In the opening passage of his memoirs, Gustav Freytag (1816–95) mused that the secret of his literary success came down to the fact that his life “on the whole, resembles the life experience (Bildungsgang) of thousands of my contemporaries.”Footnote 1 A century of scholarship on the Kaiserreich has validated Freytag's claim to serve as crown witness for the mentalité of his generation.
Freytag's archetypical prussianism is significant because it so clearly demonstrates how much the Sonderweg narrative relied upon reproducing the fretful contemporary perspectives of liberals.Footnote 2 His vigorous public engagement as a journalist supports the critical post-Sonderweg narrative of David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley that ascribes far more agency and influence to the German middle class.Footnote 3 On the other hand, his Prussianism and his identification of the Prussian state with the forces of progress reflect the classic Sonderweg iteration of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka.
If, as Helmut Walser Smith wrote in 2008, the entire Sonderweg debate “turned on the form of domestic politics,” the observations of contemporary National Liberals such as Freytag introduced the themes that shaped and informed that historiographical dispute.Footnote 4 It is, of course, axiomatic that National Liberals hailed Otto von Bismarck's unification as the true culmination of German history; nevertheless, as a Prussian scarred by the outcome of the Konfliktzeit, Gustav Freytag never underestimated the domestic political cost of the national triumph. While his political articles and historical writings echoed the conventional borussianism of the early Kaiserreich, his private correspondence, edited and published only in the early twentieth century, revealed that Freytag viewed Bismarck as a malicious political manipulator who took advantage of his influence over the king to lay the foundations of a reactionary Caesarism. National Liberals such as Freytag and the twentieth-century exponents of the Sonderweg thesis thus shared the assumption that Bismarck's Reichsgründung marked a turning point in German history.
As Virginia Woolf wrote of Lord Macaulay, Freytag's work displayed a conviction that can only come to a writer who feels that “his age was behind him; all his strength went straight into his work.”Footnote 5 The comparison to Lord Macaulay is apt. Modeled upon Macaulay's History of England, Freytag's Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit was a literary hybrid positioned precisely at the boundary between history and the novel. It was a popular German Whiggish attempt at what Hayden White has described as “metahistory,” that is, history that uses “modes of argument” characteristic of the realist novel. Freytag used it as a vehicle for his liberal ideology. Writing within the tradition of cultural history, Freytag's ultimate aim was to extract a progressive national narrative from the history of Prussia between the Reformation and 1848 and present it in “Walter Scott's confident cadences.”Footnote 6
National liberals and their academic successors agreed about two key points: for better or worse, the middle class was the protagonist in the drama and Prussia was the locus of German historical continuity. Freytag identified Prussia as the epicenter of the modern confrontation between the forces of progress and the “unholy trinity of feudalism, absolutism, and religious orthodoxy.”Footnote 7 He wrote that it was his duty “to proclaim before civilized Europe that Prussia was not a feudal state and that the Prussian people were stakeholders.”Footnote 8 His imagined Prussia was a constitutional monarchy in which the legitimate demands of Staat and Volk were harmonized and the claims of the Bildungsbürgertum, the men of Freytag's own class, would be honored by all.Footnote 9 Thus history's chosen agent was the Protestant middle class of businessmen and scholars, its instrument the Prussian state.
As editor of the Leipzig journal Grenzboten (1848–1873), Freytag worked to organize and rally liberal opinion, transforming a modest literary weekly into an influential organ of National Liberal ideas. Defining public opinion as the “judgment of a hundred thousand educated men,” the Grenzboten pledged “to represent a decisive democracy toward the government, and aristocracy of education and of rights toward the stupidity of the masses.”Footnote 10 In 1853 he complained, “We have a small readership—the number of ‘Gebildeten’ is disproportionately small. Therein lies the weakness of our party.”Footnote 11
Freytag's conditional relationship with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm reflected the intersection of emotional ties of loyalty and continuity to the old regime and the political hopes for reform that liberals invested in a new reign. In a striking private declaration of bürgerlich confidence, he wrote in 1863, “I have put myself the task [. . .] of rousing the crown prince of Prussia against the existing system.”Footnote 12 He reminded his readers, “There is an old and hearty friendship between them [the Hohenzollerns] and the spirit of the German nation; it is a manly friendship that can bear a few jolts.”Footnote 13 Thus an alliance between a progressive monarch and a loyal Bürgertum was preordained, provided the people advanced “along the legal path to a perfect constitutional monarchy, resisting all temptations to the right hand or to the left, not with embittered feelings, but in the cheerful temper of moral self-confidence.”Footnote 14
No other popular writer, certainly no novelist of comparable status, articulated claims for bürgerlich hegemony in politics and culture so consistently throughout the unification period. Taken together, Freytag's novels, history, and journalism all, in the words of Lothar Gall, “describe a superficial, but perpetually glorious success.”Footnote 15 Freytag's idealized Bürgertum of the 1860s was neither passive nor servile; in short, it did not equate to the passive image of the German middle class that has so often appeared in the various versions of the Sonderweg argument. On the contrary, through his novels, history, and journalism, Freytag worked to mobilize the Bürgertum in the struggle to promote a “modern, secularized, postcorporate, self-regulating, enlightened civil society.”Footnote 16
Freytag believed the central theme of German history was the political education of the Bürgertum—in practical terms, its transition from economic and scholarly preeminence to a corresponding political status. To Freytag, the middle class represented “civilization and progress” and embodied “the warmest pulse of the nation. That sense of bürgerlich superiority was firmly grounded in a culture of achievement. In contrast to Junker egoism, the Bürgertum offered “the strong-minded virtue of the industrious person [and] the glory of work.”Footnote 17
Freytag announced to the German people that the unity they so ardently desired already existed in the form of a middle-class Protestant cultural identity. In the final passage of the Bilder, he summed up the meaning of modern German history:
