REVIEWS

...His aristocratic friends and the beneficiaries of his financial favors mocked his waddling gait, his accent and "Jewish" mannerisms...

...For 30 years these two worked together for two purposes—to manage the statesman's private finances and to scheme diplomatic maneuvers for the glory of the fatherland...

...The anti-Semitism of the post-Bismarck era confirmed the prevailing value system and indeed was part of it...

...So personal and private, so uncapitalistic in spirit was Bismarck's economic imperialism...

...But alas...

...For his own reasons of dori e„tic policy, he lield out to the masses (who eagerly accepted it) the new perspectives of "world politics” and forged a new alliance of imperialist ideologies with the militaristagrarian aristocrats—and against the liberal bourgeoisie—thus restoring Germany's old class structure...

...Lasker, a Jew and a commoner, was scrupulously correct and upright...

...These swindle enterprises were frequently graced by the names of well-known noble families who lent their prestige to lure unsuspecting "small investors" into the broker's office...

...The bourgeoisie— which had allowed Bismarck to persecute Socialists and Catholics, and in fact had hidden its own interests under the umbrella of his "strong state"—had abandoned its historical mission to create a middle-class consciousness and a middleclass national state...

...Indeed, the German bourgeoisie identified its own future with that of an imperial power...

...That society was far from accepting him as a bona fide member...

...Nietzsche too was painfully aware of the vulgarity of that upstart empire...

...Others certainly were squeamish, and Bismarck himself was at least circumspect in one significant instance: When he was preparing for the war with France, he did not inform Bleichroeder directly but dictated a letter to his wife in which she advised the banker to sell her railroad shares...

...In the Prussian hierarchy of values, the two spheres were linked by a one-way street: business was allowed to serve the higher aims of the fatherland but was not supposed to set goals for its policy-maker...

...J. A. Hobson called imperialism "the outdoor sport of the ruling class...

...He maintained a luxurious mansion where he occasionally lodged influential persons, gave brilliant balls and concerts, and housed his business offices...

...Dawley tends to discount such factors as social mobility or slow access to property ownership as explanations for the lack of a Marxist class GOLD AND IRON: BISMARCK, BLEICHROEDER AND THE BUILDING OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE, by Fritz Stern...

...Alas!—more recent research by Wolfgang Mommsen has shown that the resurgence of antiSemitism coincided with the decline of small enterprise, trade, and the professions—the occupations of most German Jews...

...are all on a level of abstraction where they lose contact with historical reality...

...On the contrary, Bleichroeder and other solid capitalists advised against them...

...Haggling...

...Strousberg, to sell stock in a Rumanian railway that was never built...

...The former ruling class still thought it owned the state, though it was losing out in its struggle to maintain economic status and power vis -a-vis the newly rising bourgeoisie...

...Where underlying interests determine overt political decisions, they do not stem directly from business needs or even from more general economic causes, but from the class structure of late 19th-century society, in this case, from the caste system in Prussie, then Germany's largest state...

...here he gives the ideology a sociological underpinning: a bourgeoisie that failed to think liberal on its own behalf obviously could not fight against intolerance and illiberalism on behalf of minorities...

...104 Yet, in his memoirs, Bismarck did not mention this friendship, and German historians so far have overlooked, discreetly and diligently, the valuable source material that Professor Stern now reveals in this book...

...To tell the truth, Bleichroeder had something of Moli^re's Bourgeois gentilhomme...

...15.95 I n this double biography of Prince Bismarck and his banker, Columbia professor Fritz Stern paints the portrait of an era and tells the story of a grandiose failure—that of the liberal middle class in the new German Reich 100 years ago...

...In an earlier work, Professor Stern has studied this "Politics of Cultural Despair...

...In the case to which I alluded earlier, a few audacious noblemen helped a Jewish promoter, the "railway king" Dr...

...Only for a brief period of one generation did the Jews enjoy the feeling that they were rising abreast with that urban middle class to which most of them belonged...

