A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook
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Название: A History of Germany 1918 - 2020

Автор: Mary Fulbrook

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Историческая литература

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isbn: 9781119574248

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СКАЧАТЬ as well as the older groups of the self-employed, traders and shopkeepers, and small artisans. These latter groups were increasingly challenged by the rise of ‘modern’, large-scale mechanized industry, run by major entrepreneurs and by the growth of big department stores as outlets for mass-produced wares. Urban life was clearly changing and expanding at a quickening rate.

      Politically, the old Prussian aristocracy retained preeminence nationally, through its domination of the largest constituent state of the federal empire – Prussia. The inegalitarian three-class voting system obtaining in Prussia entailed the division of the population of each electoral district into three classes according to the payment of wealth taxes. The minority that were the richest were entitled to one-third of the votes; the moderately wealthy the next one-third; and the large majority that fell into the poorest category were also allotted only one-third of the votes. The double effect of this system not only greatly disadvantaged the propertyless masses but also promoted the political position of the landowning Junker class (who were relatively the wealthiest within the sparsely populated rural constituencies) compared with the very much wealthier urban bourgeoisie. Dominating Prussian politics, the Junkers were then able to play a major role in the Prussian-dominated Reich. It was a role they were to exercise in the context of the autocratic political structure of the German Empire: real power lay not so much with the Parliament or Reichstag as with the emperor, his close circle of advisers, his chancellor, and leaders of the army and the civil service. Influence was exerted on these groups and individuals by the increasingly important pressure groups – many stridently nationalist – that circumvented parliamentary politics in pursuit of their aims. As the German sociologist Max Weber put it, no person with any aspirations to real power would seriously consider becoming a member of Parliament in imperial Germany.

      Bismarck’s complex juggling act among the European powers had been replaced by less stable foreign alliances within Europe, accompanied by imperialist ambitions in the reign of Wilhelm II. The long period of peace within Europe after the Franco–Prussian War of 1870 had, around the turn of the century, increasingly been marked by flashpoints abroad. The growth of the German navy appeared usefully to combine the militaristic values traditionally associated with the landed aristocracy with the economic interests of the bourgeoisie, contributing to the growth of a more strident and expansionist nationalism in some quarters. Germany’s newly acquired colonies abroad were in practice economically and politically relatively insignificant, but the militarist culture and the brutal practices deployed in the suppression of anticolonial revolts in German southwest Africa and east Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century served only to enhance the esteem in which military medals were held among a populace safely distant from any military action. On some views, the acts of brutality and the willingness to contemplate the ‘extermination’ of ‘inferior’ civilian populations played a long-term role in the background to German atrocities in the First and Second World Wars.2 Meanwhile, growing strains between the European powers, accompanied by an arms race amidst an atmosphere of rising tension and expectation of war, contributed to increasing political instability within Europe itself. Although the causes of the First World War, and Germany’s own role in unleashing it, remain controversial, there is little doubt that it was a war that the Emperor and his advisors were at the time only too willing to entertain.3