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  even the landowning nobility (the Junkers), and introduce representative government or a separation of legislature and executive. Instead the successful bid for power came from the king’s offi cials, and the autocratic absolutism of the 18th century gave way to the bureaucratic absolutism of the 19th – a rule of law, free of conscious corruption and directed to the common welfare, but imposing a military level of discipline on all layers of society. The king’s personal decisions remained fi nal, but they were increasingly mediated, and so to some extent checked, by his civil and armed services, into which the nobility were gradually absorbed – partly as a brake on the ambitions of the middle class. The new Prussia, the largest and most powerful of the German Protestant states, had an altogether new signifi cance for its fellows, once the old Imperial framework had vanished.

  Territories which before 1806 could pass as constituent parts of a larger whole, however ramshackle and loosely defi ned, now had 12

  to justify themselves as economically and politically self-suffi cient states, a task to which none of them, apart from Prussia, Austria, and perhaps Bavaria, could pretend to be equal. Some kind of association between them had to be found. There was a supine intergovernmental ‘Federation’ dominated by Austria and a much more effective Customs Union ( Zollverein) of a smaller number of territories grouped round Prussia, but the word ‘Germany’

  now meant something future and unreal. If it had once referred to the Empire and any other territories attached to the Empire in which German was spoken and written, now it meant the political unit in which all, or most, German-speakers would fi nd their home. And there was the rub: who precisely was to be included in this future Germany? It could hardly contain both Prussia and Austria, as the old Empire and the new Federation The bourgeois and the offi

  were able, more or less, to contain them – though there were many dreamers to whom this seemed possible, among them the author of ‘ Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ – but equally it could hardly exclude them, given their infl uence over the smaller states and frequent interventions in their affairs. In practice, the two great powers were resolving the issue for themselves: Prussia cia

  was expanding purposefully westwards to the Rhineland, while l

  Austria was withdrawing from German affairs to concentrate on its non-German-speaking territories in Eastern Europe and North Italy. In the end, the Protestant intellectuals of Northern Germany, still held together, as under the old regime, by the publishing industry and the university network, threw in their lot with Prussia. After a decade of increasing agitation, 1848, Europe’s ‘year of revolutions’, saw the summoning of the Frankfurt Parliament, a quarter of whose membership was made up of academics, clergy, and writers, and which in 1849

  offered the Prussian monarch the kingship of a Germany without Austria. Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused to rule by the free choice of his subjects – ‘to pick up a crown from the gutter’ – though his brother, Wilhelm I, accepted the same ‘lesser German’

  ( kleindeutsch) crown when Bismarck secured it for him by force of arms in 1866–71.

  13

  To the extent to which it was a revolution of professors, and perhaps rather further, the failed German revolution of 1848

  was a revolution of the offi cials, the last act, and the fi nest hour, of the 18th-century reading public. It was an attempt to unify Germany by constitutional and administrative means, while retaining for government, and monarchical government at that, the leading role in the structuring of society. But the balance of power in the German middle class was already beginning to shift fundamentally. Between 1815 and 1848 the population grew by 60%, and as poverty intensifi ed the need for employment grew desperate. After some tentative, state-sponsored beginnings in the 1830s, a fi rst wave of industrialization was felt in the 1840s, with huge (often foreign) investments in a railway network, mainly within the Customs Union, and a consequent economic upswing.

  The decade ended with an economic as well as a political crash, and with the last of the pre-industrial famines (partly caused by the same potato blight that devastated Ireland) – factors that atureer together led (as in Ireland) to a surge in emigration. But in the following 20 years Prussia, governed from 1862 by Bismarck, embraced economic liberalism as a means of sweeping away German Lit

  historic and institutional obstacles to the unifi cation of its heterogeneous territories, and the long period of intensive growth began which was to transform Germany into an industrial giant.

  As a result, when the Second German Empire was founded in 1871

  it had a bourgeoisie, a property-owning and money-making class, which was much larger, wealthier, and more signifi cant for the common good than anything the First Empire had known. The consequences for literature and philosophy were far-reaching. As this class emerged, it battled for self-respect and cultural identity with the long-established middle-class instruments of state power, the offi cials. The revived bourgeoisie had a more obvious interest in the economic and political unifi cation of Germany than civil servants who owed their positions to the multiplication of power centres, and entry to it was not dependent on passage through the universities. In the early years of the 19th century its frustrated political ambitions expressed themselves, particularly in Prussia, 14

  in the literature of escape known as ‘Romanticism’, but as it gained in confi dence its literary culture took on a more explicitly revolutionary, anti-offi cial colour – though the oppositional stance betrayed a continuing dependence on what was being opposed. After the humiliation of offi cial Germany at Frankfurt, however, with industry and commerce fl ourishing in the sunshine of state approval, any sense of inferiority passed, the icons of the previous century were cheerfully ridiculed, literature itself became a paying concern as copyright became enforceable, and novels and plays with such strictly bourgeois themes as money, materialism, and social justice emerged from the realm of the trivial and, for a while, linked Germany’s written culture with that of its neighbours in Western Europe. The uniquely – for the outside world perhaps impenetrably – German culture of the late The bourgeois and the offi

