Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 by Katja Hoyer

Author:Katja Hoyer [Hoyer, Katja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750996228
Google: jyDmzQEACAAJ
Publisher: History Press Limited
Published: 2021-01-13T19:00:00+00:00

Imperial Germany as an Economic Powerhouse

Berlin, c.1900.

Between the high grey stone facades that frame the long, wide avenues all the way to the horizon, an electric tram trundles past. Underground a U-Bahn train rattles towards Potsdamer Platz. In his chauffeur-driven Benz sits a young Walther Rathenau staring at Old Berlin – ‘the palace with its ever-cursed chapel, the ungainly Neue Wache and Altes Museum’. * Berlin exemplifies the rapid changes of the times like no other German place. Only a few years earlier, Edison’s electrical light had still been a marvel to behold. ‘At Chausseestrasse young Walther had flicked the invention’s switch off and on, filled with wonder until his father pushed him away, knocking him to the ground, telling him it wasn’t a toy.’ † By 1899, Rathenau had joined the AEG board. Germany’s biggest electrical company had, only four years earlier, built Berlin’s first underground train connection and would grow to dominate the electrical market together with its rival, Siemens. The Kaiser was fascinated by it all and invited Rathenau and others like him to the palace to discuss the modern marvels of technology and patronise further research and development. Like Germany itself, Berlin was in transition. Horse-drawn carriages could be seen alongside electrified trams. Old neo-romantic facades were just a short walk away from glittering department stores like the famous Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), which in turn contrasted with the dreary workers’ districts and their rows and rows of grey apartment blocks. Berlin would swell to 2 million inhabitants by 1905 and be catapulted from sleepy ‘Prussian garrison town to metropolis’ * with bewildering speed. On the one hand, this created immense excitement and a flurry of scientific and technological activity. Combustion engines, electricity and medical advances had all grown out of their infancy in the 1870s and ’80s and broken through the barrier of practicability into widespread application. Leading physicists such as Max Planck worked in Berlin and were involved with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. This, in turn, attracted further world-class scientists to the German capital, most notably Albert Einstein, who had been born in Ulm, Württemberg. With such high-calibre research and powerful financial backing, Germany’s new industries ‘pulled the German economy into a whirlwind boom period after March 1895’, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler has comprehensively shown in his meticulous economic study of the German Empire. †

The economic and political misery that the German people had to live through with little respite from the First World War well into the 1950s may have led to a rather rose-tinted viewing of the supposed prosperity of the Kaiserreich. ‡ But despite the uneven nature of growth in geographical, chronological and structural terms, overall the German economy experienced a period of massive growth that was perceived as a boom by contemporaries, too. From the already accelerated levels of the Bismarckian era, German industrial production increased again by an incredible third in the years 1895–1900 alone. Reinvestment of profits into production and development was high and the total value added of the German economy had risen by 75 per cent by 1913.

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