Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire (Peregrine Books) [Paperback]

The book covers two main subjects: The relationship between Germany and its Jewish citizens in the roughly fifty years between mid-1900 and the turn of the Century; and relationship between Germany's perennial helmsman, the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and his (Jewish) banker, Gerson von Bleichröder.

It helps enormously to have a grounding in 19th Century European and especially German history, it's not a light read. But what particularly fascinated me was the backdrop for the book's two main subjects: The German economic, media and political landscape in years 1860 to 1890.

The change Germany experienced after the end of the reactionary Metternich system in 1848 was wrenching - political liberalisation was accompanied by a phenomenally fast industrialisation, the rise of the press as a mass market phenomenon and then political unification with the founding of the (second) German Empire after the victory over France in 1871.

The euphoria over political unification and the emergence of Germany as a world power was cut short by a depression brought on by excessive speculation and unethical practices in the then still unregulated financial sector.

Both the social dislocations caused by industrialisation and the misery caused by the depression in turn favoured extremist political factions. Bismarck himself, though in no way liberally inclined, was unideological enough to recognise that a hard conservative line would endanger the power of the conservative elites, and he introduced old age pensions, workmen's comp and then universal health care in order to blunt the appeal of the rising leftist parties.

Fritz Stern chronicles the remarkably fast rise of anti-Semitism from a lunatic fringe to mainstream political acceptability. Before the 1880s, Germany was firm in the constitutional equality of its Jewish citizens, even though that did not mean that Jews had social equality; in that respect, German society was no different from society in France or England.

The German elites generally felt that a proper expression of Jewish gratitude for receiving their legal equality was conversion (preferably to Protestantism). Bismarck himself was no anti-Semite and the relationship he had with Bleichröder went beyond the merely business-like, but he was not above the societal prejudices of his class. And though he defended the constitutional equality of Jews in Germany, he did so not out of any principled belief in human rights, but out of a belief that the system he had put in place was working well and it would be wrong to tinker with it.

The historical sketch of the emergence of anti-Semitism into the political mainstream is replete with fascinating characters: Disgruntled conservatives pestering the courts with law suit after law suit claiming to reveal the corrupt influence of "Jewish moneybags" on the Court and government; dead-end journalists writing in obscure but rapidly-expanding papers on the same subject; and second-rate politicians jumping on the anti-Semitic bandwagon to bolster their electoral chances.

Jews as a group had benefited mightily from the new economic opportunities offered by the new Germany post-1848; the still strong institutional "genteel anti-Semitism" excluded Jews from the two traditional German career mainstays, public administration and the military, and pushed them into the emerging areas of economic activity: Law, medicine, banking and the media. Politically, too, Jews had few places to go; politically conservative Jews were attracted to the conservative parties, but the nobility and landed gentry rebuffed Jews as social unequals and boorish parvenus. So politically active Jews were only welcomed by the political parties advocating either leftist policies or liberal policies - "liberal" in the European sense, i.e. pro-business but also pro-equality, which in Bismarck's time meant an expansion of suffrage and democratic rights. Bismarck was viscerally opposed to both leftism and to liberalism, so despite his desire to defend Jewish equality as part of his system, he was not above tacitly tolerating anti-Semites as a tool to attack leftist and liberal Jews, again in order to defend his system.

It's a fascinating read, well written, well researched, well documented and highly recommended.