Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (88 page)

This was an important shift, because the transition from a preventive to a repressive policy brought governmental measures into the open. Newspapers and journals could be penalized only after they had begun to circulate, that is, after the ‘damage’, as it were, had been done. The administration was thus under increasing pressure to find other, less direct means of influencing the press. At the same time, differences between the police authorities, the judiciary and responsible ministers as to what constituted an illegal printed utterance meant that the efforts of the former were often thwarted. This problem was particularly pronounced under Minister-President von Manteuffel, who disagreed with the extremely conservative Interior Minister Ferdinand von Westphalen on what was permissible in print and what was not.
⁸⁸
The fact that all citizens now enjoyed the right, in theory at least, to express their opinions in print provided the basis for all those involved with the production of political reading matter – booksellers and newsagents, publishers and editors-in-chief – to besiege the authorities with petitions, constitutional objections and appeal proceedings. In such cases, the governments found themselves confronting not merely an isolated journalist or editor, but the entire circle of those who supported a specific journal.
⁸⁹

In Prussia, as in most European states, the expansion of political print and of the politicized reading public that had taken place during the revolution proved irreversible. The government dealt with this problem by adopting a more supple and coordinated approach to the business of shaping public attitudes. Here as in so many other areas
of administrative innovation, it was the experience of revolution that provided the impetus behind reform. In the summer of 1848, under the liberal government of Minister-President Auerswald, the Prussian administration established a Literary Cabinet in order to coordinate an official response both to liberal policy critiques and to the more fundamental anti-constitutional opposition of the Old Conservatives and their organ, the
Neue Preussische Zeitung
.
⁹⁰
The first Literary Cabinet collapsed in November 1848 after the change of government, but it was reconstituted under Otto von Manteuffel in the following month, and its activities gradually broadened to encompass the strategic placement of government-friendly articles in key journals and the purchase of a semi-official newspaper, the
Deutsche Reform
, that would support the line of the Cabinet while retaining the appearance and credibility of an independent publication. On 23 December 1850, the coordination of press policy was at last given a secure institutional basis in the Central Agency for Press Affairs (
Zentralstelle für Pressangelegenheiten
). The agency’s responsibilities included the administration of funds set aside for the purpose of subsidizing the press, the supervision of subsidized newspapers, and the cultivation of ‘relationships’ with domestic and foreign papers.
⁹¹
The
Zentralstelle
also ran its own newspaper,
Die Zeit
, which was known for its blistering attacks on the chief spokesmen of the conservative camp, including Otto von Bismarck, the Pietist Hans Hugo von Kleist-Retzow and even Interior Minister Westphalen himself.
⁹²

Manteuffel believed that it was time to move beyond the traditionally confrontational relationship between press and government that had been the norm before 1848. The administration would not enter directly into political debate, but through its press agency it would inaugurate ‘an organic exchange [
Wechselwirkung
] between all arms of the state and the press’; it would work proactively to establish in advance the right attitude to governmental activity. The government would draw on privileged sources within the various ministries to promulgate news concerning the life of the state and important events abroad.
⁹³
During the early 1850s, the Central Agency succeeded in building up a network of press contacts that penetrated deep into the provincial press. Cooperative editors were provided with privileged information or funding, and many local newspapers became financially dependent on
the various perks that came with joining the system: fees for official announcements, subsidies, ministerial block subscriptions and so on.

Manteuffel’s innovation thus heralded the transition from a system based on the filtering of press material through a cumbersome apparatus of censorship, to a more nuanced method of news and information management. All this was persuasive testimony to the irreversibility of the changes wrought by 1848. ‘Every century has seen new cultural powers enter into the sphere of traditional life, powers which were not to be destroyed but to be incorporated [
verarbeitet
],’ Manteuffel wrote in July 1851. ‘Our generation recognizes the press as such a power. Its significance has grown with the expanded participation of the people in public affairs, a participation that is partly expressed, partly fed and directed by the press.’
⁹⁴
Among those entrusted with disbursing Manteuffel’s cash to friendly journalists and newspaper editors was none other than Otto von Bismarck, who took up his post as Prussia’s representative at the Confederal Diet in 1851.

