Ian Porter - Imperial Germany 1890 - 1918

The German Empire, 18711918

The map on page 41 is adapted from page 45 of Tony Howarth: Twentieth Century History: The World Since 1900 , second edition by Josh Brooman, publ. Longman, 1979; the map on page 62 is adapted from page 77 of J. C. G. Rhl: Problems and Perspectives in History - Bismarck to Hitler , publ. Longman, 1970; the map on page vi is from D. G. Williamson: Seminar Studies in History: Bismarck and Germany , publ. Longman, 1986.

The authors wish to thank Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Potsdam for supplying the original for .

The Wilhelmine* period in Germany is vital to an understanding of German, and indeed European, history, but it is only in the last quarter-century that this has been properly appreciated, even by historians. Before 1961, when the German historian, Fritz Fischer, brought out his controversial Griff nach der Weltmacht (Bid for World Power) (, p. 2).

Fischers book rode rough-shod over these comfortable assumptions, sparking a controversy which has been raging bitterly ever since. In a study of the lost subject of German war aims, Fischer made a number of assertions which his fellow German historians, at least, found hard to accept. For one thing, he claimed that Germanys expansionist war aims were foreshadowed by equally aggressive and expansionist policies before 1914. War aims, Fischer wrote, were the symptoms of a planned drive for world power in evidence since the 1890s, a Weltpolitik* which would place Germany on an equal footing with the global empires of Britain, France and Russia. Worse, not only did this aggressive policy command a significant level of popular support both before and during the First World War, but it led to the decision of the German government to risk war in July 1914. For the sake of world power, Germany had consciously brought about world war

For a German historian to saddle Germany with primary responsibility for the First World War was provocative in itself, and the reaction among the old guard of the German historical profession was one of patriotic indignation. Equally unwelcome, to Germans generally, was the suggestion of a continuity in German history, that the ideas and attitudes which helped produce National Socialism went back well before 1918. To that extent imperial Germany had more in common with the Third Reich than most Germans liked to admit. Fischer also insisted that German foreign policy, which led to the outbreak of war, could only be understood with reference to social, economic and domestic political factors. In asserting this, Fischer was breaking with the traditional German belief in the primacy of foreign policy, according to which foreign policy could be understood on its own, and determined all other aspects of a states history. To claim otherwise was to open up a new perspective in the way Germans looked at their past ().

In the 1960s a new generation of historians began to reexamine German history with new methods and assumptions. These revisionist historians were bent on uncovering the domestic determinants of foreign policy. They produced, for instance, studies of the popular support for Weltpolitik (). A great deal was done to illustrate the sheer complexity of Wilhelmine politics and society; no one could complain, by the end of the decade, that the period 18901918 was still dominated by old-style diplomatic historians. Ironically, the ultimate preoccupation of all this work on domestic factors was still the explanation of that foreign policy which the domestic factors were assumed to have shaped.

By the mid-1970s, this revisionist primacy of domestic policy had become so common as to be dubbed the new orthodoxy. Hans Ulrich Wehler evolved a theory of imperialism which interpreted colonial expansion as a movement conceived by the German upper and middle classes to distract the working class from socialism ().