The Hansemann Ministry

The Camphausen ministry had received a barely-concealed rejection from the Prince of Prussia and a totally unconcealed one from the representatives of the people. However, it was above all Hansemann who impatiently thrust to one side his ‘honoured friend’ who was still battling with all sorts of ideological twinges of conscience.

Hansemann thought that passive resistance to the revolution had done its duty and that an active attack upon it was now in order, that from being the shield of the monarchy the bourgeoisie must now become its sword against the people, and that the ‘ministry of mediation’ must now be followed by the ‘ministry of deeds’ in order to disarm the revolution at all costs and, if humanly possible, the counter-revolution as well. His plan was as simple as it was brilliant. The bourgeoisie was to sacrifice the people to the monarchy, and in return the monarchy would sacrifice the nobility to the bourgeoisie. The Assembly would be won over by giving each of the three bourgeois factions a portfolio. Hansemann was the complete artful bourgeois in the mould of of Louis Philippe, whose constitutional system of swings and roundabouts had just gone so shamefully bankrupt. He never took into account the tiny incidental question of whether the monarchy and the Junkers, the historical powers of old Prussia, might not settle accounts with the bourgeoisie all the quicker once the latter had settled accounts with the working class. For the time being, the monarchy had good reasons to give him a free hand, and the Assembly too took the tempting bait offered them. Of the numerous Auerswald clan, Hansemann took the nearest to hand and made him Minister-President and Foreign Minister, while he himself took the Finance Ministry as the source of all patronage. The Ministries of the Interior and of Justice were occupied by the bourgeois bureaucrats, Kühlwetter and Märker; Trade went to Milde of the Right, Agriculture to Gierke of the Right Centre and Education to Rodbertus of the Left Centre. This shows very drastically how much that brave saviour of society, Hansemann, was concerned with trading votes and how little he was concerned with even bourgeois reforms. Rodbertus, practically and theoretically trained as an agriculturalist, was entrusted with the administration of education, for which task he had never betrayed either vocation or interest, while the Town Clerk, Gierke, entered the newly founded Agricultural Ministry, which was to sweep away all the mess of feudal rubbish, anxiously admitting that he could tell neither barley from oats nor rye from wheat. It was only the War Ministry that the bourgeoisie did not manage to penetrate; here General Roth von Schreckenstein was ensconced, in a dual capacity as a ghost from yesterday and as a bogey for tomorrow.

On June 26 the new cabinet presented itself to the Assembly. The constitution on the broadest democratic foundation had sunk out of sight with Camphausen. In its place came the fully-fledged constitutional monarchy with a bicameral system and no return to absolutism; on the other hand, freedom was not to degenerate into anarchy; lost confidence was to be restored, credit strengthened, and once bourgeois rule had been given a solid foundation, in a rosy glow, there would be comprehensive works for the benefits for all the gainfully employed classes of the population.

The glory lasted only a few days. On June 28, after several weeks of fantasizing about its nebulous sovereignty, the German National Assembly at Frankfurt allowed that honourable man, Gagern, to pursuade it to take the ‘bold step’ of appointing on its own authority an Imperial Regent without responsibility picked from the ranks of the princes. Archduke Johann of Austria was chosen, and thus the German movement was delivered into the hands of the governments. Whether Gagern carried out the betrayal in their direct interest, or whether he really imagined that the House of Habsburg would tie its hands by accepting the provisional central power for an Austrian Archduke, so that later it would be obliged to accept the assumption of a hereditary imperial crown by the House of Hohenzollern, may be open to question. In any case, he was fooling either himself or the others when he bombastically claimed that he had not in doing so abandoned the sovereignty of the nation.