For nearly half a century after 1815, Prussia stood on the sidelines of European power politics, steering in the lee of the great powers, avoiding commitments and shying away from conflict. It avoided antagonizing its powerful neighbours. It acquiesced in Russian tutelage over its foreign policy. Prussia was the only major European power to remain neutral during the Crimean War (1854–6). To some, it even seemed that Prussia’s status as a member of the concert of the great European powers was obsolete. Prussia, a
Times
leader article observed in 1860, was

always leaning on somebody, always getting somebody to help her, never willing to help herself [… ] present in Congresses, but absent in battles [… ] ready to supply any amount of ideals or sentiments, but shy of anything that savours of the actual. She has a large army, but notoriously one in no condition for fighting. [… ] No one counts on her as a friend; no one dreads her as an enemy. How she became a great Power, history tells us; why she remains so nobody can tell.
¹

And yet, within eleven years of this blistering appraisal, the Kingdom of Prussia had reinvigorated its armed forces, driven Austria out of Germany, destroyed the military might of France, built a new nation-state and transformed the European balance of power in a burst of political and military energy that astonished the world.

It was no coincidence that the unifications of Italy and Germany were accomplished within a decade of each other. The cultural prehistory of the German nation-state extends back into and beyond the eighteenth century, but the chain of events that made its foundation a
political
possibility began with the second Italian war of unification. On 26 April 1859, the Austrian Empire declared war on the north Italian Kingdom of Piedmont. This was a conflict that had been planned in advance. During the summer of 1858, the Piedmontese Prime Minister Camillo di Cavour had negotiated a defensive alliance with Emperor Napoleon III of France. In the spring of 1859, Cavour provoked Vienna by massing Piedmontese troops near the border with Austrian Lombardy. The resulting Austrian declaration of war activated France’s obligations under the secret treaty. French troops rushed southwards across the Alps in the first major mobilization by railway. Between the end of April and the beginning of July, the joint French-Piedmontese forces occupied Lombardy, winning two major victories against the Austrians at Magenta (4 June) and Solferino (24 June). Piedmont annexed the Duchy of Lombardy; the duchies of Parma, Modena and Tuscany and the papal territory of Romagna were coaxed into a union with Turin. Piedmont now controlled the north of the peninsula and things might have stayed that way, had it not been for an invasion of the south by a band of volunteers under the command of Giuseppe Garibaldi. The Kingdom of Naples quickly collapsed, clearing the way for the unification of most of the peninsula under the rule of the Piedmontese monarchy. An Italian kingdom was proclaimed in March 1861.

The Prussian monarch, William I, and his foreign minister, Alexander von Schleinitz, responded to these events with the usual Prussian circumspection. As the Franco-Austrian conflict loomed, Prussia stuck to the middle ground, adopting neither the ‘conservative’ option of an alliance with Vienna, nor the ‘liberal’ option of a partnership with France against Austria. There were the usual efforts to make incremental gains in Germany at Austria’s expense. Berlin promised, for example, to assist Austria against France, but only on the condition that Prussia be placed in command of all the non-Austrian Confederal contingents. This proposal, which recalled the security initiatives of Bernstorff and Radowitz during the war scares of 1830–32 and 1840–41, was rejected on prestige grounds by the Austrian Emperor. At about the same time, Berlin deployed heavy troop concentrations to the Rhineland to deter Napoleon III from extending the sphere of his operations to western Germany. There was nothing particularly remarkable or unexpected about these measures. In responding thus to the Italian crisis (and the accompanying French war scare), the Prussian government worked within the well-worn
grooves of a tentative dualist rivalry that sought to avoid direct confrontation while embracing the opportunity to expand Prussian influence at Austria’s expense.

