Bismarck: Domestic Policy

The Reichsfeinde
1. Catholics
  1. The Kulterkampf: The struggle against Roman Catholicism.
    1. Ultramontanism: The Pope is over the mountain. If Catholics are supposed to be loyal to the nation, how can they be loyal to the Vatican?
2. Socialists
  1. Anti-Socialist Laws: 1878-1888: Socialists groups and associations are forbidden; newspapers suppressed; and trade unions outlawed. These are justified by the assassinations attempts on Wilhelm I in 1978.
    1. The SPD gets around this by running electoral candidates as independents; by publishing newspapers outside of Germany; and by maintainging social organisations such as choirs and sporting clubs.
    2. January 1890: The Reichstag refuses to renew the Anti-Socialist Laws
3. Jews
  1. Two separate groups of Jews in Germany
    1. A largely m/c, affluent, professional group, often seeking to assimilate thoroughly with German life.
      1. N.B. The formal emancipation of the Jews in 1971 paved the way for assimilation.
    2. A largely poor, relatively uneducated influx of Jews from Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century, often much more visibly serarate from the larger German host community. Identified in the Germany as 'Ostjuden (Jews from the East).
  2. A wider set of associations: Jews associated in the nineteenth century with materialism, money, capitalism, the breakdown of all other systems of belief and loyalty. Also imaged as rootless, and not linked to the soil of any country.
4. Poles
  1. Measures taken against the Poles.
    1. Insistence on the use of German in Schools and in official dealings of all kinds.
    2. Insistence on the use of German Catholic priests.
    3. Forced changes of name
    4. Deportations of Polish settlers from Prussia
    5. General climate of hostility, discrimination and rascism
Social and Economic Policies
1. 1874 onwards
  1. The start of the prolonged economic depression; this calls to abandon the policy of free trade
    1. Bismarck introduces tariffs to protect German grain producers and manufacturers from foreign competition; this gains his conservative and Catholic support in the Reichstag.
    2. 1881: Wilheme I calls for the state to take on responsibility for old age and sickness insurance workers. Bismarck supports this in the Reichstag; and in the 1880s introduces old age pensions; accident insurance; medical care and unemployment insurance.
2. 1890: Bismarck falls
  1. New Kaiser wants to rule alone - indicated in particular by his involvement in trying to settle the coal strikes of 1889.
    1. 20 March 1890: Wilhelm accepts Bismarck's resignation.

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Bismarck: Domestic Policy

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