Road to Unity — Part 2

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. The proclamation of the German Empire was a rather formal affair. It took place in a tiny, crammed room in the Hall of Merit in the Palace of Versailles. Bismarck read out a somewhat perfunctory declaration to a room packed full of army officers. There were no civilians to be seen, there were nobles and Princess and officers from every regiment had fought in the United German Army that had just triumphed so magnificently over the old foe of France.

After reading out the proclamation, the gathered audience let out a cheer for the new German Reich and for the new German Kaiser Wilhelm the First. But even this proclamation itself showed the scale of the challenges that Bismarck would face by turning a collection of squabbling states into a single nation. Could it even be done? Could it be possible to achieve this? It wasn't in Berlin that the new German Empire was proclaimed.

It was proclaimed in France and there was a specific reason for this, because this new German state was comprised of people's with very strong regional identities, but there had to be a power centre somewhere within this new German Empire. Bismarck realized that by proclaiming a German Empire anywhere in Germany would immediately elevate that state above the others, so he declared in France to avoid the idea of elevating Prussia. This was just one of the many, many challenges that we are going to be looking at how Osser von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, addressed between 1871, the creation of the German state and 1890, the end of Bismarck's tenure in office.

And that is going to be the subject of today's episode of ancient to recent the history of the Second German Reich. The German Empire had a somewhat shaky start. Dozens of separate nations, many of them fiercely independent and proud of their regional identities, had only actually been able to be brought together by the common threat posed by the old foe France. Bismarck had manipulated Napoleon the Third into a foolish declaration of war against Prussia that had brought the German states together and collectively they had stunningly defeated France in the Franco Prussian War. And this had given Bismarck the political capital to push through the creation of a single united German state. And overnight, this new German Reich immediately became Europe's superpower. 41 million people, the largest country in Europe.

The world woke up to a completely new reality. Further to this, Germany had also annexed Alsace and Lorraine, actual parts of France with large French speaking populations. Abyssmark had actually thought this was a bad move. He believed that this would create permanent enmity between the new German state and France. But the pressure for this because these were areas that yes, they had large French speaking populations, but they also had large German speaking populations.

And would a opportunity ever present the German state to bring these people into Germany ever again? Weren't they going to be? If they weren't incorporated into Germany, they would be incorporated into France, and therefore they would be used against Germany. So why not strike the blow while you have the opportunity? Bismarck relented. He thought that hostility between Germany and France was simply a reality. It was as much a reality as the laws of physics, for the new German state was born immediately with a hostile neighbor to its West, it's honour wounded, but it was also born with intense regional and local divisions.

What Bismarck tried to do to overcome the divisions not just on region but also on class, on ideology, on religion or on ethnicity, is he tried to design a system that was both progressive and authoritarian simultaneously. He tried to devise a system that would give enough power to the regions and the states whilst preserving enough authority within the Prussian state. He created a state whereby Prussia would have certain privileges reserved for it.

King of Prussia would always be the Kaiser of Germany. Prussia would always have 17 votes in the upper chamber when it only required 14 votes to pass legislation. The Kaiser would ultimately be the commander of the army and would be needed to approve the passing of any legislation. But at the same time, full male suffrage was granted to all men over the age of 25, which was incredibly liberal by the standard of the time. Britain didn't have that level of male suffrage and also the Reichstag.

The German parliament was required to approve. It couldn't propose, but it had to approve all laws and all budgets. A period between 1871 and 1878 is what's known as the Liberal era is a period that's defined by the relationship of Bismarck, the arch pragmatist, the arch proponent of ruthless realpolitik, with a political party called the National Liberals, who were founded in 1867. The National Liberals were people who believed in constitutional power, in the rule of law, and also in more sort of free market style economics. Bismarck was willing to work with the National Liberals because all Bismarck really cared about was entrenching the achievement of the unification of Germany and in many ways unleashing free market economics really worked quite nicely to achieve that.