In the German Bürgertum lies the loftiest power of leadership in the area of ideal and practical interests. Since the beginning of the century, it is no longer a caste, closed off from above and below. It is not comparable to the bourgeoisie of France; it is both gentry and people. The historical development of the Germans, portrayed in these small pictures, is at once the age of the rise and liberation of the German Bürger.Footnote 18
All that was missing in this “extravagant vision of public felicity” was a state that endorsed the claims of the Bürgertum and accorded them what their counterparts in Great Britain and France already enjoyed: a voice in the creation of national institutions. Jürgen Kocka conceded that the German Bildungsbürgertum “was strong and clearly contoured. In the face of these and other findings, the empirical foundations of the Sonderweg thesis have crumbled.”Footnote 19
On the other hand, Freytag's career also illustrates the unease liberals felt when they considered the contrast between the arc of English historical development and the stalled vision of a reformed Prussia. Put another way, he felt obliged to address the classic Sonderweg question, was Prussia comparable to England? Even during the Konfliktzeit, Freytag was careful to point out that the English revolutionary model did not inevitably apply to Berlin. Like Oswald Spengler a generation later, Freytag viewed the parliamentary system as a “genuine and quite inimitable” product of English history that had “insular position instead of the state as its starting point.”Footnote 20 In response to charges of servility in the English press, he explained, “Here there are no Whigs and Tories facing one another, no liberals and conservatives,” “but rather those who seek the rule of law and those who deny it.” Musing on the outcome of the constitutional crisis, he concluded that a replay of the English Revolution had never been a serious possibility: “[Parliament would not have won] if King Charles had 200,000 soldiers under his flag and an obedient bureaucracy to carry out his excellent arrangements.”Footnote 21
Immersion in modern military history convinced him that progress toward constitutional government had been checked by the rift between a progressive, evolving civil society and a reactionary army that reflected the royal absolutism of the Prussian past. Freytag's essays from the Konfliktzeit helped to shape the liberal consensus that the reform of civil-military relations was necessary to destroy the social base of the Prussian reaction. In the concluding volumes of the Bilder, he offered a liberal, alternative military history of Prussia ascribing Prussian military weakness to the legacy of a royal army burdened with the agenda of the feudal aristocracy. He found a political ally in the Gotha circle: General Albrecht von Stosch, an unofficial military advisor to the crown prince and a soldier he believed embodied “the reform spirit of Scharnhorst.”
Contrary to the later historical assumption of liberal fervor for war with Austria in 1866, Freytag expressed private doubts about the likelihood of a Prussian victory. He deplored “the dilettantish way in which [Otto von] Bismarck plays with the German reform project” by risking a war with Austria that could possibly spur military intervention by France. He predicted that “The task of the army will be to cover Bismarck's deposits or to conceal his losses.”Footnote 22 He cautioned Heinrich von Treitschke that “Prussia still lacks a winning army. For that, a new organization is needed, under different generals.”Footnote 23
Although he later claimed “secret pride” in the fact that Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit appeared in 1866, the deafening silence in the work about Otto von Bismarck, a figure that he initially regarded as a transitory product of the Prussian reaction, speaks volumes. Extravagant faith in predetermined historical courses left liberals in a compromised political position. If that faith was a casualty of Königgrätz, so was the ancient Habsburg claim to leadership in the German lands. Given that trade-off, Protestants had every reason to view the victory as their victory.
Thomas Nipperdey and Wolfgang Mommsen have argued that Bismarck's triumph confronted liberals with the stark option “of furthering their own objectives either with Bismarck or after Bismarck, this exceptional man, the man one had to put up with.”Footnote 24 Retaining his “whiggish” faith in gradual progress toward reform, Freytag suggested that Bismarck's North German constitution might in fact be a temporary product of the times, a “Kriegesverfassung.”Footnote 25 He complained to Herzog Ernst II in 1869 that “This Bismarck system—this eternal temporizing—is becoming unbearable, most of all in Prussia. [. . .] We always maintained that 1866 will be hard to overcome.”Footnote 26 In a letter to General Stosch a month later, he complained that Bismarck had identified himself “with the glory and greatness of Prussia in such a way that anyone who beat him would simultaneously be hurting the state. It is hard to say publicly [but Bismarck] must go!”Footnote 27
Believing that Freytag had allowed his personal antipathy to cloud his political judgment, Stosch reminded him that “Bismarck only uses liberalism and the constitution to lead and sway the king and the conservatives, but never as an assured element of power.”Footnote 28 Furthermore, “Bismarck pursues his constant goal, the unification of Germany and prefers to do it without a war. He must go forward on this path looking to, and in the end, uniting with the liberals.”Footnote 29 The reality was, “Without Bismarck, we cannot make progress to a Reich.”Footnote 30
The likely succession of the liberal-minded crown prince alone suggested that Bismarck's position might be unsustainable. As early as 1863 Freytag reminded Heinrich von Treitschke that monarchical legitimacy did not necessarily equate to reaction:
We must put up with the fact that the regeneration of the state will be produced [. . .] by a change on the throne. Then destiny will be imposed from above. [. . .] It will come all at once in a reform movement like a champagne bottle when the cork pops.Footnote 31
Because they belonged “not to a small but a great and powerful party,” liberals could afford to compromise with Bismarck on the Indemnity Bill. A coalition of the Free Conservatives and National Liberals would offer a true government party “that is capable of governing, a party that will provide the security of a strong majority to a future government.”Footnote 32
