German Empire

The German Empire (Deutsches Kaiserreich) is a constitutional imperial federation in central Europe and one of the central powers of the modern world. It is the continental anchor of the alliance that won both Great Wars, the principal obstacle to French revanchism, and a monarchy that has survived by reforming enough to endure without ceasing to be an empire in form and law. Its government joins an executive Crown, a confidence-bearing elected Reichstag and a Bundesrat of constituent governments.

The Empire covers approximately 541,000 square kilometres between the North Sea and the Baltic in the north and the Alps in the south, and holds a population of approximately 110 million. Its capital is Berlin. It is composed of five kingdoms, seven grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities and three free cities, each of which retains its own monarchy or senate, government, courts and institutional life within the imperial framework.

The Empire’s government joins an executive Crown that retains an absolute veto and a personal power of dismissal to a Reichstag elected by proportional representation and a Bundesrat of state governments in which the largest state is capped at thirty per cent of the votes. Its highest courts sit in two other kingdoms’ capitals rather than in Berlin. Its social insurance system, the first comprehensive one in the world, was enacted to defeat the party that has since become its principal defender. Its economy produces the highest income per head of any large economy in the world alongside one of the most equal distributions, through coordinated institutions that slow every decision it takes.

Beyond Europe the Empire retains a set of associated states, the former overseas protectorates converted across the middle of the twentieth century into self-governing partners whose treaties of association each state may terminate alone and without cause. The association has grown since the conversion: Gabon, a former mandate, joined in 1968, Namibia after its independence in 1990, and the East African Federation, which had left in the 1970s, came back as a whole in 1994. South West Africa was not among the territories converted: it was ceded to a South African mandate in 1919, eleven years after the German colonial forces there had destroyed most of the Herero and about half the Nama population, and when it associated with the Empire as independent Namibia in 1990 it did so against the objections of the Herero and Nama, for whom the reparation for that genocide is still unsettled.

At present the Empire is governed under a regency. Heinrich I died suddenly on 12 February and was succeeded by his fourteen-year-old son, whose powers were exercised through a nine-member Regency Council. The Council’s conduct in the Prussian capacity, where it dismissed a ministry that commanded a majority, was held unlawful by the Prussian Constitutional Court on 9 October, and the next day the Reichstag and the Bundesrat, with the Prussian Landtag, abolished the Council by constitutional amendment, all twenty-seven states ratifying within a day. Since 11 October the Emperor’s elder sister, Princess Charlotte, has been sole Regent until he attains sixteen. The imperial government stayed out of the Prussian litigation throughout.

The largest of the constituent states is the Kingdom of Prussia, whose King is also German Emperor. The two Crowns are inseparable in succession but remain separate offices, and the distinction between an act done in the Prussian capacity and an act done in the imperial capacity is one of the load-bearing rules of German public law.

Etymology

The state’s formal name is the Deutsches Kaiserreich, the German Empire, and its shorter legal style is the Deutsches Reich. Reich derives from the Old High German rīhhi, a realm or dominion, and is cognate with the Latin regnum; it carries no necessary imperial sense of its own, and is used in German for kingdoms and empires alike. Kaiser descends from the Latin Caesar, borrowed into Germanic speech in late antiquity, and shares an ancestor with the Russian imperial title. Kaiserreich therefore means simply the realm over which an Emperor reigns.

The national adjective is older than the state. Deutsch comes from the Old High German diutisc, meaning “of the people”, a word originally used to distinguish the vernacular from Latin rather than to name a nation, and Deutschland accordingly means the land of those who speak it. The country’s name in its neighbours’ languages preserves an unusually varied record of who encountered which Germans first: the English Germany and its Romance relatives descend from the Latin Germania, French Allemagne from the Alemanni of the south west, Italian tedesco from the same diutisc root as the Germans’ own word, and the Slavonic names from a root meaning those who cannot be understood.

The imperial title is a constitutional formula rather than a description of territory. The sovereign is styled German Emperor, Deutscher Kaiser, and not Emperor of Germany. The distinction was insisted upon at the foundation of the Empire in 1871 and has never been abandoned: the other German monarchs are not the Emperor’s subjects but his fellow sovereigns within a federation, and an emperor over Germans could be accommodated in their constitutions where an emperor of Germany could not. The same logic keeps the Prussian royal title separate and undiminished in the same person.

The relation of that title to the older imperial dignity was settled at the same moment and in the same spirit. The Empire acknowledges the Holy Roman Empire, dates a good deal of its regalia and its ceremonial vocabulary from it, and has never suggested that a German emperor was an invention of 1871. It declines to call itself that Empire’s successor. The official position, argued by Bismarck against considerable sentiment on his own side, is that the Empire rests on treaties between living sovereigns and derives its authority from those treaties alone, and that a claim to inherit from an institution Prussian arms had destroyed five years earlier would have been false in law and gratuitously offensive in Vienna. German constitutional writing observes the distinction carefully, and the popular habit of numbering the two is not a usage the state has ever adopted.

Neither the name of the state nor the title of its sovereign changed in the twentieth century. Victory in both Great Wars removed the occasions on which such names are usually revised, and the Empire stands today under the style it adopted at unification. In ordinary speech Germans say Deutschland; Kaiserreich belongs to legal and formal registers; and the prefix Reichs- marks the federal level of government, as in the Reichstag, against the Landes- prefix that marks a constituent state.

History

Before the Empire

The territory that became the Empire spent the early modern period as several hundred separate polities under the loose authority of the Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved in 1806 when Francis II laid down the imperial crown rather than see Napoleon take it. He had provided against that day two years earlier by assuming the separate and hereditary style of Emperor of Austria, and for nine years the German lands had no common institution at all.

The Congress of Vienna gave the name back. Vienna pressed for the restoration and the powers conceded it, and from 1815 the German states were again gathered under a Holy Roman Empire, its Diet sitting at Frankfurt, its membership some three dozen sovereign states in place of the several hundred that the Napoleonic reorganisation had reduced by abolishing the ecclesiastical states, the imperial knights and most of the free cities. The restored Empire held that it was the old one continuing, 1806 having been a suspension and never a death, and Prussia and the middle states denied that for the whole of its existence. In name it was the old Empire, and in very little else. The imperial dignity remained elective in form, but the electoral college of the old Empire was not revived with it: the prince-electors had lost their dignity in 1806 and did not get it back, and the election passed instead to the member sovereigns sitting in Diet. They elected a Habsburg at every vacancy from the restoration to the end, which is the entire history of the electoral principle after 1815. Its constitution was a treaty among sovereigns rather than a hierarchy of vassals, and it contained five kings where the old Empire had admitted only one.

Prussia consented to the arrangement, and the terms of that consent decided the century. Berlin took the substance and left Vienna the dignity: the Rhineland and the western provinces, the army, and from the 1830s the customs union. A Habsburg emperor at Frankfurt was judged an antique that cost Prussia nothing, and the judgment held for fifty years.

The economic unification preceded the political one and made it possible. The customs union built around Prussia from the 1830s created a single German market with Austria outside it a generation before any political union existed, and by the time the constitutional question was settled the commercial question had been settled for thirty years in Prussia’s favour. The revolutions of 1848 produced a parliament at Frankfurt, a draft constitution and an offer of an imperial crown that the King of Prussia declined. The offer was a graver thing than its failure has made it look, because the crown it proposed to confer was already worn, and an assembly sitting in the Empire’s own seat of Diet was inviting a Prussian king to displace a reigning emperor at a parliament’s invitation. The King refused it on both grounds at once, and the failure of the attempt fixed the terms of every subsequent argument: unification would come from the princes or not at all.

Prussia settled the matter by war, against Denmark in 1864, against Austria in 1866 and against France in 1870. The war of 1866 excluded Austria from Germany permanently, dissolved the Holy Roman Empire a second time, and is the reason the Empire is a smaller Germany rather than a greater one. It also produced the annexations that reshaped northern Germany, and the exception to those annexations, the survival of the Kingdom of Hanover, is the single most consequential difference between this Germany and the one that might have been, since it preserved a Welf kingdom inside the Empire and with it the constitutional seam that now connects the German federation to the Crown-realm world.

Foundation, 1871

The Empire was proclaimed in January 1871 during the war with France, on the basis of treaties negotiated separately with the southern states rather than by a single act of accession. Bavaria negotiated last and hardest and obtained reserved rights that no other state received. The imperial constitution that emerged was a federal bargain rather than a national settlement, and it was drafted by Bismarck to be workable rather than symmetrical.

Its central device was the double role of Prussia. The King of Prussia was German Emperor, the Prussian Minister-President was Imperial Chancellor, the Chancellor instructed Prussia’s Bundesrat delegation, and Prussia’s weight in that chamber was uncapped. The Empire was therefore governed through Prussia rather than over it, and a Chancellor who lost the Prussian government could be destroyed by it without any vote in the Reichstag.

The Reichstag was elected by universal manhood suffrage, which was radical for its date, and had genuine legislative and budgetary power and no power to appoint or dismiss a ministry. That combination, a democratically elected chamber facing a government responsible to a monarch, is the constitutional problem the Empire spent its next fifty years failing to resolve and its subsequent fifty years resolving.

Bismarck’s Empire

The domestic history of the first two decades is the history of two campaigns against internal enemies, both of which failed and both of which created the parties that dominated German politics afterwards.

The Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, waged through the 1870s, expelled religious orders, imprisoned or deposed bishops, subjected clerical appointments and education to state supervision and left dioceses vacant for years. It was fought hardest in Prussia’s Catholic provinces, in the Rhineland, Westphalia, Silesia and Posen. It produced the Zentrum, welded German Catholicism into a disciplined political bloc, and was abandoned by the state in stages without having achieved anything it set out to achieve. It is also the reason Bavarian federalism is a memory of what a Berlin government did rather than a preference for what one might do.

The anti-socialist legislation of 1878 to 1890 outlawed the Social Democratic organisation, its press and its meetings while leaving its candidates able to stand for the Reichstag, a half-measure that produced the worst of both outcomes for its author. The party grew throughout the period of its illegality and emerged as the largest political organisation in Europe. The social insurance legislation of the same decade was designed as the constructive half of the same strategy and shared its political failure and none of its subsequent reputation.

Externally the period was one of restraint. Bismarck’s system was directed at keeping France isolated and preventing the coalition that would eventually form anyway, and the colonial acquisitions of the 1880s were made with a reluctance he expressed frequently and a persistence that suggests it was not total.

The years before the war

Friedrich IV succeeded in 1888. The period to 1914 was one of extraordinary economic and scientific expansion, of a naval programme that made an enemy of Britain and was then partially reversed when the consequences became clear, and of a domestic politics increasingly unable to accommodate the country it governed. The Prussian three-class franchise, which weighted votes by tax paid, returned a conservative Prussian chamber in a kingdom whose imperial deputies were majority socialist and Catholic, and the contradiction was visible to everyone and soluble by nobody.

The alliance system hardened. France and Russia came together, Britain moved from hostility towards Germany’s naval programme to alignment against it and then, as the naval question receded, into a working relationship with Berlin that surprised both capitals. By 1914 the continental division placed France and Russia on one side and Germany, Britain and eventually the United Kingdom of America on the other.

The First Great War

The First Great War began with the assassination of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha by a French national. The victim was a German sovereign prince with dynastic connections across half the courts of Europe, and the perpetrator’s nationality made the crisis a Franco-German one from the first day.

Germany was the continental anchor of the allied effort and bore the weight of the European theatre. Britain dominated the naval dimension and the blockade. The United Kingdom of America entered in 1916 and contributed manpower, finance and industrial production on a scale that settled the outcome. Apart from the eleven days of the French offensive into Lorraine in 1916, the war’s only large invasion of German soil was the Russian entry into East Prussia in the opening weeks, which was destroyed by the following spring and left the eastern towns to be rebuilt by public subscription across Germany.

The war exhausted the old domestic settlement. A state conscripting men it disfranchised could not defend the three-class franchise, and by the middle of the war the demand for equal suffrage was being pressed by parties that had previously defended the system. The Polish policy in the eastern provinces was suspended for the duration, since the state could not simultaneously expropriate a population and call it to the colours.

The allied powers won after the collapse of the Russian war effort and the exhaustion of France. Friedrich IV, who had spent the war attached to field headquarters, died a few months after the peace and was succeeded by Albrecht I.

The Treaty of Berlin

The settlement was dictated from the German capital as the Treaty of Berlin in 1919. It restrained France, reorganised eastern Europe on the wreckage of the Russian collapse, and confirmed Germany, Britain and the United Kingdom of America as the organising powers of the new order. Germany retained Elsaß-Lothringen, Posen, Silesia and East and West Prussia. It ceded South West Africa into a South African mandate, consensually and with compensation, and received French Equatorial Africa as League mandates, which became the independent republics of Gabon, the Congo, Ubangi and Chad in 1960.

The settlement was Germany’s to defend, and the Empire understood this at the time. What it did not sufficiently understand was that France had not accepted the settlement in its political bloodstream, and that a peace dictated in an enemy capital creates an obligation on the victor that outlasts the generation that imposed it.

The settlement of 1919 to 1923

Because Germany won, it had no revolution. There was no collapse, no proclaimed republic, no council movement and no counter-revolution, and the reform of the German and Prussian constitutions was therefore carried out by amendment, by institutions still standing and under pressure from demobilised soldiers, an organised labour movement, a strengthened SPD and a coherent Zentrum.

Three imperial reforms were carried together and are properly read as one act. The Imperial Chancellorship was separated from the Prussian Minister-Presidency. Prussia’s Bundesrat vote was capped at thirty per cent. The Great General Staff was transferred from Prussia to the Empire. Together they converted Prussia from the state through which the Empire was governed into the largest of the states the Empire governs, and they are the reason the modern federation works.

The same period produced the fiscal reform that gave the Empire the direct taxes and created the shared-tax and equalisation system, ended the multi-year military appropriations that had removed the army from parliamentary scrutiny, and abolished the Prussian three-class franchise. In Bavaria, Rupprecht I came to the throne in 1921 as a victorious army commander and democratised from strength, carrying universal suffrage, a ministry answerable to the lower chamber, the disestablishment of the Catholic Church by concordat and the conversion of the royal domains into public trust. Across the Empire the constitutional monarchy of 1871 became something recognisably modern without any of its monarchies falling.

The interwar decades

Victory carried its own risks. German conservatives read the outcome as proof that monarchical order was superior to republicanism, a belief that made diplomatic restraint harder to argue for and that looks worse in retrospect than it did at the time.

Fascist France seized power through crisis in the interwar period. It regarded Germany as humiliation made permanent: the victor of the First Great War, the guardian of the settlement, the patron of Mitteleuropa and the principal barrier to French revenge. Germany was the primary target of French revisionism from the beginning and knew it.

German policy attempted containment through diplomacy, inspection and economic pressure, and the Low Countries crisis, with Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands caught between France, Germany and the sea, became the central strategic anxiety of the 1930s. The Empire’s difficulty was that every instrument available to it was one a victor uses against a defeated power, and using them confirmed the French account of what the settlement was.

The Second Great War

The Second Great War began in 1939 and reconstituted the alliance of the first against the same enemy in a new ideological form. Germany, Britain and the United Kingdom of America fought fascist France.

The war reached the imperial capital. French forces drove deep into Germany and besieged Berlin for two weeks in the winter of 1941, and Albrecht I remained in the capital throughout the siege rather than withdraw. The French advance was halted on the Weser. The occupation of German soil, the bombing of the German cities and the fighting in the south west and the Alpine approaches are the parts of the war that occupy German memory, more than the counter-offensive that followed or the taking of Paris in 1945.

Bavaria was a front-line state in the second phase. Munich was bombed, sustainedly and destructively, and was rebuilt faithfully afterwards. Very large refugee populations were housed in monasteries and requisitioned Alpine hotels under a diocesan administration better organised than the state’s, and a substantial minority of those people stayed, changing the confessional balance of several southern districts permanently.

The fascist French regime collapsed in 1945.

Victory, and the postwar order

France was reconstituted not as a republic but as the French Empire, a constitutional parliamentary empire under Bonapartist legitimacy. The Versailles Conference reorganised the European order, and Germany’s position there was the position of a twice-victorious power that had learned what a dictated peace produces. The restraint of the second settlement compared with the first is the most consequential thing the Empire did in the twentieth century.

The domestic consequences were as large. Land reform broke the economic dominance of the old estate system. Merit recruitment widened entry to the army, the foreign service and the civil administration. The coordinated institutions of sectoral bargaining and codetermination were given constitutional standing rather than left to custom. The separate military jurisdiction was abolished, and with it Bavaria’s reserved right of military justice. The Imperial Constitutional Court received its modern jurisdiction and independence.

The League of Nations was reconstituted in 1945 under the San Francisco Charter with its Security Council seated at Kyoto, and Germany holds a permanent seat. The Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949 under the American Prime Minister Harry S. Truman, and Germany is its largest continental contributor.

The cold war and after

The Russian Republic, which had emerged from the Russian collapse in 1922 under Admiral Kolchak, was the antagonist of the postwar world, and the confrontation between the monarchies and the republic ran for four decades. It placed the eastern provinces on the front line, paid for a great deal of their infrastructure as a by-product, and shaped German defence policy, alliance policy and industrial location.

The same decades saw the conversion of the remaining overseas territories into associated states, the acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent under the strict statutory and parliamentary controls that still govern it, the end of peacetime conscription, the closure of the deep coal industry by negotiated agreement, and the long expansion that made German income per head the highest of any large economy in the world.

The confrontation with Russia faded rather than ended. Trade resumed, the eastern provinces became a corridor rather than a glacis, and the divergence between a commercial assessment of Russia and a security one became, and remains, the most consequential unresolved argument in German foreign policy.

The present

Germany entered the present era as a founding power of the European Concert, established at Straßburg in 2027 on a Franco-German initiative, within which its older Mitteleuropa arrangements now sit. The union is a year old, is deep and supranational by design, and has not yet been tested by a serious dispute.

The Empire’s domestic year has been dominated by a succession it did not expect. Heinrich I died suddenly on 12 February 2028 and was succeeded by his fourteen-year-old son as Alexander I, whose powers are exercised through a Regency Council. The Council’s conduct in the Prussian capacity has produced a constitutional crisis in the largest constituent state which the imperial government has deliberately declined to enter.

Geography

Relief and drainage

The Empire occupies the whole breadth of central Europe between the Baltic and North Seas and the northern face of the Alps, and its relief rises in three broad steps from north to south. The North German Plain covers the entire northern third of the country, from the Rhine delta and the Frisian marshes eastward through Brandenburg, Pomerania and the Prussian provinces to the Masurian lakes and the Curonian Lagoon. It is low, glaciated and in places barely above sea level, drained by slow rivers and interrupted by heath, bog and lake country. Behind it stands the belt of central uplands: the Rhenish massif and the Eifel in the west, the Harz on the border between Prussia and Brunswick, the Thuringian Forest, the Ore Mountains along the Bohemian frontier, and the Sudetes and Silesian uplands in the south east. South of these the land rises again through the Swabian and Franconian scarplands and the Bavarian plateau to the Bavarian Alps, where the Empire reaches its greatest elevations along the Austrian border.

Almost all of the Empire drains north. The Rhine enters from the south west, cuts its gorge through the Rhenish massif and carries the traffic of the western industrial belt to the sea through the Low Countries. The Weser, Elbe, Oder and Vistula cross the plain in parallel to the North Sea and the Baltic, all of them navigable well inland and all of them worked. Only the Danube runs the other way, rising in the Black Forest and leaving Bavaria eastward towards the Habsburg lands. The rivers are joined by an old and heavily used canal system, and the inland waterway remains a serious commercial artery rather than a picturesque survival.

The coasts are two and they are not alike. The North Sea coast is a shallow tidal shore of sand islands, mudflats and diked marshland behind them, with deep-water access confined to the estuaries at Hamburg, Bremen and Emden. The Baltic coast is calmer, less tidal and indented by lagoons and spits, and carries the ports of Kiel, Stettin, Danzig and Königsberg. The distance from Aachen in the west to Tilsit on the Memel in the east exceeds the length of most European states.

Climate and vegetation

The climate is temperate, and its dominant gradient runs from west to east rather than from north to south. The maritime west has mild wet winters and cool summers under Atlantic influence; the further east one travels the more continental the pattern becomes, with sharper seasons, hotter summers and materially longer and colder winters in Silesia and East Prussia. Rainfall is moderate and reliable in most of the country, heaviest on the western slopes of the uplands and in the Alpine foreland, and lightest in the rain shadow of the central massifs around the middle Elbe.

The natural vegetation is deciduous and mixed forest, beech and oak on the lowlands and lower slopes, spruce and fir on the uplands and in the Alps. Roughly a third of the Empire remains under forest, much of it worked woodland under old regimes of state and communal management. The plains are farmed, the heaths and moors of the north west and the Lüneburg country are a distinctive open landscape of their own, and the Alpine and upland pastures carry a transhumant grazing tradition that survives in the south.

Regions and urbanisation

Germany is one of the most heavily urbanised countries in the world, and its urban system is polycentric rather than dominated by a single metropolis. The largest single concentration is the Rhineland and Ruhr in the west, a continuous industrial and residential region spread across the Prussian provinces of Rhineland and Westphalia and governed for many purposes through a cross-provincial authority. Berlin, in the middle of the northern plain, is the largest single city and the seat of both imperial and Prussian government. Beyond these, the Hanseatic ports of the north, the Saxon and Silesian industrial districts of the east, the Rhine-Main region around Frankfurt, the Württemberg and Baden manufacturing belt of the south west and the Bavarian plateau around Munich each form a distinct regional economy.

The constituent states vary in scale by two orders of magnitude. Prussia alone holds approximately 348,000 square kilometres and some sixty million people, more than half the Empire on either measure, while the smaller Thuringian principalities count their populations in the tens of thousands. This asymmetry is the permanent structural fact of German federalism and the reason the constitution caps Prussian voting weight in the Bundesrat.

Major cities

Germany’s political and cultural life is distributed across several distinct urban centres, each with its own character within the imperial order.

Berlin is the imperial capital, the seat of the Kaiser, the Reichstag, the Imperial Chancellor, the Prussian government and the military command structure, all compressed into a city that is also the Empire’s greatest concentration of newspapers, publishing houses, universities, banks, department stores and theatres. Berlin is modern and industrial rather than ancient or organic. It grew by function rather than memory. Its character is administrative confidence edged with anxiety: the city that knows it is the centre and cannot quite relax into that knowledge.

Hamburg is Germany’s window to the sea, the largest port on the North Sea and the most internationally oriented city in the Empire. Hamburg’s identity is mercantile in the deepest sense: the city thinks in terms of trade, shipping, insurance and credit as other cities think in terms of politics and theology. Its Free City status within the imperial order is guarded jealously. Hamburg’s commercial network reaches across the British realm, the UKA, the Crown sister realms and the trading ports of Africa and Asia with an ease that reflects centuries of Hanseatic culture.

Munich is the other Germany, southern, Catholic, baroque, beer-garden-civilised and culturally suspicious of Berlin. It is the capital of Bavaria and the cultural heart of German Catholicism: great museums, great orchestras, a great university, and a great deal of difficulty pretending to be subordinate to Prussia. The Centre Party’s Bavarian wing and Munich’s press make Bavarian opinions felt in imperial politics in ways no other constituent state manages as reliably.

Frankfurt is the Empire’s exchange and fair city and its densest transport junction, and it is not the capital of anything. Annexed from its free-city status by Prussia in 1866 and administered ever since as part of the province of Hesse-Nassau, it carries the exchange, the commodity trades, the great fairs and the busiest airport in Germany, while the central bank and the great banking houses sit in Berlin. The gap between its economic weight and its political standing is the oldest grievance in the city and the least likely to be resolved.

Cologne is the Rhineland’s great city, ancient, Catholic, cathedral-defined and the cultural midpoint between Germany and France. Cologne faces the western question more directly than any city except Straßburg: Germany’s relationship with France, with Catholicism and with the territories between them is more visible here than anywhere else in the Empire.

Leipzig is the Empire’s intellectual and publishing capital, the city of Bach, of the great book trade, of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and of the massive trade fair that makes it an annual commercial crossroads for central Europe.

Dresden is Saxony’s jewel: the cultural city of the east, home to world-class museums, galleries and opera, and the political seat of the Kingdom of Saxony, which maintains its own vigorous institutional and cultural life well outside Prussian and Bavarian gravity.

The southern and western centres

Stuttgart, the capital of Württemberg, sits in a bowl in the Neckar hills and is the centre of the Empire’s densest concentration of engineering firms, an industrial region that grew without coal and therefore without the Ruhr’s landscape. The city is prosperous, is short of building land for the obvious topographical reason, and has the housing costs that follow.

Düsseldorf is the administrative and commercial capital of the Rhineland industrial region, in the way that Essen and the coalfield towns are its productive centre, and the distinction between the two functions is jealously observed by both. Nuremberg is Franconia’s real capital and the second city of Bavaria, a free imperial city until 1806 and still resentful about it, known for Dürer, for toys and gingerbread, for the Christmas market and for having built the Empire’s first railway to Fürth in 1835.

Straßburg is the capital of Elsaß-Lothringen, a cathedral city on the Rhine, bilingual in life and German in administration, and since 2027 the seat of the European Concert’s parliament. Karlsruhe in Baden is a planned city of the eighteenth century laid out in a fan from its palace, and holds the Imperial Constitutional Court, which has given a modest state capital a national significance out of proportion to its size.

Hanover is the capital of its kingdom and the seat of a court that is simultaneously the court of a German constituent monarch and of the sovereign of eleven kingdoms, two duchies and an empire beyond Germany’s frontiers, which makes it the most constitutionally peculiar residence in the Empire. Bremen and Lübeck are the smaller free cities, the first a working port and the second a Hanseatic town that has been living on the memory of the Hanse for four centuries and has made an excellent job of it.

The eastern cities

Breslau is the largest city of the German east, the capital of Silesia, a university town and an industrial one, and the centre of a province whose population is mixed German and Polish and whose politics reflect it. Königsberg is the Prussian coronation city, seat of the kingdom’s oldest university and of the crowning function among Prussia’s three capitals, and it is the most distant major city from Berlin in an empire that measures its distances east to west.

Danzig and Stettin are the Baltic ports of the eastern provinces, both of which lost traffic to the militarisation of the eastern frontier during the cold war and have recovered a good deal of it since. Magdeburg and Halle anchor the central industrial belt, Leipzig and Dresden the Saxon one. Kiel and Rostock are the naval and Baltic-trading towns of the northern coast.

The eastern cities share a common problem. They are handsome, well-provided and losing people, and every one of them has invested heavily in its university and its technical institutes on the reasoning that a city which can educate can retain. The reasoning is sound and the outcome has been partial: the universities are full and the graduates go west.

The public year

The Empire has no common calendar of festivals beyond the foundation anniversary, because holidays are a matter for the constituent states and the states differ by confession. The Catholic south and west keep the great Marian and sacramental feasts, Corpus Christi processions through the streets of Bavarian and Rhenish towns being the most visible instance; the Protestant north and east keep a penitential day the Catholic states do not; and the number of public holidays accordingly varies by several days depending on where a German lives, which is a standing subject of complaint from employers in the states with more and from employees in the states with fewer.