Bismarck knew that straight away Germany needed to be knit together by massive infrastructure projects, that Germany needed to really deliver on the project of German unification. That a lot of people who joined this German state didn't do it out of their love of the idea of German unity. They did it instead out of expedience, and it also needed to be a strong state that could finance a large and powerful army to fend off its predatorial neighbors, especially a revanchist France.

They created a civil and Criminal Code standardizing the laws throughout the new German state. They swept away tariffs. They engaged in massive levels of infrastructure investments. This led to the creation of the Reichsbank. This led to the doubling of the size of Germany's railway system between 1871 and 1880. But there was also another important reason that Bismarck was eager to work with the National Liberals, which was that they were they were a predominantly Protestant political party in a country that now had a large number of Roman Catholics in it. This was a time of incredible political Catholicism, fear of papal interference within the domestic affairs of countries. To work closely with a Protestant political party that he knew could be relied upon to check Catholic political power was going to be very useful to Bismarck. But the relationship with the national liberals broke down for a number of reasons.

The 1st is that in 1873 there was a massive economic crisis throughout Europe. And this really seemed to make a lot of people much more skeptical about laissez faire economics. It led to a lot of poverty, it led to a lot of hunger, it led to a lot of hardship. And so the devotees of unlimited free market economics all of a sudden found that their message wasn't quite as well received as it previously had been. The big appeal of the National Liberals had been the ability to get legislation through the Reichstag, and if they all of a sudden no longer had that popular legitimacy, then they all of a sudden weren't so useful. There was a number of other major problems that led to the decline of the national liberals. The first was that they achieved a lot of their objectives. They swept away tariffs.

They brought about a Civil Code. They helped push through secularization in education. And so once they'd served that purpose, what did Bismarck really need them for? Plus, on top of that, you had the rise of socialism as a political movement from the 1870s onwards. You had the foundation of the SPD, the Socialist Party of Germany. And Bismarck now had an anvil against which his hammer could # the national liberals that he could say, here's the rising tide of socialist tyranny that you need to side with me against.

If you don't do that, then the country will be swept away. Bismarck had a somewhat strange relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm. Bismarck had a very, very bad relationship with Wilhelm, the first wife, Queen Augusta, because he had suggested to Augusta that her and Wilhelm overthrow Wilhelm's father, also called Wilhelm, in 1848. And this was seen as a appalling interference in the affairs of the of the royal family in the monarchy by someone who wasn't even a senior politician at the time.

And she never forgave him. She hated him for the rest of his life. However, Wilhelm became dependent upon Bismarck. You see, Wilhelm hadn't really been particularly keen on the idea of the unification of Germany. Wilhelm very much saw himself as the King of Prussia, not the King of Germany. As soon as Germany had been unified, Wilhelm lost even more interest in politics and effectively retired for the last 20 odd years of his reign to his hunting lodge.

He wanted to just do what aristocrats in the 19th century did. Rode around horses, shot things, and had banquets. This worked great for Bismarck. Bismarck didn't want the only person within the political system who could actually checkmate him to be interfering in domestic affairs. Bismarck, who was by no means a Republican. He was very much so a monarchist. He was very, very happy to be running the shop while the Kaiser was off doing his hunting. Also had a somewhat strange relationship with Crown Prince Frederick.

The Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm's son was much more liberal and he was also married to Queen Victoria's daughter, also called Victoria, and she was quite a strong personality. She was quite assertive in her commitment to a much more constitutional monarchy. Germany at the time was a mixed democracy, constitutional system, but also AI. Suppose you would say an interventionist monarchy. Unlike in say Britain or Canada where the king has powers but doesn't use them out of convention.

It's a misconception of the British constitution to say the king has no powers. He doesn't interfere in day-to-day politics. Those things are reserved for moments of national crisis. In Germany, the Kaiser played a much more active role if you wanted to, which of course Wilhelm the First didn't want to. But if you had much more of an activist Kaiser, then that could raise problems for someone like Bismarck who very much so wanted to be involved in the day-to-day running of every part of the German government. Crown Prince Friedrich and Victoria, they were supporters of a much more liberal, much more constitutional, much more ceremonial monarchy, which Bismarck was not keen on at all. Because of course, you've got to remember that Bismarck really needed the monarch.

