The Wilhelmine period or Wilhelmian era () comprises the period of German history between 1888 and 1918, embracing the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the German Empire from the death of Kaiser Friedrich III until the end of World War I and Wilhelm's abdication during the November Revolution.
It represented an era of creative ferment in the society, politics, culture, art, literature, and architecture of Germany. It also roughly coincided with the late Victorian and Edwardian eras in the British Empire, the Gilded Age in the United States, the Belle Époque in the Third French Republic, and the Silver Age in the Russian Empire.
Overview The term "Wilhelminism" () is not meant as a conception of society associated with the name Wilhelm and traceable to an intellectual initiative of the German Emperor. Rather, it relates to the image presented by Wilhelm II and his demeanour, as manifested by the public presentation of grandiose military parades and self-aggrandisement on his part. The latter tendency had already been noticed by his grandfather, Emperor Wilhelm I, while Wilhelm II's father, later Frederick III, was Crown Prince.
Wilhelminism also characterizes the social, literary, artistic, and cultural climate of Wilhelm II's reign, which on the one hand was dominated by the rigidly-conservative opinions of the Prussian Junker aristocracy, those associated with the German Agrarian League, and of the German industrialists, which closely mirrored those of the British upper class during the parallel Victorian era in the British Empire. Ironically, Germany during the Wilhelmian era was, on the other hand, distinguished by escalating secularization and growing belief in progress among intellectuals, in response to recent medical and scientific advances and the enormous prosperity of the heavily-industrialized German Empire, but which was at polar odds with the last Kaiser's belief in both Lutheranism and social conservatism. Even so, Otto von Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws were not renewed and the Iron Chancellor's efforts to renew them were the catalyst for his forced resignation at the last Kaiser's insistence.John Belchem and Richard Price, eds. A Dictionary of 19th-Century World History (1994) pp 33-34.
The final break between the Iron Chancellor and the last Kaiser came when Bismarck initiated discussions with the opposition to form a new parliamentary majority without consulting with the monarch first. The Kartell, the shifting coalition government that Bismarck had been able to maintain since 1867, had finally lost its majority of seats in the Reichstag due to the Anti-Socialist Laws fiasco. The remaining powers in the Reichstag were the Catholic Centre Party and the Conservative Party.
In most parliamentary systems, the head of government depends upon the confidence of the parliamentary majority and has the right to form coalitions to maintain a majority of supporters. In a constitutional monarchy like the German Empire, however, the Chancellor or Prime Minister is required to meet regularly with the monarch to explain his or her policies and intentions within the Government. A Chancellor also could not afford to make an enemy of the monarch, who represented the only real separation of powers and check and balance against a Chancellor's otherwise absolute power. Moreover, a constitutional monarch has plenty of means at his or her disposal of quietly blocking an elected head of state's policy objectives and is one of the only people who can forcibly remove an overly ambitious Chancellor or Prime Minister from power. For these reasons, the last Kaiser believed that he had every right to be informed before Bismarck began coalition talks with the Opposition.
In a deeply ironic moment, a mere decade after expelling religious orders, banning Catholic schools, and demonizing all members of the Catholic Church in Germany as (, "traitors to the Empire") during the Kulturkampf, Bismarck decided to start coalition talks with the all-Catholic Centre Party. He invited that party's leader in the Reichstag, Baron Ludwig von Windthorst, to meet with him and began the negotiations by offering to overturn the 1872 Jesuit Law in return for the Centre Party's support. The last Kaiser always had a warm relationship with Baron von Windthorst, whose decades long defence of German Catholics, Poles, Jews, and other minorities against government overreach by the Iron Chancellor have since attracted very high praise and comparisons to Irish nationalist statesmen Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, but Wilhelm was furious to hear about Bismarck's plans for coalition talks with the Centre Party only after they had already begun.
After a heated argument at Bismarck's estate over the latter's alleged disrespect for the Imperial Family, Wilhelm stormed out. Bismarck, forced for the first time in his career into a crisis that he could not twist to his own advantage, wrote a blistering letter of resignation, decrying the Monarchy's involvement in both foreign and domestic policy. The letter was published only after Bismarck's death.
In later years, Bismarck created the "Bismarck myth"; the view (which some historians have argued was confirmed by subsequent events) that Wilhelm II's successful demand for Bismarck's resignation destroyed any chance Imperial Germany ever had of stable government and international peace. According to this view, what Wilhelm termed "The New Course" is characterised as Germany's ship of state going dangerously off course, leading directly to the carnage of the First and Second World Wars.