The sheep told the wolves: we want to elect you as our protectors, provided you don’t join in the vote; in our sovereign authority we will decide that you can eat us. The governments were naturally glad to concede that sort of ‘sovereignty of the nation’, but they did not think it any longer worth the effort to conceal from the bold representatives of the people that sheep are and remain sheep. Even before Archduke Johann’s election, the Federal Diet declared that the governments recognized the Imperial Regent. Meanwhile in the Prussian Assembly the Hansemann ministry, whose pact with the Prussian monarchy included betrayal of the German cause, declared that it approved the election of the Imperial Regent, but refused to draw ‘conclusions for the future on the basis of this exceptional case’

With this reservation the Prussian government had publicly contested the sovereignty of the German Parliament and Jacoby was quick to bring in a motion of censure on the Hansemann ministry. But the complete hopelessness of the German cause emerged most clearly precisely in that resolution. He called on the Prussian Assembly to reject the election of the Imperial Regent but nevertheless recognize the German Assembly’s authority to make such an appointment without prior agreement on the part of the governments. However correct the motion was in logic, in fact it amounted to telling the German Assembly: You have committed a great folly, but your right to commit such follies must not be limited. After an extremely confused debate, Jacoby’s resolution was rejected with only some fifty votes in favour. Nevertheless the incident was more of a defeat than a victory for the ministry. Not only was the majority guided by very mixed motives, but Rodbertus also resigned his portfolio. In his own way he was honestly concerned for German unity, and he did not want to assassinate it in the underhand way that Hansemann had agreed with the Prussian monarchy and the Junkers. With its leader’s resignation, the Left Centre began to edge to the Left.

It was the real tragedy in France rather than the tragi-comedy in Frankfurt that cut the Hansemann ministry off before its prime. At first the cruel overthrow of the Paris proletariat in the terrible June battles seemed to fulfil the secret desires of the European bourgeoisie, and Bismarck was audacious enough in the Prussian National Assembly to greet the fact that ‘this question has been so successfully buried in France’ as ‘one of the happiest events anywhere in Europe’. In fact, however, in murdering the proletariat of Paris, the bourgeoisie was murdering its own political role. September in Frankfurt, October in Vienna and November in Berlin were simply echoes of June in Paris.

Under such auspices the deeds of the ‘ministry of deeds’ consisted in opening the door for the return of the old Prussian bureaucratic, police and military state. Without asking the Assembly, Hansemann increased the police force of the capital by adding the ’Constabulary Institute’, 1,600 officers who hastened to outdo even the police of the Vormärz in a mass of illegal activities, by incessant provocations of the peaceful public on the streets and in brutalities to which even Rodbertus, despite his quiet and refined manners, fell victim. When Schulze-Delitzsch complained that ‘these butterflies of the new peoples’ spring’ were more brutal than those ‘old winter birds the gendarmes’, the Mister of the interior, Kühlwetter, replied, as if March 18 had never happened, ‘a state which really wishes to be free must have a really good police force as its executive power’. In vain Rodbertus moved that the government should introduce a retrospective law on the powers of the police; the Right and the Right Centre voted the motion down. The Assembly was satisfied with an impotent protest. On Waldeck’s motion they approved a law protecting personal freedom, which actually received the royal assent. It looked very good on paper, and that is where it remained. Hand in hand with the illegal arrests went numerous press prosecutions on the basis of common law, and when the systematically-provoked masses were carried away into such slight excesses as breaking the Minister-President’s windows, the ministry introduced a law on riotous assembly which was intended to destroy freedom of assembly.

The ‘organic laws’ with which Hansemann started rested on exactly the same basis that the French bourgeoisie had operated on for eighteen years under Louis Philippe, except that, in relation to the monarchy and the Junkers, it ‘did not even achieve the level of consciousness of a Paris grocer’. Hansemann’s proposals on the local government structure and the organization of the Bürgerwehr sought to secure the gates of the March revolution for the bourgeoisie alone and to exclude the working class completely. Typical of this kind of legislation was the Bürgerwehr law, which was actually passed, but after the fall of the Hansemann ministry. According to this the Bürgerwehr was, it is true, ‘to defend constitution, freedom and legal order’, but the individual organizational regulations made it half into a useless playing with weapons and half into an armed police force. Conscription began at 24 and finished at 54; servicemen had to arm themselves; if they did not possess the means to do so the local authorities were under the obligation to supply them with arms, but at the same time the local authorities were only given the right to call up one twentieth of the population, so that two thirds or even three quarters of the servicemen, and above all the propertyless proletariat, could be and was in fact excluded. In addition there was a mass of petty bureaucratic regulations, the very first of which – that the monarchy could dissolve the Bürgerwehr of individual local authorities ‘if it has serious reasons, which must be detailed in the Order of Dissolution’ – made a mockery of the whole law and placed under the arbitrary control of the crown the people’s right to bear arms that had been won in the March revolution. Nevertheless, in the end only the Left and part of the Centre Left voted against this suicidal act.