Liberals such as Freytag invested their hopes in a liberal administration rather than a liberal parliamentary system. Geoff Eley noted that such a position was sensible in the circumstances: “The German pattern of ‘revolution from above’ in 1848–71 was just as capable of securing bourgeois predominance as the different experience of Britain or France [and] qualifies as readily for the title of bourgeois revolution.”Footnote 33 Liberals saw participation in building national institutions as an opportunity to seize a favorable space for middle-class political activity. Bismarck was not above the process of history; in the long run, the chancellor had no choice but to identify himself with the liberal movement: “In this era, whoever opposes the current of the age will always be in danger of having the ground cut from under his feet.”Footnote 34 Freytag assured Karl von Normann, the private secretary to Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, “things are progressing in a lovely way. The bases are sound, the energy of the people fresh, and we writers would do well to make an effort to keep the idealism of the German pure, to hold dear things such as family life, discipline, work, and devotion to the state.”Footnote 35
Bismarck's introduction of universal manhood suffrage thus came as a rude shock to a historian who defined historical progress in terms of a preordained and successful middle-class challenge to the Junkertum. Universal manhood suffrage replaced the comfortable certainties of notable politics with excruciating uncertainty. In the new politics Freytag perceived not opportunity but the challenge of confronting a volatile mass of newly enfranchised voters ripe for political manipulation. Of course the master manipulator was Bismarck himself, but he had many eager apprentices among the socialists and the ultramontanes. Freytag praised the true-hearted devotion of the working class but fretted that “this very characteristic made them the easy tool of their leaders.”Footnote 36
A sense of defensive uneasiness colored Freytag's glib account of his nomination as a candidate for the North German Reichstag elections of February 1867:
This universal suffrage is the most frivolous of all experiments ever dared by Count Bismarck. No one knows whether he'll be elected or not. And in the years ahead things will become even worse. For in the cities, the election is in the hands of the workers, and in the countryside, it is in the hands of the little people, day laborers, and farmhands. [I faced the hostility of] unkempt journeymen and red-bearded, insolent Lassalleans. [. . .] In the knowledge that I was wearing a black dress-coat and gray trousers—that is, the right mix of respectability and familiarity—I began to stir my punch, with feeling, adding well-proven lines from the Grenzboten, along with profound observations about fate and the human condition. [. . .] Coarseness carried the day [. . .] with a loud cry and the shaking of hands all around I was proclaimed the chosen one.Footnote 37
The inescapable conclusion—what Geoff Eley described as the “Realpolitik of the Bourgeoisie”—was that parliamentary institutions on the English model but based upon Bismarck's radically expanded electorate would coarsen the political culture, drown out the voices of patriotic moderates, and inevitably profit the radicals of the left and the noisy reactionaries of the extreme right. “Devoid of the highest patriotism,” Freytag predicted, “universal suffrage is of no use whatsoever; in a period of ill-feeling and quarreling, it will be our undoing.”Footnote 38 Could Bismarck control the volatile forces he had unleashed or would even the master eventually “wear himself out on Prussian aristocrats, Ultramontanes, and Socialists?”Footnote 39
His evaluation of his first and only parliamentary speech in 1867 suggested that “well-proven lines from the Grenzboten” might be a poor preparation for the demands of the new politics:
I concluded I was not cut out for parliamentary speaking. [. . .] I was unable to overcome an inevitable shyness, and from my long years of labor in the quiet Schreibstube, I had become too accustomed to the slow and calm working out of my thoughts, allowable in an author, but not in a speaker. In private, the knowledge of my unfitness annoyed me very much, though as a man of the world, I tried to hide the fact.Footnote 40
His brief account of his parliamentary career and his explanation of his decision not to run for reelection reads like a classic expression of middle-class inwardness: “I can be more useful to the people as a writer than as a deputy, albeit it in a roundabout way. Now I must put on my wings and fly to my merry realm where I am king, Bismarck, and the opposition all at once.”Footnote 41
In 1869, convinced that Bismarck had invoked the French threat to distract liberal demands for constitutional reform in Prussia, Freytag endorsed “the primacy of domestic politics” in a letter to Ernst II: “It would be comforting [to say] now that the primary focus must be [. . .] preparation for war and große Politik. But that is not true! In peacetime the essential issue is always domestic politics.”Footnote 42 Nevertheless, persuaded that war against France was now inevitable, he fell back upon the argument that the impending conflict—whatever the military outcome—would clear the path for constitutional reforms in Prussia:
We are at the beginning of immense political upheavals that historically cannot be realized without a major decision by arms; in reality we face war with the most powerful country on the continent. [. . .] Probably at the end of 1871, the domestic and foreign policy outlook of the state will be very different, as will be economic conditions, the relationship of the government to parliament, and the mood and the political culture of the people themselves. Under the pressure of a new age, we fervently believe that by the end of 1871 [. . .] parliamentary suspicions about the army's demands and the absolutist desires of the government, and on the other hand, the inflexible antipathy of the government to the legitimate demand of the people for freedom, will have faded away. [. . .] New successes or new failures will produce new programs for our future, new representative bodies, and [. . .] greater authority for the representatives of the people.”Footnote 43
On the eve of the 1870 war against France, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, hero of Königgrätz, invited his “congenial companion” and political confidant Gustav Freytag to join his staff as “chronicler of the campaign.”Footnote 44 General Stosch, now the quartermaster for the army in France, shared Freytag's optimism: “I cannot stop thinking that we are called to be a great power! The House of Hohenzollern is the representative of godly order in Europe, and we must hope that our young prince has the pride and will for such a position.”Footnote 45
For Freytag, the war against France was the defining event of modern times, the dramatic conclusion of the historical process levered into motion by Martin Luther's defiant stand against the Roman Catholic Church. The struggle for freedom that began in Wittenberg would be secured on the battlefields of France by the Prussian army. The political component of victory would be shaped by the Prussian state from Berlin. Detecting the power of the “black international” at work in Louis Napoleon's Second Empire, he viewed the war with France as the decisive confrontation in the ancient struggle between Protestant and Catholic civilizations. France, whether in the guise of Louis XIV, the revolutionary republic, or the Napoleonic Empire had been the primary weapon in Catholicism's ancient war against the German nation.
