Chapter 67 - The Iron Chancellor & Rise of Germany

**Dave Broker** (0:06)
On November 7, 1918, Friedrich Ebert, leader of the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD, met with the liberal imperial chancellor, Prince Maximilian von Baden. There was much to discuss. For one thing, it was pretty clear their country was about to lose the Great War. Their allies, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, were collapsing militarily and politically. Their enemies, now joined by a newcomer to the fight, the United States, had been pushing the lines of the Western Front back for nearly a hundred days. With their reserves used up, the German command scrambled to figure out how to manage the coming armistice, especially with the allied powers demanding regime change for the central powers as a condition for peace.
For another thing, revolution had broken out. What started as a mutiny in the German Navy had spread to the streets of the major cities. Socialist revolutionaries were taking up arms against the Reich, seeking to do here what the Bolsheviks had accomplished the previous year in Russia.
But the topic that most needed discussion, the topic that would help resolve so many other problems facing the country, was the abdication of the Kaiser.
Wilhelm II had held the throne for 30 years by this point, and although he understood his time as emperor would be ending, he hoped to retain his ancestral claims to Prussia. Even though the Constitution did not allow someone to wear one crown without the other. But he would need to be convinced to drop his claims and title and to go into exile.
Even though Wilhelm had not yet agreed to it, Prince Maximilian announced the abdication on November 9th. He then announced his own resignation as chancellor, so that Ebert, a moderate socialist, could effectively put down the socialist uprising consuming the country. Two days later, Ebert accepted an armistice agreement with the allied powers. Over the next year, he would have to impose a brutal crackdown at home, accept the harsh demands imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, and oversee the transition of the German state from an empire to a republic.
It was a spectacular collapse of a great and growing power. Established less than half a century earlier, the lifetime of the German Empire coincided almost exactly with the duration of the Second Industrial Revolution. And the Second Industrial Revolution played a key role in the success of that empire. Germany had approached the process of industrialization differently than other countries, but by many measures, it seemed to be the country most on track for political, economic, and military hegemony. Yet the seeds of so many of the crises that would eventually destroy the empire were planted earlier in this period, many of them by the creator of the empire, our old friend Otto von Bismarck. Decades earlier, Bismarck had predicted that Germany would not be forged by quote, speeches and majority decisions, but by quote, iron and blood. Indeed, in the Second Industrial Revolution, Germany was a rising power forged in iron until it finally fell, drowning in blood.
This is The Industrial Revolutions. Chapter 67 The Iron Chancellor and Rise of Germany.
Hello, everyone. Let's cover a couple of administrative notes before we get going. First of all, I hope you've been enjoying the several bonus episodes that have come out recently. Back in December, I spoke with blogger Ethan Johnson about the history of coin-op machines. Then in February, I interviewed historian Anton Howes about how the transition to coal power in the 18th and 19th centuries can inform our current energy transition today. And finally, I spoke with Professor Joseph Sassoon about his latest book on the Sassoon family, distant relatives of his who built commercial shipping empires back in the 1800s. Now, these episodes don't remain in the podcast feed forever, but remember, the full archive of bonus episodes is available to Patreon subscribers. For as little as $1 per month, you get access to this archive, as well as the footnotes at the end of each chapter. You can sign up at patreon.com/indrevpod. That, of course, is www.patreon.com/indrevpod. And the link is also in the episode notes for this episode. And if you're already supporting the podcast on Patreon, thank you. Special shoutouts this time to Brian Long and new patrons, Britt Cleaver, Paul Craisen, JJ Marks, Max Ricard, and Ray Squittiri, as well as Andrei Andriykovich, John Bartlett, Adam Bibby, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Harriet Buchanan, Yippa Burkhart, Tara Carlson, Dancer in the Dark, Michael Hosknecht, Madeline Hill, Eric Houginson, Alonso Ibanez, Naomi Kanakia, Kyle Laskowski, Ian Lacane, Andrew C. Madigan, Martin Mann, John Newton, David Roberson, Brad Rossi, Joshua Shanley, Christian Sebast, Jonathan Smith, Tanner, Ross Templeton, and Seth Weiner. Now, let's get on with the show.
Otto Edward Leopold von Bismarck was born at his family's estate in Schoenhausen in 1815 His father, a former Prussian military officer, hailed from a relatively modest Junker family. His mother, meanwhile, came from an educated petit-bourgeois family that had risen to the highest ranks of the Prussian bureaucracy. At the time of his birth, the Congress of Vienna was underway, where our old friend, Austrian foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich, was engineering a balance of power in Europe. It was in Metternich's Europe that Bismarck came of age, and it was this philosophy of balancing the European powers that Bismarck would work so diligently to maintain. Not long after he was born, the family moved to an estate in eastern Pomerania. Today, it would be found in Poland. Where feudal traditions were not weakening as much as they were elsewhere in Europe. There, they oversaw peasants who farmed the land, and they went hunting in the extensive forests surrounding them. It seems that young Otto loved these childhood experiences. The same couldn't be said of his cosmopolitan mother. Bored of provincial life and ambitious for her son's future, she moved with Otto to Berlin when he was six or seven to begin his schooling. Although he performed well academically and seemed to be a well-mannered boy, he showed little love for learning or for life in the Prussian capital. Determined for her son to have a career in diplomatic service, she pushed Otto to study law. He enrolled at the University of Göttingen in Hanover, but there he struggled with his studies as he focused more on his jovial social life, which included lots of athletic competitions, beer drinking, womanizing, and fighting, often with swords. Nevertheless, he passed the law exam and was hired into the Prussian civil service, doing rigid, boring work that he absolutely hated. After his mother died in 1839, he quit to return to his father's estate and live the life of a country gentleman. By 1847, he married, became a reserve officer in the army, deepened in his religious convictions, and joined the new Prussian parliament, the Landtag, where he gained a reputation as a backwoods reactionary.