He had Wilhelm the First in his back pocket. He was constantly balancing the king against the parliament. He was constantly coming into conflict with the Reichstag, which was overwhelmingly dominated by his political enemies. So he didn't want a constitutional monarchy because a constitutional monarchy says, well, you lads in the Reichstag and the chancellorship, you guys are going to have to Duke it out. And all of a sudden it means that the minister, president of Prussia or the chancellor of Germany is accountable to the electorate and accountable to the Reichstag, not accountable to the Kaiser. But that would be a mortal threat to Bismarck. Within this German system of government, Bismarck still had to do a lot of balancing.

He had to play the different political parties off against each other. The unification of Germany with the exclusion of Catholic Austria had created a situation whereby the southern German states such as Bavaria, which are overwhelmingly Catholic, were now locked in a union with the northern German states, which are overwhelmingly Protestants. You see, the French Revolution had seen a massive reduction in the power of the Church and wherever the armies of Napoleon marched, they brought the ideas of secularism with them. This had led to a big cultural backlash from Catholics and from the papacy.

In December 1870, the Xentrom Parte, the Centre Party, was formed to combat secularism and fight for Catholic rights and Catholic views within Prussia and then later within Germany. From a very early stage, it became apparent just how powerful the call of Catholic identity was within the new German state, where the Centre Party won as much as a third of the votes and came second in the 1870s elections. It turned out that Roman Catholics overwhelmingly aligned more on religious identity than on class or cultural issues, and Bismarck was also very concerned about the interference of the papacy within German domestic politics.

This is very shortly after the decree of papal infallibility, where the Pope cannot be wrong on theological issues, and the papacy had also denounced liberalism and nationalism. Plus, if you are running a new German state which comprises not just large numbers of German Catholics, but also large numbers of Polish Catholics who are not just religiously but culturally, linguistically, are alienated from the state and the Catholic Church is speaking up for them, then this is a very severe challenge to Bismarck's efforts to bring about a unified German identity and a unified German state.

So Bismarck sought to limit the power of the papacy. He passed a number of laws forbidding criticism of the government during church services. He also introduced something called the Church Inspection Law, allowing the state to oversee schools, including church ones. Bismarck was very happy to work with the national liberals who wanted to push this idea of secularism, especially within education. In 1872, Bismarck expelled the Jesuits from Germany, and in the spring of 1873, Bismarck went so far as to break relations with the Vatican. Bismarck passed something called the May Laws, which subjected churches to state control.

Priests within Germany had to have a degree from a German university, and religious appointments had to be reported to the state. State funding was removed from church institutions and in 1875 civil marriage was introduced as the only legal form of marriage. Couples could get married in a church service, but they would have to be married in a civil service first, and only the civil service marriage would be recognised by the German state. This led to a considerable backlash by the church. In the 1877 elections, the Centre Party secured as much as 25% of the vote.

Plus, on top of that, many Protestants were unhappy with this. Bismarck had a particular antipathy towards Catholicism, but he saw any institution that stood in the way of the creation of a German national identity as being one that really needed be stomped on. However, as the years went by, Bismarck saw a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. The Liberal Party had served its purpose and had now collapsed under the pressure from the rise of the left and the demise of the popularity of liberal economics. Bismarck saw the Catholic Church as being a potentially useful ally to box out the SPD from power. So he came to the Catholic Church. They came to an agreement that would allow the church to continue practicing some influence and having some control over state schools.

But he'd really won the major battle. He wanted to create institutions that would breed a German sense of identity and relegate regional. Ethnic, linguistic and religious identity to being secondary identities. He was able to keep the secular advancements, especially in education and marriage, in place. The identity was to be national, the source of legitimacy. The source of loyalty was to be the national identity, was to be the German Reich, to be German institutions, German wide culture and values, not religious ones. And that still persists to this day, where education is overwhelmingly secular.