  18th-century Golden Age, scholarly, humanist, cosmopolitan, survived under the patronage of the lesser courts, in the lee of political events and economic changes, until 1848, but thereafter it declined into academicism or, in the case of the kings of Bavaria, into eccentricity. But though the offi cial class had lost supremacy, it had not lost power, and through the universities, despite the cia

  growth of private cultural societies and foundations, it remained l

  the guardian of the national past. As the redefi nition of the German state came to preoccupy all minds, so the servants of the state were able to retain for themselves a certain authority and the two main factions in the middle class sank their differences in the national interest. The concept of ‘ Bildung’, meaning both ‘culture’ and ‘education’, was the ideological medium in which this fusion could take place, the value on which all could agree, precisely because it left carefully ambiguous whether you achieved ‘ Bildung’ by going to university or simply by reading, or at any rate approving, the right books. The term

  ‘ Bildungsbürger’ gained a currency at this time which it has never since lost. Suggesting a middle class united by its experience of ‘ Bildung’, its main function is to identify the offi cial with the bourgeois, to create a community of interest between salaried servants of the state and tradesmen, property owners, and 15

  2. The proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor, 1 January atureer 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles (Anton von Werner, 1885).

  Bismarck is in the centre. The treaty of Versailles was signed in the same room in 1919 at the end of Germany’s Second Empire German Lit

  self-employed professionals. A crucial step in the defi nition of

  ‘ Bildung’ was the canonizing of the literary achievements of the offi cial class as ‘classical’. Germany in 1871 was not only to be a nation like En
gland or France – it was to have its literary classics like them too.

  In Bismarck’s new Germany the bourgeoisie was accommodated, but kept on a short lead. It was given a voice in the Reichstag, the Imperial Diet, and the lesser representative assemblies of the constituent states, but the executive, with the Imperial Chancellor at its head, was in no formal way responsible to these parliaments.

  In practice, of course, the Chancellor needed their co-operation to secure his legislative programme and so offi cialdom lost the almost absolute power it had enjoyed in the earlier part of the century. But the dominant model for a society in which military 16

  service was compulsory was provided by the army (with the upper ranks reserved for the nobility), and Bismarck and his successors treated all attempts to establish parliamentary accountability as insubordination: the socialist party was virtually proscribed for over a decade. Within the constraints imposed by the supreme priority of national unity, the agents of autocracy continued to look down on those they regarded as self-interested individualists and materialists because they made money for themselves, rather than receiving a salary from the state. In the world of ‘ Bildung’

  too the profession of a shared devotion to the national tradition papered over the deep animosity between those who wrote for a living and the university intellectuals whose literary activity was now largely confi ned to historical and critical study. Like Bismarck, the professor of ‘Germanistics’ – as it was beginning The bourgeois and the offi

  to be called – had as little taste for the bourgeois as for the socialists, Catholics, Jews, or women who were now unfortunately as likely as the bourgeois to involve themselves in the national literature.

  In the turmoil of 1848–9, a little-noticed pamphlet, drafted by cia

  a German philosopher for a tiny group of English radicals, and l

  with the title of The Communist Manifesto, had prophesied that the free markets aspired to by the national bourgeoisies would grow into a global market, a ‘ Weltmarkt’. By the 1870s that prophecy was clearly coming true. Germany’s fi rst experience of globalization was painful, however. The worldwide stock-market crash of 1873, which began in Vienna, led to a long depression from which the world did not emerge until the 1890s. In Germany the depression was relatively shallow and some growth continued, though in the 1880s net emigration (which had totalled 3 million over the previous four decades) reached an all-time high of 1.3

  million – a fi gure which is itself a measure of the intensity of globalization. In 1879 Bismarck was moved by the effect of cheap American grain imports on the incomes of the land-owning Junkers to listen to the growing demands for protection from other quarters as well, particularly the heavy industry that would 17

  be of strategic importance in wartime, and to abandon his earlier policy of free trade, erecting a tariff wall round his new state. At the same time, he put an end to his ‘cultural war’ ( Kulturkampf) with the Catholic Church and endeavoured to outfl ank the working-class movement by introducing Europe’s fi rst system of social security. His motives in establishing ‘state socialism’, as it was soon called, were no different from those that had guided him earlier, and which had deep roots in the German past: fi rst, the overriding need for unity in the state and, second, the interests of the agricultural nobility which continued to furnish Prussia with its ruling class. But the protectionist course on which Germany and the other European states now embarked, and which was eventually adopted even by Britain, long the staunchest advocate, and greatest benefi ciary, of free trade, accentuated the division of Europe, and the world, into would-be autarkic blocs.