What is common is the shape of the year rather than its content: a carnival season in the Catholic west and south, culminating in the Rhineland and Bavarian festivities of the days before Lent; Easter; the spring and summer of parish festivals, shooting-club feasts and maypoles; the autumn of harvest fairs and the great Bavarian festival at Munich; and a Christmas season whose markets, which began in the medieval towns of Saxony and Franconia, are among the Empire’s most exported cultural products.

Sunday is protected by law. Shops close, most industrial work stops, and the constitutional guarantee of the day of rest has survived every attempt at liberalisation, defended by an alliance of the churches, the unions and the small retailers that no government has yet been able to break.

The frontiers

The Empire’s land frontiers run from the North Sea to the Alps and touch a dozen states, and their character has changed more in forty years than in the previous hundred. The western and southern borders are now internal boundaries of the European Concert’s market, crossed without formality, and the border regions have developed economies and labour markets that ignore them: people live in one state and work in another, and the pandemic’s state-by-state restrictions cut through those lives in ways the inquiries afterwards were pointed about.

The eastern frontier was for four decades the front line of the confrontation with the Russian Republic, fortified, patrolled, and economically dead for a strip of country several kilometres deep. Its conversion into a commercial corridor is the largest change in the Empire’s internal geography since the war, and it is incomplete: the road and rail connections were built to end at the frontier and are being extended through it, the eastern ports have recovered traffic they lost, and the security establishment’s assessment of what the corridor carries has not softened as quickly as the commercial one.

Frontier control is a federal competence exercised by the federal police, and the Empire’s participation in the Concert’s common external frontier has moved much of the work from its own borders to the union’s, which is a transfer of trust that German ministers describe as considerable and that the Reichstag has scrutinised accordingly.

The regions

The western industrial belt

The Rhineland and the Ruhr, both Prussian, form the largest single industrial and urban concentration in Europe: a continuous region of cities running from the lower Rhine through the coalfield and out along the river, in which the boundaries between municipalities are administrative rather than visible. Coal built it, steel and chemicals and engineering sustained it, and the closure of the deep mines over fifty years reshaped it without breaking it.

Its politics are the politics of the organised working class and of the Catholic Rhineland at the same time, which is why the SPD and the Zentrum have divided the region between them for a century and why neither has ever driven the other out. Its administration crosses two Prussian provinces and touches several other states, and is coordinated through a cross-provincial authority constituted by interstate treaty.

The Rhine-Main and the south west

Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region form the Empire’s exchange and aviation hub and a dense industrial and service economy that crosses the boundary between Prussian Hesse-Nassau, which holds the city, and the Grand Duchy of Hesse to the south. South of it the Württemberg and Baden manufacturing belt runs from Stuttgart through the Neckar valley and into the Black Forest, a region of medium-sized engineering and precision firms in small towns, high incomes, low unemployment and a housing shortage that follows from all three.

The south

Bavaria is the Empire’s largest state by area after Prussia and its second economy, dispersed across eight provinces rather than concentrated, with Munich as its capital and the Alps along its southern frontier. Its distinctiveness is constitutional rather than merely cultural and is the subject of its own article.

Bavaria also holds the Empire’s most conspicuous exclave. The Rhenish Palatinate, acquired at the Congress of Vienna in 1816, lies west of the Rhine with Baden and Hesse between it and the rest of the kingdom, and carries Speyer with its imperial cathedral and Ludwigshafen with the chemical works that make it the industrial centre of the German south west. The arrangement is a survival of the territorial settlement of 1815 and has never been rationalised, because rationalising it would require the consent of the states concerned and none has ever been willing to give it.

The east

The Saxon and Silesian industrial districts form the eastern manufacturing core, in textiles, machinery, instruments, chemicals and, in Upper Silesia, coal and heavy industry. Beyond them lie the eastern agricultural provinces, Posen, West Prussia, East Prussia and the Pomeranian and Brandenburg districts, which are the Empire’s demographic problem: they have lost young people westward for more than a century, they carry the oldest age structures and the thinnest services, and they were for forty years the front line of a continental confrontation whose passing has left them a corridor without yet leaving them a purpose.

Their politics are correspondingly distinct. The conservative parties are strongest here, the Polnische Fraktion draws its representation from the Polish-speaking districts, and the equalisation transfers that keep the provinces functioning are a permanent subject of resentment in the states that pay them and of insufficiency in the districts that receive them.

The north

The Hanseatic north runs along both coasts: Hamburg and Bremen on the North Sea estuaries, Kiel, Rostock, Stettin, Danzig and Königsberg on the Baltic, with an agricultural and increasingly wind-powered hinterland between them. Shipping, shipbuilding, marine insurance, fishing and, latterly, offshore energy are its industries. The Lüneburg heath, the Frisian marshes and the Mecklenburg lake country are the Empire’s emptiest landscapes west of the Vistula.

Berlin

Berlin sits in the middle of the northern plain and is the seat of two governments, the imperial and the Prussian, in a city that is also Prussia’s largest and the Empire’s greatest concentration of newspapers, publishers, universities, banks and theatres. It is modern and industrial rather than ancient, having grown by function rather than by memory, and its relationship with the rest of the Empire is the relationship of a capital that everybody visits and nobody outside it entirely trusts.

Its constitutional position is exceptional and awkward. It is a city within Prussia, not a state, and it therefore has no Bundesrat vote of its own and no state government, while housing two of them. Proposals to constitute it as a separate state have been made since the 1920s and have failed on Prussian opposition, since a Prussia without Berlin would lose a fifth of its population and the argument that follows from that has never needed to be made twice.

The government quarter

The imperial government occupies a quarter of central Berlin built for the purpose in the decades after unification and repaired after the Second Great War, and the arrangement of the buildings records the constitutional structure with some precision. The Reichstag sits apart from the executive ministries, which is a nineteenth-century statement about the separation of a legislature from a government it did not appoint and which the modern constitution has made less true and no less visible.

The Chancellery, the ministries and the Bundesrat’s chamber stand within a short walk of one another, and the Prussian State Ministry stands among them, since Berlin is the seat of two governments and the buildings of both are interleaved. Visitors are regularly confused about which building belongs to which order of government, and German officials regard the confusion as instructive rather than inconvenient.

The Berlin Schloss, the imperial and royal seat, closes the eastern end of the axis, and the museum quarter lies immediately beyond it. The sequence, palace, museums, ministries, parliament, running along a single line, was laid out by a state that intended the arrangement to be read, and it is still read, though not always in the order intended.

Government and politics

The constitution

The German Empire combines democratic government with an executive Crown under the imperial Constitution of 1871, repeatedly amended rather than replaced. Constitutional amendments require three-fifths support in both Reichstag and Bundesrat followed by ratification by the constituent states. Imperial assent is not part of the amendment procedure, which is the single clearest limit on the Crown in the imperial order.

The Imperial Chancellor

The Imperial Chancellor, Dr Matthias Brenner of the FVP, heads an FVP-Zentrum-SPD coalition. He is appointed by the Kaiser and must retain the confidence of both the Kaiser and the Reichstag. This dual-confidence rule distinguishes the Empire from a fully parliamentary system without allowing an imperial ministry to survive an ordinary vote of no confidence. The Kaiser may personally dismiss the Chancellor, and the Reichstag may independently compel a ministry’s resignation.

The Chancellor is not the Minister-President of Prussia, and the fact that this needs stating is a measure of how long the opposite was true. For the Empire’s first half-century the two offices were held by one man, because the Chancellor instructed Prussia’s Bundesrat delegation and Prussia’s weight in that chamber was uncapped, so a Chancellor without the Prussian government could be destroyed by it without any vote in the Reichstag. The settlement of 1919 separated them, alongside the cap on Prussian voting weight and the transfer of the Great General Staff to the Empire, and the three reforms are one act: they converted Prussia from the state through which the Empire was governed into the largest of the states the Empire governs.

The separation is what makes the modern arrangement work. Under dual confidence at both levels, a single officeholder would need the confidence of the Kaiser, the Reichstag, the King of Prussia and the Abgeordnetenhaus at once, which two parliaments elected on different cycles by proportional systems will rarely permit. Brenner’s imperial coalition of the FVP, Zentrum and SPD and the Prussian majority dismissed in 2028, which rested on the SPD, the FVP and the Zentrum, are the same three party families in a different order under different leaders. It is also why the Prussian crisis has not become an imperial one.

The Chancellor’s position is the central constitutional puzzle of German politics. A Chancellor who holds both the Kaiser’s confidence and a Reichstag majority can govern effectively. Loss of either confidence ends the ministry, which forces imperial government to reconcile electoral coalitions with a Crown that retains its own constitutional judgment.

Brenner treats the minor Emperor’s constitutional education as part of the office without inviting him to exercise powers he does not yet possess. During the Prussian regency crisis he has kept the imperial government outside the state litigation. Alexander’s first imperial programme has likewise concentrated on federal trust, including a balanced circuit of smaller constituent states intended to show that Prussia’s domestic crisis will not consume the Empire.

Federal and state competences

Federal and state powers overlap broadly in modern government. Imperial law prevails within federal competence, common taxes support equalisation, and state citizenship supplies the first legal membership from which German nationality follows. The arrangement gives the Empire enough authority to govern a common industrial state while preserving constituent governments as more than administrative subdivisions.

The boundary between the two orders is policed by the Imperial Constitutional Court, whose jurisdiction over federal questions includes the limits of state legislative competence. The 2028 proceedings over the Brunswick Motor Works are the most prominent current instance.

Political parties

The Reichstag’s principal organisations retain their historic names: the Deutschkonservative Partei (DKP), the Freikonservative Partei / Deutsche Reichspartei (FKP/DRP), the Nationalliberale Partei (NLP), the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (Zentrum), the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (FVP), the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and the Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (USPD). The Polnische Fraktion is a minority parliamentary group rather than an ordinary nationwide party. Regional and confessional formations supplement this federal party system, and each federal party also operates through state-level organisations that fight the constituent states’ own elections.

The Constitution in practice

The imperial Constitution of 1871 has never been replaced, and the Empire’s constitutional history is therefore a history of amendments, of judicial construction and of conventions that acquired binding force without ever being written down. The document a German lawyer works from is the original text carrying a century and a half of revision, and reading it without the accompanying case law and the accumulated practice gives a systematically misleading impression of how the country is governed.

Amendment requires three-fifths in both the Reichstag and the Bundesrat followed by ratification by the constituent states. Imperial assent is not part of the procedure. This is the single clearest limit on the Crown in the imperial order: the Kaiser can veto an ordinary statute and cannot veto a constitutional change, so the one instrument that could reduce his powers is the one he cannot touch.

The ratification requirement is the reason German constitutional change is slow. It gives every constituent state, including principalities with populations in the tens of thousands, a stake in the process, and the small states have used it. The most recent significant amendments, on the borrowing rule and on the emergency public-health powers, each took more than three years from introduction to ratification.

Dual confidence

The dual-confidence rule is the constitutional centre of German politics and has no close parallel elsewhere. The Imperial Chancellor is appointed by the Kaiser, may be personally dismissed by him, and must simultaneously retain the confidence of the Reichstag, which may compel a ministry’s resignation independently. Loss of either confidence ends the ministry.

The system is not a parliamentary monarchy with a decorative Crown, and it is not a personal monarchy with a consultative chamber. It is a genuine dual arrangement in which two distinct sources of legitimacy must be satisfied at once, and its practical operation depends on a convention that neither withdraws confidence lightly. That convention has held for a century, and the reason it has held is that both sides understand the alternative: a Crown that dismisses ministries the chamber supports invites a constitutional crisis it will lose, and a chamber that destroys ministries the Crown supports invites a dissolution.

The practical consequence is a bias towards broad coalitions. A ministry resting on a narrow parliamentary majority is vulnerable at both ends, and German governments are accordingly built wider than the arithmetic strictly requires. The present FVP-Zentrum-SPD coalition under Brenner commands considerably more than a bare majority, which is normal rather than exceptional.

The Reichstag

The Reichstag is elected for four years by mixed-member proportional representation: each voter casts a constituency vote and a list vote, the list vote determines each party’s total entitlement, and constituency winners are seated first with list members filling the remainder. A threshold excludes parties below a minimum share, with an exemption for parties representing recognised national minorities, which is why the Polnische Fraktion sits despite a nationwide share far beneath the bar.

The chamber’s authority is real. It controls the budget, and the rule that no expenditure may be incurred without appropriation is the oldest hard constraint on the imperial executive. It legislates. It may compel a ministry’s resignation. Its committees of investigation, which a minority of deputies may establish without the majority’s consent, have powers of compulsion over documents and witnesses and are the instrument through which German parliamentary scrutiny actually operates.

What the Reichstag does not have is any power over constitutional amendment alone, over the constituent states’ internal affairs, or over the appointment of the Chancellor, whom it can only remove. There is no federal referendum in Germany and never has been, a deliberate omission whose justification has changed over time and is now generally given as the observation that plebiscites in a federation of unequal states favour the largest of them.

The Bundesrat

The Bundesrat is a chamber of governments rather than of representatives. Its members are delegates instructed by the ministries of the constituent states, vote as a bloc on their state’s instruction, and may be replaced at any time by the government that sent them. A state’s delegation cannot split its vote, which means a coalition disagreement inside a state government produces an abstention, and abstentions in the Bundesrat count against a measure.

Its consent is required for constitutional amendment, for the shared-tax division statutes, for anything affecting the constituent states’ administration or finances, and for a wide range of ordinary legislation besides. In practice this covers most of what matters, and the Bundesrat is therefore not a revising chamber but a co-legislature.

Prussia holds thirty per cent of the votes, a cap imposed in the settlement of 1919 to 1923 and calculated precisely: enough that no durable federal coalition can be built against Prussia, not enough that Prussia can carry anything alone. The cap is the single most important number in German federalism and is the reason the Empire is a federation rather than a Prussian state with attachments.

Because Bundesrat majorities depend on state elections held on twenty-seven different cycles, a federal government routinely faces a chamber controlled by a different combination of parties from its own, and the resulting need to negotiate across the party lines with state governments is the ordinary condition of German legislating rather than an occasional crisis.

The ministries

The imperial executive consists of the Chancellor and the imperial ministers, who are appointed on the Chancellor’s proposal and are individually responsible for their departments. The Chancellor sets the general lines of policy, and the tension between that authority and the individual responsibility of ministers is a permanent feature of German cabinet government that has been litigated before the Constitutional Court twice.

The Chancellery is small by comparison with the executive offices of comparable states and has grown steadily. The great departments are Foreign Affairs, the Interior, Justice, Finance, Defence, Economics and Labour, with Labour carrying the social insurance system and therefore the largest budget in the Empire.

The federal administration proper is unusually small, because the Empire legislates and the constituent states execute. Imperial taxes are collected by state revenue offices, imperial regulation is enforced by state inspectors, imperial social insurance is administered by self-governing funds. The federation has a customs service, the armed forces, the foreign service, the federal police and comparatively little else, and this is the structural reason a country of 110 million people has a federal civil service smaller than several of its constituent states’.

Elections and coalitions

Federal elections are contested by the six principal parties and the minority group, and the outcome is always a coalition. No party has won a Reichstag majority since the introduction of proportional representation and none expects to.

The coalitions that form are constrained by more than arithmetic. The SPD is the largest single organisation in the country and cannot govern alone. The Zentrum is the most stable and the most frequently in office, having participated in more ministries than any other party, and its position at the centre of the confessional and geographic map makes it the natural pivot. The FVP supplies more Chancellors than its size warrants for the same reason. The NLP, the DKP and the FKP/DRP occupy the conservative and national-liberal ground and combine with one another and with the Zentrum. The USPD has never been in an imperial ministry.

Each federal party also runs state organisations that fight the constituent states’ elections separately, on state issues, with state leaderships, and in combinations that need not match the federal one. The same three party families appear in different orders at imperial, state and city level, which is confusing to outsiders and entirely ordinary to Germans.

Political culture

German political culture is shaped by three tensions that have not been resolved and are not expected to be. The first is between the Crown’s constitutional authority and the Reichstag’s democratic mandate, which is managed by convention rather than settled by law. The second is between Prussia’s weight and the constituent states’ institutional pride, which is managed by the Bundesrat cap and by an elaborate etiquette of federal consultation. The third is between the military’s social prestige and the civilian institutions that must govern alongside it.

The Junker question persists in diminished form. Postwar land reform broke the old estate system’s economic dominance and merit recruitment widened entry to the army, the foreign service and the administration. Historic networks remain influential in conservative politics, military culture, agricultural organisation and elite institutions, and the distribution of family names in the senior ranks of several professions is still narrower than chance would produce.

The style of German public argument is legalistic, procedural and slow. Disputes are referred to courts, to commissions and to negotiated agreements between organised interests more readily than in most democracies, and the resulting settlements are durable and are reached late. Germans complain about this constantly and defend it whenever a foreigner agrees with them.

Germany is not the UKA. Its Chancellor requires parliamentary confidence but also answers to an executive Kaiser with personal powers of dismissal and legislative veto. Its military carries unusual social prestige within a professional volunteer system. Its administrative culture prizes procedure, discipline and hierarchy in ways that a civic monarchy like the UKA does not. It is nevertheless constitutionally serious, legally ordered and industrially powerful.

Political participation

Turnout at Reichstag elections is high by international standards and has fallen steadily for four decades, from figures above ninety per cent in the postwar era to the high seventies. The decline is sharpest among the young, the poorly paid and the residents of the districts with the worst labour markets, which means the German electorate is now measurably older and better off than the German population and that the parties respond to the electorate.

Party membership has fallen further and faster. The mass organisations of the mid-century, the SPD above all, counted members in the millions and organised a substantial part of their supporters’ social lives through clubs, choirs, libraries and holiday associations. Those organisations survive in reduced form and the memberships are a fraction of what they were, with an age profile that every party’s internal reports describe in the same worried language.

What has not fallen is participation of other kinds. Membership of associations is stable. Signature counts on petitions to the Reichstag and to state legislatures have risen. Demonstrations are frequent, are lawful on notification rather than permission, and are policed on a doctrine of de-escalation that is written down and is generally though not invariably followed. Works council elections in the larger firms attract turnout that political parties envy, and the social insurance funds’ board elections attract almost none.

The German conclusion drawn from this, in the political science the Empire produces in some volume, is that participation has not declined but has moved from the durable and general to the specific and occasional, and that a political system built on mass parties and self-administering funds is poorly adapted to citizens who will sign, march and vote in a works council but will not join anything for thirty years.

Emergency powers

What the Constitution provides

The imperial Constitution contains a state of emergency provision permitting the suspension of specified constitutional rights and the exercise of extraordinary executive powers in defined circumstances. Its modern form dates from the postwar reconstruction and is deliberately narrow, and the narrowness is a considered response to the history of the article it replaced.

The declaration requires the assent of both the Reichstag and the Bundesrat, lapses automatically after a fixed period unless renewed by the same majorities, may be revoked at any time by a simple majority of the Reichstag alone, and does not permit the suspension of the courts, the dissolution of the chambers, the suspension of the constitutional amendment procedure or any interference with the Constitutional Court. Judicial review continues throughout. The rights that may be suspended are listed exhaustively.

Emergency powers over public health belong to the constituent states rather than the federation, which is why the response to the early-2020s pandemic was administered by twenty-seven governments and coordinated rather than directed from Berlin.

The older provision

The provision this replaced was the imperial state-of-siege power, which permitted the transfer of civil administration to military commanders and was used during the First Great War across much of the Empire. Under it military authorities censored the press, restricted assembly, directed labour and interned individuals on their own authority, in a regime that operated for four years with minimal parliamentary supervision and no judicial review worth the name.

The internments of 1940 in Prussia, which are required teaching, occurred under the successor powers before the postwar reform. The reform’s drafters had both episodes in front of them and wrote the present article to make them structurally impossible rather than merely unlikely, which is why every one of its safeguards is a specific answer to something that had actually happened.

The reserve powers question

The emergency article is separate from the Crown’s ordinary powers, and the relationship between them is the subject of a doctrinal argument that has never had to be settled in practice. The Kaiser’s veto and dismissal powers exist independently of any emergency and are not enlarged by one. The declaration is a legislative act requiring both chambers, so the Crown cannot declare an emergency and cannot prevent one.

What a Kaiser could do in a genuine breakdown, if the chambers could not meet or would not act, is unwritten. German constitutional lawyers discuss it in the conditional and in some volume. The general view is that the deliberate omission is itself the answer: the drafters considered a reserve power for the Crown and declined to write one, on the reasoning that a power written down is a power available, and that the Empire had recent evidence about what becomes available in an emergency to those entitled to define it.

The imperial house

The Hohenzollerns and the two crowns

The imperial crown rests on the House of Hohenzollern through the Prussian connection. The German Emperor is German Emperor because he is King of Prussia, the two offices are inseparable in succession, and they are separate in every other respect: separate acts, separate advice, separate records, separate seals, separate staffs and separate constitutional responsibility. An act done in the Prussian capacity is not an act of the Empire, and the distinction is a load-bearing rule of German public law rather than a formality.

The distinction is maintained in practice with a thoroughness that visitors find excessive and German officials regard as the minimum. Papers travel in separate streams. Private secretaries in one capacity have no authority in the other. When Heinrich I died in February 2028 the announcement was a single simultaneous communication containing two legally distinct instruments under two seals, and when he was buried the imperial state funeral at Berlin Cathedral was followed by a separately recorded Prussian committal at Potsdam. Even the burial kept the capacities apart.

The line

The modern Hohenzollern line is shaped by a death in England in 1840. Queen Victoria was assassinated in 1840 while four months pregnant. The Princess Royal was therefore never born, and the English marriage that would have carried the British line into the Prussian one never occurred. Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia married Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg in 1858 instead, and the line that inherited both crowns descends from that marriage.

What the Kaiser actually does

The Kaiser is an executive co-ruler rather than a ceremonial head of state, and the powers are real. He appoints the Imperial Chancellor and may personally dismiss him. He holds an absolute veto over ordinary imperial legislation. He is not part of the constitutional amendment procedure, which is the single clearest limit on the office: the Crown cannot block a change to the Constitution and cannot compel one.

The powers are used sparingly and their sparing use is practice rather than law. Heinrich I used the imperial absolute veto once in twenty-three years, during a security crisis under the Lenz ministry, with published constitutional reasons, and assented afterwards to materially revised legislation surrounded by warrants, time limits, disclosure and independent review. He dismissed nobody. Every ministerial transition of his reign followed an election, a coalition reconstruction, a resignation or a loss of confidence.

The restraint is not a guarantee and the Empire does not pretend otherwise. The dismissal power and the veto were legally real on the day Heinrich died and are legally real now. What has changed across a century is the political cost of using them, not the law.

The Kaiser has no authority whatsoever over the nuclear deterrent, no role in military appointments, operations or procurement, no direction of intelligence, police, prosecution or the courts, and no capacity to act in a constituent state’s affairs. There is no imperial doctrine of unilateral federal intervention, and Prussian forces, finance and administration may not be used as an imperial shortcut.

The doctrine of the Crown

The working doctrine of the modern German Crown was formulated by Heinrich I and has been inherited: a socially engaged Crown should visit, listen, remember and sometimes warn, but should not mistake visibility for a mandate to govern. In practice it produced a reign of visits to schools, hospitals, workplaces and civic institutions, and a settled habit of listening before speaking.

The doctrine is not merely personal style. It is an answer to the specific problem of an executive monarchy in a democratic century, which is that a Crown with real powers accumulates real expectations, and that the way to keep the powers is to disappoint the expectations gently and continuously.

The regency

Alexander I acceded at fourteen on 12 February 2028, was crowned German Emperor at Berlin Cathedral on 1 March, and his powers were exercised until October 2028 through a nine-member Regency Council, which acted for the imperial and Prussian offices in strictly separate sittings, with separate advice streams, separate votes, separate papers and separate records. The Council was abolished on 11 October 2028 by amendments to the imperial and Prussian Constitutions, and his sister Princess Charlotte has since exercised his powers as sole Regent, in each capacity separately.

Alexander assumes personal exercise of both offices at sixteen. From sixteen until eighteen the Regent continues in a supervisory and advisory role without power of her own, as the Council would have done. The accession was automatic and there was no interregnum: the regency governs the exercise of the Crown’s powers, not the possession of the Crown, and no consent by a minor sovereign was sought or required.

The Council’s early conduct in the Prussian capacity, and in particular its dismissal of the Falk ministry, is contested and is before the Prussian courts. The imperial government has kept out of that litigation, and the Chancellor’s decision to do so is generally regarded as the reason a Prussian constitutional crisis has not become an imperial one.

The court and the properties

The imperial and royal households are separate establishments with separate budgets, and the properties are divided between them and between the two states. The Berlin Schloss is the imperial and royal seat in the capital. The Potsdam palaces, Sanssouci, the Neues Palais and Cecilienhof among them, are Prussian. The civil lists are voted separately, by the Reichstag in the imperial capacity and by the Prussian Landtag in the royal one, and the accounts are audited.

The house is Protestant, and the King of Prussia is formal governor of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union. The imperial office carries no ecclesiastical position, because the Empire has no established church and its constituent states have several.

Law and the judiciary

The codes

German private law rests on the Civil Code, in force since 1900, a systematic codification prepared over two decades and drafted with a precision that made it a model for legal systems well outside Europe. It replaced a patchwork in which Roman common law, Prussian territorial law, the French codes still running in the Rhineland and a mass of local particular law had applied in different parts of one country, and its enactment did more to make the Empire a single legal space than any constitutional provision.

Alongside it stand the Commercial Code, the Criminal Code and the procedural codes, all of them imperial, all of them repeatedly amended and none of them replaced. The codes are federal law and apply uniformly. What varies between the constituent states is not the private law but its administration: the courts, the judges, the prosecutors, the prisons and the police are state institutions.

The court structure

Jurisdiction is divided into five separate branches, each with its own hierarchy and its own supreme court. The ordinary courts hear civil and criminal cases. The administrative courts hear disputes between the citizen and the state, and are the branch of which German lawyers are proudest, since the principle that an administration may be compelled by a court to justify itself was established in Germany earlier and more thoroughly than in most of Europe. The labour courts hear disputes arising from employment and from collective agreements and sit with lay assessors drawn from both sides of industry. The social courts hear disputes over insurance, pensions and benefits. The fiscal courts hear tax.

The separation is not merely administrative. It produces five bodies of specialist doctrine and five sets of judges who spend their careers within one of them, and it is the reason a German lawyer describes himself by branch before he describes himself by seniority.

The Imperial Court of Justice

The supreme court of ordinary jurisdiction is the Imperial Court of Justice, which sits at Leipzig in the Kingdom of Saxony. Its seat outside Prussia was deliberate at the foundation and has never been seriously questioned since: the Empire’s highest ordinary court was placed in another kingdom’s capital in order that it should not be a Berlin institution, and Saxony has held it for a century and a half with a proprietary satisfaction that Saxon ministers make no attempt to conceal.

The court hears appeals on points of law only. Its decisions bind the courts below, its published series is the backbone of German case law, and its senates are specialised by subject.

The Imperial Constitutional Court

The Imperial Constitutional Court sits at Karlsruhe in the Grand Duchy of Baden, again by deliberate choice and again outside Prussia. It is the youngest of the great German courts, having been given its present jurisdiction and independence in the constitutional settlement that followed the Second Great War, and it is now the most powerful.