Bismarck knew that many people who had signed up to the Reich didn't do so out of a romantic sense of German nationalism. They did so out of pragmatism. And he knew that Germany needed to begin delivering in terms of standards of living for the 41 million German citizens very, very quickly. So he put a great focus on industrialization. France and Britain at this point were well ahead, but by the creation of a new unified German state, this facilitated the abilities of Germany to catch up very quickly.

Germany had everything it really needed. It had deep rivers that acted as waterways, linking major cities and the interior with international markets. It had an abundant supply of coal, iron, minerals, fertile agricultural land. The only thing that had prevented the German states from becoming major powers was the fact that they weren't politically unified. So now that political unification was out of the way and there was a central government that was really driving economic integration, this LED very quickly to an economic boom. And this growth was reflected in German culture. It was reflected in architecture. If you go to Berlin to a lesser extent because of obviously heavy bombing during the Second World War, but if you go to Munich and Hannover, you will see some of the buildings that were built at this time in a grand style that's meant to reflect the grandeur of the newly founded self confident German Empire.

Also you saw a new Reichstag being built in Berlin. Again, is is supposed to reflect the new found confidence of the German Reich. People started to feel a sense of pride. Standards of living were rising, wages were increasing, but as they increased, so did expectations. As the German economy was incredibly deregulated, a crisis was around the corner. In 1873 Germany experienced a major economic shock and this happening so shortly after the establishment of Germany was a real set back for German national for the German unification project. Huge numbers of agricultural workers had flooded into the cities seeking a better life, higher wages and an opportunity to advance themselves.

And this had led to the creation of a vast, what would be called, in Marxist terms, a proletariat, an ocean of overworked, underpaid, easy to exploit workers who very often found themselves living in really slum conditions at a time when there was no social welfare and there were no laws protecting workers. So when Germany is hit with this economic shock in 1873, this leads to a massive rise in poverty. Many people react to this with great anger at the liberal economics of the time, and there is a call for a rise in protectionism. Free trade is out, tariffs are in. The idea is that by blocking off cheap imports that will then stimulate the growth of German industry. That can work for a bit in this era of massive investment and rising optimism.

It did allow Germany to bound back after the 1873 shock, and this was driven on by new companies like Siemens and Bayer, by new technology, by Germany's ability to export high tech machinery that other countries were desperate to have. Even if there was this initial shock, Germany was able to overcome it fairly quickly. However, many people didn't forget the memories of 1873 so quickly. The creation of a new German state had been greeted by many people euphorically.

Many people saw this as a panacea. Many people saw this as the silver bullet that would solve the problems of all German peoples. But of course, the reality is that with increased expectations very often comes increased disappointment. So stands of living did rise and wages did increase, but many parts of society found this incredibly alienating. The aristocrats, they saw unification and they thought in this new industrialized Germany, power is no longer going to fall to land owning privileged people coming from the old royal families, the aristocratic families, people with Vaughan in their name. Now all of a sudden power rests in the hands of industrialists of the nouveau riche.

And this was something that a lot of people found quite disorientating. Many people wanted to join in in the mad rush to riches and found that their inability to do so created great resentment. Many people had flooded into the cities and found no protection from rapacious employers. Terrible working conditions, long hours, terrible living conditions, a dozen people living in the same house, bad air, bad foods, lack of proper sanitation, high child mortality. And we're shocked by this.

I mean, it's one thing to experience poverty in the countryside where at least you have the church and you've got the community and you've got a bit of space, but once you're crammed into a tenement home with eight other people sharing one toilet, then even higher wages really don't compensate for that. There was also a subsequent rise in the cost of living, which increased by a staggering 14% between 1871 and 1874. The economic shock, the disappointment that Germany didn't immediately meet the sky high expectations of so many people, led to a lot of anger and resentment amongst the working class.

This led to a great increase in the rate of immigration. The rate of immigration from Germany to the US doubled between the 1870s and the 1880s. It wasn't just the upper class and the workers who were disillusioned. Very quickly there developed a big divide between the rural and the city. The way German industrialization was presided over by the national liberals was very focused on heavy industry. The railway system that expanded so quickly was focused on linking ports with major cities, with natural resources. The economic development that came about as a result of this was concentrated in the cities, and little of it spread out into the rural areas.