According to Bismarck apologists, in foreign policy the Iron Chancellor had achieved a fragile balance of interests between Germany, France and Russia. Peace was allegedly at hand and Bismarck tried to keep it that way despite growing popular sentiment against Britain (regarding the German colonial empire) and especially against Russia. With Bismarck's dismissal, the Russians allegedly expected a reversal of policy in Berlin, so they quickly negotiated a military alliance with the Third French Republic, beginning a process that by 1914 largely isolated Germany.
In contrast, historian Modris Eksteins has argued that Bismarck's dismissal was actually long overdue. According to Eksteins, the Iron Chancellor, in his need for a scapegoat, had demonized Classical Liberals in the 1860s, Roman Catholics in the 1870s, and Socialists in the 1880s with the highly successful and often repeated refrain, "The Reich is in danger." Therefore, in order to divide and rule, Bismarck ultimately left the German people even more divided in 1890 than they had ever been before 1871.Modris Eksteins (1989), Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, pp. 66–67.
In interviews with C.L. Sulzberger for the book The Fall of Eagles, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, grandson and heir of Kaiser Wilhelm II, further commented, "Bismarck was certainly our greatest statesman, but he had very bad manners and he became increasingly overbearing with age. Frankly, I don't think his dismissal by my grandfather was a great tragedy. Russia was already on the other side because of the Berlin Congress of 1878. Had Bismarck stayed he would not have helped. He already wanted to abolish all the reforms that had been introduced. He was aspiring to establish a kind of Shogunate and hoped to treat our family in the same way the Japanese shoguns treated the Japanese emperors isolated in Kyoto. My grandfather had no choice but to dismiss him." C.L. Sulzberger (1977), The Fall of Eagles, Crown Publishers. Page 391.
Subsequent Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow continued to implement legislation at the last Kaiser's insistence that favored industrial worker's rights to organized labor and collective bargaining, while still opposing Marxist ideas. Nevertheless, the German Social Democratic Party continued to expand its base and became the largest political party elected to the Reichstag during the 1912 national elections. Despite the party's stronger influence, internal developments were characterised, similarly to the Labour Party in Great Britain, by an increasing loyalty of the party leadership towards both the Monarchy and the German colonial empire. This attitude was condemned as "revisionism" by its opponents, but ultimately culminated in the policy of agreeing to support the war effort during the patriotic euphoria later dubbed the Spirit of 1914. These developments, however, were closely mirrored by other Leftist parties in other nations.
Architecture
While "Wilhelmism" is equally applied to the last Kaiser's favored styles in both the visual arts and architecture, such as the ornate Germania postage stamps, numerous government buildings and the Wilhelmine Ring housing areas of Berlin and many other German cities, the term is also used to describe an essentially-Neo-Baroque and prestige-oriented style of architecture. Similarly to the architecture of other European Capitols of the era, the Neo-Baroque was calculated to express Germany's ambitions to become and remain a naval, imperial, and colonial power.
This neo-Baroque style was particularly exemplified by the grandiose Siegesallee, a boulevard of what were intended to be heroic-looking marble statues of the last Kaiser's ancestors in the Tiergarten of Berlin.
Even though the Siegesallee was widely ridiculed by the infamously irreverent and sarcastic Berliners of the era as and as an alley where, "even the bird-shit is made of marble", the neo-Baroque statues received Royal Assent in Kaiser Wilhelm's , which was also a very harsh criticism of the recent birth of German modernist art which the last Kaiser considered degenerate art, at the formal unveiling of the Siegesallee on 18 December 1901.
Colonialism and militarism
Foreign policy was founded on Kaiser Wilhelm's support for both his Government's colonialist ambitions and their efforts to establish Germany as a world power (). The desire for a "place in the sun" as coined by Foreign Secretary Bernhard von Bülow and was shared by a large number of German citizens and intellectuals. Pan-Germanism achieved a short-lived high point after the German colonial empire expanded in Africa, China, New Guinea, and in the South Seas and became the third largest colonial empire after those of the United Kingdom and the Third French Republic. Meanwhile, European diplomatic relations deteriorated. In 1890, Germany refused to prolong the secret Reinsurance Treaty with the Russian Empire that had concluded by Bismarck in 1887, and Germany had to witness the forming of the Franco-Russian Alliance, which presenting a new threat of a two-front war.
The distinctive spiked helmet, the so-called had existed previously and not only in the German Empire, but it now symbolises Wilhelmian era and the Imperial German Army and Prussian Army-inspired militarism in general. (In fact, various sign languages still have the extended forefinger placed in front of the forehead, indicating the spiked helmet, as the sign for "German".)