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Book Reviews
‘Western’ countries could ignore self-determination when it suited
them. But the moral force of emancipatory nationalism was undoubtedly
weaker in Germany than in some other countries during the
fifty years after the founding of the Wilhelmine Empire.
When considering domestic policy Winkler comes down firmly
against the notion that the Empire was evolving into a democratic
parliamentary state before 1914. The concept of a ‘silent parliamentarization’
cannot be squared with the constellation in the Reichstag, in
which most middle-class parties opposed or feared reform and the
Social Democrats were refusing to coalesce with them. Wilhelm II
himself, despite his initiative in dismissing Bismarck in 1890, was
completely averse to liberal or parliamentary developments in the
Reich. When he topped out the new Reichstag building in 1894 he
privately sneered at it as the Reich monkey-house and refused to
allow the motto ‘Dem deutschen Volke’ to be inscribed over it until
1916, by which time the foundations of his Empire were already
beginning to crumble. �urthermore, amongst the conservative classes
and the Bildungsbürgertum, racialist, militarist, and social Darwinist
views were gaining ground before 1914. Such attitudes were to be
found at the very top of the Reich’s hierarchy. Thus Wilhelm II was
much impressed by the work of the woolly-minded British racist
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and when a Bavarian cavalry general
circulated a memorandum demanding a programme of discriminatory
measures designed to drive Jews out of Germany, the Prussian
Crown Prince passed this on approvingly to Bethmann-Hollweg and
the Kaiser. In 1911 the mood amongst Conservatives and other rightwing
nationalists was warlike and often openly contemptuous of
parliamentary procedures. Winkler rightly denies that this sort of
movement was the result of ‘populist’ tendencies amongst the
German masses. It was more the expression of a conservative nationalism
appealing to the middle and lower middle class whose spokesmen
continued to be deferential to Germany’s aristocratic élites. The
anti-Semitic proto-fascist Heinrich Claß, head of the Pan-German
League, exemplified this attitude. Winkler might perhaps have made
more of the fact that many Germans in the years before the �irst
World War seemed unimpressed by jingoist hysteria, as the
Reichstag elections of 1912 demonstrated. Although much is often
made of the enthusiasm with which the war was greeted in
Germany’s capital cities when it broke out, there had been mass
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