Three new publications for Wilhelm I. and Bismarck | EUROtoday

The music comes from the Empire: “We want to have our old Kaiser Wilhelm again! But with the beard, with the long beard. ” It was sung on the melody of the “Fehrbellin rider march”; The text was created around 1900 and was initially directed against Wilhelm II. After 1918, after the revolution and the end of the monarchy, his popularity grew with the longing for better times, the summoning of a supposedly good old days. For this, of course, Wilhelm II, who agitated his exile against Republic and Democracy, was not for this, but his grandfather, whose picture is still clearly determined in historiography. Around the way Christopher Clark described him: “Wilhelm I was an honorable and widely admired person, a figure with the gravitas and the beard of a biblical patriarch.” No less, but also not.

Does this image do justice to the historical meaning of the first Hohenzollern emperor? Three studies almost simultaneously suffered doubts about it, Bismarck’s historiographical dominance in particular question. Bismarck is considered the “imperial founder”, the Empire proclaimed in 1871 is the “Bismarck Empire”, and the “era Bismarck” is also an established term. The historian Jan Markert is now turning against such “Bismarck Centrism”. Biographically and historically traditionally, his guide pursues the intention of deconstructing the “delusion of the Chancellor because the founding father of the Reich” and letting Wilhelm I step out of the shadow of Bismarck. The, shortened – print version, still almost eight hundred pages strong, source satet dissertation has no lower goal than not only to recent the judgment on one of the most thoroughly examined eras in German history, but also to be fundamentally revised over long distances.

The creator undertakes this for the time between the revolution of 1848, when the later king and emperor entered the political stage as “Kartätschenprinz”, until 1866, when after the war between Prussia and Austria the path to a small German nation state orchestrated from Berlin emerged. The foundation itself and the Empire, whose crown Wilhelm I wore until 1888, are not the subject of the investigation.

It is not easy to be under Bismarck Kaiser. The Wilhelm I and Ditictum, which was attributed to Ludwig Bamberger by the Reichstag MP in the 1890s, stands for the beginning of the posthumous dominance of Bismarck over his king and emperor. This dominance developed from a competition between the Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm myths, which began immediately after the death of the monarch and after Bismarck’s discharge. In whole series of monuments, she was reflected in 1898, especially after Bismarck’s death.

Last but not least, Wilhelm II was behind the Wilhelm myth, who only knew too exactly that the Bismarck myth and the heroization of the Chancellor always had a critical turn against himself. The young emperor tried to meet this up to the not particularly successful idea of ​​anchoring his grandfather as Wilhelm the big one in public memory. This is shown by the Dutch historian Frederik Sterkenburgh, who examines Wilhelm I as an emperor in his book. Inspired culturalistically, it is no less politically historical because it understands the staging of the monarch and the representation of the monarchy as genuinely genuinely.

The Bismarck myth was also highly political. At first, he mainly went back to Bismarck himself, who worked on him after his fall in the Saxonswald in 1890, not least in his “ideas and recollections”. This quickly combined with the criticism of Wilhelm II, which was growing in conservative, national circles, but which was not opposed to his grandfather, but the political genius of Bismarck as a kind of “anti-Wilhelm II.”. This included the transfiguration of the alleged “imperial cleaner” in an increasingly divided, fragmented, rugged society – right down to the idea, even the endeavor to a new Reichsinigungs war, a new foundation.

In the center of this new Reich cleansing war-the fortress peace didn’t final long-the historian Erich Marcks wrote his enormously in style “life picture of Bismarck” until the 1940s. “Germany needs to listen to from Bismarck in the present day” was the first sentence. There was little space for Wilhelm I, not even in the Weimar Republic and also not under National Socialism, for which monarchism – and well served by the last emperor and his son – had an instrumental function. In any case, on the “Day of Potsdam”, Hitler stood in a row that Frederick the Great about Bismarck – not Wilhelm I. or even Wilhelm II – led to him.

This was precisely the core of the “Bismarck downside”, on which German historians worked through after 1945. And even in the argument – and through the argument – Bismarck kept his dominant position with this problem. He was devoted to the great biographies, not Wilhelm I. and more importantly: The sources on which the large Bismarck biographies rested were mostly Bismarck sources, directly or indirectly back on Bismarck himself, and guided by the intention to let Bismarck shine in a bright shine, especially as a imperial founder and to put Wilhelm in his shadow.

Bismarck also participated in the picture of Empress Augusta. To date, it is reduced to the alleged role of the Queen Empress as a political opponent of Bismarck. This image corrects and differentiates Susanne Bauer, who – for the first time – analyzed the entire letter communication in Augusta, around 22,000 letters. However, it also shows how Augusta was continuously attacked and discredited not least from Bismarck’s closest environment. “Feeling coverage” was just as much talk as – Evil and Misogyn – of “politics in an beneath -rock”. But the attacks, also public, ultimately only confirmed the political weight of the empress, who only challenged the gender order of the Empire.

“Bismarck sources inform Bismarck tales,” emphasizes Jan Markert, rightly marginalized the monarch. He demonstrates this using various examples, right down to the famous September crisis in 1862, the highlight of the Prussian constitutional conflict, when Bismarck was appointed Prime Minister and, according to the established reading, the issue of action was taken into account. The Bismarck biographers from Lothar Gall to Ernst Engelberg and Otto Plant to Christoph Nonn, from whom none of whom evaluated the extensive archival estate of Wilhelm, in order to check the Bismarck narrative, which was repeatedly continued and no longer questioned.

The danger that Jan Markert does not completely escape is to fill the child with the bathing and to place an overpowering Bismarck an overpowering Wilhelm, for whose political action he even uses the concept of “private regiment” originally used on Wilhelm II. With this excessive revisionism, Markert harms his concern to counter the Bismarck myth, which has been entered into the historiography. Because of course Wilhelmquellen tell Wilhelm stories, and it hardly continues to play out the other against the others instead of bringing together the different perspectives.

The relationship in the exercise of power of the two protagonists who went back to September 1862 was complex; However, a constellation of excess and subordination did not work, but was repeatedly characterized by extensive agreement- and far beyond 1870. Otherwise Bismarck would not have become prime minister – and remained. You needed each other. And last but not least, the fear of the revolution and the endeavor to prevent a new in 1848. Markert is then closer to previous research when he sometimes gives the impression. Because in the end the question remains: If we now replace Bismarck-Centrism with Wilhelm Centrism-what does that mean for our judgment about the Empire in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century? Probably not much. This in no way diminishes the knowledge value of all three books.

Susanne Bauer: “The letter communication by Empress Augusta (1811–1890)”. Letter practice, letter network, scope for action. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2024. 448 p., Fig., Born, € 99.90.

Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh: „Wilhelm I as German Emperor“. Staging the Kaiser. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2024. 357 S., geb., 149,79 €.

Jan Markert: “Wilhelm I.” From the “Kartätschenprinz” to the founding father of the Reich. The Great household publishing, Berlin / Boston 2025. 768. 768 P., 49.95 €.