  Thanks to the inability of politicians, of any country, to imagine an international institutional order which would accommodate atureer to each other the competing energies of numerous growing economies, the developed states, whether empires, federations, or unitary nations, set out to achieve economic and political – that is, German Lit

  military – self-suffi ciency. Germany’s bid for colonies in Africa and the South Seas, which began in 1884, was not so much a serious geopolitical move as a symbolic irritant. Like the huge expansion of the navy, it was a declaration that Germany was anyone’s equal and could look after itself. As general growth resumed in the 1890s it became clear that, with its armed forces backed by the largest chemical and electrical industries in the world, and a coal and steel industry that was catching up on the British, Germany was capable, not necessarily of displacing the British Empire, but certainly of disputing its power to impose its own will. A British hegemony was giving way to a bi-polar world, and from the turn of the century something like a Cold War began in the cultural sphere. Britain turned away from the German models, particularly in philosophy and scholarship, which had had great prestige since the days of the Prince Consort, while voices in Germany emphasized the uniqueness of German literary, musical, 18

  and philosophical achievements and the need to protect ‘Kultur’

  (the creation of the offi cial classes) from contamination by the materialistic and journalistic (that is, bourgeois) ‘civilization’

  of the West. The fusion of disparate elements in the concept of the ‘ Bildungsbürger’, though rejected by some of the most clear-sighted critics of the Second Empire, was sustained by projecting its tensions outwards on to the relations between nations and defi ning a unique role for the new Germany. Britain and France at this time wove similar myths of their own special mission in world-history. Tariff walls became walls in the mind, and the mental effects were as serious as the economic distortions which put increasing strains on the inadequate international political order. After more than a decade of toying by the nations of Europe with fantasies of their own exceptionality, in 1914 the The bourgeois and the offi

  war-games went real.

  The offi cials strike back

  Globalization spelled the end of the bourgeoisie, in the strict sense, and not only in Germany. A class living solely off its cia

  capital, off the alienated labour of others, was sustainable only l

  by societies with open frontiers, with open spaces into which the disadvantaged and disaffected could expand. As the world economy grew into a single closed system, and as societies that shrank from the challenge of the political co-operation required by economic integration sought – in vain, of course – to seal themselves off in smaller units, so there was less and less room for a leisured capitalist class, and it was forced increasingly into work. The intrusion of work into the world of capital was refl ected, in the fi rst decades of the 20th century, in an intellectual upheaval which broke apart the forms and conventions of the earlier stages of cultural modernity and was at least as violent in Germany and Austria as anywhere else. In literature, art, music, philosophy, and psychology, the concepts of identity, collective and personal, that had been appropriate to an age when the world was wide, and economic expansion was untrammelled 19

  by political institutions, were subjected to intense and hostile scrutiny. It was Germany’s misfortune that the representatives of the bourgeoisie achieved the political autonomy, and even supremacy, for which they had been struggling for well over half a century, only when their social and economic and even their cultural position was fatally undermined. In 1918 Germany had its revolution at last. But the new republic was born in military defeat and shackled at once by an unequal peace. It was shorn, not only of its symbolic overseas empire, but of much of its mineral wealth in the territories returned to France and the resurrected Poland. Its middle class, which had grown into prosperity over the previous two generations, was pauperized in the terrible infl ations which refl ected the lack of confi dence in its future, and, with the loss of their capital, many private foundations and charities, old and new, ceased to exist. Its rivals, cushioned for a while yet by empire, and by the complacency of victory, could afford to ignore the challenge to their identity implicit in the global market. But atureer Germany and Austria, friendless and unsupported by the labour o
f subject peoples, had to make their way back to prosperity by their own efforts, as the world’s fi rst post-imperial, and post-German Lit

  bourgeois, nations. The culture of the German and Austrian successor-states in the age of the Weimar Republic had about it a radical modernity, indeed postmodernity, whose full relevance to the condition of the rest of the world became apparent only after 1989.

  In one crucial respect, however, the Weimar Republic had not been released from its past. The German bourgeoisie might have been reduced to a few super-rich families heading the vertically integrated industrial and banking cartels that had prospered in the days of Bismarck’s ‘state socialism’. But the other component of the middle class, the offi cials (including the professorate), had survived the debacle remarkably unscathed. The authoritarian monarch had gone, but the state apparatus remained, and its instinct was either to serve authority, or to embody it. The 20

  army, the academy, and the administration hankered after their king. They were ill at ease with parliamentary institutions that bestowed the authority of the state on a proletarianized mass society – that is, a society based not on the ownership of land, or even of capital, but on the need and obligation to work. The representative bodies of the Second Empire, crudely divided between nationalists and socialists, had been, largely, a sham and, once the monarchy that was the reason for their existence had passed away, they could not be grown on as a native democratic tradition. Nor was there any obvious external source of democratic inspiration. For nationalists there was no reason to look kindly on the liberal traditions of the victor powers, who hypocritically imposed self-determination on Poles and Czechs, in order to break up Germany and Austria, but withheld it from Indians and The bourgeois and the offi

  Africans, in order to preserve their own empires. To socialists it seemed more important that communist Russia had correctly identifi ed the proletarian nature of modern society than that it was maintaining and extending the brutal Tsarist regime of social discipline. In the absence of native republican models, and with the Prussian inheritance still obscuring the view back to the cia