Yet it is clear in retrospect that the Italian war set Prussian national policy on a new footing. It was obvious to contemporaries that there were parallels between the Italian and the German predicament. In both cases a strong sense (within the educated elite) of historical and cultural nationhood coexisted with the fact of dynastic and political division (though Italy had only seven separate states to Germany’s thirty-nine). In both cases, it was Austria that stood in the way of national consolidation. There were also clear parallels between Piedmont and Prussia. Both states were noted for their confident bureaucracies and their modernizing reforms, and both were constitutional monarchies (since 1848). Each had sought to suppress popular nationalism while at the same time manoeuvring to extend its own influence in the name of the nation over the lesser states within its sphere of interest. It was thus easy for small-German enthusiasts of a Prussian-led union to project the Italian events of 1859–61 on to the German political map.
²

The Italian war also demonstrated that new doors had opened within the European political system. Most important of these was the estrangement between Austria and Russia. In 1848, the Russians had saved the Austrian Empire from partition at the hands of the Hungarian national movement. During the Crimean War of 1854–6, however, the Austrians had made the fateful decision to join the anti-Russian coalition, a move that was seen in St Petersburg as rank treachery. Vienna thereby irretrievably forfeited the Russian support that had once been the cornerstone of its foreign policy.
³
Cavour was the first European politician to show how this realignment could be exploited to his state’s advantage.

The events of 1859 were instructive in other ways as well. Under Napoleon III, France emerged as a power prepared to challenge by force the European order established at Vienna in 1815. The Prussians now felt the ancestral threat from the west more keenly than ever. The shock effect of the French intervention in Italy was heightened by memories of the first Napoleon, whose ascendancy had begun with the subjugation of the Italian peninsula and continued with an invasion of the Rhineland. The Prussian mobilization of 1859 may not have been the disaster some historians have described, but it did nothing to allay the sense of vulnerability to a resurgent Bonapartist France.
⁴
As for the Austrians,
they had fought bitterly to keep their Italian possessions, inflicting 18,000 casualties on the Franco-Piedmontese at Magenta and Solferino. Would they not also fight to defend their political pre-eminence within a divided Germany? Prussia’s position was in some respects worse than Piedmont’s, for it seemed clear that the middling states of the ‘third Germany’ (unlike the lesser north Italian principalities) would support Austria in any open struggle between the two potential German hegemons. ‘Almost all Germany for the last forty years has [… ] cherished a hostile spirit against Prussia,’ William wrote to Schleinitz on 26 March 1860, ‘and for a year this has decidedly been on the increase.’
⁵

The Italian war was thus a reminder of the centrality of armed force to the resolution of entrenched power-political conflicts, and the view gained ground within the military leadership that Prussia would have to reform and strengthen its army if it was to meet the challenges facing it in the near future. This was not a new problem. Since the 1810s, financial constraints had meant that the size of the army had not kept pace with the growth in the Prussian population. By the 1850s, only about one-half of the young men of eligible age were being drafted. There were also concerns about the quality of the Landwehr militia created to fight Napoleon by the military reformers Scharnhorst and Boyen, as its officers were trained to much less exacting standards.

Leading the campaign for military reform was the new regent, Prince William of Prussia. William was already a 61-year-old man with an impressive spray of whiskers when he began in 1858 to deputize for his older brother, who had been incapacitated by a sequence of strokes. William’s emotional attachment to the Prussian army was deeply rooted in his biography. He had worn a uniform since the age of six. On 1 January 1807, at the age of nine, he received his ensign’s commission (together with promotion to lieutenant as a Christmas present). His earliest experiences in service were bound up with the memory of invasion and the flight of the royal family to East Prussia. Unlike his more mentally agile elder brother, William disliked his lessons and was never happier than when in the company of his fellow cadets and military tutors.
⁶
It is easy to imagine how important the companionable routines of service must have become after the trauma of his mother’s death in 1810. William’s devotion was focused on the regular army of the line, not on the auxiliary militias of the Landwehr. William was repelled by the civilian ethos of the Landwehr, which he regarded as both militarily
ineffective and politically unreliable. Boyen and Scharnhorst had set out to forge a military establishment that would feel and engage the patriotic enthusiasms of the people. William and his military advisers wanted an armed force that was responsive only to the will of the sovereign.