Thus far the monarchy and the Junkers were glad to let the ‘ministry of deeds’ get on with it. They resisted all the harder when, after the treacherous way he had deprived the working class of their rights and held them down, the good Hansemann thought that he could pass feudal society as well under the bourgeois shears. The sober businessman had fallen victim to poetic rapture, imagining that the monarchy would sacrifice the nobility to him as willingly as he had sacrificed the working class to them.

The King was very pleased that the bourgeoisie had fetched his chestnuts out of a fire that had burnt his gracious fingers, but he wanted to eat them on his own. Courtiers had woven round his credulous soul a web of incredible lies about the origins and progress of the March revolution; in his confidential letters to Bunsen, the King, with uncanny imagination, describes liberalism as ‘tuberculosis of the backbone’, as a ‘sinful madness, cursed by God’, and abuses his liberal ministers as ‘simpletons’ and ’intriguers’. For all that, Hansemann was as modest in his demands on absolutism and feudalism as he was unscrupulous in his ill-treatment of the masses. While the special privileged courts for the aristocracy were abolished, he preserved the ones for the army and the universities, and was backed by the legal formalism of the Assembly. He did not even dare to touch the many forms of feudal labour-service. Even the shameless robbery of the peasants by the Junkers in preceeding generation was to go unpunished. The draft law that Gierke brought in on the abolition of various fees and services was intended to do nothing more than remove those feudal dues and services that were least valuable to the Junkers. It was to do the least possible harm and sow the greatest possible confusion among the peasants.

Hansemann only lost his good humour in the one field which for him had never been ‘a joking matter’ – in the field of finance. Here things looked difficult enough. The state’s income had fallen and its expenses had increased; state credit was exhausted. Hansemann began his period of rule under the sign of the forced loan. In order to finance bourgeois rule and trim its production costs as much as possible, he intended to revolutionize somewhat the old Prussian system of finances. As a true bourgeois, he hated all state enterprise. He wanted to sell off the state domains, denationalize the state bank, break up the Seehandlung and sell off state-owned factories to private owners ‘even at a significant loss’. He began by selling for a song the great spinning and weaving mills the Seehandlung had set up in the Silesian mountains. He spoke out against those indirect taxes that raised wages by making staple foodstuffs more expensive. In return, the big landlords were to be bled. Hansemann introduced draft legislation to increase the taxes on spirits and beet sugar and to remove the tax immunities of the feudal estates and the nobility.

He boasted that he was thus cutting ‘deep into the flesh of reaction’, and it is true that the feudal moneybags raised a fearful cry by God for King and Fatherland. But what Hansemann lost on this side he did not make good on the other. The reactionary side of his policies took its revenge in that the masses distrusted what could be called their revolutionary side. Were the people interested in filling the moneybags of a ministry whose police-truncheons beat down their justified demands with all the strength at its disposal, which could not be rid fast enough of the gains of the March revolution? This thought even poisoned the Left’s pleasure at the removal of land-tax immunities, the most decisive measure that Hansemann planned. Moreover, the increase in the spirit tax made more expensive a luxury that had become indispensable to the great mass, and placed the Rhenish distillers in an unfavourable position in their competition with the great landlords east of the Elbe. For all its artfulness the ‘ministry of deeds’ had sawn off the only branch that supported it, and the absolutist and feudal reaction now hastened to send it on its way with a hefty kick.

