Background
Bethmann was born at Hohenfinow on November 29, 1856, the son of an estate owner and district magistrate.
Bethmann was born at Hohenfinow on November 29, 1856, the son of an estate owner and district magistrate.
After studying jurisprudence at Strassburg, Leipzig, and Berlin, Bethmann entered the civil service in 1879; from 1886 to 1896 he succeeded his father as Landrat in Oberbarnim. Next came a spectacular career in the Prussian bureaucracy: provincial councillor at Potsdam 1896-1899, governing president of Bromberg 1899, lord lieutenant of the province of Brandenburg 1899-1905, and Prussian minister of the interior in March 1905. In the latter capacity, Bethmann in 1906 sought a basic reform of the Prussian three-class voting system of 1849, but was able only to amend some of the suffrage's most glaring inequities.
In June 1907, he replaced Count Artur von Posadowsky as Reich state secretary of the interior, concurrently serving as deputy chancellor and as vice president of the Prussian state ministry. As the second most powerful administrator in the Reich, Bethmann in 1907 defended Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow during the Daily Telegraph affair against the Kaiser's personal "regiment," as Erich Eyck termed it; thereafter he was able to rally a new parliamentary majority consisting of Conservatives, Center, and Poles to increase federal indirect taxation. But when Billow in 1908/09 introduced an inheritance tax in order to balance the budget especially for naval outlays, his Reichstag supporters turned against him; Bethmann succeeded Bulow as chancellor on July 7, 1909, because '"the main difficulties were with domestic affairs."
The new chancellor represented a change of pace from the arrogant and pliable Bulow. Tall, lanky, upright, Bethmann was more the grand seigneur than a consummate politician. In fact, he had no experience in diplomacy and his debating skills were at best modest. He possessed a degree of personal charm and warmth, but by and large remained a loner, a contemplative pessimist, a Stoic, rather than the confident "pilot" of the Bismarckian state.
Bethmann traversed a treacherous course until 1914. Although he managed to promulgate a more liberal constitution for Alsace-Lorraine in 1911, he failed to reform Reich finances. Neither did he manage to integrate the Social Democrats (SPD) into the mainstream of German politics, with the result that by 1912 one out of every three German voters rejected the Wilhelmian state; the SPD that year became the largest political party in the Reichstag with 110 seats. In the winter of 1912/13 a political storm arose over the mistreatment of civilians by Prussian officers at Zabern, and Bethmann on December 4, 1912, received the first vote of no confidence in the German parliament.
In January 1914, the Prussian Upper House also censured him, in this case for not upholding conservative principles. Hence on the eve of the Great War, the chancellor's domestic policies had suffered shipwreck.
Bethmann's foreign policy proved equally inept. He saw his main task as breaking the "iron encirclement" of Germany by the Entente that he had inherited from Bulow. Specifically, the chancellor sought an understanding with London on the matter of naval building and colonial adjustments. But by 1912, he was forced to admit defeat. Not only did France and Russia reject all German overtures, but also Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz effectively sabotaged Lord Haldane's visit to Berlin in February 1912, in an attempt to defuse the naval rivalry. Bethmann's subsequent resignation was rejected by the kaiser, and although the chancellor managed to struggle through two Balkan crises, the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, demanded of him the utmost in statesmanship.
Bethmann's performance during the July crisis has both occupied and divided historians. Some points, however, are clear. The chancellor desired the opportunity to tame Serbia, and he proved willing to accept a general war with Russia, being convinced that a war between "Slavs and Teutons" was inevitable. His hope that Britain would stay out of the fray was precisely that, and no more. His unfortunate reference to Belgian neutrality as a "scrap of paper"msigned by Prussia in 1839mas well as his reference in the Reichstag to Germany's "injustice to Belgium" did little to enhance his statesmanship. Finally, the issuance on July 6 of the famous "blank check" to the Austro-Hungarians, assuring them that whatever policy they adopted vis-à-vis Serbia would find full support in Berlin, greatly curbed Germany's diplomatic options in July 1914. Above all, Bethmann proved utterly incapable of asserting the primacy of politics over the military that July.