Its jurisdiction covers disputes between the Empire and the constituent states, disputes between federal organs, the compatibility of statutes with the Constitution, and individual constitutional complaints, which any person may bring after exhausting the ordinary courts and which make up the overwhelming majority of its docket. Its judges are elected by the Reichstag and the Bundesrat in equal numbers by qualified majorities, which in practice requires agreement across the party families and produces a bench that no single coalition has chosen.

The court has struck down imperial statutes, has ruled against constituent states, and has twice ruled against acts of the Crown in the imperial capacity. It has never been defied. The 2028 proceedings over the Brunswick Motor Works, in which a duchy’s social-property clause is set against federal market, property and corporate law, are the most prominent matter currently before it, and its interim order preserving the works while suspending the penalties is characteristic of how it manages a dispute it is not yet ready to decide.

The judges

The judiciary is a career service entered young. A German judge qualifies by the same two state examinations as an administrator or an advocate, is appointed on probation, and is thereafter irremovable and not promoted by the executive. Judicial appointments and promotions are made by the constituent states through committees in which the judiciary itself and the state parliament both sit.

The consequence is a bench that is professional, homogeneous, procedurally exact and institutionally cautious. Its defenders say this is what judicial independence looks like when it is taken seriously. Its critics say a body recruited at twenty-five from the same faculties and promoted by its own members reproduces itself, and note that the social composition of the German judiciary has changed much less over three generations than that of the Reichstag, the civil service or the officer corps.

The record

The German judiciary’s own history is part of the required critical-history teaching and is not a comfortable one. Under the anti-socialist legislation of the 1870s and 1880s the courts enforced a body of law directed at a lawful political movement, dissolved its organisations, and imprisoned its editors and organisers, and they did so with an enthusiasm that the statutes did not require of them. Sentencing through the imperial period was measurably harsher for defendants of the labouring classes than for defendants of the propertied ones, in ways the criminal statistics of the time record plainly.

Jewish jurists were excluded in practice from the judiciary and the prosecution service for most of the imperial period, admitted to the bar and effectively barred from the bench, an exclusion that rested on administrative practice rather than statute and that was therefore never repealed but merely abandoned. It was not formally ended until after the Second Great War.

The courts also, and this belongs in the same account, resisted the executive at moments when it would have been easier not to. The administrative jurisdiction was built in the same decades as the anti-socialist laws by many of the same people, and the Empire acquired a real and enforceable law of administrative action at a time when its politics were unreformed. Both things happened, and the framework requires that both be taught.

The legal profession

Advocates are organised in chambers by court district, with compulsory membership and self-regulation under state supervision. Notaries form a separate branch in most of the Empire, with the Rhineland retaining a distinct organisation inherited from the French period. Legal aid is statutory and reasonably comprehensive, and the German propensity to litigate is high by European standards, supported by a widespread market in legal-expenses insurance that is itself a subject of professional complaint.

German constitutional thought

Germany produced the modern academic study of public law, and the discipline’s vocabulary, the constitutional state governed by law, the theory of the state as a legal person, the doctrine of proportionality, the distinction between the constitution as a document and the constitutional order as a reality, is German in origin and has been exported almost everywhere.

Its central preoccupation has always been the same one: how a state that is genuinely bound by law can also be strong enough to act. Nineteenth-century German theory answered by binding the administration while leaving the constitutional apex largely unbound, which is a fair description of the Empire before 1919: an administration answerable to courts under a government answerable to a monarch. The twentieth century’s work has been to bind the apex too, and the Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe is the institutional form that work took.

The proportionality test, which asks whether a measure is suitable, necessary and proportionate in the narrow sense to a legitimate aim, is the discipline’s most successful export and the ordinary method by which German courts decide whether an interference with a right is lawful. It structures administrative litigation, constitutional complaints and, increasingly, the jurisprudence of the European Concert’s court, where judges trained in German doctrine and German advocates have carried it wholesale.

The unresolved question in German constitutional theory is the one the Empire’s actual constitution leaves open. A Crown that retains an absolute veto and a power of dismissal is bound by convention rather than by law, and the discipline has never agreed on what that means. One school holds that a convention observed for a century, relied upon and enforced by political cost is law in every sense that matters. Another holds that a power which remains legally available is legally available, and that a theory which describes an unused power as extinguished is describing the politics and calling it law. The dispute was academic until February 2028.

The civil service

The professional official

The career civil service is a constitutional institution in Germany rather than an administrative arrangement, and its principles are entrenched: appointment on qualification, lifetime tenure, a duty of political loyalty to the constitutional order, a salary fixed by statute rather than negotiated, a pension paid directly by the employing state rather than through the insurance system, and no right to strike.

The bargain is explicit. The official surrenders the industrial rights that every other German employee possesses, and receives in exchange a security of tenure that no other German employee possesses. It is defended on the ground that the functions of the state cannot be interrupted and that an official who cannot be dismissed cannot be pressured, and it is criticised on the ground that a body which cannot strike and cannot be sacked is accountable to nobody in particular.

Not everyone who works for the German state is an official in this sense. Public employment is divided between officials proper and public employees on ordinary contracts with ordinary union rights, and the boundary between the two categories, which determines whether a teacher, a nurse or a railway worker may strike, is drawn differently in different constituent states and is litigated constantly.

Recruitment and the two examinations

Entry to the higher service requires a university education, in most branches a legal one, followed by two state examinations separated by a period of practical training in the courts and the offices. The route is long, is largely unchanged in a century and a half, and produces an administration dominated by lawyers with a common formation and a common vocabulary.

The consequences are visible in how Germany is governed. German administration is procedurally exact, documents everything, is slow, and is genuinely difficult to corrupt. It is also institutionally conservative, treats ministers as temporary, and has a well-developed capacity to obstruct a policy it dislikes without ever refusing to implement it.

The technical services, the forestry, water, building and statistical administrations, the teaching service and the medical service have their own parallel routes, and their long complaint is that the legal route dominates the senior posts even in departments whose work is not legal.

The reform, and what it did not reach

The imperial civil service before the Second Great War was a preserve. Its upper reaches were closed in practice to Jewish Germans, to Social Democrats and to those without private means during the unpaid training period, and its recruitment from the landed and official classes reproduced itself across generations.

Merit recruitment after the war, together with paid training and the expansion of university education, broke the formal barriers and widened entry substantially. What it did not do was change the social composition of the senior grades as fast as it changed that of the junior ones, and the studies conducted on this in every decade since have found the same thing: entry has broadened, the top has broadened more slowly, and the fastest route to a senior post still runs through a small number of faculties.

Imperial finance

How the Empire was originally funded, and why it changed

The Empire of 1871 had almost no revenue of its own. It lived on customs duties, on a few consumption taxes, and on matricular contributions requisitioned from the constituent states in proportion to population, and the direct taxes belonged to the states entirely. The arrangement was deliberate. It kept the federal government dependent on its members and was defended at the time as the guarantee that the Empire would not swallow them.

Its practical effect was that the imperial government was chronically short of money and that any expansion of federal activity required either a tariff or a negotiation with every state at once. The Empire spent its first fifty years devising indirect taxes to escape a constraint its own founders had built, and the constituent states spent the same fifty years resisting each one.

The fiscal reform of the settlement period, carried between 1919 and 1923 alongside the separation of the Chancellorship from the Prussian ministry and the capping of the Prussian vote, ended the arrangement. It gave the Empire the great direct taxes, converted the states from the Empire’s creditors into its beneficiaries, and established the shared-tax system that still operates. It was the largest single transfer of power to the federal level in German constitutional history and it was carried, characteristically, in the same period as the reforms that reduced the power of the largest state.

The shared taxes

Income tax, corporation tax and turnover tax are imperial taxes whose yield is divided between the Empire, the constituent states and the municipalities under statutes requiring the consent of the Bundesrat. Because the Bundesrat is a chamber of state governments, the states negotiate their own share, and the division statutes are among the hardest legislation to pass in the German system.

Beneath the vertical division runs the horizontal equalisation between states, which transfers revenue from the richer to the poorer. Bavaria and the south west are contributors. Prussia is a net contributor while containing the districts that most need the transfers, which is why Prussian ministers argue for a stronger scheme in provincial forums and for restraint in federal ones without any sense of contradiction. The eastern agricultural provinces, the Thuringian principalities and the poorer uplands are the principal beneficiaries.

The equalisation is litigated periodically before the Constitutional Court, has been amended after two of those cases, and is the single subject most likely to produce an alliance between constituent states that agree about nothing else.

The states’ own taxes and the reservations

The constituent states retain a small number of their own taxes and, in one case, a reserved power. Bavaria taxes beer and spirits within its own territory under a right reserved in its accession treaty of 1870, and the regulation of composition travels with the power to tax, which is what makes the Bavarian purity law a Bavarian statute. No other state holds anything comparable, and Bavaria has no general tax autonomy.

The states otherwise raise property transfer duty, gaming duties, licensing charges and the returns of state enterprises, forests and lotteries. The municipalities raise a trade tax on business, real property rates, and local charges, and receive a fixed share of the income tax. Municipal finance is the weakest link in the German fiscal system, because the trade tax is cyclical and falls hardest on exactly the industrial municipalities whose social spending rises when it falls.

The budget and the Reichstag

The imperial budget is annual, is introduced by the Imperial Finance Minister, and is the Reichstag’s most substantial power. The chamber’s budget committee examines it line by line, and the rule that no expenditure may be incurred without appropriation is the oldest and hardest of the constraints on the imperial executive. The Reichstag’s control of the budget is the reason the dual-confidence system works in practice: a Chancellor who holds the Kaiser’s confidence and has lost the chamber’s cannot obtain money.

Military expenditure was for the Empire’s first half-century voted in multi-year blocks rather than annually, an arrangement that removed the army from effective parliamentary scrutiny and that was one of the central constitutional grievances of the imperial period. It was ended in the settlement, and defence is now appropriated annually like everything else, with the deterrent carried on a separate published line at the insistence of the Reichstag and against the preference of successive ministries.

The central bank and the currency

The German mark is issued by an independent central bank whose independence is constitutional rather than statutory, placed beyond the reach of an ordinary majority after the monetary disorder of the interwar decades. Its mandate is price stability, stated in narrow terms, and it has interpreted the mandate narrowly.

The bank’s independence is the most exported German institution. It is admired by German savers, resented by German finance ministers, and cited across the European Concert by both the advocates of a common monetary order and its opponents, who read the same history in opposite directions. Several associated states peg to the mark and therefore import a monetary policy made in Berlin by people who are not accountable to them, a point their governments make regularly and to no effect.

Public debt

Imperial debt is moderate by international standards and is governed by a constitutional borrowing rule that limits structural deficits and permits departure only in a declared emergency or a severe downturn, with a repayment path fixed at the moment of departure. The rule was adopted after a long argument and was suspended once, during the early-2020s pandemic, under its own emergency procedure and with the repayment path duly fixed.

The rule’s critics, principally the SPD’s left and the USPD, argue that it has enforced under-investment in infrastructure, in the eastern provinces and in the municipalities, and point to the condition of bridges, schools and rail as the evidence. Its defenders point to the debt ratio. The argument has not moved in fifteen years.

Government below the Empire

Municipal self-government

Local self-government is not a federal competence and is not uniform. Each constituent state legislates its own municipal constitution, and the arrangements differ in detail across the Empire in ways that surprise Germans who move between states. What is common is the principle, entrenched in the imperial Constitution and in every state constitution, that municipalities administer all local affairs on their own responsibility within the law.

The principle is old. It descends from the reforms of the Prussian reform era at the beginning of the nineteenth century, spread across the German states in the decades afterwards, and it survives as a genuine constraint: municipalities litigate against their own state governments and win, and the Constitutional Court has developed a substantial jurisprudence on what the guarantee protects.

The municipal enterprises

German municipalities own things. The municipal works of a typical German town supply its electricity, gas, water, heating and public transport, are owned by the municipality, and are run as commercial undertakings whose surpluses cross-subsidise the loss-making services, above all the trams and buses.

The savings banks, publicly owned and municipally or district-anchored, form a banking sector of a kind that exists on this scale almost nowhere else, operating under a regional principle that restricts each to its own territory and prevents them competing with one another. Together with the cooperative banks they hold the great majority of German household deposits and finance the great majority of German small and medium firms, which is one of the structural reasons German industry is dispersed rather than concentrated.

Both sectors have been under pressure since the opening of the European Concert’s common market, which is neutral on who owns a bank and strict on how it behaves, so that public guarantees and the territorial restriction of competition are both questionable. Germany has defended them at Brussels, has lost ground on the guarantees and has held the territorial principle so far.

The great cities and the cross-state bodies

The largest cities are district-free and administer functions that elsewhere belong to a higher tier. Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck are more unusual still, being simultaneously cities and constituent states or, in Berlin’s case, a city within Prussia carrying an entirely exceptional set of arrangements as the seat of two governments.

Where an economic region crosses state boundaries the Empire has generally solved the problem by agreement between the states rather than by federal legislation. The Rhineland and Ruhr authority, which crosses two Prussian provinces and touches three other states, handles planning, transport and regional development through a joint body whose constitutional basis is an interstate treaty. Similar bodies govern the Rhine-Main region, the lower Elbe around Hamburg and the upper Rhine around Karlsruhe and Straßburg, the last of which now has a cross-border dimension inside the European Concert.

Constituent states

The German Empire is a federation of kingdoms, grand duchies, duchies, principalities and free cities under an imperial crown. It is not a flat country. Every member state retains its own monarchy or senate, its own government, its own courts and its own institutional life within the imperial framework, and many of them retain old names still doing modern work.

Kingdoms

Grand duchies

Duchies

Principalities

Free cities

Prussia within the Empire

Prussia is not a province. It is the largest constituent kingdom and the principal state power within the Empire. The Kaiser is simultaneously King of Prussia. The Prussian government, Landtag, military contingent, courts and provinces shape imperial politics in ways that no other constituent state can match.

Prussia supplies approximately fifty-five per cent of German active forces and thirty per cent of Bundesrat votes. Its scale gives it structural influence without making either the German Army or the Bundesrat a Prussian institution. Postwar land reform and federal balancing reduced the old Junker monopoly while leaving landed, military and administrative networks influential.

Other constituent states, Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony, Württemberg and the rest, retain real institutional life. Their parliaments function. Their courts operate. Their governments manage domestic affairs. But the Empire cannot be understood without Prussia, and Prussia cannot be simplified into merely another member of the federation.

Bavaria within the Empire

The Kingdom of Bavaria is the second state of the Empire and the only one whose accession was negotiated rather than acceded to. Bavaria entered last, in November 1870, by separate treaty rather than by simple accession, and it obtained reserved rights no other member state received: its own army in peacetime under its own War Ministry, its own diplomatic representation, its own post, telegraph and railways, its own military justice, the taxation of beer and spirits, and a permanent seat on the Bundesrat’s committee for foreign affairs.

Several of those rights are gone, surrendered by Bavaria itself in exchange for things it wanted more: the post and telegraph in the 1920s for imperial investment, the railways at mid-century for money and rural-line guarantees, military justice after the Second Great War. What remains is the army in peacetime, the legations, the beer law and the committee seat. The kingdom sold the reservations that were worth money and kept the ones that were merely dignified, and what it retained is not power but standing.

The arrangement’s practical residue is small and its constitutional weight is not. Bavaria is the reason the imperial federation cannot be described as a uniform structure with a large member, and the reason every federal negotiation begins from the position that the member states are not interchangeable. The cabinet at Munich still holds a War Minister and a Minister for Foreign Affairs, neither of which exists in any other state government, and the second of them publishes a description of its functions notable chiefly for what it says the ministry does not do.

Hanover within the Empire

The Kingdom of Hanover holds a particular position within the German federal structure. Hanover joined the Empire as a constituent kingdom, maintaining its dynastic identity within the broader imperial order, and it governs through its own Landtag, Minister-President, courts and Royal Archives. Its dynastic connection to the British royal house, the Hanoverian line that produced the British Crown, gives Hanover a symbolic weight in Anglo-German relations that no other constituent state possesses. George V of the House of Hanover reigns, as his father Ernest V did until 31 October 2028, as King of Hanover and also as King of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom of America, so that the link between the German imperial structure and the wider Crown-realm world is a recurring diplomatic fact rather than a historical curiosity.

Through the House of Welf succession the same sovereign also holds the Duchy of Brunswick. When the Brunswick ducal line ended in 1884, Ernest III inherited automatically under settled Welf law, an outcome that annexation of Hanover by Prussia would have foreclosed. The two states remain separate under their own institutions and advice, although both Crowns rest on the same head.

Hanover’s importance comes from the Crown Exception: a narrow protected arrangement allowing Hanover to handle specific Crown-to-Crown matters without routing them through ordinary German imperial foreign policy. It belongs to Hanover alone. Brunswick receives no equivalent and cannot use Hanoverian offices to conduct ducal or foreign business. The King of Hanover is also George V, King of the UKA, Britain, Ireland, New Wessex, New Albion, South Africa, the River Plate, the West Indies Federation and the Philippines, King and Protector of Malaya, Duke of Normandy and Brunswick, and Emperor of Raj, eleven kingdoms, two duchies and one empire in total. Hanover is where those multiple capacities are kept constitutionally separate from one another and from Germany’s foreign-policy apparatus.

Brunswick within the Empire

The Duchy of Brunswick is the Empire’s clearest example of a small constituent state whose institutions remain politically substantive. Its historic fragments and exclaves are joined through German citizenship, the common market, rail regulation and guaranteed interstate service corridors rather than territorial consolidation. The duchy governs under the continuously amended Constitution of 1919 through a 60-seat Landtag, responsible ministry, ceremonial Landesverweser and a State Constitutional Court at Helmstedt.

Brunswick’s economic identity is mobility engineering governed through codetermination, sectoral bargaining, paid transition rights and a public development bank. The 2028 dispute over Brunswick Motor Works has therefore become a German constitutional case: the duchy has imposed a five-year closure moratorium under its social-property clause, while Continental Transport AG argues that federal market, property and corporate law forbid one state from freezing a plant. The Imperial Constitutional Court’s interim order preserves the works while suspending penalties. The case illustrates the Empire’s federal bargain at its most exact. Brunswick may govern real economic life; it may not pretend Germany has no law above it.

Elsaß-Lothringen

Elsaß-Lothringen, Alsace-Lorraine, is the western frontier territory incorporated into the Empire following the Franco-Prussian War and constituted as a grand duchy with its seat at Straßburg. It is German in administration, bilingual in life, and constitutionally contested in identity. Its French-speaking population has never fully reconciled with German governance. Its German-speaking communities have their own complicated relationship with imperial authority. Elsaß-Lothringen is Germany’s permanent western question: a zone of memory and language pressure where the Empire’s relationship with France is most legible on the ground. Its capital now houses the parliament of the European Concert, which has given the most contested territory in western Germany an unexpected second career as a European capital.

Why the small states survived

The Empire contains states whose populations are smaller than a modest town’s, and the reason they exist is that they existed in 1871 and nothing since has removed them. Unification was a treaty between princes, not a reorganisation of territory, and the Empire has never possessed a power to abolish a constituent state or to redraw its borders without its consent.

Proposals to consolidate have been made repeatedly, most seriously in the settlement period and again after the Second Great War, and have failed each time on the same obstacle: a merger requires the agreement of the states merged, the states have never agreed, and the constitutional amendment that would permit compulsion requires ratification by the states that would be compelled. The Thuringian principalities have accordingly cooperated intensively, sharing courts, higher administration, broadcasting and a good deal else through interstate treaties, while remaining separate sovereignties with separate crowns, and the arrangement is generally regarded as the German solution to a German problem.

The asymmetry is extreme and permanent. Prussia holds approximately 348,000 square kilometres and some sixty million people, more than half the Empire on either measure. Reuss Elder Line holds a valley. Both send delegations to the Bundesrat, both have a Landtag, both have a court, and the constitution treats them as members of the same class.

The states’ own institutions

Every constituent state has its own constitution, its own legislature, its own ministry responsible to that legislature, its own courts including in most cases a constitutional court, its own civil service and its own established or concordat relationship with a church. Several have institutions the Empire lacks: Bavaria has a War Ministry and a Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Prussia has three capitals discharging distinct functions, Brunswick has a ceremonial regent rather than a reigning duke exercising power.

The states legislate on education, policing, local government, culture, broadcasting, planning, health provision, the courts’ organisation and much of the environment. They administer nearly all imperial law. They levy a small number of their own taxes, receive the largest share of the shared taxes, and negotiate the division in the Bundesrat as governments rather than as parties.

State politics are genuinely distinct from federal politics rather than a reflection of them. State elections turn on state questions, produce coalitions that do not match the federal one, and make and unmake political careers on their own terms. A Minister-President of Bavaria, Saxony or Württemberg is a considerable figure who need never sit in the Reichstag.

The larger states in their own right

Bavaria is the second kingdom by population and area and the most constitutionally distinct member of the federation, holding some fifteen and a half million people across eight provinces, one of which lies detached beyond the Rhine. It is Catholic, dispersed rather than concentrated in its industry, and alone among the states in retaining rights it negotiated rather than received.

Saxony is the Empire’s third kingdom by population, industrial and technically accomplished, with Dresden as its royal and cultural capital and Leipzig as its commercial and intellectual one, and it maintains an institutional and cultural life entirely outside Prussian or Bavarian gravity. Its precision and instrument trades, its publishing and its music are national assets, and the Saxon possession of the Imperial Court of Justice at Leipzig is a source of satisfaction that Saxon ministers make no attempt to conceal.

Württemberg is the engineering kingdom of the south west, prosperous, Protestant in its core and pietist in its history, with a civic and associational tradition that produced a distinctive small-firm industrial structure. Baden is the most legalistic and academically oriented of the grand duchies, holds Heidelberg and the Imperial Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe, and carries a liberal constitutional tradition older than the Empire.

Hesse is a middling grand duchy seated at Darmstadt, and it does not contain Frankfurt, which lies across the boundary in Prussian Hesse-Nassau. What it does contain is the southern half of a metropolitan region whose centre belongs to another state, which is a problem of scale that Hesse has never had the weight to solve. Elsaß-Lothringen is the contested western grand duchy and now the seat of the European Concert’s parliament. The Mecklenburgs, Oldenburg and the northern principalities are agricultural, conservative and thinly populated. Anhalt carries the Bauhaus inheritance and a mixed industrial and agricultural economy.

The three free cities, Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck, are republics inside a monarchy, governed by senates and burgher assemblies, with no prince, no court and no nobility of their own. They are the Empire’s oldest constitutional anomaly and the one it has never found the slightest difficulty in accommodating.

How federalism works in practice

The formal division of competences describes less of German government than the informal machinery that has grown around it. Most substantial policy is made through joint arrangements: standing conferences of state ministers by portfolio, whose agreements bind by convention; interstate treaties, which have the force of law between their parties; joint funding programmes in which the Empire pays and the states execute; and a continuous process of negotiation between the Chancellery and the state chanceries that has no constitutional basis whatever.

The standing conference of education ministers is the clearest example, determining what is taught to every child in the Empire without any legislative authority at all. The conferences of interior, justice, health and economics ministers work similarly. Their agreements are negotiated by officials, ratified by ministers, and enforced by the practical impossibility of a state departing from a standard its neighbours apply.

The system is criticised, by German constitutional lawyers more than by anyone else, as government by a body of ministers accountable individually to twenty-seven legislatures and collectively to none. The defence is that a federation of this asymmetry cannot function on the written competences alone, and that the alternative to informal coordination is either federal centralisation or twenty-seven incompatible regimes. Both defences are accurate and neither answers the objection.

Where the money goes and who decides

The financial relationship is the one the states care about most. They receive the largest share of the shared taxes, negotiate the division as governments in the Bundesrat, and are bound into a horizontal equalisation that transfers between them. They also depend on joint programmes in which federal money arrives with federal conditions attached, and the standing complaint of every state government of every party is that the conditions amount to federal policy in areas of state competence purchased with the states’ own tax share.

The Constitutional Court has adjudicated this repeatedly and has produced a jurisprudence limiting the conditions the Empire may attach. The limits are respected in form. The negotiation continues in substance, because a state that refuses a programme forgoes the money and its neighbours do not.

The armed forces

A common army of contingents

The German Army is one army composed of state contingents, and the arrangement is a constitutional survival that has been made to work rather than a piece of ceremony. Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg each retain a contingent with its own name, traditions, recruiting area and, in Bavaria’s case, its own War Ministry. The smaller states’ forces were absorbed into the Prussian contingent by convention in the nineteenth century and their names survive in regimental titles.

Prussia supplies approximately fifty-five per cent of active strength and Bavaria approximately an eighth. Equipment, doctrine, ranks, training standards, discipline and pay are imperial and uniform. No contingent has an independent operational capacity and none claims one. State war ministers are subordinate to the Imperial Defence Minister in all federal defence matters, and on mobilisation every contingent passes wholly to imperial command.

What the contingents actually preserve is recruitment, administration, basing, regimental identity and a set of oaths. The Bavarian soldier swears to his King in the Bavarian capacity and to the imperial Constitution, and the practical content of the first oath is nil while the symbolic content is considerable. An imperial deputy proposes to tidy the arrangement away about once a generation and is told at length why it will not be tidied.

The one genuinely operational consequence is specialisation. Bavaria supplies the Empire’s mountain formations, and the specialisation protects the whole arrangement, because a general staff that might otherwise regard a separate contingent as a nineteenth-century survival has a concrete reason to keep this one.

The General Staff

The Great General Staff was Prussian until 1919. It planned for the Empire, drew its officers from the Prussian service, reported through the Prussian military cabinet and was answerable to the King of Prussia in that capacity, which meant that the Empire’s war planning was conducted by an institution over which the imperial government had no direct authority.

The settlement of 1919 transferred it to the Empire. The transfer belongs with the separation of the Chancellorship from the Prussian ministry and the capping of the Prussian Bundesrat vote, and the three together are properly read as one act: they converted Prussia from the state through which the Empire was governed into the largest of the states the Empire governs. Of the three, the General Staff transfer was resisted hardest and conceded last.

The staff is now an imperial body under the Defence Ministry, its officers drawn from all contingents, and its chief is a serving officer answerable to a civilian minister who is answerable to the Reichstag. The chain is written down, is short, and is one of the things about the modern Empire that its own conservatives find least congenial and its neighbours find most reassuring.

The Navy and the Air Force

The Imperial Navy was never a contingent force. It was created after unification, was imperial from the first day, and has no state components, which is why it is the only German service in which the federal question has never arisen. Its bases are at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven with the Baltic and North Sea commands, and its long argument with the Army over the share of the estimates is the oldest continuous dispute in German defence policy.

The Imperial Air Force, the Luftwaffe, was formed as a separate service between the wars out of the flying troops of the army and the naval air arm, and it too is wholly imperial. It carries the air component of the deterrent.

Service and the officer corps

Service is professional and voluntary. Peacetime conscription was ended in the postwar decades after an argument that ran for fifteen years, and the arguments used against abolition, that a professional army becomes a caste, are the arguments still used by the critics of the present arrangement.

The officer corps was for the whole imperial period a Prussian noble preserve in its upper reaches, and the phrase used at the time, that the army was the school of the nation, described a school with a strictly regulated entrance. Merit recruitment after the Second Great War widened entry substantially and the composition of the corps today bears little resemblance to that of 1914. What survived the reform is a set of networks, a distribution of family names in the senior ranks that is still noticeably narrower than chance would produce, and a social prestige attaching to the uniform that is unusual among industrial democracies and is regarded within Germany as either a healthy respect for service or an unreformed residue, according to the speaker.

