Berlin

On a more elevated plain, Heinrich von Treitschke, doyen of nationalist professors at Berlin University, published an article in the Preussische Jahrbücher in which he too railed against the predominance of Jews and their subversion of German values. He claimed that the Jews, by exerting control over key institutions of national life while maintaining a cliquish separateness, were undermining German cohesion. “The Jews are our misfortune,” he concluded, coining a phrase that would later be echoed by the Nazis. Another highly influential figure on the Berlin scene, Adolf Stocker, chaplain at the imperial court, spoke of the need to fight “Jewish supremacy” as part of a crusade to restore “Germanic-Christian culture.”

It was not, however, only the conservatives who held the Jews responsible for Germany’s plight. Theodor Fontane saw his professed “philosemitism” severely tested by the crash. “I have been philosemitic since my childhood,” he wrote a friend. “Nevertheless, I have the feeling of their guilt, their unlimited arrogance, to such an extent, that I wish for them a serious defeat. And of this I am convinced: if they do not suffer it now and do not change now, a terrible visitation will come upon them, albeit in times that we will not live to see.”

In their attempts to “explain” the slump, some commentators even faulted Bismarck, accusing him of surrendering economic policy to his influential banker, Bleichröder. Thus the archconservative Kreuzzeitung, the voice of Protestant orthodoxy, taxed the chancellor with practicing a shameless Judenwirtschaft (Jewish economic policy). Insinuations that Bismarck was under the influence of the Jews were echoed in the conservative Catholic press, which attributed the so-called Kulturkampf, the chancellor’s anti-Catholic crusade of the 1870s, to an unholy alliance between the national government, the liberals, and the Semites. In Fontane’s novel L’Adultera (1882) a conservative former official suggests that Bismarck emulated the Jews in his opportunistic political style: “He has something of the plagiarizing quality, he has simply annexed other people’s thoughts, both good and bad, and put them into practice with the help of all readily available means.”

Smarting from charges that his alleged subservience to the Jews was responsible for the crash, Bismarck embarked on a hasty program of damage control. He convinced Bleichröder to bail out some prominent noble investors who had lost huge sums. However, he did nothing for the little investors; they, as he admitted to the French ambassador, were “left drowning.” Through his son Herbert, the chancellor also asked Bleichröder to publicly disavow his close connections to the government. Deeply humiliated, the Jewish banker contemplated leaving Germany altogether. After all, he had given his unswerving support to the German nation in the belief that he himself was fully German and that the state would protect him. Bismarck did not personally join in the vicious attacks against his banker, but he never once offered him his support, nor did he take a public stance against anti-Semitism, which he clearly hoped could be manipulated to deflect the criticism leveled against his own policies. Thus, in addition to cold-shouldering Bleichröder, he turned against the man who had done most to pop the speculative bubble, Edward Lasker, who was conveniently Jewish as well as liberal. Blaming the messenger for the message, Bismarck suggested that the parliamentarian and his colleagues had engineered the crash to embarrass the government. In the wake of the financial debacle, Bismarck saw to it that Germany began to move away from the economic liberalism of the Gründerzeit toward a program of high tariffs and state subsidies for hard-pressed manufacturers. Berlin, briefly a center of free trade, now became a bastion of protectionism.

Anti-Semitism—the term was coined by a Berlin journalist named Wilhelm Marr—continued to pollute Berlin society through the Bismarckian era and beyond. Because of anti-Jewish agitation in West Prussia and pogroms in Czar Alexander Ill’s Russia, Jewish immigration to the German capital increased rapidly in the 1880s. This brought calls for measures to keep the Ostjuden out. Bismarck himself joined in these efforts, insisting on the need to exclude “undesirable elements.” Significantly, some of Berlin’s more established Jews also worried about increased Jewish immigration from the East, for they understood that this fanned the flames of local anti-Semitism. To assimilated Jews, moreover, the Ostjuden were just as “alien” as they were to German gentiles. Hoping to stem the tide of immigration, a spokesman for the Berlin Jewish community threatened to cut off further financial support to the Alliance Israelite in Paris if it continued to encourage Russian Jews to come to Berlin.