Personal regiment

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According to one doctrinal opinion, personal regiment denotes the first phase in the reign of Wilhelm II , the last German Emperor , in historical studies . The section lasted from Otto von Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 to the dismissal of Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülows in July 1909 and was divided into an early and a high phase.

The term means that the emperor was particularly heavily involved in domestic and foreign policy. This was inappropriate because the government was led by the Chancellor. This was the only responsible minister in the system of the empire; all actions of the emperor required the countersignature of the chancellor or one of his deputies.

origin

The term personal regiment probably comes from Bernhard von Bülow (1849–1929), who coined it in a letter to Philipp Graf zu Eulenburg on July 23, 1896:

“I would be a different Chancellor like the previous ones. Bismarck was a power of his own, Pipin, Richelieu. Caprivi and Hohenlohe felt and still feel that they are representatives of the 'Gouvernement' and, to a certain extent, of Parliament towards Sr. Majesty. I would consider myself to be His Majesty's executive instrument, in a sense his political chief of staff. With me, in a good sense, but actually a personal regiment would begin. "

The term and thesis of the “personal regiment” owe their recent popularity to the work of the historian John Röhl .

thesis

Early phase (1890-1900)

According to the thesis advocated by Röhl since the 1970s, the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888–1918) divided into two phases, which were separated from each other by the dismissal of Chancellor Prince Bülow in 1909. In the first phase, the Kaiser, who in 1890 dismissed the 75-year-old Otto von Bismarck after 28 years as Prussian Prime Minister and 19 years as the first Chancellor of the German Reich , actively shaped domestic and foreign policy of the Reich and Prussia . The heads of government between Bismarck and Bülow, Leo von Caprivi (1890–1894) and Chlodwig Fürst zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1894–1900), are “weak” or “weak” from the outset due to a lack of political experience (Caprivi) or their age (Hohenlohe). Transitional Chancellors ”who were exposed to pressure from the strong-willed emperor and the bureaucratic apparatus influenced by him, which they were unable to cope with.

This is how contemporaries assessed the situation. The liberal Eugen Richter dismissed the government in the Reichstag on May 18, 1897 with the words:

“And where is a set of new ministers (cheerfulness left) who could be listed behind the gentlemen here? As far as you can see, nothing but lithe courtiers who join every view from above! Advanced bureaucrats or dashing hussar politicians (very good! Left), that is what such a policy can offer. (Lively agreement on the left.) Henchmen, but in the ordinary sense of the word! (Stormy Bravo on the left. - Clap hands.) "

In the early phase of the Emperor under the slogan of whether New Course domestic policy independently in the field of social legislation emerged; In terms of foreign policy , he made decisive decisions with the non-renewal of the reinsurance treaty with Russia in 1890, the fleet building program since 1897 and the swing policy towards England. The Prussian administrative bureaucracy on the one hand and the diplomatic corps on the other would have been willing to serve him here, also because of the charismatic traits of his rule.

High phase (1900–1909)

With the appointment of Count (later Prince) Bülow, patronized by Prince Eulenburg and favored by the Emperor, as Chancellor on October 17, 1900, who was not only comparatively young (50 years old), but also had a solid political and social status in the Prussian elite , the personal regiment had entered its peak phase. In Bülow the emperor had a compliant colleague who carried out his wishes without contradiction and tried, within the framework of the so-called collection policy, to create a broad parliamentary basis for the imperial decisions and legislative proposals ( Bülow block ). Only after the crisis year 1908 ( Daily Telegraph affair ), the failure of a naval agreement with England and the subsequent dismissal of Bülow on July 14, 1909, did the Kaiser hand over the management of political affairs largely to the new Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg , left to the bureaucracy and the top military. In the First World War (1914–1918), the emperor hardly took part in the political, let alone military, day-to-day business.

