Read Online Europe's Last Summer by David Fromkin - Free Book Online

stopped being an essentially agricultural country and had surged ahead to become the Continent's most dynamic commercial and industrial power. One result was that the country was now divided against itself.
As noted before, farming interests still demanded protective tariffs in order to survive, while industry now pushed for the free trade it needed in order to thrive. This was but one of the many contradictions that made Kaiser Wilhelm II's Reich so difficult to fathom— and to govern. At the cutting edge of the modern world in some respects, Germany was obsolete in politics, and therefore unable to reconcile the diverse trends to which modernism gave rise.
According toVolker R. Berghahn, "the salient feature of German domestic politics before 1914 was . . . an almost total impasse." He quotesGustav Schmidt to explain: "The notion of several groups blocking each other and hence blocking a way out of the deadlock offers 'the key to an understanding ofGerman politics in the last years before the war.'" Some, under the spell of Nietzsche, believed that the solution was to dynamite society. It was not easy to identify an alternative that did not involve violence.
Until the nineteenth century the German peoples of Europe had been fragmented. In the former Holy Roman Empire alone, they dwelt in hundreds of principalities, cities, and other quasi-sovereignties. Napoleon restructured them. The Allies who defeated Napoleon tried their hand at restructuring too. In the end,unification came from within the German-speaking world.
The country we know today as Germany derives from the German Empire, which was created through a series of wars culminating in 1870–71 by militarist, Protestant Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck's new unified Germany contained less than half the German peoples of Europe. It consisted of the kingdom of Prussia, three other kingdoms, eighteen duchies, and three free cities. But Bismarck deliberately excluded Austria, which had led the German states of Europe. He did so, of course, in order to secure Prussia's own leadership in German Europe. This also had the effect of ensuring a Protestant majority in the German federation. A later Chancellor of Germany,Prince Bernhard von Bülow, reminded his government's representatives abroad in 1906 that if the German-speaking Austrians were to be incorporated into Germany, "We shall thereby receive an increase of about fifteen million Catholics so that the Protestants would become a minority . . . the proportion of strength between the Protestants and the Catholics would become similar to that which at the time led to the Thirty Years War, i.e., a virtual dissolution of the German empire." In Germany, Bismarck had chosen to bring into the political world a smaller country that he and his fellow Prussians could control rather than a larger one that they could not, and that continued to be Berlin's preference.
Yet it became Germany's belief that, in case of war, Austria would be indispensable as an ally, even though Austria was weaker than Germany. The continued existence of the Hapsburg Empire was viewed in Berlin as a vital German interest, indeed, perhaps as Germany's main vital interest in international politics.
Prussia, undemocratic and militaristic in its culture, was controlled by its army and the largely impoverished landowning Junker class that led its officer corps. In turn, Prussia exerted considerable control, and in time of war almost total control, over the rest of Germany. Germany, by industrializing rapidly, made itself into the economic leader of the Continent, but in doing so necessarily converted much of its population into an industrial proletariat. The workers could not be admitted into the officer corps of the army without diluting the aristocratic Prussian character of the corps—and the regime it supported. So Germany, despite harboring ambitions to dominate Europe and perhaps even the world, deliberately chose not to increase the size of