Military justice is administered by ordinary courts in peacetime, a change made after the Second Great War when the separate military jurisdiction was abolished. Bavaria’s reserved right of military justice went at the same time and by the same statute, and its surrender is one of the three reservations Bavaria gave up.

The deterrent

Germany is one of six recognised nuclear powers, with the United Kingdom of America, Great Britain, China, Russia and Raj. Its deterrent is independent: it is not assigned to an ally, is not held under a shared key, and is not dependent on another state for its warheads, its delivery systems or its targeting.

Its constitutional position is the point that matters, and it is stated with an exactness that repays attention. The deterrent exists under statute rather than prerogative. Its employment is a decision of ministers answerable to the Reichstag. Its funding is voted annually on a separate published line. The chain of authority from the Chancellor through the Defence Minister to the executing commands is documented, published in outline and audited, and the identity of every officeholder in it is a matter of public record.

The Kaiser has no part in it whatsoever: no target selection, no posture decision, no launch authority and no personal veto. The sovereign who retains an absolute veto over ordinary legislation and a personal power to dismiss the Chancellor has no authority at all over the Empire’s nuclear weapons, and the asymmetry is deliberate. It was settled when the deterrent was acquired, was insisted upon by the Reichstag as the price of the appropriation, and was accepted by the Crown of the day without public objection. German constitutional lawyers describe it as the clearest single demonstration that the executive Crown is a creature of law rather than a residue of personal rule.

The deterrent’s size is modest by comparison with the American and Russian arsenals and is not published in detail. Its declared doctrine is retaliatory. The standing argument about it in the Reichstag concerns cost, the replacement cycle for the delivery systems, and whether a Germany inside the European Concert and the Atlantic Treaty Organization needs its own at all, a question on which the SPD is divided against itself and has been for forty years.

Deployment and the associated states

Defence of the associated states is a common responsibility discharged in practice by the Empire, which maintains small garrisons, a naval presence in the Pacific and West African stations, training missions, and since 1994 a standing arrangement with the East African Federation. The arrangements are set out in the individual treaties of association and differ between them. The West African station is at Duala in Kamerun, with a garrison at Jaunde, and since 2014 German troops have fought beside Kamerun’s gendarmerie against Boko Haram raids into its far north, the first German combat in Africa since 1945; eleven German soldiers were killed in an ambush near the Lake Chad shore in 2015.

German forces otherwise deploy under the Atlantic Treaty Organization, under League of Nations mandates, and for disaster relief. Deployment abroad requires a prior resolution of the Reichstag in each case, a rule adopted in the postwar decades that has no exception for urgency and that has twice delayed a deployment past the point of usefulness. The rule’s defenders regard both occasions as the cost of the principle.

The military in society

The uniform carries a social prestige in Germany unusual among industrial democracies, and the fact is acknowledged inside the country rather than concealed. Officers are addressed by rank in civilian life, reserve commissions are noted in professional biographies, and the regimental and veterans’ associations are a substantial element of associational life, particularly in the smaller towns of the north and east.

The prestige is a residue of the imperial period, when the army was described as the school of the nation and its officer corps was a closed caste, and it survived the postwar reforms that opened recruitment because prestige is not a personnel policy. Its defenders describe it as a healthy respect for a difficult profession in a country that has asked a great deal of it. Its critics describe it as an unreformed inheritance and point to the persistence of particular family names in the senior ranks and to the difficulty successive defence ministers have had in imposing civilian judgement on professional advice.

Both accounts have to accommodate the fact that the Empire’s civilian control is stronger on paper and in practice than its reputation abroad suggests. The General Staff is an imperial body under a civilian minister answerable to the Reichstag. Deployment abroad requires a prior resolution of the chamber with no exception for urgency. Military jurisdiction over soldiers in peacetime was abolished after the Second Great War. And the deterrent is outside the Crown’s authority altogether.

Veterans’ organisations are large, are politically courted and have a complicated relationship with the critical-history framework, since the conduct of German forces in both wars is required content and the associations’ membership includes people who served. The associations’ own position, arrived at over three decades and not uncontested within them, is that the required teaching is compatible with honouring service, and that the alternative proposition, that a country may not examine what its army did, is one no serving officer should want to defend.

Foreign relations

The three-power core

German foreign policy rests on the alliance that won both Great Wars: Germany, Great Britain and the United Kingdom of America. The relationship survived the transition from wartime coalition to peacetime alliance, which most such coalitions do not, and it survived because all three powers wanted the same settlement and none of them wanted the others’ territory.

The relationship with the UKA is the closest and the least equal. The Realm is larger, richer in aggregate and less dependent, and it is not a member of the European Concert, which it regards with the goodwill of a patron who has declined to join. German policy towards the Realm is conducted on the assumption that American support is reliable and American attention is not, and the imperial foreign service has an institutional habit of explaining Europe to New Westminster at greater length than New Westminster wishes.

The relationship with Great Britain carries an additional constitutional thread that exists nowhere else. George V is King of Hanover, a constituent state of the Empire, as well as King of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom of America. The Crown Exception allows Hanover to handle specific Crown-to-Crown matters without routing them through imperial foreign policy, and the arrangement is narrow, is policed, and belongs to Hanover alone.

France

France is the permanent western question and the relationship that defines German policy more than any other. France was the enemy in both Great Wars, was the fascist power of the twentieth century, occupied German soil and reached Berlin, and was rebuilt after 1945 as a constitutional parliamentary empire under Bonapartist legitimacy rather than restored as a republic.

The settled doctrine of the imperial foreign service is that German policy towards France succeeds when it is strong, lawful and patient, and fails when it treats a victory as a permanent possession rather than as something that has to be defended. The doctrine is taught to entrants and is quoted at ministers by their own officials.

Its most remarkable product is the European Concert itself, founded at Straßburg in 2027 as a Franco-German initiative. That the two states which fought both Great Wars against one another jointly proposed a supranational union, and that they did so while the memory of the second was still within living memory for the oldest generation, is the largest single fact about the present European order. It is also very new, is contested in both countries, and has not yet been tested by a serious dispute.

Elsaß-Lothringen and the residue

The one territorial question between them is Elsaß-Lothringen, taken from France in 1871, held through both wars, and constituted as a grand duchy. No French government has pressed a claim to it since the fall of the fascist regime, though the settlement of 1945 left the question formally open and it lived on in French politics, and France formally renounced any claim in the treaty establishing the Concert. The renunciation was the hardest article to negotiate and is the one most often cited in France by the Concert’s opponents.

Within the grand duchy the question is not territorial but linguistic and constitutional, and it is live. Straßburg now houses the Concert’s parliament, which has given the most contested territory in western Germany an unexpected second career and has changed the local argument in ways nobody predicted, since a European capital has interests of its own.

Russia

The Russian Republic is the antagonist of the postwar world and the reason the Atlantic Treaty Organization exists. The cold war between the monarchies and the republic shaped four decades of German policy, placed the Empire’s eastern provinces on the front line of a continental confrontation, and paid for a great deal of the infrastructure of the eastern districts as a by-product.

That confrontation has faded rather than ended. Trade has resumed, the eastern provinces have become a corridor rather than a glacis, and the German business interest in the Russian market is substantial and politically organised. The security establishment’s assessment has not softened as fast as the commercial one, and the gap between the two is the most consequential unresolved argument in German foreign policy. It runs through the governing coalition rather than between government and opposition.

The alliance and the institutions

Germany is a founding member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in 1949 under the American Prime Minister Harry S. Truman on a basis of Atlantic geography and willingness rather than any test of constitutional form, and it is the largest continental contributor to it. Alliance policy belongs to ministers, parliaments and treaty institutions rather than to the Crown, a point the imperial government makes routinely and which is worth making because the alliance is popularly understood in Germany as an association of monarchies, which it is not.

Germany holds a permanent seat on the Security Council of the reconstituted League of Nations at Kyoto. It is a founding power of the European Concert and is, with France, its principal engine and its principal constraint, since a union in which the largest economy is also the largest net contributor and the most cautious about supranational competence tends to advance at that economy’s pace.

Mitteleuropa

Mitteleuropa is the older German arrangement in central and eastern Europe: a system of trade agreements, currency arrangements, transport conventions, technical standards and development finance binding the Empire to the Habsburg lands, the buffer states, the Balkan monarchies and the eastern kingdoms. It grew out of the settlement of 1919 as the economic dimension of a security guarantee and was for two generations the principal instrument of German influence east of the Empire.

Its record is mixed and is contested by its members rather than by outsiders. It brought capital, railways, industrial technique and market access to countries that had little of any of them. It also locked several of them into supplying raw materials and agricultural produce to German industry on terms set in Berlin, and the industrial development that did occur was concentrated in the sectors German industry wanted supplied. The word Mitteleuropa is used in Germany without embarrassment and in Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade with a good deal.

The arrangement now nests within the European Concert, most of its members having joined the union that has absorbed the functions Mitteleuropa performed. What survives is a development bank, a set of technical bodies, and a habit of consultation. German officials describe the nesting as the natural evolution of a regional order into a European one. The smaller members’ officials describe it, in private and occasionally in public, as the moment the arrangement finally acquired a court that Germany does not control.

The wider world

Relations with the Empire of China are commercially enormous and politically correct rather than warm, the return of the Kiaochow lease having removed the one standing grievance. Japan leads the Pacific institutions and is a close economic partner and a maritime one. The Empire of Raj is a nuclear power, a major trading partner and a fellow monarchy with which Germany has no history of conflict, which German diplomats note is a rarer condition than it sounds. The Union of South Africa is the state to which Germany ceded South West Africa, and the relationship carries that history and the unresolved reparation question with it.

Germany maintains a substantial development programme outside the association, votes with its Concert partners at the League more often than not, and has a settled policy of not taking positions on the internal constitutional arrangements of other states, which is convenient, is consistently applied, and is a policy the Empire adopted after discovering during the interwar period how much damage the opposite habit could do.

Austria and the German question

The most consequential fact about the German Empire’s borders is who is outside them. Austria-Hungary is a sovereign state of some seventy-five million people, allied to the Empire and culturally close to it, in which German is the imperial language and the Emperor-King reigns in four co-equal capacities. It is not part of Germany and has not been since 1866.

The exclusion was Prussia’s work and was deliberate. The war of 1866 settled the constitutional question of German unification by removing the alternative answer, and the Empire that followed is therefore a smaller Germany, built around Prussia, rather than the greater Germany that would have included the Habsburg lands and could not have been led from Berlin. Every subsequent feature of the Empire follows from that choice: its Protestant plurality, its Prussian centre of gravity, its manageable size and the fact that it contains one great power rather than two.

The German question in its nineteenth-century form is therefore closed, and the Empire treats it as closed. What survives is a relationship of unusual intimacy between two separate states: a common literary language and a shared cultural inheritance that neither can claim exclusively, dense economic integration through Mitteleuropa and now through the European Concert, an alliance that has held through both Great Wars, and a settled mutual understanding that union is not on the agenda and that raising it would be an unfriendly act.

The understanding is not merely sentimental. A union of the two would produce a German state of nearly two hundred million people in the centre of Europe, and every other power on the continent has an interest in its not occurring, including France inside the Concert Germany helped design. German governments are aware of this, say nothing about it in public, and have declined every opportunity to test it. The one German party that has periodically raised greater-German themes is the DKP’s national wing, which raises them for domestic consumption and has never carried a resolution.

The European neighbours

Germany’s relations with the smaller states of Europe are conducted mostly through the Concert now, and the bilateral texture beneath that is older and more varied than the union’s uniform procedures suggest.

The Benelux states occupy the ground that was the Empire’s central strategic anxiety in the 1930s, when French pressure on the Low Countries carried the message that a war would not remain regional. That memory shapes German policy towards them still: the Empire is careful with the Low Countries in a way it is not careful with states of comparable size elsewhere, and the Rhine, which carries the Ruhr’s trade to the sea through their territory, gives them a standing leverage over German industry that they have never needed to use and both sides can calculate.

The Scandinavian Union is a close economic partner, a fellow member of the Concert and, on several of the union’s arguments, Germany’s most reliable ally, since both are net contributors with strong domestic institutions they are reluctant to see harmonised away. The Socialist Kingdom of Italy is a founding power of the Concert and a partner with whom German relations are correct, commercially substantial and marked by a persistent mutual incomprehension about economic policy that neither government has resolved in eighty years.

The Byzantine Federation sits at the eastern end of the Concert’s reach and at the junction of German, Russian and Levantine interests, and German policy towards it is conducted with an attentiveness that its size alone would not command. The buffer states of central Europe, the older Mitteleuropa partners, are the countries where German influence is oldest, most institutionalised and most resented, and where the transfer of those functions into the Concert has been received with a relief that their officials express privately and their ministers do not.

Switzerland is German-speaking in its majority, holds a seat in the Concert on an instrument of its own that keeps it in the market and out of the politics, is not in the Empire, and has never been seriously proposed for the Empire by anyone whose opinion mattered.

German forces in the two wars

The Empire’s armies fought the First Great War on two fronts and its decisive theatre was the western one, where the German army bore the weight of the continental effort while the British blockade tightened and the American entry in 1916 supplied the manpower and industry that settled the matter. The only large invasion of German soil was the Russian entry into East Prussia in the opening weeks, which was destroyed by the following spring.

The Second Great War was different in kind. Fascist France attacked with an operational doctrine the German staff had studied and underestimated, drove deep into Germany, and reached the imperial capital. The Battle for Berlin in the winter of 1941 is the central event of the German twentieth century: the capital was fought over, the Emperor remained in it, and the front was afterwards stabilised on the Weser rather than restored. The recovery took four years, and the taking of Paris in 1945 occupies less space in German memory than the winter in which the enemy was in Berlin.

The conduct of German forces in both wars is required teaching and is not treated as a settled account. The occupations, the requisitions, the treatment of prisoners and civilians in the eastern theatre of the first war and in the reconquered territories of the second, and the internments of 1940, are all within the framework’s required content. The German military’s own historical service produced the first serious studies of several of these, which is a fact its defenders cite and its critics observe took a very long time.

What the Empire commemorates is service and loss. There is no victory day, the anniversaries are observed in a register of obligation rather than triumph, and the memorials of the western and southern provinces record French occupation and German civilian death in a country that had been told for a generation that it was the strongest power in Europe.

The Empire and the European Concert

What Germany joined

The European Concert was established by the Treaty of Straßburg in 2027 as a supranational union of the European monarchical order, on a Franco-German initiative, and Germany is its largest member by economy and by net contribution and, with the Byzantine Federation, by population. The union is deep by design rather than by evolution: it began with a directly elected parliament, a commission under a President of the Concert, a council of governments, a common market and a court whose rulings override national law within the union’s competences, and it began with all of them at once.

Germany’s participation is the largest transfer of competence in its constitutional history and was carried through the amendment procedure, with three-fifths in both chambers and ratification by all twenty-seven constituent states. Four states ratified late and two attached formal declarations. The Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe examined the treaty on referral and held it compatible with the Constitution while reserving, in terms that have been read very carefully in Straßburg, the question of what would happen if the Concert’s institutions acted beyond the competences conferred.

Why Germany wanted it

The German case rested on three arguments made in different registers to different audiences. To the security establishment, the Concert binds a rehabilitated France into a structure it helped design, which is a better guarantee than any treaty of restraint imposed on a defeated power, and the Empire had eighty years of evidence about what the alternative produces. To industry, the common market removes the residual frictions in Germany’s largest export destination. To the public, the Concert was presented as the completion of the postwar settlement rather than as a departure from it.

The argument that persuaded the Reichstag was the first. The doctrine that German policy towards France succeeds when it is strong, lawful and patient, and fails when it treats a victory as a permanent possession, points towards exactly this kind of arrangement, and the officials who drafted the German negotiating position said so in terms.

What Germany resists

Germany is simultaneously the Concert’s engine and its principal brake, which is the ordinary position of a union’s largest and most cautious member and is nonetheless resented.

The Empire has defended the public and cooperative banking pillars against the Concert’s rules on state guarantees and territorial restriction of competition, has lost ground on the guarantees and held the territorial principle. It has defended the coordinated model’s sectoral agreements and their extension by ministerial declaration. It has resisted proposals for common borrowing, on grounds that are constitutional as much as fiscal, since a borrowing rule entrenched in the German Constitution is difficult to reconcile with joint liability for other states’ debt. And the social-property clause litigation, of which the Brunswick Motor Works case is the current instance, sets a constituent state’s power to restrain the closure of a viable works directly against the Concert’s rules on capital and establishment.

The last is the sharpest, because it is not a dispute between Germany and the Concert but a dispute inside Germany that the Concert has made unavoidable. The coordinated model’s constitutional duty on productive property and the common market’s freedom of capital cannot both be unlimited, and Germany has spent a century building institutions on the assumption that the first would not be seriously tested.

The Concert’s German problem

From the other side, the union’s difficulty with Germany is the surplus. A union whose largest economy runs a persistent current account surplus, restrains its own wages and constrains its own public investment by constitutional rule exports its adjustment to its partners, and the partners say so with increasing directness at Straßburg.

The German answer, that no government can be asked to make its industry worse, is true and is not an answer to the question asked. The reply that German public investment is constrained by a rule Germans adopted for themselves and could amend is also true and is not one German ministers can act on without an amendment procedure requiring twenty-seven ratifications. The exchange has become ritual.

Straßburg

The Concert’s parliament sits at Straßburg, in the German grand duchy of Elsaß-Lothringen, which is the most contested territory in western Germany and has acquired an unexpected second career as a European capital. The choice was French in origin and German in acceptance, and both governments understood the symbolism precisely.

The local effect has been to change the argument within the grand duchy in ways nobody predicted. A European capital generates its own interests, its own population and its own relationship to both national governments, and the language question in Elsaß-Lothringen is now conducted partly in a European register that neither Berlin nor Paris controls.

The overseas empire and the associated states

The colonies

Germany acquired overseas territories late, held them for a shorter period than the older colonial powers, and governed them through a Colonial Office at Berlin that was created after most of the acquisitions had already been made. At their fullest extent the protectorates comprised Togoland and Kamerun on the West African coast, German East Africa between the great lakes and the Indian Ocean, German South West Africa, the leased territory of Kiaochow on the Shantung coast with its port at Tsingtao, German New Guinea with the archipelagos to its north and east, the Micronesian island groups, and German Samoa.

The administration was small, chronically underfunded and dependent on locally recruited troops and on the cooperation of rulers whom it recognised in order to govern through. Settlement was significant only in South West Africa. The economic case was made in terms of raw materials, coaling stations and prestige, and for most of the period the territories cost the imperial budget more than they returned to it, a fact that colonial enthusiasts disputed at the time and that the imperial accounts support.

In Kamerun the seizure of the Duala people’s land on the coast was resisted by King Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, who was hanged for it in 1914; a joint commission later called the execution a judicial murder, and the Reichstag rehabilitated him in 2016.

The Herero and Nama genocide

Between 1904 and 1908 the German colonial forces in South West Africa destroyed the greater part of the Herero and Nama peoples. The campaign began as a response to an uprising against land seizure and forced labour, and became something else. The commanding general issued an extermination order in the field, the Herero were driven into the Omaheke desert and the water sources were sealed against them, and those who survived the desert and those taken afterwards, together with the Nama who rose subsequently, were held in camps where deaths from starvation, disease and forced labour were on a scale the German authorities themselves recorded.

The best estimates are that a substantial majority of the Herero population and around half of the Nama population died. It was a genocide, it was carried out by the armed forces of the German Empire under orders issued in the field and under a civil administration that supplied the camps, and the responsibility is the Empire’s. The extermination order was disavowed at Berlin after it became public and after it had done its work, and the disavowal did not end the camps.

The Empire did not reckon with this for the greater part of a century. The colonial record was taught, where it was taught at all, as an episode of administration, and the killing appeared in the literature as a war. That changed in stages from the 1970s under pressure from Herero and Nama organisations, from historians, and from the archives themselves, which the Empire had kept in the meticulous order that turned out to be the strongest evidence against it. The Empire formally recognised the events as genocide, apologised, and entered into negotiations over reparation.

Those negotiations are not concluded and are complicated by facts that Germany created and cannot now undo. South West Africa was not among the territories converted into associated states. It was ceded to South Africa in 1919, and the descendants of the survivors lived for seventy years as subjects of another Crown’s realm, which imposed its own racial legislation upon them. Since 1990 they have been citizens of an independent Namibia, which associated with the Empire in the year of its independence over their objections, and the association is a live dispute. The Empire negotiates with a government that Herero and Nama organisations do not accept as speaking for them on this, about a wrong done before that government existed, in a territory the Empire gave away and has since taken back into association. Herero and Nama organisations have said consistently that they will not accept a settlement negotiated between two states over their heads, and the German government has accepted the principle and has not solved the problem of applying it.

The cession of South West Africa

At the Treaty of Berlin in 1919 the victorious Empire ceded South West Africa into a South African mandate under the League of Nations, with compensation and with guarantees for the German settler population. The cession was consensual. South Africa had entered the war beside Britain, Germany and the United Kingdom of America, had fought French colonial forces rather than German ones, and did not take the territory by conquest.

The German case for the cession was that the territory was expensive, indefensible and adjacent to an ally who wanted it, and that a victor could afford a gesture. The case against it, made at the time by the colonial lobby and made since by everyone else, is that the Empire disposed of a country and its people as an asset in a settlement to which none of them was a party, and that it did so eleven years after what it had done there.

The conversion

The remaining territories were converted into associated states across three decades, beginning in the 1950s and completed in the 1970s. The conversion was not a grant of independence and was not presented as one. Each territory received its own constitution, its own legislature and executive, its own courts, its own citizenship and its own head of state or traditional headship as its constitution provided, and entered a treaty of association with the Empire.

The instruments are individually negotiated and are not identical, but they share a common shape. The associated state governs itself in all domestic matters without imperial supervision. It conducts its own external relations except where it has chosen to have them conducted for it. Defence is a common responsibility, discharged in practice by the Empire. There is free movement of persons between the associated states and the Empire, a currency arrangement that in most cases pegs to the mark, and preferential access to the German market. A development fund carries capital transfers on a formula fixed by treaty rather than voted annually, which was insisted upon by the associated states precisely so that it could not be withdrawn in a bad session of the Reichstag.

The decisive provision, and the one the Empire resisted longest, is that association is terminable by the associated state alone, unilaterally, on notice, and without cause. The Empire has no reciprocal right and no power to expel. That clause is why the arrangement has any standing at all, and the negotiators who obtained it understood exactly what they were obtaining.

The states of the association

Kamerun and Togo on the West African coast were the first converted, Kamerun in 1955 and Togo in 1957, and are the most closely integrated with the Empire, in trade, in education and in movement of people. Both retain German as a language of administration and higher instruction alongside their own languages, a position that is defended on grounds of practical utility and criticised on every other ground, and both have widened the use of their own languages in law and schooling in successive constitutional revisions.

Kamerun’s constitution departs from the common shape in one respect. It alone kept the Emperor as head of state, as Kaiser von Kamerun, a separate capacity created by the 1955 constitution and represented at Jaunde by a governor-general appointed on the advice of Kamerun’s Prime Minister, in which the Imperial Chancellor has no part. Its treaty of association is also the only one that makes the associated state’s citizens German nationals.

Ruanda and Urundi were associated separately, as distinct monarchies with their own dynasties recognised in their constitutions. Their association agreements were the shortest of the set and reserved the least to the Empire. When the rest of German East Africa left in the 1970s, both kingdoms stayed. They acceded to the East African Federation in 1977 with their treaties intact, an exception the Federation’s constitution allows, and they keep them: German defence and the mark, with the Federation’s consent.

The Pacific members are Samoa and five island states of Micronesia, Palau, the Marianas, the Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands and Nauru, small, distant, and constitutionally the most autonomous of the association. Their association is principally a matter of movement, of the development fund, and of the maritime and fisheries agreements that are their largest economic interest. New Guinea, the north-east of the island, the old Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, with the Bismarck Archipelago and Bougainville, is the largest of the Pacific members and the poorest of the associated states by any measure. The south-east of the island, Papua, is a territory of New Wessex, and the old Anglo-German line is the frontier between them.

Two states joined after the conversion. Gabon, one of the four French Equatorial territories Germany held as League mandates between the wars, became independent in 1960 and associated in 1968, for the development fund and the mark; the Congo, Ubangi and Chad stayed fully independent. Namibia, the former South West Africa, associated after its independence in 1990, against the objections of the Herero and Nama described above.

Kiaochow was not converted. The lease was a lease, its term was running, and it was returned to the Empire of China by agreement, with the port installations transferred and the German commercial presence continuing under ordinary Chinese law. The return is generally treated in Germany as the least contentious thing the Empire ever did overseas, which is accurate and is not a large claim.

East Africa, which left and came back

East Africa was the largest of the associated states, the most populous, and the one whose conversion was most difficult. It became an associated state in 1961 after negotiations that broke down twice, entered the East African Federation as Tanganyika in 1963 with its treaty intact, and terminated the association in 1974 under the unilateral clause, leaving Tanganyika wholly inside the Federation and outside the German framework. Ruanda and Urundi did not follow it: they stayed in the association, and in 1977 the two kingdoms acceded to the East African Federation with their treaties intact.

The German government of the day accepted the termination without contesting it, which was the only course open to it under the treaty and was nonetheless a decision, since there were voices in the Reichstag urging that the clause be litigated. The Chancellor’s statement to the chamber, that a right which is honoured only when its exercise is convenient is not a right, is quoted in Germany more often than any other sentence from the whole colonial period and is quoted in East Africa rather less.

For twenty years relations between the two states were ordinary and correct. Trade continued, the development fund was replaced by a bilateral agreement on terms less favourable than the treaty had provided, and the departure was regarded within the association as the proof that association is voluntary and outside it as the proof that leaving is possible and expensive.

In 1994, the year the Somali Coast acceded to it, the Federation came back as a whole, by a treaty of association negotiated as a federation rather than state by state. It is a full association: defence is a common responsibility discharged in practice by the Empire, and the East African shilling is pegged to the mark. The Federation stayed in the Commonwealth, where the dual status was debated at a summit and accepted, and it is the one state that belongs to both. The return was broadly accepted in East Africa. It is now cited inside the association as proof that association is voluntary in both directions, and outside it as proof that leaving was expensive enough to be undone.

What the association is for, and what it is criticised as

The German case for the association is that it kept open, at the moment of decolonisation, a set of relationships that most European powers destroyed or had destroyed for them, and that the associated states are on the whole better provided with schools, hospitals, capital and access to a rich market than comparable territories that took the other route. Development-fund transfers are large, are fixed by treaty, and are not conditional on political alignment.

The case against it is that a former colonial power which retains defence, the currency, the terms of trade and the largest single source of public capital has retained the substance of control and given up the name, and that a right of unilateral departure is not worth much when departure means losing all four at once. East Africa’s experience is cited by both sides, which is a fair indication of how the argument stands.

Within the associated states themselves the association is contested politics rather than settled policy, and the parties that favour departure are ordinary parliamentary parties rather than movements. Within Germany the association has been supported by every imperial government since the conversion and is criticised from the left of the SPD, from the USPD and from the churches, whose missionary societies were part of the colonial apparatus and whose position is complicated by that history and is generally acknowledged by them to be so.

