The lamps went out in Europe

319 Pages·1955·0.745 MB·English

by  Ludwig Reiners

THE LAMPS WENT OUT
IN EUROPE
Ludwig Reiners

THE
LAMPS WENT OUT
IN EUROPE

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY RICHARD AND CLARA WINSTON

Meridian Books
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK
TITLE OF THE GERMAN ORIGINAL EDITION:

In Europa gehen die Lichter aus

A Meridian Book Published by The World Publishing Company
2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland, Ohio 44102
Published simultaneously in Canada by Nelson, Foster & Scott Ltd.
First Meridian Printing 1966
Copyright ® 1955 by Pantheon Books, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages included in a
review appearing in a newspaper or magazine.
Reprinted by arrangement with Pantheon Books, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-10282
Printed in the United States of America.
CONTENTS

Chapter
1 Bismarck's Heritage 1
2 The Wire to St. Petersburg is Severed 13
3 Weltpolitik 26
4 British Overtures 34
5 The Morocco Crisis 44
6 Austria-Hungary 56
7 Kaiser Wilhehm II 70
8 Intrigues 80
9 A Full Circle 89
10 Inside Germany 98
11 The Black Hand 102
12 Berchtold's Blunders 112
13 Attempts at Mediation 123
14 The Machinery of Mobilizations 149
16 Whose Was the Guilt? 159
17 The Blitzkrieg Fails 165
18 The Breakout to the East Fails 183
19 The Mounting Assault 197
20 The Crucial Error 214
21 Domestic Conflicts 222
22 The Year 1917 236
23 Peace in the East 245
24 The Last Offensive 251
25 The Collapse Begins 258
26 Ludendorff Asks for an Armistice 266
27 The Downfall of Austria-Hungary 276
28 The Fleet Mutinies 281
29 Revolution 285
30 Why Germany Lost the First World War 297
Chronological Table 303
Selective Bibliography 305
Index 307
The lamps are going out all over Europe;
we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.
GREY

The mistakes that have been committed in foreign policy
are not, as a rule, apparent to the public
until a generation afterwards.
BISMARCK

World history is not the soil of our happiness.
HEGEL
CHAPTER ONE
Bismarck's Heritage

This man was one of those who always come
When an age about to die draws up the sum
Of everything that it has been and meant.
Then one man, under the whole weight unbent,
Casts all into the cavern of his heart.
The others took their good and bad apart,
But he can feel nothing but life's great mass,
And that he holds all things in one embrace.
RILKE

I
German history has been a sad affair ever since the middle of the thirteenth
century, when the last of the Hohenstaufens died. The authority of the empire
disintegrated; there was no longer a recognized capital; Germany splintered into
hundreds upon hundreds of petty states and fragments of states. The political,
economic and cultural barriers between these states were raised higher and
higher. Finally the religious dissension of the Reformation split the German
people into two hostile camps. Once upon a time the German Empire had
shielded the western world against Arabs, Normans, Hungarians, and Mongols.
Now Germany became the threshing-floor upon which foreign nations flailed
their bloody harvests. They profited mightily. The coastline of Germany was not
her own. Poland, Sweden, Denmark, and France held much of German soil. In
the turmoil of the Religious Wars Germany was caught in a Franco-Swedish
pincers; then the Turks replaced the Swedes, but the steel pinched just as hard.
The Germans deeply felt the danger of their position in the heart of Europe.
While other nations were reaching out across the seas, the Germans retreated
into dusty libraries where no sea-breezes penetrated. That the Germans are
abnormally deficient in any gift for politics is both cause and effect of this
history. But the power vacuum in the heart of Europe was no blessing to other
nations either. Had Germany not been divided, Louis XIV would never have been
able to set the Continent blazing for forty years; Napoleon would never have
begun his parades to Madrid and Moscow. In all the battles of those centuries
German blood was shed on both sides.
2 The Lamps Went Out in Europe
Within Germany herself, the powerful rivalry between two German powers,
Austria and Prussia, while making for a tremendous enrichment of her culture,
had the direst political consequences. The Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation was a medieval phantasm which Napoleon dispelled with a kick. The
Confederation of the Rhine seemed to the French the last word of history, and
the German coast as far as Lübeck became part of the French Empire. In Aachen
all German newspapers were banned; in the Palatinate recruits were loaded
aboard the French vessels which Nelson was to send to the bottom at Trafalgar;
on the snowy plains of Russia tens of thousands of German soldiers bled under
the banners of Napoleon. It was only a fortunate accident that a power had risen
in northern Germany which was able, with the support of Russia, to check
Napoleon's presumption.
But the powerless German Confederation remained the laughingstock of Europe.
The «parliament of professors» at Frankfurt imagined that its decree on
«fundamental rights» would be sufficient to bring in the dawn of a new era; it
did not suspect how German unity would be opposed by Europe. This parliament
decided to build a navy, and England coldly retorted that she would treat the
German flag as a pirate flag. In 1863 Denmark, in open breach of the London
Treaty, annexed Schleswig. In reply to a German protest, England's subsequent
prime minister, Salisbury, wrote that Schleswig-Holstein was needed only as a
naval base—and Germany did not need a fleet. Her claim to Schleswig, he
declared self-righteously, was like Ahab's claim upon Naboth's vineyard—an
attempt at outright theft unparalleled in history. He continued cynically that
France might, «without undue pangs of conscience,» tear up the treaties which
barred her from the left bank of the Rhine and absorb those «half-French»
districts—the Rhine Province, the Rhine Palatinate, and Rhine-Hesse. Only by
such a move, he maintained, would Napoleon III regain the wavering affections
of his people.
Thus a man of Salisbury's standing wished to see prolonged the fragmentation of
Germany which had obtained over the centuries. Such was the situation in
Europe when there appeared on the stage of history the man who was to bring
Germany out of her six-hundred-year-old misery—though only for a few short
decades.