Freytag's press accounts of the Franco-Prussian War, written from the headquarters of the Prussian crown prince, projected the seventeenth-century wars of religion—defined as a failed struggle for national unification—onto the current war with France.Footnote 46 Prussian arms now defended the German spirit against the schemes of the Jesuits, the pernicious doctrine of papal infallibility, and the “modern Caesarism” of Napoleon III. The French clergy were “the fiercest enemies of the Germans, [the] most active inciters of war. To them, Germany is the land of heresy [and] the war a religious struggle.”Footnote 47
Since “military vainglory, that disgusting disease of the French,” required little encouragement in any case, war was inevitable.Footnote 48 Napoleon III, both villain and victim in Freytag's dramaturgy, was the object of historical (and marital) forces beyond his understanding. Controlled by his wife the Empress Eugénie, herself “under the dominion of the Jesuits,” the French Emperor was “a martyr to a wretched clandestine government.”Footnote 49 In support of his claim that the power of international Catholicism underlay French adventurism, Freytag cited an Alsatian Protestant: “We knew there was something in the wind, when the priests were swarming about like bees, for it was just the same in the Crimean and Italian wars and Mexico.”Footnote 50
Military events soon confirmed his long-cherished claims of national and confessional superiority. Freytag's Grenzboten account of the Battle of Wissembourg on August 4—the first clear defeat of French arms since Waterloo—confirmed that victory was in the offing for the Germans:
[The army of the crown prince] has fully defeated the French—their elite troops, their renowned General MacMahon, Chassepots, Mitrailleuses, Zouaves, and Turkos, all overthrown and destroyed by German power and German blows. It was a grim, hot struggle; the French are a brave and warlike nation, we, however, are more so.Footnote 51
Prussia, once dismissed as “the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire,” had smashed the power of the Habsburgs in central Europe in 1866. It was now poised to challenge the might of France for hegemony on the continent. He gloated, “Since yesterday evening, it has become clear to all of Europe that we possess [. . .] superior military strength. Since yesterday evening, the French emperor and his army know this as well as we.”Footnote 52
Freytag pronounced, “In attack the French are certainly more ardent and quicker than we North Germans.”Footnote 53 Warming to his subject, he proclaimed the reassuring lesson of this first battle: “With comparable weapons, [the German soldier] is not only a better fighter than the French conscripts, he is also a civilized man pitted against half-savages.”Footnote 54 Such advantage as the French gained through temperament could not alter the cultural imbalance. They “are by every form of individual ability the weaker race, they cannot rid themselves of their primeval Celtic ill-breeding.”Footnote 55 He detected the true source of German prowess in the peculiar virtues of Protestant civilization: “superior moral strength” [and] “calm self-reliance.”Footnote 56
In his exultant Grenzboten articles from Prussian headquarters, he proclaimed that the victories of Wörth and Sedan had redeemed that national sacrifice of the Thirty Years' War. Freytag reminded his readers that the Habsburgs had historically hired foreign mercenaries from every land: “Irish adventurers, Spaniards, Italians, [. . .] Cossacks—among them certainly Mohammedans”—against their fellow Germans.Footnote 57
A new Catholic emperor now pitted non-European troops (“a despicable, loathsome, brigand rabble from Africa”) against the German nation:
Whoever has witnessed the hordes of these prisoners [. . .] has seen filthy half-apes—among them many with the most evil criminal faces. Whoever compares this merry crowd with the red-cheeked faces of our sturdy fellows must say to himself that one result of our victory must be that this foreign frog spawn [Froschbrut] must never again be set against a Christian, civilized army.Footnote 58
On the contrary, the German army was the nation in arms: “With us the army is the people, the honor of the army is our honor, [and] its customs are our customs.”Footnote 59
The Battle of Sedan, nothing short of a second Waterloo in Freytag's judgment, now confirmed the German army as the “heroic instrument of unification and exemplar patriotic self-sacrifice.”Footnote 60 In the company of General von Stosch, he witnessed the “brazen ring of German helmets closing around the French army.”Footnote 61 Consciously reversing Goethe's famous verdict on the battle of Valmy in 1892, he wrote, “Thus our Lord worked through the army to apportion glory to the victors in battle: exalting the conquerors with a grand worldly position.”Footnote 62 The courage and sacrifice of the Prussian army proved that “the dreadful work of the battlefields served a higher ethical purpose [. . .] Hundreds of thousands perceived this as the poetry of the historical process.”Footnote 63 In the historicist painting by Georg Bleibtreu, Freytag was portrayed standing with his arms crossed in the command group of the crown prince observing the German bombardment.Footnote 64
On Sedan Day in 1873, Freytag declared the glory of unification did not belong exclusively to the soldiers: “The longing for national unity has been the driving force for thousands, but loyal devotion to the Prussian monarchy was the regulator of that driving force.”Footnote 65 He called upon his readers to recall their fathers “may not have fought on the battlefield, [but they have] promoted the rise of their state from relatively minor importance to the status of majestic great power. From the very beginning until their realization in the Reich, they have fought to achieve those ideas on which to base a new political life, legislation, and public and private law.”Footnote 66
The six weeks Freytag spent at the headquarters of the crown prince marked the zenith of his career as a political journalist.Footnote 67 Looking back from the vantage point of 1889, Freytag explained his personal decision to retire from public journalism in 1873 as the obvious response to an overwhelming record of success:
For twenty-five years I had stood among the leaders of opinion in the German press, though only on the modest staff of a weekly paper. The dream and longing of my youth had been realized; through the courage of our soldiers on the fields of battle and the greatness of our political leaders in the cabinet, a mighty German state had been established. [. . .] But did not contemporary events themselves give the most brilliant close to the period covered by my diffuse work? The mighty rising of united Germany against modern Caesarism, the inspired rush and the heroic deeds of the last war, the battlefields of Gravelotte and Le Mans—were these not the only worthy ending?Footnote 68
Freytag's claim to have “stood among the leaders of opinion” was entirely valid; in fact, he was one of those opinion shapers who accomplished “the real work” of “proposing the category of the German nation and of organizing public life into a new political community.”Footnote 69 Few would have contested his inclusion among Germany's most admired public figures; no nationalist writer evoked patriotic sentiment with such delicate artistry. Franz Mehring wrote, “In 1870 the hour of his praise tolled. [. . .] Freytag became the classical writer of the German bourgeoisie, which ever increasingly associated their salvation with the waving points of Prussian bayonets.”Footnote 70
Although Freytag did indeed begin to withdraw into private life to write his famous cycle of historical novels, Die Ahnen, he still found time to write some articles for the Grenzboten and a new journal, Im Neuen Reich. As usual, he reserved his most insightful political commentary for his private correspondence with General Stosch. In a letter from July 1871, Freytag still read Bismarck's draft constitution as a “fluid” document offering significant tactical opportunities for the opposition:
The organization of the Reich, however inadequate it may otherwise be, offers the Reichstag such excellent opportunities for defense and attack against the chancellor that I am obliged to wonder if it should not by a bold interpretation of its authority seek to seize full command of the war powers of the constitution. In any case, that would be a great step forward, the best we could have. If the priests, the civil register, control of marriage, and education are taken from them [the Ultramontanes] and the prohibition of secret societies with foreign superiors is imposed on them, then they can behave as they like; they no longer are in the least a danger to the state.Footnote 71
If, in his postwar euphoria, he was misled about the potential authority of the Reichstag in the areas of the army and foreign policy, Stosch bluntly reminded him that “The person who reopens the military conflict is betraying both crown and fatherland.”Footnote 72 Nevertheless, he still worried that the terms of the Reichsgründung would project the Prussian problem of civil-military relations onto the nation.Footnote 73 A Christmas greeting for 1871 to his patron Duke Ernst II contained the unseasonal report that “From Berlin come complaints about the almost insurmountable difficulty with which the alte Herr opposes the most urgent reforms in the army.”Footnote 74 He complained to Heinrich von Treitschke that “The contradiction between military jurisdiction and civil society is madness! Our good army gives us many such opportunities for moral outrage.”Footnote 75
In a letter to Albrecht von Stosch from September 1871, Freytag mused upon the negative political effects of Bismarck's statesmanship and fretted that the fundamental nature of the old authoritarian state remained intact.