The reckoning

The associated states hold seats as observers in the Reichstag’s colonial affairs committee, which was renamed and reconstituted for the purpose and which retains the older name in ordinary speech. A standing joint commission on the colonial period meets alternately in Berlin and in the associated capitals, has full access to the imperial archives, and publishes without German editorial control, a concession obtained in the 1990s after two decades of refusal.

The commission’s published findings are required teaching within the German critical-history framework, alongside the eastern marches policy, the exclusion of Jewish Germans from professions and commercial bodies under the Empire, and the conduct of German forces in both Great Wars. The complaint made about the framework in the colonial context is the same complaint made about it everywhere: that it requires the facts to be stated and stops short of requiring that responsibility be attributed, so that a German child may leave school knowing that the camps in South West Africa existed without having been told in terms who built them and on whose orders.

The restitution of objects, human remains and archives has proceeded further and faster than the reparation negotiations. Skulls and other remains taken for the racial-science collections of German universities have been returned in a series of transfers since the 1990s, each accompanied by ceremonies that the German institutions involved have described as inadequate and have not been able to improve upon. The universities that held them have published their own institutional histories. Several were among the most distinguished scientific bodies in Europe at the time they were collecting.

Development and the wider world

The programme

The Empire runs one of the larger development programmes among the advanced states, and it is organised in two channels that are kept administratively separate for reasons that are entirely political. The development fund of the association carries capital transfers to the associated states on formulas fixed by treaty, is not conditional on political alignment, and cannot be reduced by an ordinary vote of the Reichstag.

Everything else runs through the ordinary development ministry and is voted annually. It is concentrated in technical assistance, vocational training, water and energy infrastructure, and the establishment of the kind of applied research and technical-institute capacity the Empire built for itself, which is the German development idea and which German officials advance with a confidence that recipients find variously useful and irritating.

The criticisms

The programme attracts the criticisms that all such programmes attract and two that are specifically German. The first is that a development effort concentrated on vocational training and industrial capacity is also an effort to create markets and suppliers for German capital goods, which is true, is not denied, and is presented by the ministry as an alignment of interests rather than a defence. The second is that the association’s development fund, which is the larger and the more secure of the two channels, flows to the Empire’s own former colonies, so that the countries with the strongest claim on German conscience receive assistance through an instrument that also binds them to the German market and the German currency.

Both criticisms are made inside Germany as well as outside it, principally by the SPD’s left, the USPD and the churches. Neither has produced a change in the structure, and the associated states’ own governments have consistently opposed any reform that would convert their treaty-fixed entitlement into an annually voted appropriation.

The League and the multilateral system

Germany holds a permanent seat on the Security Council of the reconstituted League of Nations at Kyoto, contributes to its budget at a level commensurate with its economy, and supplies personnel to its missions under the rule requiring a prior resolution of the Reichstag for any deployment abroad.

Its multilateral posture is legalist and incremental. The Empire is a heavy user of international courts and arbitral bodies, has submitted to jurisdictions its own lawyers advised against, and has a settled policy of not taking public positions on the internal constitutional arrangements of other states. That policy is applied consistently, is convenient, and was adopted after the interwar decades demonstrated what the opposite habit costs a power that has recently dictated a peace.

Economy

The coordinated model

The German economy is a coordinated social market, and the coordination is constitutional rather than merely customary. Sectoral bargaining sets wages, hours, training and classification across whole industries rather than firm by firm, and an agreement may be extended to every employer in a sector once a representative review is complete. Codetermination places workers on supervisory boards as of right rather than by concession. Cash welfare and social insurance operate at imperial level while the constituent states administer education, housing, regional development and the infrastructure beneath them, so that a German worker’s pension is imperial and the same worker’s school was Prussian or Bavarian.

Output and living standards

Germany has the highest income per head of any large economy in the world. Output of approximately A£9.2 trillion across 110 million people gives approximately A£84,000 a person, a little above the American figure, and only the much smaller Scandinavian and Benelux unions stand above it. Human development is 0.950 and the Gini coefficient 0.28, which is the combination the coordinated model exists to produce: high output distributed more evenly than the liberal market economies achieve. The Empire is not the largest economy in the world, which China is on population, nor the largest among the advanced states, which the United Kingdom of America is. It is the one where the ordinary person is best off.

Industry and the regions

Industry remains the organising fact rather than a legacy sector. The Rhineland and the Ruhr, both Prussian, form the largest single industrial concentration in Europe, in coal, steel, chemicals, engineering and transport equipment. Württemberg’s engineering tradition, Saxony’s technical manufacturing and precision trades, Brunswick’s mobility engineering and the Hanseatic shipping of Hamburg and Bremen give the constituent states distinct industrial identities that survive inside one customs and currency area. Berlin adds the banks, the publishing houses and the department stores, and is the Empire’s financial centre without being its manufacturing one.

Pressures on the model

The pressures are those of a mature industrial economy rather than a declining one. Decarbonisation is closing mines and reshaping heavy industry, and the settled German answer is that transition is negotiated through unions, firms, states and municipalities rather than imposed as a single federal programme. Demographic ageing bears on an imperial pension system that was designed when the working population was still growing. And the constitutional duty on productive property, which obliges the owner of a viable works to justify closing it, has become the sharpest point of conflict between the coordinated model and the mobility of capital inside the European Concert’s common market. The unresolved dispute over the Brunswick Motor Works is the case in which that question is currently being tested.

The Mittelstand

The most distinctive feature of German industry is not the great firms but the layer beneath them: several hundred thousand medium-sized undertakings, overwhelmingly family-held, technically specialised, frequently located in small towns, and in a striking number of cases the world leader in a narrow product that nobody outside the trade has heard of. Bearings, filtration elements, packaging machinery, laboratory glass, cutting tools, industrial adhesives and the machines that make other machines are German specialities in this sense.

The pattern is sustained by three institutions that reinforce one another. Family ownership permits investment horizons that a listed company cannot defend to its shareholders. The savings and cooperative banks provide relationship finance to firms too small for capital markets and too regionally anchored to interest a national bank. And the technical institutes and applied research network give firms of two hundred employees access to research capacity they could not possibly maintain alone.

The consequences are an industrial geography that is dispersed rather than concentrated, a smaller productivity gap between the metropolitan and provincial economies than most countries have, and a chronic vulnerability at the moment of generational succession, when a firm passes to heirs who may not want it. Succession failure is the largest single cause of the loss of such firms, and the states have built advisory and financing structures around the problem with mixed success.

Banking and finance

German banking runs on three pillars that do not fully compete with one another. The private commercial banks are the smallest of the three by domestic deposits and the largest internationally. The savings banks are publicly owned, municipally or district-anchored, and restricted by a regional principle that prevents them competing outside their own territory. The cooperative banks are member-owned and organised on a similar territorial basis.

The system is inefficient by the standards of a consolidated banking market and is defended on the ground that efficiency is not the only thing a banking system is for. Between them the two public and cooperative pillars hold the great majority of household deposits and finance the great majority of small and medium firms, and their territorial anchoring is why credit does not drain from the provinces towards the capital in a downturn.

Berlin is the financial capital. The imperial central bank, the great banking houses and the ministries are all there, and the concentration is a deliberate consequence of a century and a half in which finance followed government. Frankfurt holds the exchange, the commodity trades and the Empire’s principal fairs, and operates at one remove from the institutions that set policy. It is a Prussian city, in the Nassau country of the province of Hesse-Nassau, not the capital of any state, and the division of function between the two cities is one Frankfurt periodically contests and has never overturned.

The German equity market is small relative to the economy and German households hold little of it, preferring deposits, insurance and property. The resulting complaint, that German savers finance the world’s investment and take none of the returns, is made regularly by finance ministers and has not changed household behaviour in fifty years.

Trade and the surplus

The Empire runs a large and persistent current account surplus, exports a high proportion of what it makes, and is the world’s principal exporter of capital goods. Its trading partners are the European Concert, the Mitteleuropa states, the United Kingdom of America, China, Japan and Raj, in roughly that order, with the associated states significant in particular commodities and negligible in the aggregate.

The surplus is a source of standing international friction. The German position is that a surplus is the arithmetic consequence of a high savings rate in an ageing society and of firms that make what the world wants, and that no government can be asked to make its industry worse. The position of Germany’s partners, argued most persistently inside the Concert, is that a surplus of that size in the union’s largest economy is a policy choice expressed through wage restraint and public under-investment, and that the counterpart deficits are borne by countries with less capacity to bear them.

The argument is unresolved, is conducted with more heat inside the Concert than outside it, and connects directly to the domestic dispute over the borrowing rule, since the most obvious German answer to a surplus is public investment and the borrowing rule is what constrains it.

Labour, unions and codetermination

Union density has fallen for two generations and remains high by international standards, and the reach of collective agreements is far wider than membership, because agreements are extended by ministerial declaration to every employer in a sector once a representative review is complete. Bargaining is sectoral rather than firm by firm and settles wages, hours, training and classification across whole industries.

Codetermination places employee representatives on company supervisory boards as of right, with parity in the largest firms, and works councils operate in establishments above a threshold with real rights over working time, engagement, dismissal and the organisation of work. Neither institution is a concession that can be withdrawn; both have constitutional standing.

The system’s defenders argue that it explains the German record on industrial peace, on skill formation and on the negotiated management of decline in the coal and steel regions. Its critics argue that it slows adjustment, that it protects those inside the arrangement at the expense of those outside it, and that the growth of employment on terms outside the sectoral agreements has produced a segmented labour market beneath a well-protected core. The segmentation is real, is measured, and is the subject of successive statutes that have narrowed it without closing it.

Housing

Germany is a country of tenants. Home ownership is low for a rich country, renting carries none of the social stigma it carries elsewhere, and the rental sector is regulated in ways that make a tenancy something close to a property right: indefinite terms, restricted grounds for termination, and rent increases limited by reference to a local comparative index compiled by the municipality.

The system produced stability for two generations and is now under severe strain in the large cities, where population growth, restricted land, slow permitting and the sale of municipal housing stock in the 1990s and 2000s have produced shortages and rents that the comparative index has followed upward rather than restrained. Munich is the worst case in the Empire, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin are not far behind, and the eastern provinces have the opposite problem of towns with more dwellings than households.

The political response has been rent regulation of increasing stringency, municipal acquisition programmes, and construction targets that have not been met in any year in which they have been set. The measure that would work, building at scale on the periphery of the large cities, requires land that municipalities do not control and permits that the same municipalities’ own residents oppose through the procedural rights German administrative law gives them.

Wealth, and the gap the income figures hide

The Gini coefficient of 0.28 describes income. German wealth inequality is high, higher than in several countries with worse income distributions, and the reason is the housing system that produces the income equality’s social stability: a population that rents does not accumulate housing equity, and housing equity is how ordinary households in most rich countries become wealthy.

The consequence is a country in which incomes are compressed, public provision is generous and the median household has strikingly little net wealth, while the top of the distribution holds a great deal, much of it in the family firms that are the industrial system’s foundation. Proposals for wealth or inheritance taxation therefore collide directly with the Mittelstand, since the assets concerned are largely illiquid business property, and the exemptions granted to keep firms intact are the largest single source of the disparity. The argument recurs, is technically difficult, and has produced more commissions than statutes.

Cartels, competition and the consumer

German industry organised itself into cartels earlier, more thoroughly and more legally than the industry of any other advanced country. Through the imperial period and the interwar decades, agreements fixing prices, allocating markets and setting quotas were not merely lawful but enforceable in the German courts, which held that a contract restraining competition was a contract like any other, and the great syndicates of coal, steel, chemicals, potash and electrical goods were among the most powerful private institutions in Europe.

The system was defended at the time in terms that were not cynical. Cartels stabilised employment through the cycle, financed research collectively, protected the smaller members against the largest, and were argued to be the reason German industry weathered downturns with less social damage than the liberal economies. The argument was not without force and it was made by people who had watched what unrestrained competition did to the Ruhr in the 1870s.

Its costs were paid by consumers and by outsiders. Prices were higher than they needed to be, entry to organised sectors was effectively closed, and the syndicates’ relationship with the imperial state was close enough that tariff policy, procurement and export finance were shaped in their interest and generally without much concealment.

Competition law arrived with the postwar settlement, under pressure from the American ally and against considerable German resistance, and the Empire now maintains a Cartel Office with real powers to prohibit agreements, control mergers and act against abuse of dominance. It is an independent authority, its decisions are appealable to the courts, and it has acquired an institutional culture of some severity.

The German position on competition is consequently unusual: a state that regards competition policy as a constitutional-order question rather than an economic-efficiency one, and that argues for strict enforcement inside the European Concert with the enthusiasm of a convert. The historical reason is not concealed in the German literature. A country whose industry once organised itself into private governments has a particular reason to be careful, and the Cartel Office’s own published history says so.

The one sector where the old logic survives untouched is banking, where the savings and cooperative pillars operate under a territorial principle that expressly prevents them competing with one another. Germany defends this at Straßburg as a matter of public service rather than of commerce, and the defence is exactly the kind of argument the Cartel Office would demolish in any other industry.

Communications

The Empire’s postal and telegraph service was one of the great institutions of the nineteenth-century state, and the surrender of the Bavarian and Württemberg postal reservations in the 1920s, in exchange for imperial investment, completed a single network across the federation. That service has since been separated into a regulated postal operator and a telecommunications undertaking, both privatised in part and both operating under an independent network regulator.

Fixed and mobile telecommunications are universal and expensive by comparison with the rest of the Concert, a consequence of a regulatory settlement that favoured investment returns over price competition and that the regulator has been steadily unwinding. Fibre coverage lagged for a decade behind comparable countries, was the subject of a good deal of national self-criticism, and has been substantially corrected through a joint federal and state programme in which, characteristically, the Empire paid and the states executed.

The digital state is advanced in some respects and conspicuously backward in others. The registration system, the tax administration and the social insurance funds are thoroughly computerised and interoperate well. Municipal administration, the courts and the health system do not, and a German who can file a tax return in twenty minutes may still be required to appear in person at a municipal office with a paper form. The obstacle is neither money nor technical capacity but the division of competences: a federal government cannot digitise twenty-seven states’ administrations, and the standing conference method that works for school curricula has proved poorly suited to information systems.

Data protection is strict, is enforced by independent commissioners at federal and state level, and is treated by the German public as a constitutional matter rather than a consumer one. The origin is the same conclusion about the imperial state’s capacity for surveillance that produced the separation of police from intelligence, and German officials advance the point at Straßburg and at Kyoto with a persistence that their partners find principled and exhausting in equal measure.

The associated-state communities in Germany

Free movement between the Empire and the associated states has produced substantial communities from Togo, Kamerun, the Pacific territories and East Africa, from before the termination and again since 1994, concentrated in the western industrial cities, in Hamburg and Bremen through the shipping connection, and in the university towns.

They are German-speaking on arrival, since German remains a language of higher instruction in several of the associated states, which distinguishes them from most other immigrant populations in the Empire and has made their educational outcomes noticeably better. It has not made their experience straightforward. The colonial relationship is the reason they speak German and the reason they are in Germany, and the discrimination they report is of the ordinary kind that the Empire has been slow to legislate against and slower to enforce against, with a specific additional edge supplied by a public which knows that Germany had colonies and is generally hazy about what happened in them.

Their organisations have been among the more effective participants in the colonial reckoning, have supplied evidence to the joint commission, and have pressed successfully for the required content of the critical-history framework to be enlarged. The observation most frequently made by their representatives, in the Reichstag committee and in public, is that Germans are willing to discuss the colonial past in the abstract and become noticeably less comfortable when the descendants of the people it was done to are in the room and are also their neighbours.

Tourism

The Empire receives a large volume of visitors and generates a larger one, Germans being among the most travelled people in the world. Inbound tourism concentrates on the Alpine districts, the Rhine and Moselle valleys, the medieval towns of Franconia and Swabia, the Baltic and North Sea coasts, the Christmas markets, and the cultural institutions of Berlin, Dresden, Munich and Vienna’s German counterparts.

Its economic weight is regional rather than national. It matters enormously in the Alpine and coastal districts and in a handful of small towns whose preserved centres carry them, and hardly at all in the industrial regions. The pressures it creates are the familiar ones: housing converted to seasonal accommodation, visitor numbers that particular sites cannot carry, and municipalities dependent on an industry they cannot control.

The Alpine districts face the additional problem that their winter season is becoming unreliable. Snowmaking has extended it, at a cost in water and energy that places the resort municipalities inside the water argument on the side of the abstractors, and the lower-lying resorts have begun the conversion to year-round walking and cycling tourism that the higher ones have not yet needed to consider.

The vehicle industry

The vehicle industry is the largest single industrial employer in the Empire and the sector on which several constituent states depend to a degree that makes their politics legible only in that light. Württemberg, Bavaria, Saxony, Brunswick and the Prussian west all carry major assembly or component operations, and beneath the assemblers lies a supplier network of Mittelstand firms whose dependence is deeper and whose capacity to diversify is smaller.

The industry is being reshaped by decarbonisation, and the German method of managing such a transition is being tested at its limits. The settled approach is negotiation through unions, firms, states and municipalities rather than a single federal programme, with retraining, paid transition rights and staged timetables. It worked for coal over fifty years. The vehicle transition is faster, the supplier firms are more numerous and less visible than the mines were, and a component maker whose entire product line becomes obsolete has no equivalent of the pit closure agreement.

The politics are correspondingly tangled. Bavarian ministers support in Berlin what Bavarian ministers resist in Munich, from the same party. The SPD’s industrial unions and the SPD’s environmental wing are on opposite sides inside one organisation. And the Brunswick Motor Works dispute has turned the question into a constitutional one: a duchy has imposed a five-year closure moratorium under its social-property clause, the operating company argues that federal market, property and corporate law forbid a state from freezing a plant, and the Imperial Constitutional Court’s interim order preserves the works while suspending the penalties.

That case is the sharpest current expression of the Empire’s central economic tension. The constitutional duty on productive property, which obliges the owner of a viable works to justify closing it, and the freedom of capital within the European Concert’s common market cannot both be unlimited, and Germany built a century of institutions on the assumption that the first would not be seriously tested.

Chemicals and pharmaceuticals

The chemical industry is the oldest of the Empire’s scientific industries and the one that established German industrial research. Synthetic dyes, nitrogen fixation, pharmaceuticals and the whole apparatus of the industrial laboratory were German inventions in the sense that matters, which is that Germany was where the laboratory was joined to the works.

The sector remains among the world’s largest, concentrated along the Rhine and in the central German districts, and its structural problem is energy. Chemical production is energy-intensive, the energy transition has raised its cost base, and the industry’s negotiating position in every domestic argument about power prices rests on the observation that a chemical works can be built anywhere and that the ones already built stay only as long as the arithmetic holds. Ministers treat this as a threat and as a fact in roughly equal measure, and are correct on both counts.

The industry’s history is required teaching and is not softened. The laboratory that ended the world’s fertiliser shortage produced the gas released on the western front in the First Great War, under the same director, and the two achievements are taught together rather than separately.

Agriculture and the land

Agriculture is a small share of output and a disproportionate share of politics, and its structure divides along the same line as everything else in Germany. The northern and eastern plain carries large arable holdings, a legacy of the estate system that land reform broke without fragmenting; the south and west carry small mixed and dairy farms whose average size is a fraction of the eastern one. The wine districts of the Rhine, the Moselle and Franconia are economically minor and culturally weighty out of all proportion.

Support runs through the European Concert’s common arrangements since 2027, with national and state programmes beneath them, and the transition from the older national schemes has been among the union’s more difficult early files. The environmental conditions attached to support are the sharpest domestic agricultural dispute: nitrate in groundwater, the loss of meadow and hedgerow diversity, the intensification of dairy and the spread of energy crops are the recognised problems, and organic conversion rates above the European average and the small-farm structure of the south are the recognised mitigations.

Farm politics are the Zentrum’s foundation in the Catholic countryside and a substantial element of the conservative parties’ base in the Protestant north and east, which means that no German governing coalition of any composition has ever been able to move quickly on agricultural questions. The pattern is the one that holds across German policy: rapid change is impossible and gradual change is reliable, and the farming organisations defend the arrangement in exactly those terms.

Forestry is a larger part of rural land use than agriculture in several provinces, is dominated by state and communal ownership under long rotations, and is undergoing the slow conversion from even-aged plantation to mixed uneven-aged stand that the dieback of the 1980s and the droughts since have made unavoidable.

The sea

The Empire is a maritime power that does not think of itself as one, which is the reverse of the position it occupied before the First Great War, when a naval programme built for prestige made an enemy of Britain and was partially reversed once the consequences became clear.

The modern maritime economy is commercial. The merchant fleet is substantial and is a significant source of invisible earnings; ship finance and marine insurance are concentrated in Hamburg and Bremen and are among the largest such markets anywhere; shipbuilding survives in specialist, naval and repair work rather than in bulk construction, having lost the volume trades to Asian yards over three decades in a retreat managed with the usual German combination of transition agreements and regional funds.

Fishing is a small industry with an outsized political voice in the coastal districts, operating under quotas negotiated within the Concert and resented in every port that lands a catch. Offshore wind has become the North Sea and Baltic coasts’ largest new industry and has brought with it a conflict with fishing and with conservation that the coastal states are managing through marine spatial planning, a procedure that is orderly, consultative, and slow enough that the transmission connections are behind the turbines.

The Imperial Navy’s ports at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven and the Kiel Canal remain strategically significant, and the canal’s traffic, which is overwhelmingly commercial, is the reason the Empire treats a waterway across its own territory as a matter of international obligation rather than of domestic administration.

Insurance and the funded sector

Germany has one of the world’s largest insurance sectors, and its shape follows from the welfare settlement rather than existing alongside it. Because the statutory funds carry health, pension, accident and long-term care, German private insurance concentrates on the margins the statutory system leaves: supplementary health cover for the privately insured minority, life assurance sold as a savings vehicle to households that do not hold equities, liability cover of every description, and legal-expenses insurance, which is a German speciality and one reason the propensity to litigate is so high.

Munich is one of the world’s principal centres of reinsurance, a business conducted almost entirely between institutions and invisible to the public, and the concentration of catastrophe modelling expertise there has made the German reinsurers among the more consistently outspoken commercial voices on climate risk. Their loss data is cited in the Reichstag by parties that would not otherwise quote an insurer.

The sector’s structural problem is the one that afflicts every European insurer with a long book of guaranteed-return life policies written in a higher-interest era, and the supervisory authority has spent two decades managing the run-off. Its political problem is that life assurance is the second pillar of German household provision after the statutory pension, so a solvency question in the sector is a retirement question for a large part of the population.

Consumer protection and product liability

Consumer law is largely harmonised within the European Concert and rests beneath that on a German tradition that approached the subject through contract and product liability rather than through a regulator. The Civil Code’s provisions on unfair terms, on defective goods and on withdrawal from distance contracts do most of the work, and they are enforced not by an agency but by consumer associations with statutory standing to sue for injunctions against unlawful terms and practices.

This is the German method in its clearest form: a public function discharged by a self-governing body funded partly from public money and accountable to its members, litigating in the ordinary courts. The associations are effective, are perpetually underfunded, and have shaped the standard terms of German commerce more than any ministry.

Product safety runs through the technical standards system, so that compliance with a committee-written standard satisfies a statutory duty, and the testing and certification marks that appear on German goods are issued by houses whose independence from the manufacturers paying them is the subject of periodic scandal and periodic reform. Food safety is a state competence with imperial framework legislation, inspected by state authorities of varying diligence, and the recurring criticism after each incident is that twenty-seven inspectorates produce twenty-seven standards of vigilance.

Transport and infrastructure

The railways

The German railway network is dense, publicly owned and the most heavily used in Europe. It was built by the constituent states rather than by the Empire, which is why the network’s shape still records a political geography rather than an economic one: lines converge on state capitals that are not the natural commercial centres of their regions, and several of the busiest corridors were completed late because they crossed a boundary between two states that could not agree terms.

Consolidation into a single imperial system came in stages across the first half of the twentieth century. The states surrendered their railways for money, for investment guarantees and, in Bavaria’s case, for undertakings about rural branch lines that were written into the transfer instrument and are still cited in the Landtag whenever a closure is proposed. The Imperial Railways are now a single undertaking in public ownership, operating under a regulatory regime that has admitted competing operators on the freight side and, more slowly and less successfully, on some passenger routes under the Concert’s market rules.

High-speed passenger services link the major centres, and the network’s structural weakness is the consequence of its own polycentrism: a country with eight or nine cities of comparable importance and no dominant metropolis requires a mesh rather than a hub, and a mesh is more expensive to build and harder to run punctually. German punctuality statistics are a subject of national complaint out of all proportion to their international standing.

Freight is a larger share of traffic than in most comparable countries, and the combination of rail freight with the inland waterways is the reason German heavy industry remains viable inland.

The waterways

The inland waterway is a working commercial artery rather than a survival. The Rhine carries more freight than any other river in Europe and is the spine of the western industrial belt, connecting the Ruhr to the sea through the Low Countries. The Elbe, Weser, Oder and Vistula are navigable far inland, and an old and heavily engineered canal system links the northern rivers to one another across the plain, so that a barge may cross the Empire from the Rhine to the eastern rivers without entering the sea.

The Kiel Canal cuts the base of the Jutland peninsula between the North Sea and the Baltic. It is one of the busiest artificial waterways in the world, saves several hundred miles around Denmark, and is a strategic asset of a significance the Imperial Navy has never allowed anyone to forget. The canal between the Main and the Danube, completed in the modern period after more than a century of intermittent effort, connects the North Sea drainage to the Black Sea and carries less traffic than its promoters projected, a fact its critics raise annually.

Waterway maintenance is an imperial responsibility and is chronically underfunded, the locks and weirs of the older canals having reached the end of their design lives at approximately the same time.

Roads

Germany built its first long-distance motorways in the 1920s and 1930s as public works, financed partly by the Empire and partly by the states, and extended the network steadily through the postwar decades. The network is dense, is toll-free for private cars and tolled for heavy goods vehicles, and includes long sections without a general speed limit.

The speed limit question is the most reliably intractable subject in German domestic politics. It returns every few years, is supported by the SPD, most of the churches, the insurers and the accident researchers, and is opposed by the vehicle industry, the motoring associations, the FVP and enough of the SPD’s own industrial constituencies to make the arithmetic impossible. Ministers who have promised it have not delivered it. The absence of a limit on part of the network is not a considered policy and is not defended as one by anybody who has looked at the casualty figures; it survives because the coalition arithmetic has never permitted its removal.

Ports and shipping

Hamburg is the first port of Europe, and its position, its free port and its relationship with the Empire are the subject of its own article. Bremen and Bremerhaven carry a large share of the vehicle trade and the container traffic that Hamburg cannot take. Emden, Kiel, Rostock, Stettin, Danzig and Königsberg serve the Baltic and the eastern provinces, and the eastern ports have recovered a great deal of traffic since the eastern frontier ceased to be a military line.

The German merchant fleet is substantial, the shipbuilding industry survives in specialist, naval and repair work rather than in bulk construction, and marine insurance and ship finance are concentrated in Hamburg and Bremen.