II
Bismarck did not follow any preconceived plan for creating a German Empire. In
politics he was never a system-monger. It was his way to keep in view a variety
of goals and to exploit the many opportunities which offered themselves at any
given moment. Or as he himself expressed it in one of his magnificent images:
«We can do no more than wait
Bismarck's Heritage 3
until we hear the footsteps of God in history; then we must leap forward and try
to hang on to His coat-tails.»
The annexation of Schleswig-Holstein by Prussia was only the prelude to
German unification, but even in taking this first step Bismarck had the entire
world against him. England, France, Russia, and Austria opposed this action, but
so did the German people, so did King Wilhelm of Prussia. Bismarck first secured
Russia's friendship by helping the Czar to suppress a Polish uprising. Members of
the Prussian Landtag who were innocent of the realities of politics upbraided
him; he would do better, they said, if he persuaded the Czar to treat the Poles
with less severity. Bismarck replied sharply; «It is always perilous to give advice
to foreign states on their internal affairs. It leads easily to responses in kind. The
advice His Majesty the Czar would give me on how to handle the Prussian
Landtag I would not dare mention in your presence.» He then kept Napoleon III
in check by dangling before him vague promises of territory in Belgium or the
Rhineland; rightly calculated that he had nothing to fear from England because
of Gladstone's indecisiveness; and lured Austria into the game on his own side.
Proceeding toward his goal with the greatest circumspection, he offered
Denmark a compromise: let Schleswig-Holstein return to its former status of
union with Denmark and he would be content. Denmark, deceived by all the talk
in the British press of England's surely coming to her aid, rejected this
suggestion. Only then did Bismarck unleash the Prussian and Austrian troops.
His initial solution for the German question was also conceived in modest terms.
Prussia was to become the predominant power in North Germany, Austria in
South Germany. Austria would not accept this compromise. Realizing then that
his ideal of German unity would have to be imposed by force on the German
states, Bismarck faced the necessity of war against a brother nation. Once he had
made up his mind, he did not hesitate, even when the Prussian Landtag assured
him that he would not be able to get the recruits into the troop trains. Always
flexible in pursuit of his aims, he tried to win over Bavaria by offering her
hegemony in South Germany, but in vain. Ruthless toward his own past, this
notorious reactionary proposed the election of an all-German parliament by
universal suffrage; at that time not a single great power in Europe had gone this
far in the direction of democracy. Even August Bebel, the great socialist leader,
thought the German people not yet ripe for it.
When Austria committed the folly of mobilizing the troops of the German
Confederation against Prussia, Bismarck insisted that King Wilhelm declare war.
The King refused. Bismarck retired from his audience with the King, and burst
into tears in the anteroom. Fifteen minutes later he returned to the fray and
forced Wilhelm to sign the declaration of war
4 The Lamps Went Out in Europe
—this time leaving the King in tears. We can feel only admiration for the
monarch who found this decision so hard to make, and admiration for the
statesman who was willing to take the burden of responsibility upon his own
conscience for Germany's sake.
A few weeks later, after the Austrians were decisively defeated at Sadowa, this
same man opposed his own generals and demanded extreme moderation. By
threats of resignation he made King Wilhelm accept the «disgraceful» peace
settlement by which Austria lost not a foot of territory and paid not a penny in
reparations. He was not above using the methods of spy thrillers to attain his
ends: during the negotiations with Bavaria he had a note smuggled into the coat
pocket of Count Bray, the Bavarian minister. The note read: «Reject all territorial
claims; offer instead a military alliance with the North German Confederation.»
On this basis he came to terms with South Germany.
It was this incredible flexibility of his, this plethora of new ideas, this constant
shift from hard to soft policy, that kept France from intervening during this
Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Such intervention would probably have meant a
