Eugen Richter and Max Weber on Bismarck’s Legacy (1890 and 1917/18) Most liberals did not share Hans Delbrück's recognition of Bismarck's greatness or his confident assessment of Germany's future. The leader of the left-liberal German Radical Party, Eugen Richter (1838-1905), was frankly pleased by Bismarck's resignation in 1890. Here he stresses the detrimental effects of the former chancellor's ruthlessness and the “blind cult of authority” he fostered. The sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), writing from the perspective of 1917, charges that Bismarck left the German people wholly lacking in political education. Weber has nothing good to say about those who tried to fill the political void after Bismarck's departure: they did so, he writes, with “an astonishing lack of self-doubt.” But Bismarck's attitudes and policies while still in office emasculated parliament, fostered the growth of suffocating bureaucracy, and left Germans utterly unprepared to take the reins of power should the opportunity arise (as it finally did on November 9, 1918).
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page 1 of 3 I. Eugen Richter on Bismarck’s System of Government (March 1890) The dismissal of Reich Chancellor Prince Bismarck is a fait accompli. Thank God he’s gone! We say this today with the same honesty that we have always shown towards him. It would have been a blessing for the Reich if he had been removed much earlier. We are not saying this on account of his person but because of the system of government to which Prince Bismarck adhered. [ . . . ] It is our deepest conviction that a continuation of the domestic policy pursued up to now, especially of the kind initiated in 1877, would actually have brought Germany to ruin, had it been followed by another such period. The fact that in the last elections one-fifth of the German people declared their support for a Republican party* is mainly the product of the Bismarckian system of government; it was all too suited to raising Social Democracy artificially by offering the carrot one moment and applying the stick the next. Additionally, existing confessional differences were exacerbated, on the one hand, through the battle over church policy, carried out by way of the police and criminal regulations, and, on the other hand, through the chancellor’s attitude towards the development of the antisemitic movement. The rampant growth of interest parties, striving ruthlessly to exploit state authority at the expense of the general good, can be attributed to the policy of protective tariffs and to the kind of agitation for protective tariffs that the chancellor personally called for and fuelled. The incitement of the parties against each other, the suspicions cast upon people’s patriotism, and the denial of patriotism to any political dissident all result from a press corrupted by the Guelph Fund,** they also stem from the tone that the chancellor’s press adopted against all those who just once expressed views differing from his. The chancellor’s misguided policy alone is to blame for the tax burdens of the Reich having risen by nearly 400 million over the last ten years, above all to the disadvantage of the less well-off classes. [ . . . ] Parliament was always treated in the most ruthless manner, and its reputation was belittled whenever the representatives of the people did not vote to the chancellor’s liking. [ . . . ] * Richter refers here to the SPD, which received just under 20 percent of the popular vote in the Reichstag elections of February 20, 1890 – ed. ** The Welfenfond of about 48 million marks was sequestered by the Prussian government in 1868 from the fortunes of King Georg V of Hanover, whose troops had fought the Prussians in 1866. Bismarck used the interest generated by this fund mainly to hire, bribe, and otherwise influence journalists who toed the government line and attacked liberal opponents like Richter – ed.
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