Aviation

The principal airports are at Frankfurt, which is the Empire’s intercontinental hub and one of the busiest in the world, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf and Hamburg. The distribution again reflects the polycentric structure: the Empire has one dominant hub and five substantial airports rather than the two or three that a centralised country of the same size would have, and the resulting duplication is defended by the constituent states whose airports they are.

Air traffic within the Empire competes directly with high-speed rail on the major domestic routes and has lost ground on all of them. Short domestic flights have been the subject of proposals to restrict or tax them, most of which have been enacted in some form after argument.

Environment and energy

The forests

Roughly a third of the Empire is under forest, most of it worked woodland under regimes of state and communal management several centuries old. German scientific forestry is one of the country’s exported institutions and one of its more ambiguous exports, since the practice it spread across the world was the even-aged single-species plantation, which produces timber efficiently and produces a forest that is fragile.

The consequences arrived in the 1970s and 1980s as forest dieback, when acidification from sulphur emissions damaged large areas of upland spruce and the death of the forest became a national anxiety of a peculiarly German intensity. The response was among the most stringent air-quality legislation then enacted anywhere, imposed on an industrial base that resisted it hard, and it worked: sulphur emissions fell sharply and the acid damage largely ceased.

The lesson drawn from the episode inside Germany is that the country will accept expensive environmental regulation when the damage is visible and native. The lesson drawn by the country’s environmental scientists is that the forest was saved from acidification and has since been damaged more severely by drought, heat and bark beetle than acid rain ever managed, and that the conversion of the plantations to mixed and uneven-aged stands, which foresters have advocated for a century, is proceeding at the speed of a rotation rather than the speed of the problem.

Coal, and the end of it

Coal built the German industrial economy, in the Ruhr and the Saar in the west and in Silesia and the lignite fields in the east, and the mining communities of those regions were for a century the core of the organised working class and of the SPD. Deep coal mining has been in retreat for fifty years and is now essentially finished, and the lignite fields are closing under the decarbonisation programme.

The German method of closing an industry is worth stating exactly, because it is the coordinated model’s clearest demonstration. Closures are negotiated over long horizons through agreements between the federal government, the state governments, the firms and the unions; the transition is financed; nobody is dismissed without a route to another job or an early pension; and the structural funds follow. It is expensive, it is slow, it has been criticised as paying to postpone the inevitable, and the mining regions of Germany did not experience the social collapse that comparable regions elsewhere experienced. Both halves of that sentence are accurate and the German argument concerns which one matters more.

Energy now

The Empire’s power supply rests on renewables, on gas, on nuclear and on a diminishing residue of coal. Wind is concentrated on the northern plain, the North Sea and Baltic coasts and offshore; hydro in the Alps and on the southern rivers; solar across the south. The structural problem is that the wind is in the north and the industrial load is in the west and south, and the transmission lines required to connect them have been delayed for years by objections from every municipality along their routes, which have used exactly the procedural rights that German administrative law gives them.

Nuclear power supplies a substantial share and is politically contested without being politically decisive, since the Empire’s possession of a deterrent removes the argument, made in several other countries, that the civil programme is the disguised foundation of a military one. Germany’s is not disguised.

Gas is the acute question. Trade with the Russian Republic resumed as the cold war faded, Russian gas is cheap and abundant, German industry wants it, and the pipelines exist. The security establishment’s assessment of the dependency has not softened as fast as the commercial one, and the argument runs through the governing coalition rather than between government and opposition. It is the sharpest present instance of the general German problem of what to do about a former antagonist that has become a supplier.

Rivers, air and land

The rivers were among the most polluted in Europe within living memory and are now among the cleanest, the recovery of the Rhine being the standard example cited in every German textbook on environmental regulation. Air quality has improved comparably. Both were achieved by regulation against strong industrial resistance, and both are used in current arguments by people who draw opposite conclusions about what that proves.

The unresolved problems are those of agriculture and land rather than of industry: nitrate in groundwater, the loss of meadow and hedgerow diversity, the intensification of dairy and the spread of energy crops. Agricultural politics in the Empire, as in Bavaria, make rapid change impossible and gradual change reliable.

How the argument is conducted

There is no German green party. The environmental argument runs inside the SPD, where it contends with the industrial unions, and through the churches, which have a real constituency, a moral standing and no seat at any cabinet table. Both channels are genuine and neither is decisive, and the structural consequence is that German environmental policy advances through the coalition arithmetic of parties whose primary commitments are elsewhere.

Whether this makes German environmental policy slower or merely more durable is disputed. The regulatory record on sulphur, on water and on the negotiated closure of the coal industry is a strong argument for durability. The transmission lines are a strong argument for slowness.

Social insurance and the welfare state

Origins, and what they were for

Germany built the first comprehensive system of social insurance in the world, in the 1880s, under Bismarck, and it was built for a reason that the Empire’s own critical-history teaching now states plainly: it was intended to detach the industrial working class from the socialist movement. Sickness insurance, accident insurance and invalidity and old-age insurance were enacted in the same decade in which the socialist party was outlawed, its press suppressed and its organisers imprisoned, and the two policies were understood by their author as complementary halves of a single strategy.

The strategy failed in its political object. The Social Democrats survived the anti-socialist laws, emerged from them larger, and became the largest party in the Empire. What did not fail was the machinery, and the party that the insurance was designed to destroy became its most effective defender and the author of most of its subsequent extensions. German social insurance is therefore an institution with a discreditable purpose and a creditable history, and the Empire has settled into describing it in those terms rather than choosing one.

The branches

The system is organised in separate branches, each with its own contribution, its own funds and its own law, rather than as a single tax-financed service. Sickness insurance covers medical treatment for the whole population through statutory funds. Accident insurance covers injury and disease arising from employment and is financed by employers alone, which is the legacy of the original bargain by which employers accepted strict liability in exchange for the abolition of civil suits. Pension insurance covers old age, invalidity and survivors. Unemployment insurance was added in the interwar decades. Long-term care insurance is the newest branch, added within the last forty years in response to ageing, and is the only one whose adequacy is seriously disputed across all parties rather than along the usual lines.

Cash benefits and insurance run at imperial level. The services underneath them, the schools, the housing, the hospitals in most states, and the social work, are administered by the constituent states and their municipalities. A German worker’s pension is imperial and the same worker’s school was Prussian or Bavarian, and the division is the practical shape of German federalism in ordinary life.

How it is governed

The funds are not government departments. They are self-governing public-law corporations administered by boards on which employers and insured persons sit in equal numbers, elected in periodic ballots that attract low turnout and considerable organisational effort from the unions and the employers’ associations.

This self-administration is defended as the reason the system has survived a century and a half of political change without being captured by any government, and criticised as an arrangement that gives two organised interests control of very large sums with weak democratic scrutiny. Both are true. The Reichstag legislates the framework and cannot direct the funds within it, which is precisely the point of the design and precisely the complaint about it.

What it costs and who pays

Contributions are levied on wages, shared between employer and employee in most branches, and capped above a ceiling that is itself a permanent political question, since the cap makes the contribution regressive at the top of the earnings distribution. Federal subsidies from general taxation make up a substantial and rising share of pension expenditure, and the pension line is the largest single item in the imperial budget by a wide margin.

The combination of high output and this system is what produces a Gini coefficient of 0.28 alongside the highest income per head of any large economy in the world. The coordinated wage bargaining compresses market incomes before the state redistributes anything, which is the less visible half of the explanation and the half German officials abroad find hardest to convey.

The pension problem

The number of contributors for each pensioner has been falling for two generations and continues to fall. Every serious projection shows the position worsening into the 2050s. The available responses are the usual four, and Germany has used all of them partially and none of them decisively: later retirement, higher contributions, lower replacement rates and larger subsidies from general taxation.

The political difficulty is specific rather than general. Later retirement bears hardest on manual workers whose life expectancy is lower, which the SPD will not accept without differentiation; differentiation by occupation is administratively formidable and has been rejected twice on those grounds. Higher contributions raise the cost of labour, which the FVP and the employers resist. Lower replacement rates hit exactly the constituency the Zentrum represents in the small towns. The result is a sequence of partial reforms, each of which buys a decade.

Where the system does not reach

The system is an insurance system, and its weakness is the weakness of insurance: it protects people according to their employment record, and it protects people without one badly. Long-term unemployment, interrupted careers, self-employment at low incomes, and the care work done overwhelmingly by women all produce entitlements below what a full working life produces, and the means-tested minimum beneath the insurance is deliberately austere.

Child poverty in the Empire is low by international comparison and concentrated in single-parent households and in families with a migration history. Homelessness is low and rising. The eastern agricultural provinces and the poorest uplands have a pattern of long-term worklessness that thirty years of regional policy have reduced without ending. None of these is a scandal by the standards of comparable countries, and all of them are argued about in the Reichstag in the terms of a country that expects better of itself.

Health

Provision

Health care reaches the whole population through the statutory funds, with a small minority of higher earners and the self-employed insured privately under a parallel regime. The two-tier structure is the most criticised feature of German health care and the most durable. Private patients are more profitable to treat, obtain appointments faster, and subsidise the statutory system through the higher fees they generate, and every proposal to unify the two has foundered on the fact that unification would remove that subsidy and require it to be replaced.

Provision is dense. Germany has more hospital beds and more physicians per head than almost any comparable country, a legacy of a system that paid for capacity and only latterly began paying for outcomes. Ambulatory care is delivered largely by physicians in private practice contracted to the funds through regional associations, and hospitals are run by municipalities, by states, by churches and by a growing private sector whose expansion is politically contested.

The doctors and the funds

The relationship between the medical profession and the funds is governed by collective negotiation between the funds and the regional physicians’ associations, which set the schedule of fees and distribute a capped total among their members. The arrangement gives the profession self-government and the funds cost control, and it produces an annual negotiation that both sides describe publicly as unsatisfactory and neither has proposed to abolish.

The physicians’ associations are among the most effective organised interests in the Empire. They have defeated more health ministers than any other body, and the ministerial graveyard is a standing joke in the Reichstag that both governing and opposition deputies make.

The hospitals

Hospital provision is a state and municipal competence, which means the Empire has no single hospital plan and instead has twenty-seven, of varying quality. The rural east and the poorer uplands have lost hospitals steadily for thirty years as small institutions have proved unable to maintain the specialist staffing that modern standards require, and the closures are among the most bitterly resisted decisions any German state government takes.

The counter-argument, which the closing authorities make and which is supported by the outcome data, is that a small hospital which performs a procedure twenty times a year is more dangerous than a longer journey to one that performs it four hundred times. This is correct and has never once persuaded a town meeting.

The pandemic

The respiratory pandemic of the early 2020s fell on the Empire under the Brenner ministry and was managed through the states, since the emergency public-health powers belong to them. The federal government coordinated, procured and paid; the states decided.

The result was a patchwork that was defended at the time as federalism working and is now generally judged to have cost lives at the margins through inconsistency between neighbouring states, particularly in the border districts where people live in one state and work in another. A subsequent statute strengthened the imperial coordinating power without transferring the substantive decision, which is the compromise the Bundesrat would accept.

The system’s capacity held. The hospital and intensive-care capacity that the Empire had been criticised for over-providing turned out to be the reason its mortality was lower than several comparable countries, a point made frequently in Germany since and one that has considerably weakened the case for reducing bed numbers.

Public health and its history

Preventive public health, occupational medicine and industrial hygiene are old German strengths with an institutional history running back to the nineteenth century, and the tropical and port medicine institutes of the Hanseatic cities are among the oldest in the world.

That institutional history is not separable from the colonial one. The tropical medicine institutes were built to keep colonial administrations and their soldiers alive, their early research was conducted on colonial subjects under conditions that were not consented to in any sense the word will bear, and several of the reputations founded in that period rest on work that would now end a career. The institutes have published their own histories, which is more than several of their foreign counterparts have done, and the histories are unsparing.

Education

A state competence

Schooling belongs to the constituent states, and the Empire has no education ministry worth the name. What the federation supplies is a framework: mutual recognition of leaving certificates, a common structure of stages, agreed minimum content including the critical-history requirement, and a standing conference of state education ministers whose agreements bind by convention rather than by law.

The conference is one of the odder institutions of German government. It has no constitutional standing, its resolutions are not statutes, and its decisions determine what is taught to every child in the Empire. It works because a state which departs from an agreement finds its certificates questioned in the other twenty-six, and no state education minister has ever been willing to explain to parents why their children’s qualifications are worth less across a state boundary.

Structure and the tracking argument

The common structure is a shared primary stage of four years followed by differentiated secondary tracks: the academic Gymnasium leading to the leaving certificate and the university, the intermediate track leading to the higher commercial and technical qualifications, and the general track feeding directly into apprenticeship. States differ in how sharply the tracks are separated, in whether comprehensive schools exist alongside them, and in how easily a pupil may transfer between them.

The argument about tracking is the oldest continuous dispute in German domestic politics after the confessional question, and it has not changed its terms in seventy years. Selection occurs at ten or eleven. It correlates strongly with parental occupation and education, and the correlation has narrowed over three generations without disappearing. The defenders of the system argue that early differentiation is what makes the vocational track a respected destination rather than a residue, and that comprehensive systems produce a single hierarchy in which everything that is not academic is failure. The critics argue that a country which decides a child’s route at ten is not a meritocracy and knows it.

Both sides are able to cite the outcome data, because the data support both propositions: German vocational qualifications carry an economic and social value that has no equivalent in most comparable countries, and German social mobility through education is not notably better than theirs. Successive states have made the tracks more permeable, and the SPD has campaigned on comprehensive reform in every election since the 1960s and implemented it in the states it has governed, with results that neither side finds decisive.

The apprenticeship

The dual system of apprenticeship is the institution German policy is most often asked to explain abroad and the one least easily exported. An apprentice holds a contract of training with a firm, is paid, spends part of each week in a vocational school run by the state, and sits an examination set not by the state but by the chamber of trades or the chamber of industry and commerce.

The examination is what makes it work. It is external to the employer, so the qualification is portable; it is set by the trade, so it certifies competence the trade recognises; and in a range of occupations it is a licence rather than a certificate, without which the trade may not be practised independently. Employers, unions and the states govern the system jointly, and the curricula are revised through a tripartite procedure that is slow and produces standards all three parties will defend.

The system’s difficulties are real. Firms provide fewer places in a downturn, precisely when school leavers most need them, and the states have repeatedly had to create substitute provision of lower value. Some trades have long since ceased to need three years of training and retain it because the length is bound up with the status. And the system is a poor fit for the fastest-changing occupations, where a curriculum agreed by three parties over two years is obsolete before its first cohort qualifies.

The universities

The universities are old, numerous, state-funded and, by international standards, remarkably uniform in quality. There is no German Oxford and no German Harvard, and the absence is deliberate policy rather than accident: German higher education was built on the principle that a student should be able to study any subject at a good level in his own state, and the constituent states each maintain institutions accordingly. Baden’s Heidelberg, Saxony’s Leipzig, Bavaria’s Munich and Prussia’s Berlin are among the most distinguished, and a dozen others are not far behind.

Tuition is free or nominal at the state institutions. Admission to most subjects follows from the leaving certificate rather than from competitive selection, with numerical limits in medicine and a few other fields allocated centrally by grade and waiting time. The student body is consequently large, the drop-out rate is high, and the German response to both facts is that a system which admits broadly and examines strictly is preferable to one which selects at entry.

The research institutes outside the universities form a second sector of comparable weight: a network of publicly funded institutes for basic research, a second network for applied and industrial research working under contract to firms, and the academies of the constituent states. The applied network is the mechanism by which German medium-sized manufacturers obtain research capacity they could not maintain themselves, and it is the least glamorous and most consequential part of the German research system.

The universities’ own record

The German university was the model for the modern research university everywhere, and the prestige it built in the nineteenth century remains the largest single element of German cultural self-regard. The same institutions supplied the personnel and the intellectual apparatus of the racial science of the colonial period, held collections of human remains obtained in circumstances that were not consented to, and excluded Jewish scholars from professorial chairs through an administrative practice that no statute required and no faculty resisted.

The universities have published their institutional histories, returned remains, renamed buildings and endowed chairs in the fields that were used against the people they were used against. The historians who did this work were in most cases employed by the institutions they were investigating, which several of them have described as the central methodological problem of the exercise and none has claimed to have solved.

The universities, the students and the corporations

Student life at the German universities carries institutions that have no close equivalent elsewhere. The student corporations, fraternities with colours, ceremonies, houses and lifelong membership, date from the nineteenth century, and several retain the academic fencing that once produced the duelling scar as a badge of caste.

Their history is not a decorative one. The corporations were among the most reliable carriers of antisemitism in German academic life, excluding Jewish students by constitution or by practice from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and the exclusion in the universities and in the professions that the corporations fed was social before it was ever administrative. Some corporations were liberal and nationalist in origin and became something else; some were confessional; a minority admitted Jewish members throughout and were treated accordingly by the others. This is required content and the corporations’ own historical commissions have documented it.

They survive, considerably diminished, alongside a student body that is overwhelmingly unaffiliated and a student representation organised on the ordinary democratic model. The universities’ relationship with them is uneasy: the houses are private property, the traditions are lawful, and a rector who wishes to distance his institution can do little more than say so.

Science, technology and industry research

The inheritance

German science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the most productive in the world, in chemistry above all, and in physics, medicine, engineering and the mathematical sciences. The synthetic dye industry, the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, the great advances in bacteriology and the foundations of quantum theory were German work, and the German university and the German industrial laboratory between them created the model of organised research on which every subsequent system is based.

That position was not lost. There was no emigration of German science in the 1930s, because there was nothing to emigrate from: no regime arose to drive out a generation of German physicists, chemists and mathematicians, and the careers those people would have made abroad were made in Göttingen, Berlin, Munich and Leipzig instead. German science therefore enters the modern period without the rupture that reshaped world science elsewhere, and the consequences are visible in the distribution of Nobel prizes, in the language of the literature and in the location of the great instruments.

The consequence is not straightforward superiority. A scientific establishment that has never been broken is also one that has never been forced to reconstitute itself, and German science carries a hierarchy, a deference to the chair-holder and a slowness in the appointment of the young that its own reformers have been complaining about for a century.

Where the strength lies now

The Empire’s research strength is concentrated where its industry is: chemicals and pharmaceuticals, materials, mechanical and electrical engineering, vehicle and transport technology, optics and precision instruments, and the industrial application of computing rather than the consumer end of it. German firms hold a disproportionate share of the world’s patents in production technology and machine tools, and a much smaller share in consumer software and platforms, a distribution that is the subject of a permanent and slightly anxious domestic argument.

Basic research is strong in physics, chemistry and the mathematical sciences and is supported at a level that has not fallen with any change of government. The Empire participates in the large international scientific collaborations, hosts several of them, and is a major contributor to the European instruments established under the Concert.

The uncomfortable half

The chemical industry that gave Germany its scientific pre-eminence also gave the First Great War its gas warfare, and the same laboratories and in several cases the same men were responsible for both. This is required teaching and is not softened in the teaching: the fixation process that ended the fertiliser shortage and the chlorine released on the western front were the work of the same laboratory and the same director.

The medical research conducted in the colonial territories, and the racial anthropology conducted in the universities on remains taken from them, belong to the same account. So does the willingness of German industrial research to work for whatever government commissioned it, which produced excellent science under an unreformed imperial state and would, the critical-history framework observes, have produced it under a worse one.

The Empire is one of the five equal partners in Concord Station. It contributed the laboratory Kepler, and its Adler capsules, flying since 1968, and their cargo variants, which dock at Kepler and keep the station in orbit, are among the station’s indispensable vehicles; German and Chinese vehicles alone carried the station from 2003 to 2005. Germany regards the station as the continuation of the 1975 docking between a German capsule and an American Apollo spacecraft, the only two-nation docking of the cold war.

Technology and the present arguments

The Empire’s current technological arguments are those of a mature manufacturing economy facing transitions it did not choose. The vehicle industry, the largest single industrial employer and the one on which several constituent states depend disproportionately, is being reshaped by decarbonisation, and the negotiation of that transition through unions, firms, states and municipalities rather than by federal programme is the settled German method and is being tested at its limits. The energy transition has changed the chemical industry’s cost base. And the concentration of digital platforms outside Europe is a subject on which the Empire has views, has legislated within the Concert, and has not obtained an outcome it regards as satisfactory.

Demographics and society

Population

The Empire holds approximately 110 million people, the largest population in Europe west of Russia, distributed very unevenly across a territory of approximately 541,000 square kilometres. Roughly four fifths live in towns and cities, with the heaviest densities in the Rhineland and Ruhr, the Saxon and Silesian industrial districts, the Rhine-Main region and the belt of cities along the northern rivers, and the lightest in the eastern agricultural provinces, the northern heaths and the Alpine districts.

Growth is slow and driven mainly by migration rather than by natural increase. The population is ageing: the median age stands in the mid-forties, life expectancy is a little over eighty years, and the imperial pension and social insurance systems carry the resulting weight. Internal migration runs from the eastern and rural districts towards the western industrial regions and the larger cities, a movement that has continued for more than a century and that the equalisation payments between states are partly designed to slow.

Immigration has been the principal source of population growth since the postwar decades. Movement within the Empire’s own borders was joined by movement from the European buffer states, from the Habsburg lands and, since the opening of the European Concert’s common market, from across monarchical Europe. Freedom of movement within the Concert is still phasing in, and its practical effect on German labour supply is a live subject of federal politics.

Languages

German is the language of the Empire, of federal law and of instruction almost everywhere, in the standard form that emerged from the printed and administrative usage of the early modern period. Beneath it survives a deep dialect landscape, from Low German across the northern plain, through the central dialects of Saxony, Thuringia and the Rhineland, to the Alemannic and Bavarian dialects of the south, differences large enough that a speaker of one extreme cannot follow the other without effort.

The Empire is not monolingual. Polish is spoken by several million people, principally in the Prussian provinces of Posen, West Prussia, Silesia and East Prussia, where the Polnische Fraktion organises its parliamentary representation and where Prussian law makes a regional language co-official in any district where it passes a twenty per cent threshold. Danish is spoken in northern Schleswig under a province-wide binational settlement, French and Alemannic in Elsaß-Lothringen, Sorbian in the Lusatian districts, and Frisian on the North Sea coast and islands. Several constituent states give a regional tongue equal statewide standing: Brunswick, for example, makes Eastphalian Low German co-official with standard German.

Religion

Religion in the Empire is a matter for the constituent states rather than for the federation, and the resulting map is the map of the sixteenth-century settlement carried forward. The north and east are historically Protestant, the south and west historically Catholic, and the two are interleaved in the middle. Prussia maintains the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union as its established church with the King as formal governor; Brunswick’s established Lutheran church keeps the Duke as its supreme governor; the Catholic populations of the Rhineland, Westphalia, Bavaria, Silesia and Posen are among the largest confessional blocs in Europe, and the Zentrum is their historic political expression.

Establishment at state level carries public-law status and defined relations with a Crown, but no preference in civil rights, public employment, education or access to public services. Jewish communities hold equal standing as public-law religious bodies, and other recognised communities may organise under the same framework. Religious practice has declined across the century in the manner common to industrial societies, most sharply in the great cities, and a substantial minority of Germans now profess no confession while remaining formally enrolled in one.

Education and health

Schooling is a competence of the constituent states, and its structure is broadly common across them: a shared primary stage followed by differentiated secondary tracks, with the academic Gymnasium leading to university and the vocational tracks feeding an apprenticeship system that is the backbone of German industrial training. Employers, unions and states jointly govern the apprenticeship, which is the reason skilled industrial work carries a social standing in Germany that it has lost elsewhere. The universities are old, numerous and state-funded, and several of the Empire’s constituent states maintain institutions of European standing well out of proportion to their size.

Health care and social insurance run at imperial level and cover the whole population through statutory funds. Combined with the states’ housing and municipal provision, this is the material foundation of the human development figure of 0.950. The system’s principal strain is demographic rather than financial: the number of contributors per pensioner has been falling for two generations.

Citizenship

German nationality follows from citizenship of a constituent state rather than the reverse, a structure inherited from 1871 and never rationalised. A German is a Prussian, a Bavarian, a Saxon or a Hamburger first, and a German in consequence. The arrangement has almost no practical effect on the individual and considerable symbolic weight, and every proposal to replace it with a direct imperial nationality has been defeated in the Bundesrat by states that have no material interest in the question and a strong attachment to it. The one exception to the rule that nationality comes through a constituent state is Kamerun, whose treaty of association of 1955, alone among the treaties, makes its citizens German nationals without citizenship of any constituent state, a clause tied to the Emperor’s position as Kamerun’s head of state.

Nationality passes by descent. A statutory route to naturalisation by residence was added in the postwar decades, was narrow, and has been widened repeatedly and contested each time. The present rules require a period of lawful residence, competence in German, self-support and knowledge of the constitutional order, and permit dual nationality in a wider range of cases than formerly. The naturalisation rate remains lower than in comparable countries, and the reasons given by the people entitled to naturalise and not doing so are studied at length and reduce mostly to inertia and to the cost of surrendering another passport.

The national minorities

The Empire is not a nation state and does not describe itself as one, which is the reason its minority arrangements are older and more developed than those of most of its neighbours.

Poles are the largest minority, several million people, principally in the Prussian provinces of Posen, West Prussia, Silesia and East Prussia. Their political representation runs through the Polnische Fraktion in the Reichstag and the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus, which is a parliamentary group rather than a nationwide party. Prussian law makes a regional language co-official in any district where it passes a twenty per cent threshold, funds minority-medium and bilingual schooling on equal per-capita terms with a small-school supplement, and guarantees the leaving certificate in the language of instruction with a common German paper.

That settlement is the outcome of a long defeat for the state. The eastern marches policy of the imperial period, directed from Berlin ministries, set out to Germanise the Prussian east: settlement commissions bought Polish land for German colonists, the use of Polish in schools was restricted, and the Expropriation Act of 1908 permitted compulsory purchase on grounds of nationality. It provoked school strikes, produced a Polish cooperative and credit movement that outperformed the commissions, and failed. It is required teaching by name.

Danes in northern Schleswig live under a province-wide binational settlement negotiated with Denmark and administered jointly. Sorbs in the Lusatian districts, Frisians on the North Sea coast and islands, and the French and Alemannic speakers of Elsaß-Lothringen hold protections of varying strength, the Elsaß-Lothringen arrangements being the most contested because the identity question there is unresolved rather than settled.

Several constituent states give a regional tongue equal statewide standing rather than district standing. Brunswick makes Eastphalian Low German co-official with standard German, a measure whose practical effect is small and whose symbolic effect within the duchy is not.

The Jewish communities

Germany’s Jewish communities are old, continuous and unbroken. The Rhine valley congregations at Cologne, Worms and Speyer are the oldest north of the Alps; Berlin, Breslau, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Fürth, Munich and Königsberg carry communities of long standing; and the institutional record, the registers, the cemeteries, the archives and the buildings, runs back without the rupture that destroyed it elsewhere.

They hold equal standing as public-law religious bodies, on the same footing as the Christian churches, with the tax collection, the endowments and the standing in public law that status carries. German Jewish scholarship, publishing and religious training continued through the twentieth century in Germany, and the Empire is in consequence a principal centre of Jewish learning in Europe rather than a place from which it departed.