The benefits were reaped by the middle classes, by the upper classes who could enjoy the bars and the cafes and the cabaret shows, who could travel around Germany. But for the peasants of Bavaria and Saxony, their lives stayed the same economically, but all of a sudden they weren't central to German cultural life. They were the forgotten people, the left behind people, the people whose opinion didn't really matter. And they very quickly started to see the hustle, the bustle, the change, the modernity, the noise of centres like Berlin and Hanover and Dresden and Leipzig as alienating. You would actually see a lot of the similarities in how people in late 19th century Germany were talking to the way that people are talking now.

The left behind, forgotten, the detestables, the smoldering resentment against the sense of being looked down on patronised, having your concerns not taken seriously and the retreat into a more solid national identity. Those are things that we see in our own society today. So the resentment against the clever folks from the city grew and grew and grew. Women were also deeply affected by the creation of a unified Germany and the industrialization that came with it, which really transformed the more traditional conservative roles that had been assigned to women within society.

Women had always worked. They had made cloth at home, they had brewed beer, they had helped out with agriculture. But now they were increasingly being drawn into roles within the industrial world, and this challenged a lot of the gender roles that were assigned to women within German society. This also affected middle class women who had to adhere to a more constrained attitude of what was acceptable for them. So women were allowed to enter into quote UN quote, respectable professions such as teaching only until they were married, however. But it was expected that women would stay at home and would take care of the children.

But there was still a lot of shame attached to the idea of women working because that meant that their men folk were bad providers for them, which of course is not true. It's just an economic reality. But there were changes. There was the ability of women to go to university for the first time in 1881. Laws introduced such as maternity leave, a cap on working hours for women. Women were banned from working at night. A lot of this was introduced as an effort by Bismarck to Co opt the working class movement. Some of it came about from pressure from the early feminist movement, but the feminist movement at the time was an incredibly middle class institution and a lot of women actually resented it and saw it as challenging their principal role within society as wives and mothers. The new German state also inherited very large non German ethnic minorities.

Poles in Silesia, Danes in Schleswig, Holstein, French in Alsace. Lorraine had by accident of birth found themselves amputated from the nations that they identified with and citizens of Germany. Bismarck worried greatly about these national minorities, and he set about a policy of Germanization, of incorporating them into the Reich. The only language that was to be spoken in public life was to be German. School inspectors were sent to enforce this.

All schools were to teach in German and there was a special attention given to enforcing this law in Polish areas. Institutions like universities and conscription were meant to draw people from these ethnic minorities in and give them a sense of Germanness. They were supposed to act as melting pots that would break down national religion and cultural identities to create a German identity. There were also more stringent methods that was employed by the German government. French people were encouraged to leave Alsace. Lorraine were encouraged to apply for jobs and university positions in France, and there were even examples of Poles being deported.

About 30,000 Poles were basically rounded up and shipped across the border into Poland, which was at the time part of Russia, and also into Austria. Bismarck, from what we know about it, didn't seem to approve of this. However, he didn't really seem to do anything about it. These were measures taken by state governments, not necessarily by the German government. But he didn't do anything about it. Germany also had a very large Jewish community.

In 1871, there were 512,000 Jews living in Germany. Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm the First both saw Judaism as a religious issue, not as a racial issue. This is before the real rise of theories of, quote UN quote, scientific racism that would come about later in the 19th century. But they saw Jews as people who belong to a different religion, and so Jews were encouraged to convert to Christianity. However, there were rises of Judeophobia as opposed specifically to anti-Semitism.

Judeophobia is hatred of Jewish people for religious reasons. anti-Semitism is more racial in its concept. These ugly, hateful, stupid and evil ideas did gain more traction after the economic crisis of 1873 where it was presumed that Jews were economically benefiting. Of course this is all complete nonsense and ignorant lies. There were further waves of anti Jewish hatred in the 1880s. There was a wave of Jewish migration into Western Europe, into Central Europe, as Jews were fleeing the persecution that was being unleashed on them, really genocide that was being unleashed against them in the old Tsarist empire after the assassination of Alexander the 2nd and the rise of Alexander the First, who was a truly ignorant bigot of a man.