world war, for before the war Austria had made a treaty with France agreeing to
the formation of an «independent» Rhenish state. After Prussia's victory France
promptly demanded Luxemburg, the Saar, the Palatinate, Rhine-Hesse, and
Mainz as «compensation» for the unification of North Germany. But by then it
was too late. Count Benedetti, the French ambassador, wrote anxiously to
Napoleon III that he did not dare deliver such demands orally to the hot-
tempered prime minister of Prussia. He sent a note, which Bismarck simply
ignored. He could afford to do so now that he was again at peace with Austria
and South Germany.
Bismarck again employed the greatest delicacy in bringing about unification
with the South Germans. As late as 1868 he assured the war minister of
Württemberg that the formation of a united Germany in the nineteenth century
would be unlooked-for good fortune; that if anything of the sort should happen
in ten or even five years it would be an outright miracle. He suspected that
France, Austria and Italy had formed a triple alliance to oppose German unifi-
cation. That alliance had at its disposal more than one hundred million people
and nearly three million bayonets. France and Austria had agreed that, if it came
to war, they would not lay down their arms until Germany had been converted
into a confederation consisting «insofar as possible of equally powerful states.»
Austria was to receive Silesia; France the left bank of the Rhine. The French,
Austrian, and Italian armies would meet in the neighborhood of Leipzig.
Bismarck had no intention of provoking this triple alliance. He therefore rejected
Baden's offer to enter the North German Confederation, preferring not to give
the French any pretext for war.
Bismarck's Heritage 5
Meanwhile he waited for God's footstep. When it came, he leaped. Napoleon III,
tormented by an ambitious wife, gallstones, and waning popularity at home, was
lured into forcing the issue of the Spanish succession after the Hohenzollern
aspirant had solemnly renounced his candidature. He demanded further
guarantees and an apology from King Wilhelm. Prussia rudely rejected the
demand, and France declared war. Because Bismarck had the support of Russia,
Austria played a waiting game, and after the first Prussian victories she held to
her neutrality. South Germany marched at Prussia's side; Italy did not lift a
finger; and France was beaten.
But even now the building of a German Reich called for superhuman tact.
Bismarck granted the South German states every special privilege they desired.
He did not stop at bribes. King Louis II of Bavaria and his intimate associate.
Count Holnstein, were awarded large pensions in return for offering the imperial
crown to King Wilhelm of Prussia; the letter King Louis sent to the hated
Prussian King was written by Bismarck. With a margin of just two votes above
the necessary two-thirds majority, the Bavarian Landtag gave its approval.
Bismarck shrugged off Wilhelm's protest that he wanted to be titled «Emperor of
Germany,» not the «German Emperor.» After the proclamation containing the
offensive phrase was read out, the new Kaiser strode past the creator of his Reich
without a word and went on to greet the princes and generals.

III
But the German Reich had been founded. «Under the guns of all of Europe»
Germany was at last a nation-state—centuries later than her neighbors. Profiting
by the situation beyond her borders—a friendly Russia, a beaten France, an
intimidated Austria, and an England benevolently waiting to see—the most
helpless country in Europe had become at one magic stroke the most powerful
state in the world. All the statesmen of Europe kept a wary eye on Berlin. They
felt certain that after such tremendous triumphs Bismarck would reach out for
further booty—like Louis XIV or the two Napoleons.
But nothing of the sort happened. What followed was a development unique in
history: a statesman at the summit of success renounced all further efforts to
extend his country's power and bent every effort to preserve peace. In a note
intended only for Kaiser Wilhelm's guidance—not for publication—Bismarck
wrote that German unification was the most Europe could be expected to brook
from the Germans; Germany must therefore attempt no further expansion and
must keep herself within bounds her neighbors would not resent. When
Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's father, said to the chancellor's son,