As early as September 9, 1914, the chancellor prepared a detailed war aims program that reflected Friedrich List's views of the 1830s of a Central Europe dominated by Germany "for all imaginable time." France was to be reduced to secondary rank while Belgium would become a "vassal state"; Russia was to be driven as far east as possible and denied holdings in the Baltic and Balkan areas. Luxembourg was to be annexed outright along with the Franco-Belgian Channel coast, and the Netherlands were to be brought "into closer relationship with the German Empire.” A central European economic union from Scandinavia to Turkey and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caspian Sea was to have a central African colonial empire as a reservoir of raw materials.
In the ensuing two years, Bethmann's diplomacy brought Germany the support of Turkey and Bulgaria, but cost it that of Italy, Greece, Rumania, and most of the other states of the world. By agreeing, under pressure from the military, to the creation of Congress Poland in August 1916, the chancellor forever closed the connection to St. Petersburg. Bethmann further proved unable to take advantage of President Woodrow Wilson's peace initiatives after October 1916, and the hasty promulgation of German terms for a negotiated settlement only undermined Wilson's efforts.
Bethmann's greatest crisis came late in 1916 when the new army leaders, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, concurred with Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff that only an immediate resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping bound for the British Isles could turn the tide. At a crown council at Pless on January 9, 1917, Bethmann remained "cold and pessimistic" about the U-boat gamble, but when pressed, he endorsed the action that would add the United States to the list of Germany's enemies within three months. We will probably never know why he gave in to the military on that dreary January day. Nor will we ever know why he clung to office thereafter, rather than making a clean break with a system and a policy that he could not fully endorse.
Sadly, Bethmann's domestic policies by then paralleled his diplomacy. At Easter 1917, he managed to wring from Wilhelm II an agreement that the three-class voting system in Prussia would finally be reformed once the war had ended. The promise of March 7 was never fulfilled as Bethmann continued to drift between the Scylla of Prussian conservatives and the Charybdis of Reich moderates; the chancellor basically favored gradual parliamen- tarization for Prussia and the Reich but never managed to commit himself to such a course. In the end, his opponents, both on the right and left, in the military and in parliament, combined, though obviously for different reasons, to topple him.
On July 7, the parliamentary majority in the Reichstag consisting of Center, Progressives, and Social Democrats introduced a "peace resolution" calling for an end to the war without annexations or indemnities. Once again, Bethmann vacillated, unable to chart his own course. The military was convinced that he supported the peace initiative while parliamentarians such as Matthias Erzberger were equally resolved that the chancellor was unwilling to renounce his erstwhile war aims program. At the height of the crisis Bethmann attempted to persuade the kaiser to reform the Prussian suffrage and to place himself at the head of a popular monarchy. But to no avail. Ludendorff sent his alter ego, Colonel Max Bauer, to caucus the chancellor's known parliamentary foes; Bauer was fully backed in his political offensive by Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia.
Bethmann's resignation on July 13, 1917, led the crown prince to crow: 'This is the happiest day of my life." A colorless but energetic civil servant, Georg Michaelis, succeeded Bethmann. With this act, Wilhelm II in effect turned political power over to Hindenburg and Ludendorff, preferring to sacrifice his chancellor in the face of threats of resignation from his military paladins. Whatever may be said of Bethmann, his dismissal proved a watershed in German affairs as with it the military fully triumphed over the political in a classic reversal of Carl von Clausewitz's dictum. Bethmann Hollweg retired to his estate at Hohenfinow to write his memoirs; he died there on January 1, 1921.
Bethmann Hollweg failed as Germany's wartime leader. The demands made on this highly competent bureaucrat by the exigencies of a world war simply were too great for his limited talents. The chancellor essentially attempted to steer a moderate course between left and right, and in the process won the support of neither and antagonized both. A Hamlet-like figure, Bethmann fell victim to indecision and half-measures, not unlike so many of the generals. He possessed neither historic nor personal greatness, as was revealed most glaringly in his pathetic performance at Pless in January 1917.