And that's by the standards of Tsarist Roshan, who unleashed violence and waves of massacres that were called pogroms against the Jews of the Czarist Empire, who he blamed for everything, blamed for the rise of trade unionism, blamed for the political instability, blamed for everything. Why was the weather bad today? It was the Jews fall huge amounts of violence directed against Jews, and Jewish people started to flee the persecution and the murder that was being inflicted upon them and travel W.

Many of these people arrived in Germany and they were very different from German Jews. German Jews were increasingly integrated into German society, increasingly secular. Many of them were converting to Christianity and Jews who had seen many of the laws that persecuted them stripped away with the foundation of the German Reich heavily identified with Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, this wave of Jewish people coming into Germany were people who were more Orthodox, were culturally linguistically alien, very often didn't speak German, and were competing for the lowest paid jobs. And this led to a stupid bigoted resentment directed against Jewish people.

Bismarck disapproved of anti-Semitism, but he didn't really see it as a major issue. It wasn't something that was going to keep him up at night. And the Jewish population of Germany continued to grow. There were 615,000 Jews living in Germany by 1910, but the vast majority of them were incredibly integrated into German society, considered themselves to be Germans first and foremost, and Jews secondary. And this was then further facilitated by the policies that Bismarck's government had enacted.

Everyone is going to speak German, everyone is going to serve in the armed forces. The advent of the railways means that people can travel. Everyone is going to have civil marriages. The purpose of these policies was to culturally meld together different peoples, and they were remarkably successful in creating a German national identity and a shared sense of cultural belonging. Late 19th century was a period of rapid industrialisation for many countries. As mentioned before, Germany was a little bit late to the party in terms of industrialisation, but it caught up very, very quickly and it had all of the incredible and unfortunate consequences that go with breakneck industrialization. And this led to a debate within Germany about the fairness of Germany's new found prosperity.

People could see the prosperity, they could see the opera houses being built, they could see the new Reichstag, they could see the wealth of the opera middle classes. But they were also presented starkly with the contrast between the haves and the have nots, between the opulence of the government buildings that were springing up in Hanover and Frankfurt and Bonn and the universities and the cafes with two stops of the bus down the street, the slums and the poverty and the children with no shoes and the open sewers and the gutters. There was a philosopher at the time, you may have heard of him, by the name of Karl Marx, who was a German himself, analyzing the impact that this industrialization was having, the alienation this caused many people. Marx was one of many people offering a critique of how the capitalist economy worked and socialism was gaining ground, gaining traction within a section of the working class. However, there was still a lot of. Residual optimism.

People still believed that it would come good for them eventually. Socialism was viewed even by working class people with considerable suspicion. It was considered to be disloyal. Hadn't the Kaiser created Germany? Weren't things kind of getting better? What are these socialists coming along talking about? How we should overthrow the system? What? What's what's this all about? People's had a very, very strong connection to Bismarck, to the Kaiser, to the Reich, but the sheer harshness of life for many working class people drove them into the arms of the socialist movement. Homelessness, starvation, the lack of Social Security LED people to start organizing.

And as they started organizing and finding their voice in the newly found SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, this caused Bismarck tremendous concern. It was one thing dealing with the national liberals who really shared most of Bismarck's ideas. They just had a rather naive, as Bismarck would see it, commitment to constitutionalism and free market economics. But these socialists, they are a different breed. They don't respect the Yonkers.

Maybe they don't even respect the monarchy. So I'm going to have to keep an eye on them. He started to think about how I can maneuver in certain ways to suppress them. But he just needed an opportunity. And the amazing thing about Bismarck is that opportunity was never far off. On the 11th of May 1878, a man called Max Hooder, a former SPD member, wouldn't you know what a coincidence, attempted to kill Kaiser Wilhelm, the first he missed and unfortunately killed a person stood by the Kaiser. But this was Bismarck's big opportunity. Well, he introduced into the Reichstag legislation to suppress the SPD.