The record of the German state towards them is not clean and is required teaching. Jewish Germans were excluded in practice from the judiciary, the prosecution service, the officer corps above junior ranks, the senior civil service and a range of commercial bodies and associations throughout the imperial period. The exclusion rested on administrative practice rather than statute, which meant there was nothing to repeal and nothing to point to, and it was not formally ended until after the Second Great War. Antisemitism was a normal feature of the conservative press, the student corporations and parts of the Catholic press, and it was sustained and sometimes violent.

What did not come was annihilation. The distinction between a state that excluded and a state that exterminated is the whole of the difference and does not convert the exclusion into anything other than what it was, and this is the formulation the critical-history framework uses.

Immigration

Immigration has been the principal source of population growth since the postwar decades. Industrial recruitment from southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean from the 1950s brought a population that was expected to return and largely did not, concentrated in the industrial cities of the Rhineland and Ruhr, in Berlin, and in the southern manufacturing belt. Movement from the Mitteleuropa states followed. Since the opening of the European Concert’s common market in 2027 a third movement has begun, still phasing in and already a live subject of federal politics.

The Empire spent thirty years insisting that it was not a country of immigration while conducting one, and the citizenship law, the schooling and the housing policy all reflect that period of denial. The correction has been under way for a generation and is incomplete. Educational outcomes for children of migration background have improved and remain below the average; the early tracking of the school system bears on them disproportionately; and the residential concentration in particular districts of particular cities is the subject of a policy debate that has produced more studies than results.

The political argument about immigration is conducted in much the same terms as elsewhere. Its German particularity is that the largest conservative bloc is a confessional party whose clergy take a consistent and public position in favour of reception, so that a substantial part of the argument occurs inside the Zentrum rather than between it and its opponents.

Class, mobility and region

German society is less unequal in income and more stratified in trajectory than its own self-image allows. The tracking of the school system, the prestige hierarchy of occupations and the persistence of family firms all reproduce position across generations more reliably than the income figures suggest. The professions, the judiciary and the officer corps have all broadened since the postwar reforms and none has broadened as much as the Reichstag.

Regional identity is strong and is not in tension with national identity, which is the aspect of German society most consistently misread abroad. A Bavarian, a Rhinelander, a Saxon and a Hamburger will each assert a regional character with some vigour and none of them means anything separatist by it. The constituent states are the reason: an identity attached to a real polity with a real government, real institutions and a real budget does not need to become a grievance in order to be expressed.

The one place where the pattern does not hold cleanly is the internal migration from east to west, which has run for more than a century, has emptied districts of their young, and has left the eastern agricultural provinces with an age structure and a political temper distinct from the rest of the Empire.

Women, family and the demographic question

Women received the imperial franchise in the reforms of the settlement period, later than in several comparable countries and without the revolution that carried it elsewhere. Legal equality in family law, property, employment and the professions was achieved piecemeal across the following half-century, and the last of the formal disabilities, including the provisions that gave a husband rights over his wife’s employment and property, were removed within living memory.

The persisting inequality is structural rather than legal and is bound up with the way the German welfare settlement was designed. The social insurance system was built around a full working life in continuous employment, which describes the careers of men better than those of women; the school day in much of the Empire has historically ended at midday, on the assumption that somebody is at home; and the tax treatment of married couples, which splits income between spouses for assessment, produces a strong disincentive to a second full-time earner in the household. Each of these was a considered policy at the time it was adopted, each has been reformed in part, and each still shapes behaviour.

Participation in employment is high and part-time work among women is far more common than in comparable countries. The gap in pay is moderate at the point of entry and widens sharply after the first child, which is the pattern the German literature calls the motherhood penalty and which the reforms of the last two decades, parental leave with an earnings-related payment, a statutory entitlement to a nursery place and the extension of the school day, were designed to address. They have narrowed it. They have not closed it, and the constituent states differ considerably in how far they have implemented the provision that was legislated federally.

The birth rate has been below replacement for two generations, which is the demographic fact underneath the pension problem, the immigration argument and the emptying of the eastern provinces at once. Family policy has been directed at it explicitly since the 1970s under governments of every combination. The honest summary of the result, which German family ministries themselves publish, is that policy has raised the rate somewhat, that the countries which have done best are those which made it easiest to combine a career with children rather than those which paid the most per child, and that no rich country has returned to replacement.

The German language

The standard and the dialects

Standard German emerged from the printed and chancery usage of the early modern period, was fixed by the Lutheran Bible and the printers rather than by an academy, and is the language of imperial law, of instruction and of public life throughout the Empire. Germany has never possessed a body with authority over the language comparable to the French academy, and the successive orthographic reforms have been negotiated between the states, Austria and Switzerland through conferences whose recommendations are adopted by each government separately.

Beneath the standard lies a dialect landscape of unusual depth. Low German across the northern plain is by descent a separate language from the High German of the centre and south, and is recognised as such under the minority-language arrangements. The central dialects of Saxony, Thuringia and the Rhineland shade into one another. The Alemannic of the south west and the Bavarian of the south east are mutually difficult and are both remote from the standard. A speaker of broad Low German and a speaker of broad Bavarian cannot converse in their own varieties.

Dialect use has declined across the century and has declined unevenly. It remains vigorous in Bavaria, Swabia and the Alemannic south west, where it is spoken across the social classes and in public settings; it has retreated further in the north, where Low German is now largely a language of the old and of deliberate revival; and in the great cities a regionally coloured standard has generally replaced dialect proper.

Language and the state

The Empire has no imperial language law and does not need one, since German’s position is not in question. What it has instead is a set of minority-language arrangements administered by the constituent states: the twenty per cent district threshold for co-official status in Prussia, the Danish settlement in northern Schleswig, the Sorbian and Frisian protections, the contested arrangements in Elsaß-Lothringen, and the statewide co-official status that Brunswick gives to Eastphalian Low German.

The states also differ in their treatment of their own dialects. Bavaria funds dialect programmes in schools and broadcasting; several northern states support Low German similarly; and the standing criticism of all such programmes is that a dialect maintained by a state subsidy has already lost the argument that mattered.

German beyond the Empire

German is the imperial language of Austria-Hungary, is spoken in the Swiss cantons and Luxembourg, remains a language of administration and higher instruction in Togo and Kamerun among the associated states, and survives as a community language in the Mitteleuropa states and among the descendants of nineteenth-century emigrants overseas.

The most substantial of those overseas survivals is Wisconsindeutsch in the United Kingdom of America, a vernacular formed from the speech of emigrants drawn from every German state and never suppressed, which carries northern, Rhenish, Bavarian and Franconian features layered together. German linguists study it with the particular interest of a discipline examining what its own language does when removed from the state that standardises it.

The Empire maintains cultural institutes abroad and funds German instruction in the associated states and in the Concert, on a scale that is substantial and that its critics inside Germany describe as insufficient and its critics outside Germany describe as considerable.

Language and science

German was one of the three principal languages of world science until the middle of the twentieth century and did not lose that position as abruptly as might have been expected. There was no emigration of German science in the 1930s, so the shift of the scientific literature towards English proceeded through the ordinary pressure of a large anglophone research community rather than through the sudden relocation of a generation of German-speaking scientists.

German therefore remains a working language of publication in several fields, chemistry, parts of physics, law, classical philology, theology and art history among them, to a degree that surprises scientists trained elsewhere. The Empire’s universities teach in German, admit foreign students on that basis, and have resisted the general European move to English-language graduate instruction more successfully than most, which is defended as the preservation of a scientific culture and criticised as a barrier the Empire has erected against its own recruitment.

The churches and the state

There is no imperial established church and there cannot be one, because religion is a matter for the constituent states and the states are confessionally divided. What exists instead is a common framework of public-law status, under which recognised religious bodies may levy a church tax collected for them by the state revenue offices from their declared members, hold property, run schools, hospitals and welfare institutions on public funding, and appoint chaplains to the army, the prisons and the hospitals.

Establishment survives at state level in several places and means less than the word suggests. Prussia maintains the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union with the King as formal governor; Brunswick’s Lutheran church has the Duke as supreme governor; Bavaria disestablished the Catholic Church in the settlement of 1919 to 1923 by concordat, without rancour, and guaranteed its schools and its position in the process. In none of these cases does establishment carry preference in civil rights, public employment, education or access to public services.

The church tax is the institution most often questioned and least often changed. It is opt-out rather than opt-in: a German who does not wish to pay it must formally leave the church, and formal departure is a registered administrative act with consequences for burial, for church employment and, in Catholic practice, for the sacraments. Departures have risen steadily for fifty years, more sharply after each institutional scandal, and the revenue has fallen more slowly than membership because those who remain are older and better paid.

The confessional map, and what became of it

The map is the map of the sixteenth-century settlement carried forward with remarkable fidelity. The north and east are historically Protestant, the south and west historically Catholic, and the middle is interleaved village by village in ways that a traveller can still read from the church towers. The Catholic populations of the Rhineland, Westphalia, Bavaria, Silesia and Posen are among the largest confessional blocs in Europe, and the Zentrum is their historic political expression and the reason the map still matters politically.

What has changed is practice rather than affiliation. Attendance has fallen across the century in the manner common to industrial societies, most sharply in the great cities and least in rural Bavaria, Westphalia and the Catholic Rhineland. A substantial minority of Germans profess no confession while remaining formally enrolled in one, which is the church tax’s doing and is the honest answer to why German affiliation figures are higher than German belief figures.

The churches retain an institutional weight out of proportion to their congregations. They are among the largest employers in the Empire through their welfare organisations, they hold seats on broadcasting councils and ethics commissions, and, because there is no German green party, the environmental argument runs through them as well as through the SPD. That gives the churches a real constituency and a moral standing on a question they would not otherwise own, and no seat at any cabinet table, which is exactly the structural position they occupy on immigration as well.

Muslim communities, established by the postwar labour migration, have organised under the same public-law framework with difficulty, since the framework presumes a membership register and a hierarchy that the communities do not uniformly possess. Several states have concluded treaties with associations of mosques on terms analogous to the concordats. The arrangements are recent, are contested within the communities as well as outside them, and are the clearest current test of whether the German framework of recognised religion can accommodate a body it was not designed around.

The Empire and the Holy See

The Empire has no concordat of its own, because relations with the Catholic Church are a matter for the constituent states and several of them have their own. Bavaria’s concordat, concluded at the disestablishment of the 1920s, is the most substantial; Prussia has none, which is the residue of the Kulturkampf and a fact both sides have found it convenient not to remedy.

Diplomatic relations with the Holy See are nonetheless imperial, and the nunciature at Berlin is among the older missions accredited to the Empire. The relationship is correct and is conducted with an awareness on both sides that the Empire once imprisoned and deposed bishops and that the party which emerged from that conflict has been in more German governments than any other.

The Zentrum’s relationship with Rome is not the relationship of a confessional party to a directing authority and has not been for a century. The party’s clergy take public positions on immigration and the environment that the German episcopate supports and that no Roman authority has instructed, and the standing German conservative complaint that the Zentrum takes its politics from abroad has been made since the 1870s and has never been true.

Culture

Music

Music is the deepest element of German cultural self-image and the one in which the claim to pre-eminence is least disputed abroad. The inheritance runs from the Lutheran chorale and Bach through the Viennese classical tradition that Germany treats as substantially its own, the nineteenth-century symphonic and operatic repertoire, and the modernism of the early twentieth century.

Its institutional expression is a density of provision that exists nowhere else. Almost every state capital of any size supports a permanent orchestra and an opera house out of public funds, and so do a great many towns that are not state capitals. Leipzig is the city of Bach and of the Gewandhaus; Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt maintain opera of the first rank; Bayreuth holds the Wagner festival in the theatre Ludwig II built for it.

The funding model is the point. German orchestras and opera houses are public institutions supported by states and municipalities, not commercial undertakings dependent on box office and donation, and their programming is accordingly less constrained by what will sell. The system is expensive, is defended across all parties, and comes under pressure in every municipal budget crisis without ever being dismantled. Its critics note that the subsidy flows to an audience that is older, richer and better educated than the population paying for it, which is true and has never yet been decisive.

Theatre and letters

The theatre is likewise a public institution rather than a commercial one. The municipal and state stages of quite modest towns carry repertoires that would be metropolitan elsewhere, employ permanent ensembles, and operate on the principle that a town of eighty thousand people is entitled to see the classical repertoire performed properly. The system produced, and continues to produce, a directorial tradition that treats the canonical texts as material to be argued with, which is a settled expectation of German audiences and a recurring shock to visiting ones.

In letters, the inheritance of Goethe and Schiller is treated as a national possession rather than a Thuringian one, and the Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach connection is a source of pride to that grand duchy out of all proportion to its size. Book publishing is concentrated at Leipzig and Frankfurt, whose fairs are the central commercial events of the German book world and among the largest anywhere. The German book market is large, is protected by a fixed-price agreement that keeps small bookshops viable and is periodically challenged inside the European Concert, and sustains a translation industry that brings more foreign literature into German than into most languages.

Film

German cinema is one of the major world traditions, and an unbroken one. The studios of the 1920s produced the expressionist and street-realist work that established the German visual language, and the generation that made it did not leave. There was no regime to drive out the directors, writers, composers and cinematographers who would otherwise have reconstituted themselves in an American industry, and German film therefore carried its own inheritance forward continuously.

The consequence is an industry with a large domestic market, a state and state-supported financing structure closer to the theatre model than to a commercial one, and a persistent argument about whether public financing has produced a cinema that is respected and unwatched. German audiences see a larger share of domestic production than most European audiences and a smaller share than the industry thinks they should.

The visual arts, design and architecture

The museum collections of Berlin, Dresden and Munich are among the great collections of Europe and carry the provenance questions that all such collections carry, in the German case with the colonial dimension unusually prominent and unusually well documented. The Bauhaus tradition of Anhalt is the most exported piece of German design thinking, and the applied arts and porcelain traditions of Saxony and the Thuringian principalities remain economically as well as culturally alive.

Architecture is dominated by the reconstruction. German cities were bombed in the Second Great War, and the decisions taken about how to rebuild them define what they look like now. The choices ran from faithful restoration, which Munich chose and which is why modern Munich is substantially the Munich of 1938, through selective reconstruction of monuments within a modern fabric, which most cities chose, to comprehensive modern replanning, which a few chose and several regret. The argument about which was right is conducted in every German city with a damaged centre and is not settled in any of them.

The press and broadcasting

Germany has one of the densest newspaper markets in the world and it is organised regionally rather than nationally. Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich, Hamburg and Leipzig each support papers of national influence; beneath them the constituent states sustain their own press; and beneath that the local subscription paper, still delivered before breakfast, remains a genuine institution in a way it has ceased to be in most comparable countries. The market is contracting under the same pressures as everywhere else, more slowly, from a higher base.

Broadcasting is organised at state and municipal level rather than through a single imperial corporation, on the principle that a service expected to scrutinise governments should not be owned by one. Prussian public broadcasting is owned by a consortium of municipalities rather than by the State Ministry or the Crown. Others are constituted as public-law corporations governed by councils on which parties, churches, unions, employers and cultural bodies sit, an arrangement that distributes influence widely and is criticised for distributing it to exactly the organised interests that already have some.

The result is a plural landscape with a great deal of duplication, both of which are accepted as the price of the principle. There is no imperial broadcaster and proposals to create one have failed in the Bundesrat every time they have been made, for the obvious reason that the Bundesrat is a chamber of the governments who own the existing ones.

Sport, food and the ordinary institutions

Association football is the mass spectator sport, organised through club competitions that run within and across the constituent states, with club loyalty following the industrial geography of the Ruhr, Saxony and the northern ports more closely than the political map. German clubs are member-owned under a rule requiring that the members retain control, a rule which is challenged periodically by investors and defended fiercely by supporters and which has no equivalent in most European leagues.

The older gymnastics and shooting societies remain a substantial part of associational life in the smaller towns, particularly in the south. Alpine and winter sport is a Bavarian speciality; rowing, athletics, handball and cycling have long-established followings.

Regional cuisine follows the confessional and agricultural map, the northern coasts eating fish and the plain pork, potatoes and rye bread, while the south and west carry a richer tradition tied to beer, wine and the Catholic festival calendar. Beer is brewed everywhere and is a constitutional question in Bavaria; the Rhine, the Moselle and the Franconian valleys make the wine.

Beneath all of it lies the associational life that is the ordinary architecture of German civic existence: the club, the choir, the volunteer fire brigade, the allotment association, the local historical society, the Sunday walk. Their density is one reason the Empire’s federal structure has never felt purely administrative to the people living inside it, and it is the layer of German society that foreign accounts of the country most consistently omit.

Competitive sport

Organised sport in the Empire runs through clubs rather than schools or universities, and the club is a membership association with an elected committee, a subscription and legal personality. The consequence is a sporting structure owned by its participants: football clubs are member-controlled under a rule requiring that the members retain the decisive vote, challenged periodically by investors and defended fiercely by supporters.

The Empire performs strongly in international competition across a wide range of disciplines, and the reason usually given inside Germany is the density of the club network rather than any elite programme. Public sports provision is municipal, is extensive, and is one of the first items cut in a municipal budget crisis and one of the most reliably restored.

The gymnastics and shooting societies remain a substantial part of associational life in the smaller towns, particularly in the south, and carry a nineteenth-century nationalist inheritance that most of them have examined and some have not. Winter and Alpine sport is a southern speciality, tied to the tourism economy and to the mountain-rescue services, and the shortening and less reliable winter season is now a matter of economic as well as sporting concern in the Alpine districts.

Museums, heritage and restitution

The collections of Berlin, Dresden and Munich are among the great museum holdings of Europe, and the Berlin museum quarter in particular is a nineteenth-century state’s monument to itself: an island of institutions built to demonstrate that the new Empire was the equal of older civilisations, filled by excavation, purchase and the ordinary asymmetries of power in the period when the filling was done.

The provenance questions that follow are handled better than in several comparable countries and are not resolved. The colonial material is the largest category and the best documented, since the joint commission with the associated states has access to the imperial archives and publishes without German editorial control. Human remains taken for the racial-science collections have been returned in a series of transfers since the 1990s. Archaeological material acquired under colonial or quasi-colonial administrations is the subject of continuing negotiation, and the German position has moved from denial through delay to a case-by-case process that the claimant states describe as an improvement and not as a settlement.

A separate category is domestic. Objects that entered state collections through the secularisation of monastic property in the early nineteenth century are claimed by dioceses, parishes and refounded abbeys, principally in Bavaria, and the argument that they were lawfully acquired under the legislation of the day is accurate, undisputed and not accepted as an answer.

Heritage protection itself is a state competence and the standards vary. The reconstruction of the bombed cities produced the Empire’s most consequential heritage decisions, taken in the 1950s under pressure and without much consultation, and the German preservation movement of the 1970s onward was in large part a reaction against what the reconstruction destroyed after the war rather than during it. The monuments of the imperial period are mostly still standing and are handled by addition rather than removal, since they are municipal property and the Empire has no competence over them at all.

Freedom of expression and the press

The law

Expression is protected constitutionally, and the protection is qualified in ways that reflect German legal thinking rather than the American tradition. Speech is weighed against personal honour, against the constitutional order, and against the equal dignity of others, and the balancing is done by courts rather than settled by an absolute rule. The German position is that a right exercised to destroy the conditions of everyone else’s rights is not thereby privileged, and the practical consequences are a defamation law more favourable to claimants than in the anglophone countries and a body of law restricting organisations and expression directed against the constitutional order.

Prior restraint is prohibited. Censorship of publication does not exist and has not since the imperial press law was reformed. What exists instead is liability after publication, which is extensive, and a right of reply enforceable against periodicals, which obliges a publication to carry a factual correction from the person concerned at comparable prominence and is used constantly.

The history

The Empire censored heavily within living institutional memory. Under the anti-socialist legislation the party press was suppressed outright and its editors imprisoned. Under the state-of-siege powers of the First Great War military commanders censored newspapers across most of the country for four years with minimal parliamentary supervision and no effective judicial review. The Kulturkampf brought prosecutions of Catholic clergy and editors.

Each of these is required teaching, and each is the direct explanation for a feature of the present settlement. The prohibition of prior restraint answers the press law. The requirement of judicial warrant answers the political policing. The separation of the state from broadcasting ownership answers the whole of it.

Broadcasting and its councils

Broadcasting is organised at state and municipal level rather than through a single imperial corporation, and no imperial broadcaster exists. Proposals to create one have failed in the Bundesrat every time, for the obvious reason that the Bundesrat is a chamber of the governments who own the existing services.

The public broadcasters are constituted as public-law corporations governed by councils on which parties, churches, unions, employers, cultural bodies and other organised interests sit. Prussian public broadcasting is owned by a consortium of municipalities rather than by the State Ministry or the Crown, on the principle that a service expected to scrutinise governments should not be owned by one.

The arrangement distributes influence widely and is criticised for distributing it to exactly the organised interests that already have plenty. Council appointments are negotiated between the parties, the negotiation is conducted with an eye to balance rather than to merit, and the Constitutional Court has twice ruled that the political proportion of a broadcasting council was too high and required it reduced.

The press in practice

The German press is regionally organised, dense and contracting more slowly than most. It is self-regulated through a press council whose code covers accuracy, the separation of comment from reporting, the protection of the accused before conviction and the treatment of victims, and whose sanction is a published reprimand that member titles undertake to print. The council has no legal powers and its reprimands are printed, which is a combination that works better than its critics predict and less well than its defenders claim.

Journalistic sources are protected by statute and the protection extends to a refusal to testify and to the material a journalist holds. It has been narrowed by anti-terrorism legislation and litigated back most of the way by the Constitutional Court.

The persistent complaint about the German press is not censorship but proximity. The political and journalistic classes of Berlin are small, know one another, and operate a background-briefing convention that produces well-informed reporting and a reluctance to break the arrangements that supply it. German journalists say this about themselves at conferences and continue.

Standards and technical regulation

The standards body

Germany’s industrial standards organisation is a private association, not a government department, and it is one of the most consequential institutions in the Empire. It publishes tens of thousands of standards covering dimensions, tolerances, materials, testing methods, safety, terminology and interfaces, developed by committees of the firms, the trade bodies, the testing institutes, the insurers and the unions concerned, and it does so with no statutory authority at all.

Its standards acquire force by reference. A statute or regulation requiring that equipment be safe is satisfied by compliance with the relevant standard, so that the legal duty is defined in practice by a private committee, and a court assessing negligence will treat departure from the standard as evidence against the defendant. The state has delegated a great deal of technical lawmaking to a body it does not control, deliberately, on the reasoning that the committees know things ministries do not.

Why it matters industrially

The system is one of the less visible reasons German medium-sized manufacturers can compete worldwide. A firm of two hundred employees making a specialist component works to standards developed jointly with its customers, its testing house and its insurer, can demonstrate compliance without maintaining a regulatory affairs department, and sells into markets that have adopted the same standards because German industry got there first and the standards were good.

The Empire has accordingly been an energetic exporter of its standards, through the international standards bodies and now through the European Concert, and the criticism made of this by the Empire’s trading partners is that a standard written by the incumbent supplier is a barrier to the entrant however technically neutral its language. German officials answer that the committees are open, which is true, and that participation requires the expertise and the staff time to sustain a committee seat, which is also true and is the point being made.

Weights, measures and the technical state

The imperial physical and technical institute is the national metrology body, one of the oldest in the world, and maintains the standards of measurement on which the rest depends. Alongside it sit the testing and certification houses, some public and some private, whose marks appear on German products and whose independence from the manufacturers they certify is the subject of periodic scandal and periodic reform.

The general German disposition, that a technical question should be settled by qualified people in a committee and then written down, runs through all of it. It produces reliable machinery, durable regulation and a certain difficulty in responding to anything that has not yet been standardised.

Everyday life and the state

How Germans encounter the state

The German state is present in ordinary life to a degree that visitors notice and Germans do not. Residence is registered: moving house requires notification to the municipality within a fixed period, and the registration is the key to the tax office, the health insurance, the school place, the vehicle licence and the electoral roll. Membership of a church is a registered status with fiscal consequences. Occupational qualification is certified and, in many trades, licensed.

The system is efficient, is trusted, and rests on an assumption about the relationship between citizen and administration that is not universal: that the state is entitled to know where you live and what you are qualified to do, and that in exchange it will provide services without requiring you to prove your identity repeatedly to each of them. German data-protection law, which is among the strictest anywhere and was among the first, exists in the same tradition rather than in opposition to it, and its origin is the same conclusion about the imperial period that produced the separation of police from intelligence.

Administrative decisions are reasoned in writing and are appealable, first internally and then to the administrative courts, and Germans appeal at a rate that would overwhelm most systems. The right to a reasoned decision is the practical form that German administrative law takes in ordinary life, and it is the reason a planning objection from a single household can delay a transmission line for years.

Civil protection

Civil protection is organised at state and municipal level and depends overwhelmingly on volunteers. The volunteer fire brigades are the backbone: nearly every municipality has one, the professional brigades exist only in the larger cities, and the volunteer brigade is simultaneously an emergency service and one of the principal social institutions of small-town Germany, with its own hall, its own festival and its own place in the municipal hierarchy.

Alongside them stand a federal technical relief organisation, also largely volunteer, specialising in heavy rescue, water, power and bridging, and the relief services of the welfare associations and the churches. The Empire can mobilise a very large trained volunteer body quickly and does so several times a year.

The floods of 2021

The system’s most severe recent test was the summer floods of 2021 in the western uplands, which fell on the Rhineland, Westphalia and Hesse-Nassau and on neighbouring states. Narrow valleys carrying small rivers received rainfall the drainage could not take, and the water arrived at night in communities that had not been evacuated.

The response mobilised the volunteer brigades, the technical relief organisation and the army’s engineering units at scale, and the reconstruction was financed through a federal and state fund agreed within weeks. The inquiries that followed were less kind than the response deserved. They found that the meteorological warnings had been adequate and had not been converted into evacuation decisions, that the warning chain ran through too many authorities in too little time, and that responsibility for the decision to evacuate was distributed among municipal, district and state bodies in a way that made it nobody’s in the hours that mattered.

The reforms that followed strengthened the warning systems, clarified the chain and gave the federal coordinating body a stronger role without transferring the substantive decision, which is the same compromise the Bundesrat accepted after the pandemic and for the same reason. Whether a federal structure can warn a valley in the middle of the night is a question the Empire has now asked itself twice in a decade.

Rural Germany and the small towns

A little under a fifth of Germans live in rural districts, and the small town of between five and twenty thousand people is the characteristic German settlement in a way the great city is not. Such a town will typically have a hospital or did until recently, a Gymnasium, a swimming bath, a municipal works supplying its power and water, a savings bank, a volunteer fire brigade, several churches, a dense layer of associations and, very often, a medium-sized manufacturer employing several hundred people and exporting worldwide.

That combination is the German provincial settlement and it is what the technical-institute policy, the savings banks and the equalisation transfers exist to sustain. Where it holds, the productivity gap between provincial and metropolitan Germany is small by international standards and young people are not compelled to leave. Where it has failed, in the eastern border districts, the Upper Franconian uplands, the Rhön and parts of the northern heath, the pattern is the familiar one: the hospital closes, then the Gymnasium consolidates, then the bank branch goes, then the last employer’s succession fails.

The Empire has spent sixty years on this and its record is genuinely mixed. The western and southern provinces are the strongest argument that a country can be prosperous without being centralised. The eastern districts are the standing evidence that the policy does not work everywhere, and Germans who defend the model supply that qualification themselves, because the districts concerned send deputies to the Reichstag who would otherwise supply it for them.