We have achieved greatness. Now the means by which we acquired it are casting a shadow over our future. We shall all pay a price because one arbitrary man is accustomed to playing with puppets. [. . .] The harm produced by our military victory will be tangible: arrogance and impositions, an end to the old frugality, useless regiments, and what is worst of all, a disregard for the individual even where it demands the highest respect.Footnote 76
Freytag's anxieties about the shape of the Reichsgründung clearly featured the same historical cast that populated the analytic chessboard of the Sonderweg—reactionary aristocrats (a category that now included Bismarck himself), political Catholicism, and the growing socialist movement. Given his critique of Prussian militarism, it is not surprising that Hans-Ulrich Wehler praised Freytag for being among the first liberals to discern the outlines of the authoritarian “configuration of 1871” and recognize that “Prince Bismarck's Gründerschwindel” only served to exacerbate the “permanent crisis of German society and politics.”Footnote 77
In a surprisingly gloomy 1871 essay “Das Deutsche Reich als Weltmacht,” published in his new journal Im Neuen Reich, Freytag declared, “The new constitution of the Reich offers no guarantee of power and permanence.”Footnote 78 His greatest fear was that Bismarck's territorial annexations and constitutional compromises with the princely families of Germany would reduce Prussia to a Protestant province in a new Catholic empire. “The new organization of the Holy Roman Empire,” he wrote, “is an edifice so strangely full of holes that even Prince Bismarck cannot live with it in the long term.”Footnote 79
The Kulturkampf offered the historic opportunity to implant the Protestant culture and the progressive Prussian administration that had produced the Kaiserreich firmly and indelibly upon the shape of the new state. As the one structure all Germans shared, the state had to be the institutional guarantor of the national destiny “to be pioneers of every form of progress.”Footnote 80 In short, the dream of a unitary state drawing upon the legacy of the Prussian Reform Era seemed to offer an irresistible instrument of nation building.Footnote 81 Such a state would enable Germany to assume its rightful place beside Great Britain in the forefront of a hegemonic Protestant civilization.
State power, in the sense of an abstract entity existing above politics, provided essential tools to overcome the “dense mindlessness” that had sustained the German reaction for centuries. The magnitude of the stakes involved tempted the semiretired novelist to return to the polemical wars: “I will once again become a journalist and write spiteful articles against the Pfaffen and also against the Junker. People don't become tame as they age. I assure you that I have such great anger in regard to the miserable state of affairs that I don't mind getting involved in my old age in Pressprozesse as a grouser.”Footnote 82
He wrote in the same letter, “It was Mazzini who first taught that no nation can bear simultaneously both a political and a religious revolution.”Footnote 83 But Prussia/Germany was no ordinary nation. Protestantism had “imparted both meaning to German history and a sanction to the new state's civic culture.”Footnote 84 The Hohenzollern Beamtenmaschine could legitimately harness the “rational tyranny” of the state and steer civil society through those revolutions: “It must now be the sincere demand of all liberal Germans that this strict, dutiful, and dedicated spirit in the body of officialdom endure so that the necessary reforms in administration, church, and school can be fully executed, and that the legal standing of the crown not be impaired by friction with the imperial authorities.”Footnote 85 The civilizing state need not tolerate religious opposition.
The Catholic question has been spinning around in this Circulus vitiosus [vicious circle] for an eternity, and it will keep on spinning like this for a long time yet. Our task is to make it as innocuous as possible for the state. Not through freedom of the church, but rather—for the time being—through the determination of what is church and [what is] a hostile party against the state.Footnote 86
In the Bilder, Freytag portrayed the first partition of Poland under Frederick II as the opening act of a great moral drama of state-sponsored modernization. The protagonist in this redemptive drama was the Prussian official. As was the case in Silesia in the previous century, the crucial battleground in the struggle for the German future would be the schools. Compulsory state education would solve the “Catholic question,” address the dilemma of the democratic suffrage, and break down the social basis of the Prussian reaction. Once again the teacher would be the best antidote to the priest, overcoming “the profound spiritual slumber of priestly education.”Footnote 87
If liberals could not hope to outvote the masses, the next best thing would be to transform them into men of the nineteenth century. “A sensibly organized structure of government in which the church has been separated from the school will, within one generation,” he predicted, “bring about a new age.”Footnote 88 The key to forging a permanent union of the Prussian state and German nation lay in a long-term commitment to modernize society from above, “through the long-standing, constant labor of the schools and the state administration.”Footnote 89
It does not require a bold leap of interpretation to detect the ghost of the Prussian Kulturkämpfer hovering behind the Sonderweg argument. If Geoff Eley argued that the tendency to invest hopes in another “revolution from above” should be seen as the liberal version of Realpolitik, Jürgen Kocka viewed it as the defining feature of Prussian liberalism.”Footnote 90 Concluding that liberal faith in the nation-building potential of the Prussian state cannot be ignored or argued away, Kocka insisted in 1999 that “The Sonderweg interpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history has not been completely discredited.”Footnote 91
The collapse of the Kulturkampf transformed Freytag, for so long the prophet of bourgeois hegemony, into a liberal Jeremiah, lamenting a German tragedy. It was entirely characteristic of the man that his extravagant optimism evolved toward equally dramatic pessimism. Bismarck's emasculation of the Beamtenstand seemed a greater blow to the German future than his success in blocking the establishment of a true parliamentary system. The removal of Kultusminister Adelbart Falk confirmed that “Caesar Bismarck” had no intention of deploying the “practical Hegelianism” of the Beamtenmaschine in the service of the national revolution the Kulturkämpfer envisioned.Footnote 92
On those grounds alone, Freytag pronounced the constitutional failure of Bismarck's “Gründerschwindel.”
