Germany’s Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways by James Retallack

Abstract

Reviewed by: Germany’s Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways by James Retallack Isabel V. Hull Germany’s Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways. By James Retallack. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 347. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1442650572 James Retallack is one of the foremost historians of imperial Germany. He has written important studies on the Kaiserreich, regional history of Saxony, elections, and political conservatism. In this essay collection, Retallack sets out to “rethink real or alleged discontinuities” in Germany’s modern history (xi). He finds that many recent histories are “off-kilter, skewed toward a more positive appraisal of the Second Reich than the historical evidence warrants” (xiv). In eleven essays, Retallack examines some of the most important of these debates about domestic politics and some new sources that one might use to reappraise them. He offers an engaging and insightful look at the effect of Otto von Bismarck’s methods of unification and subsequent [End Page 204] governance on German society and the development of its political culture. This volume is a sprightly, critical introduction to the recent historiography of imperial Germany’s domestic politics. The first chapter is a concise summary of the Bismarckian period, which emphasizes its regional diversity, continuing religious, class, and cultural divisions, and the consolidation of a type of nationalism that by 1890 had outgrown the limits in which Bismarck had tried to contain it. Retallack concludes that by Bismarck’s departure, Germans “had diminished themselves. They had done so by making existing cleavages of wealth and rank even deeper, by attacking the rights of minority groups, by driving a wedge between the working classes and the rest of society, [and] by compromising the prerogatives of parliament” (30–31). These techniques of repressive governance “encumbered” the future by blocking “parliamentarization, democratization, and a tolerance of diversity” (31). A lengthy bibliography, organized into rubrics, will help readers focus on the recent literature and controversies behind this conclusion. The rest of the volume explores different aspects of imperial Germany’s political culture. Along the way, readers will be entertained by a graceful tour of the diplomats—British, American, and German—who provided such helpful observations on regional political life; a close reading of the satirical description of Saxony by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian; an insider’s look at how a major documentary and photo database available to the public was assembled by the German Historical Institute; a nice appraisal of the “moral universe predicated on domination, violence, and struggle” (188–189) that united those arch foes Bismarck and Friedrich Engels; an appreciative remembrance of Ralf Dahrendorf’s classic, Society and Democracy in Germany (1967); and a series of analytical sketches on Prussia’s occupation of Saxony in 1866, the relations between the two preeminent Conservative Party leaders Ernst von Heydebrand und der Lasa and Kuno Westarp, and three analyses of voting and its repression since 1871. The consequences, intended and unintended, produced by the simultaneity of a democratic suffrage in an authoritarian system were many. Retallack nicely summarizes the pact with various devils that Conservative Party leaders made in order to garner votes: Heydebrand’s by adopting Pan-German language in 1911, though he afterwards strove unsuccessfully to mute their wild wartime annexationism; and Westarp’s by applauding the fact that the Conservatives had helped to change “the ‘Jewish Question’ into a matter of race” (224), but who struggled in vain to distinguish conservatives from antisemites thereafter. The radicalism of Pan-Germans and antisemites delegitimized traditional conservatism, which seemed timid and old-fashioned by comparison. A chapter on “electioneering without democracy” examines three interconnected issues: “exclusionary strategies targeting socialists and Jews, efforts to hold back the tide of democracy, and mendacious campaign tactics that succeeded in turning the weapon of universal manhood suffrage against [End Page 205] revolutionaries and reformers” (240). The latter happened because of the “spiral of escalating radicalism” (247) unleashed by electoral campaigns operating inside an authoritarian system. Retallack spiritedly defends “authoritarian” as an accurate term to define imperial Germany’s constitutional setup and the kind of civil society that thrived inside it (261–265). In the end, his data show that democratization actually hindered parliamentarization, rather than furthering it...