...THE GERMAN COURT SOCIETY had become infected with the spirit of stock-jobbing even while it looked down on "England, that stock-jobbing nation...

...Business is by nature "dirty," and hence it is often symbolized in German novels by Jews...

...Under Bismarck, while the Germans were prosperous, powerful, and confident, a few 107 individual Jews were allowed to thrive like eunuchs at the Byzantine court, In the Weimar Republic (and this, of course, was after the Empire's disastrous World War I defeat and its demise), Jews were part of the establishment in the arts and sciences, literature and professions, in the media and movies, while the bulk of the people faced humiliation and economic disaster...

...The parameters of his study are "Germans and Jews, power and money," and the symbol-charged protagonists of that complex relationship are the high-born first chancellor of the German Empire and the grandson of a Jewish gravedigger, Gerson Bleichroeder...

...Such connections provided Bleichroeder with a private intelligence network that reached into the embassies, the general staff, the Kaiser's antechamber and the empress's suite...

...The aristocracy grumbled that the sacred Reich had become a Jewish establishment...

...Yet his deep pessimism with regard to the possibility of a German-Jewish symbiosis seems tinged by the horrors of the more recent experience...

...Bleichroeder, aware of the role Jewish money would play in the transaction, used the occasion to extract from the Rumanian government a promise to grant equality to its Jewish minority—an obligation promptly abandoned the moment Bismarck's wrath had abated...

...Money...

...In the first case, anti-Semitism was the ideology of a rising empire...

...With all the power his money wielded, he was constantly soliciting medals and honors...

...Most workers clearly attempted to better themselves through both collective and individual strategies, switching from one to the other as circumstances dictated...

...THE ERUPTION of political anti-Semitism in Germany, as we saw, coincided with the beginning of colonial policy and the Chancellor's turn from liberal to conservative alliances...

...in the second case, it was populist and anticapitalist...

...The same, grosso modo, seems to have been the case in Lynn...

...in Germany it was something worse—an instrument to keep the other classes in submission...

...A labor historian should be aware of the fact that all the various socialist and populist journals and magazines around the turn of the century, while fulminating against the cross of gold, also contained advertisements for get-rich schemes and land speculation of various kinds...

...at a lavish ball von Bleichroeder gave for the diplomatic corps, one guest was overheard saying: "Were it not for our host, we would be entre nous...

...For the aristocrats, the wall that separates government from business had become quite porous...

...I'll tell you when it's time to sell...

...Imagine the Kaiser smoking the Jew's cigars...

...The vulgar-Marxist interpretations of anti-Semitism, imperialism, etc...

...Rumania was put under international tutelage, inaugurating a period of German ascendancy in its politics...

...For instance, when Bismarck decided to resign from the exalted post he had occupied for 28 years, he first told Bleichroeder to sell all his (Bismarck's) Prussian State Bonds...

...The bulk of the Jewish middle class held on to the liberal illusion, or even converted it into the conformist ideology of total assimilation...

...Bleichroeder was the epitome of the German bourgeois—servile and patriotic...

...Bleichroeder knew how to use such information...

...Contradicting the Hobson-Lenin theory of imperialism, Stern finds that the German colonies were not profitable and offered no investment opportunities for surplus capital...

...the respectable middle-class milieu in which this reviewer grew up was embarrassed by, rather than proud of, pushy and ostentatious coreligionaries who were "provoking anti-Semitism...

...But Friedrich Engels, for one, saw through the ideological swindle and wrote to Marx: "Unless we study the financial shenanigans of the Prussian gentry we don't understand the Empire...

...The banker's enormous influence was based largely on the great number of his clients who were diplomats, high civil servants, members of high society, politicians, and even princes in many countries...

...that liberal policies would wipe out the old prejudices...

...Hence high-born aristocrats endowed with 12 generations of noble ancestors turned to Bleichroeder, begging him to cut them in on his profits, and in one case—to which I shall return presently because it is paradigmatic —Bismarck practically ordered his banker to take care of a group of cronies who had engaged in a promotion swindle...