Civil society

The density of German associational life is the feature of the country that foreign accounts most consistently omit and that Germans themselves take least notice of. A registered association is a legal person, is straightforward to found, receives favourable tax treatment for public-benefit purposes, and is the vehicle through which an extraordinary range of activity is organised: sport, music, fire-fighting, allotments, local history, nature conservation, welfare, animal rescue, model railways, carnival and mutual aid.

The welfare associations are the largest instance and the most consequential. The great confessional and secular welfare organisations run a substantial share of the Empire’s hospitals, nursing homes, nurseries and social services under public funding, on a principle of subsidiarity which holds that the state should not perform a function that a smaller body can perform. They employ hundreds of thousands of people, sit on the councils of broadcasters and insurance funds, and constitute a layer of quasi-public administration that is accountable to its own members rather than to an electorate.

The arrangement is defended as pluralism and criticised as a settlement in which the two churches and the labour movement divide a public function between them. Both descriptions are accurate, and the practical effect is that a German encountering the welfare state most often encounters it through an organisation the state pays for and does not run.

The statistical service

The Empire maintains a federal statistical office alongside the statistical offices of the constituent states, and the division between them is the ordinary German one: the federation sets method and the states collect. The service is old, is professionally independent by statute, and publishes on a schedule that ministers may not vary.

Its data are unusually rich because the registration system supplies a continuous population record rather than a decennial snapshot, and unusually constrained because German data-protection law restricts the linkage of administrative records that other statistical services perform routinely. German statisticians describe this trade-off without complaint. It is the same trade-off, made deliberately and for the same historical reasons, that produced the separation of police from intelligence and the strictness of the data-protection commissioners.

Police, crime and internal security

Policing

Policing is a competence of the constituent states. Each maintains its own force under its own interior ministry, with its own uniform, rank structure and training, and the differences between them are real: Bavarian policing is more centralised than Prussian, the free cities’ forces are municipal in character and, in Hamburg’s case, pragmatic and tolerant in a way the port taught it to be.

The federation maintains a federal police for the frontiers, the railways, the waterways and aviation security, a criminal police office that coordinates between the states and holds the national records, and an office for the protection of the constitutional order. None of them polices ordinary crime, and the strict separation of police and intelligence functions, adopted after the imperial period’s experience of political policing, is a principle German officials cite frequently and defend against every proposal to relax it.

Crime

Recorded crime is low by international comparison and has fallen for two decades in most categories. Homicide is very low. Property crime is concentrated in the large cities and in the border districts. Firearms are licensed strictly, the licensing is administered by the states, and the shooting societies that are a substantial part of associational life in the south operate within it without difficulty and lobby against every tightening.

The prison population is small relative to comparable countries and the sentencing philosophy is explicitly directed at resocialisation, with short custodial sentences discouraged by statute in favour of fines and suspended terms. The system is administered by the states, the standards vary between them, and the eastern provinces’ institutions are the oldest and the worst.

Political policing, and its history

The Empire’s record of political policing is the part of its internal-security history that is required teaching. Under the anti-socialist legislation the police and the courts were directed against a lawful political movement, with surveillance, dissolution of organisations, suppression of the press and imprisonment of organisers, and the apparatus built for that purpose did not disappear when the statutes lapsed in 1890.

The postwar reconstruction addressed this deliberately. The separation of police from intelligence, the requirement of judicial warrant, the strict limits on the federal bodies’ operational powers and the parliamentary oversight of the intelligence services all descend from a settled conclusion about what the imperial state had done and what it had been capable of doing.

The oversight is not regarded as adequate by everybody. The parliamentary committee that supervises the intelligence services meets in secret, its members may not report what they learn, and the standing complaint from the SPD’s left and the USPD is that a supervisory body which cannot speak is not a supervisory body. The counter-argument is the obvious one and neither side expects to win it.

The 2028 position

Internal security in the present year is dominated by two matters. The first is the eastern question, where the fading of the confrontation with Russia has converted a militarised frontier into a commercial corridor faster than the security services’ assessments have adjusted, and where the argument between the commercial and security readings of Russia is conducted partly through intelligence assessments that are leaked with some regularity.

The second is the Prussian constitutional crisis, which is a matter for the Prussian courts and the Prussian police and in which the imperial authorities have no standing and have been conspicuously careful to claim none. That care is deliberate. The Empire has a doctrine, stated and adhered to, that it possesses no unilateral power of intervention in a constituent state, and the present crisis in the largest of them is the first serious occasion in a century on which the doctrine has been worth anything.

The reigning houses

The Empire is a federation of monarchies and contains more reigning dynasties than any other state in the world. Each constituent kingdom, grand duchy, duchy and principality has its own sovereign house, its own succession law, its own court and its own civil list voted by its own legislature, and the imperial crown confers no authority over any of them.

The Hohenzollerns reign in Prussia and, through it, in the Empire. The Wittelsbachs have held Bavaria since 1180, when it was taken from Henry the Lion, ancestor of the Welfs who now reign in Hanover and Brunswick, so that two houses sit in one federation with an unresolved twelfth-century grievance between them, observed with elaborate courtesy and mentioned only in jest. The Wettins hold Saxony in their Albertine line and the four Thuringian duchies in their Ernestine one. The house of Württemberg, the Zähringen of Baden, the houses of Hesse, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Anhalt, Lippe, Schwarzburg, Reuss and Waldeck hold the remainder.

The dynastic web is dense and international. German princely houses supplied consorts and sovereigns to most of the courts of Europe through the nineteenth century, and the Saxe-Coburg connection alone reached into Britain, Belgium, Portugal and Bulgaria. The assassination that began the First Great War claimed a Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha for precisely this reason: he was a sovereign prince of a small German duchy with relations in half the palaces of the continent, and killing him was an act against the European order rather than against a state.

Succession law is a matter for each house and its state, and it is not uniform. Several have adopted absolute primogeniture; several retain male preference; Prussia’s reform of 2015 was prospective and therefore left the existing order in place, which is why Alexander I reigns and his elder sister does not. Bavaria’s constitution requires a referendum for any change touching the succession, which is why a drafted reform bill there has never been introduced.

The one member state without a hereditary house of its own is Elsaß-Lothringen, which was created from territory taken from France in 1871 and constituted as a grand duchy without an ancient dynasty attached to it. The three free cities have no prince at all, being republics governed by senates inside a monarchy, which is the Empire’s oldest constitutional anomaly and the one that has never caused it the slightest difficulty.

What the princes actually do

The constituent sovereigns are constitutional monarchs of the ordinary modern kind, with the significant exception of Prussia, whose King is also Emperor and retains executive powers, and the partial exception of Bavaria, whose King commands the Bavarian contingent in peacetime. The others assent to legislation, appoint ministries that command majorities, receive and are advised, and conduct the ceremonial and charitable work that constitutional monarchy consists of.

Their political weight is nonetheless real and is exercised almost entirely through their states’ governments rather than personally. A grand duke does not instruct his ministry, and his ministry’s delegation in the Bundesrat votes on his state’s instruction, and the distinction between those two propositions is the whole of German constitutional monarchy below the imperial level.

Several of the smaller houses are, by the standards of European royalty, not rich, and live from their civil lists, their remaining private estates and in a few cases from professions. The conversion of royal domains into public trusts in the settlement period was general rather than Bavarian, and its effect on the minor houses was greater, since they had less private property to fall back on.

Public memory

How victory is remembered

The two Great Wars are the organising facts of German public memory, and the Empire’s manner of remembering them has changed more than any other part of its public culture since 1945. Victory is not celebrated as vindication. The anniversaries are observed, the dead are commemorated, and the official language is one of service, loss and obligation rather than of triumph.

This was not always so. The generation that won the First Great War took the outcome as proof that monarchical and disciplined order was superior to republicanism, and said so at length, and the conviction complicated German diplomacy through the interwar decades and made restraint towards a rearming France harder to argue for than it should have been. The Empire learned from that, expensively.

The Battle for Berlin, the occupation of German soil by fascist French forces and the reconstruction that followed occupy a larger place in ordinary memory than the victories that ended either war. Albrecht I’s decision to remain in the capital throughout the battle is the single most reproduced image of the German twentieth century, and the war memorials of the western and southern provinces record French occupation and German civilian death in a country that had been told for a generation that it was the strongest power in Europe.

The critical-history framework

The instrument of the modern settlement is the critical-history framework used in the constituent states’ schools: a minimum content, drafted by independent commissions of historians and teachers, ratified by state legislatures, revised on a cycle, and operating by requiring that certain matters be taught rather than by prescribing what is to be concluded about them.

The required content across the Empire includes the conduct of German forces in both Great Wars; the colonial record, including the Herero and Nama genocide and the findings of the joint commission; the exclusion of Jewish Germans from the judiciary, the professions, commercial bodies and associations under the Empire, an exclusion that rested on practice rather than statute and was therefore never repealed but merely abandoned; the anti-socialist legislation and the courts’ enforcement of it; and, in Prussia, the eastern marches policy by name, with the settlement commission, the school strikes and the Expropriation Act of 1908.

The argument about the framework has not changed materially in thirty years and is the same argument in every state. The conservative parties hold that it has become an instrument of national self-abasement and that a country which won both Great Wars is being taught to apologise for its existence. The Social Democrats, the minority organisations and the associated states’ commission hold the opposite complaint, that the framework is bloodless: it requires the facts to be stated and stops short of requiring that responsibility be attributed. Teachers’ organisations say the content cannot be taught properly in the hours allowed and that both other parties argue as though time were unlimited.

What is not commemorated

The Empire has no single national day of the kind most states possess. The foundation is dated to 18 January 1871 and shares its anniversary with the Prussian royal coronation of 1701, which means the imperial anniversary is also a Prussian one, and the Empire has never resolved the awkwardness by choosing a different date. Beyond it the constituent states keep their own days.

There is no commemoration of either victory as such. Proposals for a victory day were made after 1918 and after 1945 and were declined on both occasions, the second time on the explicit ground that a state which had just watched a neighbour’s politics organised around a humiliation should be careful what it built into its calendar. That reasoning is quoted in the Reichstag whenever the subject returns, which is roughly once a decade.

The monuments

The Empire is full of monuments erected in a self-confident century and inherited by a more doubtful one. The nineteenth-century national monuments, the colonial memorials, the regimental stones and the great equestrian statues are mostly still standing, and the settled German practice is not to remove them but to add: an explanatory plaque, a counter-monument, a rededication, an adjacent installation naming those the original commemorated over.

The practice satisfies nobody entirely. It is defended on the ground that a removed monument teaches nothing and a contextualised one teaches something, and attacked on the ground that a contextualised monument is still a monument and that the people it honours are still honoured in bronze at public expense. Several municipalities have removed rather than contextualised, and there is no imperial rule, because monuments are municipal property and the Empire has no competence over them at all.

Writing German history

The arguments

Germany argues about its own history more publicly and more professionally than almost any other country, and the arguments are conducted between historians in newspapers rather than confined to the journals. The recurring subjects are stable. Whether the Empire’s constitutional arrangements before 1919 were a viable modern order or an authoritarian structure with parliamentary decoration. Whether victory in 1918 delayed German democratisation or made it possible without revolution. Whether the settlement of 1919 to 1923 was a genuine transformation or a defensive concession by elites who kept what mattered. Whether the colonial record is an episode or a key.

These are live disputes among competent people and are not resolved. The Register records them as disputes because they are disputes.

The special path, and the objection to it

The organising question of twentieth-century German historiography elsewhere is why Germany took a divergent path towards catastrophe. In this Germany the catastrophe did not occur, and the question has accordingly developed differently: German historians have argued about whether the Empire’s survival demonstrates that the older account of German exceptionalism was always overstated, or whether it demonstrates only that a state can carry authoritarian structures a very long way if it keeps winning.

The second position is the more uncomfortable and has strong advocates. Its argument is that the Empire reformed under the pressure of victory rather than in spite of it, that each reform was conceded at the point where refusal became more dangerous than concession, and that a Germany which had lost the First Great War would have had all the same materials and none of the same room to manoeuvre. On this reading the Empire’s constitutional decency is a function of its strategic luck, and the reason to say so is that a country which attributes its institutions to its own virtue will not examine them.

The framework and the profession

The critical-history framework used in the constituent states’ schools is drafted by independent commissions of historians and teachers, and the profession’s relationship to it is not comfortable. Historians who serve on the commissions are asked to convert contested scholarship into required content, which is a different exercise from writing history, and several have written afterwards about how uneasily the two sit together.

The framework’s method, requiring that matters be taught without prescribing what is to be concluded about them, is a compromise between two things the profession cares about: that the facts should not be optional, and that the state should not determine interpretation. It satisfies neither of the political camps that argue about it and is defended by most historians on the ground that anything more prescriptive would be worse.

The archives

The Empire’s archives are extraordinarily complete, and completeness has repeatedly worked against the state that kept them. The colonial administration recorded the camps in South West Africa in detail. The settlement commissions in the Prussian east documented their own purchases. The imperial ministries minuted their own deliberations on the exclusion of Jewish Germans from the public service. In each case the strongest evidence against the German state was produced by the German state’s own bureaucratic thoroughness and preserved by its own archival practice.

German historians make this point regularly and it carries an obvious double edge. An administration that documents everything is auditable, which is a virtue. It is also an administration capable of executing a policy with the precision that makes documentation worth keeping, and the archives that convicted the Empire are the archives of the machine that did the thing.

The German model and its critics

What is meant by the model

Foreign discussion of Germany generally reduces to a single question: whether there is a German model, and if so whether it can be had elsewhere. The elements usually listed are the coordinated wage bargaining, codetermination, the dual apprenticeship, the three-pillar banking system, the dispersed medium-sized industrial base, the social insurance funds and the federal structure that administers most of it.

Germans themselves are more sceptical of the phrase than foreigners are, for the reason that the elements were not designed together. Social insurance was enacted to defeat the socialists. Codetermination came from the postwar settlement. The apprenticeship descends from the guilds. The savings banks were a nineteenth-century municipal invention. The federal structure is a treaty between princes from 1871. That these fit together is a fact about how institutions accumulate, not evidence of a plan, and the German scholars who study the system are careful to say so.

The case for it

The case is empirical and is strong on its own terms. Germany has the highest income per head of any large economy in the world alongside a Gini coefficient of 0.28, which is the combination the arrangement exists to produce. It carries a manufacturing sector that comparable countries have lost. It closed a coal industry over fifty years without the social collapse that comparable regions elsewhere experienced. Its productivity gap between metropolitan and provincial regions is unusually small. Its industrial relations are peaceful, and its skill formation is the envy of states that have tried repeatedly to copy it.

The case against

The objections are equally concrete. The system protects those inside it and has produced a segmented labour market beneath a well-defended core. It adjusts slowly, and its record on new industries is markedly worse than its record on established ones, which is visible in the Empire’s small share of the world’s consumer software and platforms. Wealth is distributed far less equally than income, and the housing tenure that produces the social stability is the reason. And the surplus, which is the aggregate expression of wage restraint and constrained public investment, exports adjustment to the Empire’s trading partners, which is the charge made most forcefully by the countries sharing a market with it.

The deepest objection is the one about time. Every element of the model works by slowing decisions down: sectoral bargaining, codetermination, twenty-seven state administrations, a standing conference method, a borrowing rule, an amendment procedure requiring twenty-seven ratifications, and an administrative law that lets a single household delay a transmission line for years. Germans defend this as durability and complain about it as paralysis, usually in the same conversation, and the honest position is that it is one mechanism producing both results and that no one has found a way to keep the first without the second.

Whether it exports

The Empire’s own view, expressed through its development programme, is that the technical institutes and the vocational system are the exportable parts and the rest is not. That view has been tested for sixty years with results that support it: countries that have adopted German-style vocational training have generally made it work, and countries that have attempted codetermination or sectoral bargaining without the union density, the employers’ associations and the legal framework underneath them have generally not.

The crisis of 2028

What happened

The Empire’s constitutional year has been dominated by events in its largest constituent state. Heinrich I died on 12 February 2028 from a sudden aortic aneurysm, without prolonged illness and without any managed transition, and his fourteen-year-old son succeeded automatically to both crowns as Alexander I. The accession was instantaneous and required no act by anyone; the regency governs the exercise of the Crown’s powers, not their possession.

The same nine-member Regency Council immediately began to act in both capacities, in strictly separate sittings with separate advice, votes, papers and records. In the Prussian capacity it dismissed the ministry of Dr Johanna Falk, which rested on an SPD, FVP and Zentrum majority in the Abgeordnetenhaus and which Heinrich himself had appointed after the Prussian election of 2027. A caretaker from the Free Conservative tradition was installed. In October 2028 the Zentrum left Falk’s coalition and the Prussian Constitutional Court held the dismissal void and restored her. On 10 October the Prussian Landtag and the Reichstag and Bundesrat abolished the Regency Council by constitutional amendment, the twenty-seven states ratifying the imperial amendment within a day, and Princess Charlotte became sole Regent in both capacities; on 11 October she dissolved the Abgeordnetenhaus on Falk’s advice for an election on 3 December. Main article: Prussian constitutional crisis of 2028.

The underlying dispute concerns the Advice-Binding Declaration, by which the Falk ministry asserted that the Crown’s remaining personal powers were bound by ministerial advice. Heinrich regarded the declaration as ineffective without lawful constitutional change and told Falk so privately. He did not dismiss her, did not obstruct her, and left no instruction for what should happen after his death. His record therefore neither authorises the Council’s action nor forbids it, which is precisely the difficulty.

Why it has not become an imperial crisis

The Empire has stayed out. Chancellor Brenner has kept the imperial government wholly outside the Prussian litigation, has declined invitations from both sides to express a view, and has made no use of any federal instrument.

This restraint rests on doctrine rather than on tact. The Empire possesses no unilateral power of intervention in a constituent state’s internal constitutional affairs. There is no federal supervision of a state’s ministry, no imperial standing before a state constitutional court, and no mechanism by which the Chancellor could act on the Prussian question even if he wished to. The doctrine has been stated for a century and has not been seriously tested in that time, and the fact that it is holding in a crisis in the state that supplies the Emperor is the strongest evidence anyone has yet produced that it is real.

It is also the case that the separation of the Imperial Chancellorship from the Prussian Minister-Presidency in 1919 is what makes the restraint possible at all. Under the original constitution the two offices were one man, and a Prussian ministerial crisis would have been an imperial ministerial crisis by definition. The reform that looked in 1919 like an adjustment of federal balance turns out, a century later, to be the firebreak.

The federal dimension that remains

Two consequences do reach the Empire. The first is arithmetical: Prussia holds thirty per cent of the Bundesrat votes and votes on its government’s instruction, so a disputed Prussian ministry is a disputed Prussian delegation. The caretaker voted, its entitlement to do so was questioned by the dismissed parties, and no federal measure turned on the margin; Falk’s restored ministry, now itself a caretaker, votes on the same restricted instructions until a new ministry is confirmed. What happens if one does is a question nobody has answered in public.

The second is the sovereign himself. Alexander is a minor exercising no powers, is being educated constitutionally by the Chancellor as part of the office, and has been kept scrupulously outside a dispute in which he is the person in whose name the disputed act was done. His first imperial programme has concentrated on federal trust, including a deliberately balanced circuit of the smaller constituent states, on the reasoning that the Empire needed to be shown that Prussia’s crisis would not consume it. Whether that reasoning belongs to the fourteen-year-old or to his advisers is not publicly known and is the subject of a good deal of speculation that the palace declines to assist.

Symbols

The flag and the arms

The national flag is a horizontal tricolour of black, white and red, joining the black and white of Prussia to the white and red of the Hanseatic cities, and it has flown unchanged since the foundation of the Empire. Its composition is the visual form of the federal bargain: the largest state and the trading cities, with nothing in it for Bavaria, Saxony or the south, which is a point Bavarians make when the subject arises and which nobody has ever proposed to remedy.

The imperial arms centre on the black eagle, inherited from the medieval Empire and carried forward by the Hohenzollerns, with simpler forms used by federal ministries, courts and public corporations. Each constituent state keeps its own flag, arms, motto and anthem, and the constitutional rule is that they are flown and sung alongside the imperial ones rather than beneath them. The rule is observed exactly, and Bavaria in particular has been particular about it for a century and a half.

The anthem and the day

The imperial anthem is performed at state occasions and at international fixtures, and the constituent anthems are performed with it rather than after it. There is no rule about order and there is a great deal of practice about it.

The foundation of the Empire is dated to 18 January 1871, which is also the anniversary of the Prussian royal coronation of 1701, so that the imperial national day is simultaneously a Prussian one. The awkwardness has been noticed since the beginning and has never been resolved, because resolving it would require choosing another date and every candidate date is worse. Beyond it the Empire keeps no common festival, and the constituent states observe their own.

There is no commemoration of either victory. Proposals for a victory day were declined after 1918 and again after 1945, the second time on the stated ground that a state which had just watched a neighbour organise its politics around a humiliation should be careful what it builds into its calendar.

Honours and orders

The Empire and its constituent monarchies both confer honours, and the resulting system is layered in a way that requires explanation even to Germans. The imperial honours are conferred by the Emperor on the advice of the Imperial Chancellor and recognise service to the federation. The constituent states confer their own, on the advice of their own ministries, and a German may hold decorations from the Empire, from his own state and from a state he has served in without any of them ranking against the others in a settled way.

The Prussian orders are the oldest and the most institutionally weighty, the Order of the Black Eagle standing at the head of them as the kingdom’s senior distinction. The Pour le Mérite is the most interesting to outsiders because it exists in two entirely separate classes: a military order, now rarely conferred, and a civil order for the sciences and arts whose members elect their own successors and which is among the most selective learned distinctions in Europe. The civil class is a self-perpetuating academy in the form of an order, and the Empire has left it alone on the reasoning that a body which chooses its own members is harder to debase than one a ministry fills.

Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, Baden and the lesser states maintain their own orders, several of them older than the Empire. The three free cities confer none, having no prince to confer them, and mark distinguished service instead through senate resolutions and civic honours that their citizens regard as worth considerably more.

Honours are not generally refused in Germany and refusals are not publicised when they occur. The standing criticism is the usual one, that the distribution favours the organised professions and the public service over less legible kinds of contribution, and successive governments have widened the categories in response without changing the pattern much.

Chronology

Assessment

The German Empire is the state that won, and almost everything distinctive about it follows from that fact rather than from any quality of the German character. It won the First Great War and therefore had no revolution, no republic, no reshuffled party system and no collapse to build a grievance on. It won the Second Great War and therefore wrote the settlement rather than receiving one. It entered the modern period with its monarchy intact, its constituent dynasties reigning, its party names unchanged since the 1870s, its scientific establishment unbroken and its constitutional documents amended rather than replaced.

Victory is the harder test and the Empire came close to failing it. The generation that won in 1918 concluded that monarchical order had been vindicated, said so at length, and made the containment of a rearming France more difficult than it needed to be. The settlement dictated at Berlin created an obligation the victors then had to defend for twenty years against an enemy who had never accepted it. What saved the Empire was not wisdom but the pressure of its own domestic politics: the reforms of 1919 to 1923 were conceded because refusing them had become more dangerous than granting them, and the same is true of most of what followed.

The result is a state with an unusual combination of properties. Its Crown retains real powers, an absolute veto and a personal power of dismissal, which it uses about once a generation and which remain legally live. Its largest constituent state contains over half its people and is capped at thirty per cent of the votes in the chamber that matters. Its Chancellor must satisfy an elected assembly and a hereditary monarch at once. Its highest courts sit in two other kingdoms’ capitals on purpose. And the sovereign who may veto any statute has no authority whatever over the Empire’s nuclear weapons.

Its economic and social arrangements produce the highest income per head of any large economy in the world with one of the most equal distributions, and they do so through institutions that slow every decision down. The same mechanisms that closed a coal industry without breaking its regions have left the Empire slow at new industries, short of housing in its great cities, and unable to build a transmission line in less than a decade. Germans defend this and complain about it in the same breath, and the honest account is that it is one mechanism producing both.

The record is not clean and the Empire has stopped pretending otherwise. It committed a genocide in South West Africa and then ceded the territory to another power, so that the descendants of the survivors are now another Crown’s subjects and the reparation is negotiated over their heads. It excluded Jewish Germans from its public life by administrative practice for fifty years and never had to repeal anything, because there was nothing written down. It set out to dispossess several million of its own Polish-speaking citizens on the ground of their nationality and failed. It directed its courts against a lawful political party and its colonial medicine against people who could not refuse. Every one of these is required teaching, and the standing complaint about the teaching, made by the people it concerns, is that it requires the facts and stops short of requiring that responsibility be attributed.

What the Empire has not resolved is what it is now for. The alliance it anchors was built against a Russia that no longer threatens it in the same way. The union it helped found at Straßburg binds it to the enemy of both Great Wars and constrains the coordinated model it spent a century building. The eastern provinces that were the front line are now a corridor without a purpose. The deterrent is maintained by a country inside two alliances that would defend it anyway. And the constitutional machinery that survived the twentieth century intact is being administered, at present, by a Regency Council acting for a fourteen-year-old in a state whose largest member is in the courts over whether the Crown may still dismiss a ministry that commands a majority.

That last question is the Empire’s oldest one. It was asked of Bismarck’s constitution, answered by the settlement of 1919, and left legally open by every reform since, because each of them reduced the political cost of the Crown’s powers without removing the powers. The Empire has spent a century and a half arranging for the question not to arise. It has arisen.

What makes the question answerable at all is a reform carried in 1919 for entirely different reasons. Separating the Imperial Chancellorship from the Prussian Minister-Presidency was presented at the time as an adjustment of federal balance, and it was resisted as such by people who understood it as a reduction of Prussian power. A century later it is the reason a constitutional crisis in the state that supplies the Emperor is a Prussian crisis rather than a German one, and the reason an imperial Chancellor can decline to enter it without abandoning anything. The Empire’s institutions have repeatedly turned out to be useful for purposes their authors did not have in mind, which is the ordinary fate of durable arrangements and is the nearest thing to a general observation this article is prepared to make about the German state.

Trivia

See also

• Alexander I, German Emperor, the fourteen-year-old sovereign under the present regency
• Heinrich I, German Emperor, his father, who reigned from 2005 until February 2028
• Kingdom of Prussia, the largest constituent kingdom, whose King is German Emperor
• Kingdom of Bavaria, the constituent kingdom that entered on terms and kept its reserved rights
• Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, a republic inside the monarchy and the Empire’s first port
• Kingdom of Hanover, the Welf kingdom preserved from Prussian annexation in 1866
• Duchy of Brunswick, the separate Welf duchy whose motor-works dispute is before the Imperial Constitutional Court
• Austria-Hungary, the German-speaking great power deliberately left outside the Empire in 1866
• The First Great War, which Germany won alongside Britain and the UKA
• The Second Great War, fought against fascist France
• European Concert, the supranational union founded at Straßburg in 2027
• League of Nations, on whose Security Council the Empire holds a permanent seat
• Union of South Africa, to which Germany ceded South West Africa in 1919
• Kamerun, the first associated state, converted in 1955, whose head of state is the Emperor as Kaiser von Kamerun
• Wisconsindeutsch, the German vernacular carried to America by nineteenth-century emigrants

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German Empire · Kaiserreich · Federation · Constitutional Monarchy · Europe · Nations of the World