BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

measure of political power and personal liberty to the people—quite as much as is good for them
in the peculiar circumstances of their geographical and military position as a ‘besieged fortress’
in the centre of Europe.” 72 The conservative, pro-monarchical stance was spelled out by
Blackwood’s in 1890 when it called the Prussian crown “one of the best governments and purest
administrations in the world,” and praised Frederick Wilhelm IV, despite his “mental state
bordering on insanity,” for rejecting the proposals of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament which would
have made the monarch a “slave to triumphant democracy.” The monarchical imposition of a
constitution had preserved the German “conservative character” and “profound notions of duty,”
which had been imbibed from the philosophy of Kant and the poetry of Schiller. These had
imparted distinct competitive advantages for a German Empire, “safer in the hands of the
powerful and prudent administrators.” 73 The Quarterly Review in 1891 advanced a similarly
72 “The Kaiser and His Family,” Pall Mall Magazine, 158-59. Roger Fletcher has argued
quite the opposite in “Social Historians and Wilhelmine Politics—Manipulation From Above Or
Self-mobilization From Below?” Australian Journal of Politics and History 32 (1986): 88-89,
102-3. The “barely disguised dictatorship” of the Prussian monarchical government “ruled the
roost” in Germany, Fletcher wrote, through the dual roles of Prussian king/German kaiser and
Prime Minister/Chancellor, supported through the three-tier suffrage system in the Lower House
or Chamber of Deputies by disproportionately represented ‘parties of order’ (i.e., wealthy landowners
and industrialists), and by the fact that Prussia controlled the Bundesrat or Federal
Council which had veto power over Reichstag legislation. Fletcher concluded that the
“theoretically all-powerful Imperial government” of Germany under Wilhelm II found itself
practically immobilized not due to any constitutional checks but to three factors: a decline in
authority and prestige of the executive after Bismarck’s dismissal; mounting, but largely
ineffectual, pressure from the left in the Reichstag toward democratic parliamentary reforms; and
anti-government propaganda from Conservative-led nationalist pressure groups (e.g., the Pan-
German League and the Navy League) who promoted a popular nationalism opposed to existing
government institutions as well as democratic reforms.
73 Sir Rowland Blennerhassett, “The Prussian Monarch and the Revolution of 1848"
Blackwood’s 147 (May 1890): 617, 622-23. Frederick Wilhelm IV was also credited for
listening to Anglophile advisors, a school of men “now dead and gone forever,” who sought to
establish a British-style parliamentary system in Prussia (p. 620).
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