...Stern remarks that here this was not quite accidental...

...They resented the man who had been the instrument of their own embourgeoisement, and they projected their shame into contempt of the parvenu who vainly tried to make up for his lack of 106 education, pedigree, and prepuce, by ostentatious luxuries and prodigious gifts to the mighty...

...These classes had been the backbone of liberalism, to which the Jews naturally inclined...

...But there is no contradiction here...

...It was confronted by the anticapitalist, antiliberal policies of the new masses, be they socialist or imperialist and racist...

...And contrary to Hegel, what followed does not explain what preceded...

...Still, Bebel's saying that "anti-Semitism is the socialism for morons" does not quite fit: the anti-Semites failed to win workers away from the Social Democrats, but found their support in the rural areas and the petty-bourgeoisie...

...I doubt whether the two situations can be compared at all...

...Bismarck and his son continued to make deprecating remarks behind his back...

...Similarly, when the Stock Exchange was apprehensive about a crisis in Russo-German relations, Bismarck (knowing that both governments were negotiating for an amicable settlement) instructed Bleichroeder bluntly: "Don't unload...

...Hence Stern explains the embarrassed silence of German historians regarding Bismarck's business contacts with the pithy verdict: `Bleichroeder is everything that has been left out of [the writing of] German history...

...They saw each other almost every week and wrote each other more than 1,000 letters—the one addressing himself to "your highness," the other to his "esteemed friend...

...in the late I880s, Bismarck did dissolve his coalition with the NationalLiberal party and returned to protectionism...

...ordinary citizens, by contrast, stood in awe of the state...

...620 pp...

...Stern's detailed study of Bleichroeder's archives leads him to conclude that wherever politics worked in tandem 105 with business, the former was leading, except when agrarian interests were at stake...

...Tragically, even the Jews themselves were tempted to join the party and, despite their economic liberalism, accepted the imperial values, in some noted cases even the racial ideologies of Bismarck's state...

...the paragon of Prussian virtue knew that his resignation would send the Stock Exchange into a panic, and both prince and banker were bound to make a killing...

...Hence the blame was placed at the door of the Rumanian government, an international crisis was allowed to develop, an international conference was convened, and Bleichroeder was asked to form an international consortium to bail out the Rumanian government so that it could bail out the foolish investors...

...Regrettably, Stern does not discuss the reaction of German Jews to the phenomenon of Bleichroeder...

...Minorities in Germany tried to be unconspicuous, and this brings us to Professor Stern's last chapter: did Jews have to give up their identity in order to be accepted as equals...

...after victory was won, he distributed hundredweights of caviar, carloads of wine, and thousands of cigars to the princes assembled at Versailles to found the "Reich...

...Oh no...

...A petty act of vengeance by an old man...

...In a nation where wealth (unless it was very old) had never provided status, the bourgeoisie had not succeeded in imposing its value scheme on the rest of society...

...Even if we accept Stern's assurance that Bismarck's political decisions were never influenced by his private financial interests, such disregard of decorum and discretion certainly does not agree with today's notions of "conflict of interest" or with the public image of a Prussian civil servant...

...Colonialism, militarism, and imperialism were means to perpetuate its prestige, its value system, its domination...

...What is his secular god...

...for all his diplomatic successes, of which any other man might have been proud, he was not happy until he had wangled the particle "von" from his protector—the first Jew in Prussia to be elevated for financial services to the nobility...

...I would therefore amend Professor Stern's remark on the lack of squeamishness in the Bismarck era...

...At the end of Bismarck's regime, and still more after his resignation, the resentment of Bleichroeder degenerated into a ruthless anti-Semitic campaign, and though Bismark knew that the agitators were really aiming at him trying to tarnish him with the word Judenfreund, he did nothing to protect his friend, whom he continued to consult and receive at his estate, exploiting him for petty gains and using him as a channel to communicate with the Rothschilds and others...