It is hardly necessary to praise the modesty of our political life; we are still very far from having a parliamentary government and the fortunate recipe: efficient, specialized, reasonable officials as a governing body and a patriotic Reichstag as Kontrollinstanz. We would have [achieved that goal] long ago and met the political demands of the nation had not a certain man completely disorganized and diminished the value of the higher Beamtentum through his tyrannical and erratic intervention.Footnote 93
The model of a systematic strategy of political manipulation from above directed against a politically “immature” bourgeois liberalism is central to the Sonderweg narrative. For decades Freytag had predicted that “the good-hearted Germans” would eventually see through the layers of deception and reject Bismarck, or at least, clip his wings by forcing him to accept a more authoritative liberal voice in the shaping of policy. The disappointment of those hopes was a product of the “incongruity between our inner freedom and outward helplessness.”Footnote 94 In a letter to Stosch he mused that Bismarck's popularity was a political fetish, a “characteristic” product of the instinctive German “urge to create an object to love and to worship. This is so German, so stupid, and such touching childishness. Against such circumstances and such a public mood, one sometimes feels like a sober man among drunkards.”Footnote 95
In 1881, Freytag finally declared that the costs of Bismarck's authority had become unsupportable: “However great the progress, the people have paid too much for such mastery.”Footnote 96 Arguing that the French emperor was the chancellor's real mentor, Freytag enthusiastically joined the liberal chorus that denounced Bismarck's “Caesarism.” When liberals spoke of Caesarism, or suggested that Bismarck had deployed an original theory of managing the new mass politics, they were invoking a classical narrative of political seduction owing more to Tacitus than to Karl Marx.Footnote 97 As early as September 1871 he charged that the essence of Bismarck's arcana imperii was the cynical exploitation of monarchical legitimacy: “[Bismarck] is demanding an unnatural relationship to all the parties—the actual sovereign, the prince, [and] the used and managed people.”Footnote 98
Freytag's frustration led him to the inescapable conclusion that Bismarck had “made us all accomplices to his deeds.” His cynical machinations denied the political culture the blessing of the liberal temperament: “impartiality, honest appreciation of conflicting interests, and the capacity to let them negotiate together to achieve the purposes of the state.”Footnote 99 At once fascinated and repelled by Bismarck's personality, Freytag pondered the question of Bismarck's legacy in a letter to Albrecht von Stosch:
You ask me in what category of statesmen Bismarck should be placed and whether he will leave a school behind him. Between the romantics and the aesthetes of the aristocracy, the Humboldts, Bunsen, and Usedom, on the one hand, and constitutional present, on the other, lies a thin cultural layer of peripatetic [touristischen] dilettantes: Young Germany and the Junker class in its elegant types—Freilgrath, Lenau, Fürst Pückler, Lichnowsky—insolent, taking pleasure in risks, without firm principles, without a school, chiefly dependent upon French education. The greatest late fruit of this growing period, which in literature stretches from 1830 to 1840, is, or so it seems to me, Bismarck. The salient feature is lack of reverence, a tendency to regard everything capriciously and from a personal point of view, and, at the same time [. . .] a vital energy that is fresh and impudent. For that reason, he will not have a following, either.Footnote 100
An 1882 letter to Karl von Normann contains a striking lament in which Freytag finally assigned Bismarck to his place in the master narrative of the Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit:
If the old man's domination continues much longer, we will not be spared all the sorrows produced by one man's tyranny. We in Germany have already experienced the blessings and curse of such extraordinary times twice earlier under Luther and Frederick the Great. Now the third one rules, and he has a character and disposition so much more wicked than either of those.Footnote 101
Such rhetorical outbursts—what Margaret Anderson and Kenneth Barkin termed a “collective historical sigh”—covered the political retreat of a generation of aging National Liberals. Freytag never doubted the implications of Bismarck's turn to the right, or, to put the proposition another way, he would have endorsed the notion of a “Second Foundation” of the Reich. National Liberals now found their claims to hegemony tied up with the monarchy in ways that they could never have predicted in the heady days of the Reichsgründung. The new basis for a political alliance between the monarchy and the middle class would be a common antisocialism that increasingly overshadowed the old critique of the feudal aristocratic caste. If the authoritarian state declined to accept its assigned role as instrument of progressive change, it still offered the necessary power to protect the bourgeoisie from the very forces the chancellor had unleashed.
The existing system guaranteed property rights and provided the best means of maintaining the distinction between “mein” and “dein.” As a “warm patriot, a good Prussian, a königstreuer German, and a dedicated enemy of all revolutionary trickery,” Freytag obediently followed his party leader Rudolf von Bennigsen in acknowledging the inevitability, if not the genius, of Otto von Bismarck.Footnote 102 In making common cause with Prussian conservatives, National Liberals did not absolve the chancellor of his political sins. In fact, Freytag shared the left liberal view that Bismarck's universal manhood suffrage and social legislation had created a “clerical-aristocratic-socialist alliance.”Footnote 103
He fretted about the loyalty of the working class in case of war; in fact, according to Friedrich Meinecke, such fears dominated the National Liberal imagination and precluded any attempts at dialogue across the class divide until August 1914. In socialism, Freytag saw only an implacable domestic enemy that threatened the very basis of the nation.