It had gradually recovered from the blows of the spring, thanks to the impotent policies of the bourgeoisie. First it organized a war of the loyal provinces against the rebellious capital, which was waged with a deafening din but otherwise had no great significance. It was immeasurably more important that in its own way it put itself on a revolutionary footing. It created its own parliament and press. A ‘Union for the protection of property’, popularly called, with very good instinct, the ‘Junker Parliament’, held its sessions in July alongside the Assembly. From the beginning of that month also a new paper, the Kreuzzeitung, appeared as a banner around which the scattered ruins of the feudal party collected. Its founder was Hermann Wagener, and if his management of it was evil and hateful enough, it was neither stupid nor cowardly.

The Kreuzzeitung did not waste precious time presenting itself as the ‘shield of the dynasty’. In its very first test issue it rejected ‘most decisively any absolutism by any single person, by any single prince’. It grasped completely the fact that the Vormärz methods of rule would no longer work. It declared itself to be constitutionalist, and above all hostile to a centralized bureaucracy. Wagener hoped to organize the great landlords as a class in modern bourgeois society, in so far as the situation made this an inevitable necessity. The Junkers had to learn how to set up their barricades in the constitutional battlefield in order to prevent the overthrow of the monarchy by the victoriously advancing bourgeoisie. Wagener directed his most violent attacks against the ministry. He denounced Hansemann’s ‘plans of confiscation’ to throw state and private property worth millions out of the window, and not to the poor, but into the laps of the rich, to expropriate the great landlords and alienate the loyalty due to the crown. He blustered that if the monarchy approved this robbery it would be treating the landlords worse than a foreign conqueror. ‘Hansemann is leading the revolution at a stormy pace and waving the red flag.’ These were comically exaggerated phrases, but this emphatic heavy type was the only way that Wagener could din into the thick heads of the Junkers that a new age had opened which demanded new tactics.

This educational process took some time, and Wagener never completely achieved his goal. Meanwhile the policies of the bourgeoisie opened a short cut. As a ruling class of centuries’ standing, the Junkers knew that in class struggle organized force is decisive, and the army was their great trump card against the revolution. Their whole programme was contained in the straightforward little line: The only thing that’s any use against democracy is soldiers.

The fearful collapse of the state had also revealed deep lesions in the army. In the March days, many generals exposed themselves to ridicule through cowardice and losing their heads. On the other hand, many of the younger officers had joined the revolution. In the attack on the Arsenal, Lieutenant Techow sacrificed a brilliant career to take the side of the people. By and large, however, esprit de corps overcame oppositional tendencies much faster in the army after the March days than it did in the bureaucracy. Camphausen and Hansemann outrivalled one another in their efforts to restore the Vormärz militarism by suppressing Polish insurgents and sabre-rattling against Denmark. Instead of steering the Polish revolution against its arch-enemy Russia, and waging a serious war to liberate Schleswig-Holstein, these wise statesmen preferred to betray the national interest, in doing which they whetted a sword that was turned against their own breasts.

So when the French army defeated the Parisian proletariat in terrible street fighting, the Junker sword could no longer be kept sheathed. Daily the officers intensified their presumptuous provocations. It was as Waldeck described it: ‘The old military system, with which we broke completely in the March days, still exists totally and completely’. Hansemann, in his anxiety over bourgeois profit, was in complete agreement with this; but the majority of the Assembly, who thus far had followed him through thick and thin, did at last take fright when the garrison occupying Schweidnitz, who had accustomed themselves to shedding citizens’ blood during the Weavers’ Revolt , carried out a terrible massacre of the Bürgerwehr.

Out of some whimsy, the army commandant in Schweidnitz had forbidden the Bürgerwehr to beat their drums, which heroic deed was greeted with a regular chorus of cat-calls. The Bürgerwehr was then called out to disperse this unwelcome choir, but in front of the commandant’s residence they were met by a company of infantry who without any reason fired a salvo of 102 shots at them. Fourteen Bürgerwehr men were killed and thirty-two severely wounded. This bloodbath opened the Berlin Assembly’s eyes to the true state of things. On a motion of the Left from Stein, it demanded on August 9 that the Minister of War should issue a decree to the army, warning the officers to avoid all reactionary activities and conflicts of any sort with civilians, recommending them to become closer to the citizens and work honestly and devotedly for constitutional legality, and finally making resignation a duty dictated by the honour of any officer whose political convictions made this impossible. It was for all that a very modest step, and the ‘honour’ clause was only passed by a majority of one. For the time being the Hansemann ministry thought it was enough simply to ignore the decision.