However, it was rejected. The Reichstag was dominated by politicians, many of them of a liberal Ben, who saw this as a cynical attempt by Bismarck to suppress a legitimate movement, and they rejected it. But again, Bismarck is many things, and one of them is he's certainly lucky. Only a few days after the Reichstag had dismissed legislation to suppress the SPD, the Kaiser was subject to another assassination attempt. Someone tried to shoot him with a shotgun. The Kaiser was hit and grievously wounded. He was very lucky not to be killed. Bismarck was able to go back to the Reichstag and to rail against liberal lefty politicians who had refused to protect their Kaiser.

And now the Kaiser was so gravely wounded. How could you? How can you live with yourself? How can you look yourself in the eye when our beloved Kaiser lies at death's door? And you could have protected him, but you didn't want to because you wouldn't listen to me. Bismarck managed to get the law through the law suppressed. All trade unions or socialist political parties were banned. People were rounded up and arrested, and it also suppressed all socialist publications.

But but this law wasn't enough to crush the socialist movement. People were still elected to the Reichstag as independents who were socialists. And so it merely delayed the advent of an SPD government and the progress of the socialist movement. When the SPD was legalized and stood for its first elections after the ban was lifted in 1890, they won a million votes and by 1912 they were the largest political party in the Reichstag.

But Bismarck knew that the stick wasn't going to be enough. He was going to need the carrot as well. So he did what any smart politician would do. He stole his opponent's best ideas. So in 1883, sickness insurance was introduced where workers got as much as 13 weeks of paid sickness leave. The Accident Insurance Act was passed in 1884 and that was to be funded by employers. So now employers had a direct economic interest in improving health and safety because if anything happened to a worker, they're the ones who picked the bill up. And in 1889, pensions were introduced. This allowed Bismarck to win a lot of support amongst working class voters.

Bismarck was eager to stress that Germany had no territorial aspirations. Germany really was as big as it reasonably could get. But Germany had one big problem, which is that Germany was in one hell of a bad neighborhood. To the South you have Austria, Hungary, maybe no longer the power it once was, but still a country with 34 million people in it and the country that is smarting after its defeat in 1866. To the east you have Russia, always enigmatic, always threatening, vast in territory, vast in resources and boundless in its ambition.

To the West you have France, a France that you have just humiliated, a France that is desperate for revenge against Germany. Bismarck knew that Germany was never going to secure it's future by force of arms alone. It needed insurance. It needed allies, especially against France. The amputation of Alsace Lorraine was burned into the French psyche and made France desperate for revenge. Bismarck knew this. The day was going to come where they were going to have to fight the French. If they fought the French, the worst case scenario would be a war on 2 fronts.

But it was absolutely essential that Germany had good relations with Russia and with Austria. But in 1873, Bismarck formed something called the League of Three Kaisers. Bismarck sought to present Germany not as a threatening power, not as a disruptor, but as a ballast to the order of Europe. He sought to present Germany as a stabilizing force that was not going to challenge peace, but it was going to ensure it. And the zenith of this, of this idea of Germany as the honest broker, came in the Balkan crisis of 187778, where Austria and Russia got close to going to war with each other. Bismarck invited the major powers of Europe to the Congress of Berlin, and he managed to successfully diffuse the situation.

This really is the height of Bismarck's career, that he is seen really as the elder statesman of Europe. He's unified Germany, he has won three wars, he's created a mighty armed forces, he's vanquished his domestic political foes, and he's presided over rapid, breakneck industrialization. This is his imperial zenith, but it never lasts. All political careers end in defeat. Bismarck was untouchable as long as he maintained his relationship with Wilhelm the First. They had a good relationship, Bismarck around the country. Wilhelm went hunting.

Both of them were very happy about this. But Wilhelm the First was a very old man. He was in his 70s when Germany was unified and as the symbol of German unification in the eyes of many people, he was viewed as a benevolent grandfather. He was viewed in the way that I think many British people and people throughout the Commonwealth saw Queen Elizabeth. He was very old and he was due to be replaced by Frederick with his highly opinionated English wife Victoria.

