problem of Democratization: German Catholics and the Role of the
Centre Party, in Richard J . Evans (ed.), Sociery and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London,
1978), pp. 160-85, and Class, Religion and Local Politics. pp. 23-60.
A brilliant analysis of this process in the southwest of Germany, whose importance has
never been acknowledged by the mainstream of the profession in Germany, and indeed goes
unmentioned in Mergels bibliography, can befound in Gert Zang (ed.), Provinziulisierung einer
Region. Zur Entstehung der biirgerlichen Gesellschnfi in der Provinz (FrankfurVMain, 1978),
especially the essays by Dieter Bellmann, Der Liberalismus im Seekreis (1860-1870). pp. 183-
264; Werner Trapp, Volksschulreform und liberales Biirgertum in Konstanz. Die Durchsetzung
des Schulzwangs als Voraussetzung der Massendisziplinierung und -qualifikation, pp. 375-434;
and Gert Zang, Die Bedeutung der Auseinandersetzung umdie Stiftungsverwaltung in Konstanz
( 1 830-1 870) fur die okonomische und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung der lokalen Gesellschaft.
Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der matenellen Hintergriinde des Kulturkampfes, pp. 307-75.
Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession, p. 3 18. See also Sperber, Populur Catholicism.

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Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany 131
Despite the enormous virtues of works such as Bochs and Mergels, the stakes for the
German bourgeoisie are being set implicitly too high. At one level, convicting an entire
class of political failure in terms of a long-distant future outcome (the Nazi seizure of
power), particularly given the now acknowledged scale of bourgeois achievement during
unification in the economy, in the law, in civic and social administration, in social mores,
and in the arts, design, taste and style, is frankly bizarre. In fact, in light of the necessary
counter-examples-the formation of the British, French, and US-American modernities
against which the German Sondenveg is always constructed and measured-the German
bourgeoisie showed an exceptional degree of cohesion and collective political agency
in the mid-nineteenth century rather than some peculiar l ack of political will. We search
in vain for comparable evidence of such locally and nationally organized cohesion in
the real, as opposed to the imaginary, histories of the national bourgeoisies elsewhere.
This resulted from the positioning of German unification in the developmental meta-
narrative of economic progress and nation-forming (the dual revolution of l77&1848),
one might argue, in which the already constituted histories of Britain and France (and
potentially the USA) showed the apostles of the bourgeoisie elsewhere (in Germany and
Italy, and less powerfully situated European regions) the image of their own futures. In
this sense, I would argue, the German bourgeoisie could demonstrate a remarkable
degree of collective political achi evement rather than its opposite, an exceptional effec-
tiveness in driving the dominant political agenda, for shaping the socio-political order
of the new German national state, and for exercising hegemony, rather than for political
self-abnegation in the ways more commonly claimed. Bismarck burst the collective
political bubble of the drive for unification. it is true, and the greater-Prussian aspects
of the resulting constitutional settlement recast the chances for a bourgeois national-
political project in some important ways. But the after-effects of the latter in the Kai ser -
rei ch remain enormously significant. In any case, it remains incumbent on the exponents
of the Sonderweg thesis to show us the superior political efficacies of the bourgeoisie
as a social and cultural unity in Britain, France, and the USA in this same time.
But perhaps this squeezing of the study of German history i n the unification years
into the enduring polarity of bourgeois success and failure is increasingly missing the
point. This is the first of my two concluding observations. If we continue locking the
study of the Kai serrei ch into this same dogmatic framework-fashioned from a mixture
of social-science developmentalism and unrequited whiggishness-where the later crises
of German history in the twentieth century are taken to be already inscribed, we deny
ourselves the constructive and exploratory value of new questions. The moralizing insist-
ence on a particularly strong notion of continuity between the Bismarckian era and the
politics of the Third Reich, which has structured the agenda of the modem German field
since the Fischer controversy and the revisionist initiatives of the 1960s outlined at the
beginning of this essay, for which Wehlers social imperialism thesis was the most
pointed example, had a powerful and inspiring place in the politics of historical knowl-
edge of the time (say the 1960s and some of the 1970s), but has now surely run its
course. The various monographs discussed above-from HeB on the economics of land-
ownership and Boch on the entrepreneurial ideology of unlimited growth, to Ladd on
the culture of civic pride, Smith on the complicated nationalist valencies of religious

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132 Geoff Eley
conflict, and Merge1 on the place of religion in bourgeois life-show how the constrain-
ing effects of the Sonderweg thesis may be overcome.
But secondly, there remains an odd disjunction between the recent work on the bour-
geoisie (which we may expect to continue rolling off the presses for some time to come)
and the other two categories of work discussed in this essay, from the initial revisionism
of the 1960s and 1970s, with its stress on the systemic reproduction of the primacy of
pre-industrial elites in the political system of the: Kaiserreich, to the biographical studies
of Bismarck and the high politics of the unification era. The current historiography
makes no attempt to reflect back on the political grand narrative that still dominates our
perceptions of the Kuiserreichs political history (which I summarized via the organizing
concepts of economization, protectionism, anti-socialism, social imperialism, Sammlung-
spolirik, and the societal dominance of pre-industrial elites), and there is no attempt to
find the languages of analysis and interpretation that might allow for the fruitful inte-
gration of these different sectors of scholarly research and discussion. The same is true
for the biographical interest in Bismarck. In fact, the work on the bourgeoisie, as framed
by Kocka and Wehler at least, makes a point of specifically mainraining the separations,
insisting that the processes of bourgeois social and cultural transformation ceased at the
portals of the state and the core political systetn. This is a historiographical scene that
seems unnecessarily disarticulated. The thematics of the works discussed in the final
sections of this essay accordingly become all the more valuable. It is on the political
cultures of nation forming-n the complex co-ordinates of national identity formation
in the era of Bismarck, particularly the decades of the 1860s to the 189Os, with their
rich logics and counter-logics of solidarity and dissent-that future work may usefully
be done.64
University of Michigan GEOFF ELEY
My own attempt to lay out such an agenda may be found in State Formation. Nationalism,
and Political Culture. For a more general gathering of new work and approaches, see Geoff
Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996). Several
general works appeared too late to be integrated into this essay, including: Lynn Abrams,
Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871-1918 (Laiicaster Pamphlets) (London and New York,
1995); John Breuilly, The Formution of the First German Nation-State, 180&1871 (London,
1996); Wolfgang J . Mommsen, Imperial Germany !867-1918. Politics, Culture, and Society i n
an Authoritarian Stare (London, 1995).

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