Since 1848 there has been no time when the peace of the state seemed so assured and no time where subversive ideas in domestic politics are so systematically organized to threaten the social order of the state. The chancellor's attempts to draw away the masses from the agitators through major reform legislation might yield good results in 50 or 100 years if we could succeed in holding off organized outbreaks of discontent. [. . .] We must trust that this struggle [between capital and labor] whose duration is now incalculable will be relatively calm and interrupted by a lot of good times and peace treaties.Footnote 104
Max Weber deplored “the comic operetta that has compromised [liberalism] with its stereotypical demagogues on one side and blind Bismarckians on the other.”Footnote 105 The wavering support of left-liberals for the antisocialist laws only sent a dangerous message of weakness to the agitators. Addressing the National Liberal split, Freytag concluded that the leaders of the Secession resembled “haughty Corpsstudenten who regarded the value of their brotherhood too lightly.” He detected an unseemly servility in their eager anticipation of the succession of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. The Secession had opted for ideological purity over party discipline, thus allowing “the enemy to master the field and take command.” As a result “our political life has been spoiled for the century.”Footnote 106
The death of Wilhelm I in 1888 and the brief reign of Kaiser Friedrich III inevitably prompted a wave of patriotic tributes that focused upon the monarchy as a symbol of the nation. Like 1866, the year of the three emperors marked a watershed that invited sober reflection upon the historical legacy of the liberal movement, and by extension, the authoritarian outcome of what Freytag had termed “the German reform project.” As a königstreuer National Liberal historian, Gustav Freytag now assigned himself the task of pronouncing the judgment of history upon the life of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and writing a valedictory for the brand of liberalism he represented.
Inevitably, the supposed liberal views of Friedrich Wilhelm, as crown prince and Kaiser, now became issues of intense controversy. Seizing an opportunity to indict those he judged responsible for the failure of the liberal movement, Freytag joined the polemical battle with gusto.Footnote 107 His final and most controversial historical work, Der Kronprinz und die deutsche Kaiserkrone (1889), turned out to be a stunning polemic against his old patron, the recently deceased Emperor Friedrich III. Ingenuously claiming his “Erinnerungsblätter” to be nothing more than a “small but unpleasant” duty imposed upon him by the Empress Victoria, Freytag claimed the right “as a true Prussian” to judge the “personality of the future Emperor Frederick as it appeared to him, honestly, and with a heart full of reverent affection.”Footnote 108
This slim volume summarizes classic National Liberal attitudes of the 1880s: resignation, disappointment, factional sniping, and in Freytag's case, a surprising degree of Anglophobia focused upon the personality of Kronprinzessin Victoria, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. In a letter to his third wife in August 1888, Freytag revealed his disappointment: “The gradual encroachments of his wife shriveled his vitality long before his illness broke out—never more than during the inactive period of morbid waiting for the splendor of majesty.”Footnote 109
The most controversial section of the essay focused upon events at the headquarters of the crown prince's Third Army in the opening weeks of the campaign against France. Bluntly dismissing the military skills of the crown prince, Freytag declared, “Emperor Friedrich III figures in the minds of the people as a strong winner of battles,” but “whoever should say that he became a famous general without being an able soldier would do the beloved deceased no wrong.” Fortunately, “because he trusted the chief of his general staff” and concentrated his efforts upon “the display appertaining to royalty,” his military limitations did little damage during the campaign.Footnote 110
Freytag repeated Bismarck's old insinuation that the crown prince and his wife acted almost as a pro-English fifth column in the Hohenzollern family. The coded charge of “English” ideas included and projected Bismarck's old charge that the couple had long favored a “Gladstone ministry.” When the famous English war correspondent W. H. Russell of the Times of London arrived at headquarters, Freytag complained, as an Englishman, “he was received by the crown prince with a distinction that contrasted with the neglect with which the reporters of the German papers who had found their way to us had been treated.”Footnote 111
The crown prince's indulgence of his wife, Freytag charged, extended so far as to hinder his focus on military operations and compromise diplomacy. Because nothing could be done at headquarters until the crown prince had completed his daily letter to his wife, important communiqués were subordinated to the domestic routines of the family. Those personal letters, possibly containing sensitive information, made their way to the Neues Palais in Berlin, then to Queen Victoria, and finally, to Paris. “The French got to know via England all sorts of things about our army that it would have been better to keep secret.”Footnote 112
Freytag described the royal marriage as one in which the wife dominated her husband:
His devotion and subordination to his loved wife were absolute. She was the mistress of his youth, the confidante of all his thoughts, his counselor whenever she was disposed to give advice. [. . .] His judgment of men and events, everything was ordered by him in accordance with her thoughts and wishes. [. . .] Such dominion of the wife over her husband, the future ruler of Prussia, threatened to give rise to difficulties and conflicts, greater, perhaps, for the wife herself.Footnote 113
Sir Frederick Ponsonby, private secretary to Queen Victoria and editor of the Empress Victoria's letters, detected a transparent motive in Freytag's polemic: “In order to give some plausible explanation of the fact that the crown prince himself held Liberal views, it was said that he was entirely under the domination of his wife.”Footnote 114
His description of the marriage of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm articulated fears about compromised masculinity that extended far beyond the politics of the Hohenzollern succession to the gender wars of the fin de siècle. Ultimately, the coded charge of uxoriousness implied a weak or degenerate character. Like many in the Gotha circle, Freytag had long doubted that the crown prince could ever assert the autonomous male personality required of a Prussian monarch. His anxiety about the passivity of the Kronprinz and his resentment of Kronprinzessin Vicky thus exposed the prickly vein of Anglophobia and misogyny in a noted National Liberal writer long associated with pro-English literary views. Of greater significance, the degree of mawkish marital adoration of the crown prince suggested a measure of flawed masculinity unacceptable for a future German emperor.