However, on the 12th of November 1887, the Royal Palace announced that Crown Prince Frederick had inoperable throat cancer, and at that point the focus turned to Frederick's son Wilhelm. He would be the man to lead Germany into the 20th century. Now Bismarck had cultivated a good relationship with Wilhelm the Second. He was very much so a father figure. But by the 1880s, Bismarck was increasingly having to fight on many fronts.

There was growing social unrest. There was also calls amongst nationalist elements within Germany to construct a colonial empire. If Germany was late to industrialization, it almost let the era of empire pass it by. Britain controlled 1/4 of the world, France had a massive colonial empire. The Dutch had acquired large colonial possessions. Spain and Portugal still held on to some far-flung outposts, and yet Germany, the ascendant nation, modern forward-looking of the one thing that really defined greatness in the late 19th century, which was a colonial empire. Bismarck actually thought the idea of a colonial empire was stupid.

He thought this was a waste of his time. He'd encouraged France to acquire a colonial empire because it tied France up with affairs far away and diverted French attention away from Alsace. The rain. But Wilhelm the Second saw things differently. On the 9th of March 1888, Wilhelm the First died at the age of 90. He was succeeded by Crown Prince Friedrich, who became Friedrich the Third, but he had terminal cancer. He reigned for only 99 days and then he died and on the 15th of June 1888, 29 year old Wilhelm the Second became Kaiser of Germany. He was a very different man from Wilhelm the First. He was a very different man from his father Friedrich as well. He despised his father's liberalism and he also was somewhat contemptuous of Wilhelm the First's apathy. He saw himself as an activist Kaiser. He wanted to be loved, he wanted to be involved on a day-to-day basis.

He actually had a nickname in Germany because he spent so much of his time travelling to different places, doing the royal functions, the kissing of the babies and the shaking of the hands and the visiting the factories and the posing with turnips and all the things that royalty do. He was nicknamed the Travelling Emperor, the Riser Kaiser, and he did garner a lot of public affection, but a clash between the two was inevitable and it came about by Bismarck's attempt to further ham in the socialist movement.

He introduced new anti socialist legislation very early in the reign of Wilhelm the Second and Wilhelm the Second thought this is the first thing that's happening after I'm taking the throne is we're stamping on the workers. There's protests, there's strikes. Am I going to be called to send soldiers into the streets of Berlin to shoot down striking workers? I've just come to the throne and I might be in a position where I have to tell my troops to kill their countrymen.

Wilhelm did not want this. He wanted to be loved. And so without the support of the Kaiser, all of a sudden Bismarck was vulnerable. All of a sudden, his enemies within the Reichstag, they could smell blood. Now the arithmetic doesn't work out so well for old Otto. As long as Bismarck has the support of the Kaiser, the Reichstag can't do anything. But if the Reichstag is now supported by the Kaiser, and Bismarck is on his own, Bismarck's finished. The law fails to pass in the subsequent elections, the SPD's vote share increases again to 19.7%, they become the largest party in the right stack, and the Kaiser decides it's time to put Bismarck out to pasture.

Bismarck has LED Germany for 20 years and Prussia for nearly a decade before that. Maybe some fresh ideas, Maybe a more conciliatory tone is what Germany needs in this moment. And so, on the 15th of March 1890, the Kaiser summons Bismarck to the Royal palace and informs him. You no longer have my confidence. This is it. There's, there's no coming back from this. Bismarck has made too many enemies by this point without the Kaiser.

He's finished. It still takes him two whole days to resign. On the 18th of March 1890, Bismarck hands in his resignation and it is the end of one of the most spectacular, cynical, transformative careers of any political figure of any age in human history. Man who took the squabbling divided states of Germany and created an empire. This has been ancient to recent episode 2 on our series on the history of the Second German Reich. Episode 3 will be coming up next week where we will look at Germany after Bismarck and then the collapse of the Wilhelmina Reich.

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