GHDI logo

Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow’s "New Year's Eve Letter" (December 31, 1906)

page 2 of 2    print version    return to list previous document      next document


The vote of December 13* was a blow to the allied governments and the national honor. I work with every party that respects the great national concerns [Gesichtspunkte]. Where these concerns are disregarded, friendship ends. No one in Germany wants rule by a single person. But the great majority of the German people want rule by parliament even less.

Moreover, though there is no state that has done more for the present and future of the workers, for their material and spiritual needs, than the German Reich, though the German workers are the best-educated in the world, there are millions who deliberately or passively support a party that wants to refashion the state and society from the ground up. The German people must free themselves from this kind of pressure. The liberal city dweller and [liberal] farmer are no less part of this than their conservative counterparts.

No matter how different the situations in the various electoral districts may be, the parties that stood by the side of the government on December 13 kept in mind from the outset what united them back then: the battle for the honor and good of the nation against Social Democrats, Poles, Guelphs, and the Center Party.

I put the Social Democrats first, because every defeat for Social Democracy is a warning to its blind haughtiness, a strengthening of the confidence in the calm progress of our inner development, and a solidification of our position on the outside, and because this would at the same time make it more difficult for a bourgeois party, with the help of the Social Democratic Party, to take a dominant position over the other bourgeois parties.



* Rejection of the government's motion concerning funding for the military action in German South-West Africa. Information provided in Ernst Rudolf Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte [Documents on German Constitutional History]. 2 volumes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1961. Volume 2, p. 437.

Source: Eduard von Liebert, Aus einem bewegten Leben: Erinnerungen [Memories of an Eventful Life]. Munich, 1925, pp. 180-81.

Original German text reprinted in Ernst Rudolf Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte [Documents on German Constitutional History]. 2 volumes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1961. Volume 2, pp. 436-38.

Translation: Thomas Dunlap

first page < previous   |   next > last page