It was an equally unpardonable personality trait for the symbolic leader of a liberalism that perceived politics as a male reserve. It could not have gone unnoticed that the essay recalled Freytag's earlier musings on the dubious masculinity of another emperor widely believed to be in the thrall of his wife: Napoleon III. Freytag's polemic implied that this deplorable dynamic had long been at work in the Prussian royal family. Both imperial marriages illustrated Heinrich von Sybel's 1874 assertion that the woman who sought to expand her scope of action beyond her natural sphere of the home and “rival the work of men” surrendered the “grace and power of her sex.” Such a woman was no longer an authentic female, but a Männin, “a she-male worth precisely as much to the world as the weiblicher Mann.”Footnote 115
Much of this merely served to prepare the way for his most significant indictment. It was Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm who had demanded the imperial title in direct opposition to the wishes of his father. The very designation Kaiserreich invoked distasteful memories and brought to mind the image of a federation “established by priests, consecrated and mismanaged by priests.”Footnote 116 The imperial title in itself betrayed the liberal vision of a civilizing Hohenzollern unitary national state in favor of a “new organization of the Holy Roman Empire.” The chancellor gave in to the crown prince even though “as a Prussian he can hardly have felt any enthusiasm for such a splendid accessory to real power.”Footnote 117
If we look behind Freytag's rhetorical excesses, the veiled discussion of royal versus imperial symbolism contained a bitter verdict upon decades of unfulfilled liberal hopes for a progressive revolution from above. That alone accounts for much of the accusatory tone of his last political essay. The very nation-building deficiencies of the Reichsgründung that Prussian liberals most deplored—above all the failure to see the Kulturkampf through to completion—thus bore the imprimatur of Friedrich Wilhelm's obsessive pursuit of the imperial title as much as that of Bismarck's Realpolitik. Both had contrived to emasculate the transformative dynamism of the Prussian Beamtenmaschine with the resulting negative impact on German state formation.
It had fallen to King Wilhelm and his chancellor to rein in the imperial hubris of the crown prince and his pushy English wife. He now declared that the long reign of Kaiser Wilhelm I had been a national blessing rather than a liberal tragedy. The old liberal dream of an alliance between the Hohenzollern crown and the people had been realized in the person of the father, not his weak and profoundly flawed son: “The Prince of Prussia of 1848 and the Emperor William of 1888, the hated prince and the idolized emperor, were the same man, and it took the nation half a generation to change its opinion as it did.”Footnote 118
Prussia had fulfilled its historical mission “through the courage of our soldiers on the fields of battle and the greatness of our political leaders in the cabinet.”Footnote 119 After two decades of often bitter opposition to Bismarck, Freytag still experienced national unification as the pinnacle of his life. In the end he endorsed Bismarck's constitution as “a lasting creation” that future generations will regard “as a masterpiece of political wisdom.”Footnote 120 It guaranteed the institutional framework for those “ideas on which to base a new political life, legislation, [and] public and private law.”Footnote 121 Nevertheless he insisted that the stabilization of a national political culture was possible only through the support of the loyal middle class.Footnote 122 The Reichsgründung transcended the flaws of its creator. James Retallack suggested that if liberals “did not necessarily get the system of governance they envisioned or deserved before 1918, they seem to have gotten what they actually wanted.”Footnote 123
Nothing Freytag ever wrote provoked such a negative public response. The Social Democratic literary critic Franz Mehring noted, “The little book on Kaiser Friedrich [cost him] ‘the idyllic and indisputable position’ of favor that he had enjoyed [among liberals] until then.”Footnote 124 That rancor can only be explained by the author's provocative charge that the mighty national liberal movement—the greatest force for unification and progress in German history—had been consigned to irrelevance by the failures of its leadership. In the case of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the failure was the result of a tragically flawed personality that combined princely arrogance and unmanly servility in equal parts. The charge of servility applied with equal force to his fawning supporters in the Secession; both had failed the test of leadership and left liberalism adrift without a unifying vision or a strong hand at the helm.
Freytag's final reflection on his career as a liberal historian remains a classic liberal self-critique:
How very differently it turned out and how fundamentally everything that had been regarded as probable a few years ago was refuted by events! Such experiences make one modest. [. . .] That doubling of the army that made the first years of King William's reign so difficult, and which was, at least in the manner in which it originated, so disagreeable to the great majority of the Prussians, was the basis of [. . .] everything on which the most ardent hopes of the Germans now depend.Footnote 125
To the end of his life Freytag believed that the essence of Bismarck's politics came down to self-preservation. In that sense, Bismarck remained the same man he had been in 1863. Considering the implications of Bismarck's victory over the crown prince and the generation he represented, Freytag posed the classic query, “Who can tell whether the loss of this peculiar mixture of the elements of culture will have an influence on national development?”Footnote 126 In fact, his anxiety about the poisonous cultural impact of Bismarck's Realpolitik has been largely confirmed by a century of German historiography.
Shortly before his death in 1895, Freytag pronounced an ironic valedictory: “Had the emperor put up with him [Bismarck] in office for only a short while longer, he would have worn out his welcome with Prussian aristocrats, Ultramontanes, and Socialists. [. . .] Now, however, the very thing that seemed to him the greatest misery [. . .] has become the exaltation of his old age—a popularity and a mobilization of universal gratitude such as no German has ever enjoyed before. His dismissal has turned out to be his last great stroke of luck, his atonement.”Footnote 127
Freytag's example demonstrates how much the Sonderweg narrative relied upon reproducing the perspectives and self-criticism of embittered liberal critics of the Reichsgründung. Gustav Freytag's most obvious contribution was three decades’ worth of often insightful analysis of Bismarck's manipulative political strategies—the arcana imperii the chancellor so deftly deployed against the National Liberals. In attempting to account for their political setbacks, liberals sketched in the basic framework for all the variants of the Sonderweg. Freytag's reading of Germany history stressed the persistence of feudal social and religious structures resistant to reform, and in the Reichsgründung, he detected patterns of elite manipulation in Prussian politics. As much as any German writer, Freytag chronicled the damaging blows to bourgeois hopes and self-confidence meted out by the chancellor. With a mixture of genuine admiration, and in Freytag's case, genuine outrage, liberals struggled to comprehend his masterful use of coercion, character assassination, repression, and press manipulation, while at the same time celebrating his success in accomplishing major portions of the liberal agenda.
It is difficult to overstate the influence of such contemporary expressions of liberal frustration, anger, despair, and resignation. In embracing the notion that a normative process of historical development had been usurped by the enemies of progress, the liberals indelibly injected their Manichean vision of a confrontation between feudalism and modernization into German historiography. That view has framed the historical debates that dominated a century of historical writing on the Kaiserreich. The National Liberals, their “intellectual scion” Max Weber, and an entire generation of critical historians influenced by Weber and the Bielefeld school constructed a narrative upon the premise that the advocates of German political modernization had struggled against and ultimately failed to overcome entrenched feudal social structures resistant to reason and opposed to the very idea of progress.