...Following the decline in land values and the development of overseas grain production, the Prussian squirearchy envied the rising wealth of the middle class...

...The honeymoon of liberal illusions lasted for less than a generation...

...As a supplemental inducement, this state held out for them the opportunities of "world politics," and its correlate, obviously, was racism...

...After admitting this, Dawley continues to argue that this does not prove that most workers relied on individual mobility to get ahead, since the evidence indicates that the bulk of them at one time or another engaged in various collective actions to improve their conditions...

...One wonders why governments are so often drawn into colonialist policies by the interests of weak and irregular factions rather than by the healthy members of the business community...

...Stern writes that the age was not as squeamish as ours about Caesar's wife, and Bismarck himself voiced at least his own unconcern: "Why should I be prevented from using information I have come by honestly...

...As Irving Howe has so vividly shown in The World of Our Fathers, the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side perceived no contradiction in creating instruments of collective action to better the miserable conditions of their lives, and taking individual steps on the ladder of mobility whenever an opportunity presented itself...

...Only one politician resisted Bleichroeder's blandishments—the liberal leader Eduard Lasker...

...Good historian that he is, Stern is careful not to extrapolate the Nazi experience into the lunatic fringe of the preceding period...

...He foisted his protection on the General Staff—during the French campaign (in the Franco-Prussian War) he provided the officers with amenities the army's logistics were unable to secure...

...Richard Wagner saw in Bismarck the mythical Siegfried whose sword overcomes the materialistic dwarfs of the middle class...

...This is especially true of Bismarck's colonial policies...

...But by the end of the century, 16 anti-Semites were in the Reichstag, and the leader of the Christian-Social party was the anti-Semitic Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker...

...Not everyone disregarded—or could afford to disregard— conflict of interest, but that notion simply did not exist for the class that had always considered the state its private property...

...No wonder, since in the German view of the state, government is not supposed to have an economic underside and great leaders are supposed to be aloof, disinterested civil servants...

...Stern's brilliantly written book is a model of reconstructing a period from its own conditions...

...Now Jewish liberalism became obsolete along with its economic foundations...

...he said when outraged parliamentarians attacked his unscrupulous pursuit of private gain...

...Since they were Bismarck's dear friends and pillars of the Conservative party, the Great Man was anxious to avoid a scandal...

...Emancipation from haggling and money would be the self-emancipation of the age...

...No less a critic than the young Karl Marx was outraged by the absence of idealism in business: "What is the secular cult of the Jew...

...But being obsolete need not be tantamount to being abandoned...

...that in the larger Reich they would be freer than in the narrow petty-states...

...They were interested in Russian and other government loans, on the launching of which they collected a modest commission of I percent: they left the penetration of faraway countries to financial adventurers...

...In a moving chapter, Professor Stern draws mournful conclusions on the relationship of Germans and Jews, or what he calls the assimilationist illusion...

...Many a bourgeois was happy to grovel before the throne and provide services for the Court...

...To rise and gain in self-respect, a bourgeois had to adapt to aristocratic thought processes, perhaps obtain a commission in a regiment of the Guards (as Bleichroeder did for his son), follow aristocratic taste and manners (including little turrets and balconies on town houses) and, if possible, to marry into an aristocratic family...

...nor were these ventures promoted by the banks...

...Thanks to his widespread correspondence, he was always well informed on political projects that might offer opportunities for alert investors and, vice versa, on financial projects that might interest a politician, be it in his official capacity or as a private investor...

...Stern insists that the relations between economic and political forces, between various ethnic groups, between money and power must be viewed in the specific context of each period...

...To rise" meant to be accepted by one's betters, rather than to win recognition for one's abilities and accomplishments...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Instead of tolerance and liberalism, it espoused the values of the feudal classes and recognized the state as the framework in which individuals might rise to wealth...

...the antiSemitism of the Weimar period was the debris of a shattered world view...