Most supporters of the thesis are controversial as to whether the reasons for the further, negative course of German political history up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were in the personal regiment of the emperor himself, or rather in the inability of his advisors to object and take independent initiative to be sought. A lesser opinion is that these reasons were not in principle due to the personal regiment , but to the political and diplomatic "intrigues" of Bülow and the privy councilor Fritz von Holstein , which above all continually and effectively undermined the peaceful foreign policy approaches of the emperor (v. A. Nicolaus Sombart , Eberhard Straub ); According to this inferior view, the Personal Regiment would have been successful had it not been effectively thwarted by the Emperor's opponents in his own ranks.

Reception history

The constitutional historian Ernst Rudolf Huber has spoken out against the concept of personal regiment in principle. Wilhelm almost never prevailed against the respective chancellor. To do this, he should have been ready to replace the Chancellor if necessary, which was difficult. "As a rule, Wilhelm II had no choice but to put aside his own convictions and to follow the advice of the Chancellor, as it was in accordance with constitutional law."

The thesis of the personal regiment initially caused a sensation because it signified a paradigm shift in the historical reception of the Wilhelmine epoch . In the imperial era and immediately afterwards, it was still largely and naturally represented, without having already been a thesis, by the publicist Maximilian Harden or the historian Erich Eyck . Harden wrote in 1902 in the future he edited :

“The Kaiser is his own Chancellor. All of the important political decisions of the past twelve years have been made by him. "

Since the collapse of the German monarchies in 1918, however, the image of a "weak emperor" has spread about the overthrown monarch, especially through extensive memoirs and mostly by former members of the political or courtly elite. This interpretation was held in Germany, the easier and faster uptake than Wilhelm in the recently experienced World War II years, the constitutionally entitled him sovereign power actually exercised little more, but the military elite, especially since 1916, the 3rd Army High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff , the lead left. The resulting impression was largely transferred after the war, especially in the former leading circles of the East Elbian aristocracy and the bourgeois civil service, undifferentiated to the entire reign of the emperor - possibly out of the need to conduct one's own misconduct before and during the war with the absence to justify a "strong man".

The image of the “weak emperor” remained dominant during National Socialism , but also after the Second World War , in public and academic perception - including in English history (until the nineties, the German gave the emperor's personality as the subject of a serious academic investigation disregard). It was only with Röhl - based on the strict scientific method that had become customary in the historical debate with Adolf Hitler since the 1960s - that a new, critical approach to interpretation emerged, which is not undisputed, but has meanwhile become dominant and also by German publicists , such as Eberhard Straub , is shared. Other biographers, such as Sebastian Haffner and Nicolaus Sombart , on the other hand, focused on the social-psychological integration and polarization function of the emperor, compared to which the question of his political influence was of little importance.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cf. Eulenburg, Politische Korrespondenz (ed. By John Röhl), Vol. 3, p. 1714 (No. 1245).
  2. ↑ Eugen Richter against the personal regiment of Wilhelm II.
  3. ^ Ernst Rudolf Huber: German constitutional history since 1789. Volume III: Bismarck and the realm . 3rd edition, W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1988, p. 814 f.
  4. ↑ See Eyck, The Personal Regiment of Wilhelm II. Political History of the German Empire from 1890 to 1914. Erlenbach / Zurich 1948.
  5. ↑ See Harden, Die Zukunft , No. 40 ,. Vol. 1902, p. 340.
  6. ↑ cf. a. the memoirs of Robert Graf von Zedlitz-Trützschler, Twelve Years at the German Imperial Court , Berlin-Leipzig 1923, and Georg Alexander von Müller , Did the Emperor Rule? (edited by Walter Görlitz ), Göttingen 1965.
  7. ↑ This “scapegoat” thesis is emphatically represented by Nicolaus Sombart , Wilhelm II. Scapegoat and Lord of the Middle , Berlin 1996, as well as, weakened, Stephan Malinowski , Vom König zum Führer , Frankfurt / Main 2004.
  8. ↑ Cf. Röhl 1988, p. 17: "The research direction predominant in the Federal Republic of Germany today rejects any preoccupation with him - even with personalities in history in general - as a personalistic relapse into long outdated methods of historiography."
  9. ↑ See Drei last Kaiser , Berlin 1998, pp. 196–313.