ABSTRACT
For many historians seeking to explain the origins and strength of Hitler’s national socialism, the age of Germany’s ‘second empire’ has seemed to hold many of the long-term causes. This chapter demonstrates how Germany retained the political hallmarks of the old monarchical structures, despite developing a strong industrial economy in which the working class rapidly expanded. These trends caused economic power to shift to the new capitalist classes, who had benefited from the industrial revolution but remained largely excluded from political power, which remained with the landed aristocracy. Germany’s failure to democratise at a time when liberalism was reforming many of the western European states has given rise to the theory of a German Sonderweg (‘special path’). It has been argued – but also disputed – that the dislocation caused by the concentration of political power in the hands of the Kaiser and his ministers on the one hand, and the growth of popular but powerless political movements on the other, prevented Germany from making the transition to a modern democracy. In studying the Kaiserreich, it is worth bearing in mind these ideas; they will be explored more fully in Chapter 4, which discusses these questions of continuities across disparate chronological periods of German history.