The German National Assembly was awoken from its dreams of sovereignty by Prussian militarism in a different but no less emphatic manner. Since the appointment of the Imperial Regent it had spent its time in endless chatter about paper rights, once more tricked by Gagern, that honourable man, who, in confidence, made no secret of the fact that at any cost he had to play for time until the Prussian King had so far recovered from general contempt that he could be called on to be German Kaiser. Meanwhile Gagern’s majority refreshed themselves with the satisfying spectacle of a member of the petty-bourgeois democratic minority, who interrupted the Prussian monarchy’s moral convalescence with the remark that the republican Hecker deserved an amnesty just as much as the reactionary Prince of Prussia. The ‘sovereign’ representatives of the people only avoided getting a sound hiding for this harmless remark by the skin of their teeth, although it was certainly no compliment to Hecker. But the Prussian monarchy had no desire to make even the most modest reply to such extravagant respect. Ignoring the powers of the Empire, they signed at Malmö on August 26 a seven months truce with the Danish government, a truce whose conditions, which were nothing short of shameful for Germany, were a fitting climax to the way the Prussians had waged the war in Schleswig-Holstein.

The war had been begun by the Prussian monarchy in order to demonstrate its German vocation and carry out the decisions of the German Federal Diet, whose successor was the German National Assembly. As early as June 9 it had solemnly decided that it would not ratify any peace treaty that gave up the right to the Duchies and Germany’s honour. In the Truce of Malmö however the Prussian monarchy gave up both; the right to the Duchies was Germany’s honour. After all the empty decisions and speeches the National Assembly now for the first time had to prove in practice whether it was a power that meant anything. On September 5 it rejected the Malmö Pact and decided by a majority of 17 votes that measures to carry out the truce were to be stopped.

Thereupon the so-called Imperial Ministry resigned, that imaginary cabinet of the Imperial Regent or, as Blum used to call him, the Imperial Rotter, the cabinet in which the Austrian Schmerling and the Prussian Peucker, for all their rivalry, collaborated peacefully in making the German Parliament the object of public scorn. Then, according to the constitutional pattern, the Imperial Regent entrusted the leader of the majority of September 5 with the formation of a new ministry. It was Dahlmann, the very type of the professorial liberal of the Vormärz. His personal incapacity to act energetically loyally reflected the whole impotence of the German Parliament. After a few days, he returned his mandate as unrealizable to the smirking Imperial Regent, and on September 16 the National Assembly cancelled its previous decision and ratified the Truce with a majority of 21 votes.

It thus destroyed itself morally and politically. It had shamefully squandered the fruits of the revolution which had fallen into its lap, and its only chance of salvation lay in a new revolution. Thousands of ready fighters rose up within two days’ travel of Frankfurt and demanded that the Left factions should form as a convention and take over the leadership of a new revolutionary movement. But with a few exceptions, like the courageous Schlöffel, these factions failed. They decided to submit to the parliamentary majority. It was then that Robert Blum, their most influential member, incurred the guilt that he was to expiate by his tragic death a few months later. The disappointed armed hordes left Frankfurt. Without support from the elected representatives of the people, an uprising was bound to fail and would only strengthen the princely counterrevolution. A new putsch by Struve in Baden fell apart on the spot.

In Frankfurt itself, a small uprising broke out, which the newly reappointed ministers, Peucker and Schmerling, if they did not instigate it, at least deliberately fostered so that they could bring an overwhelming military force from the Federal fortress at Mainz and place the Parliament under the domination of the bayonet. These efforts were actually superfluous where the Assembly was concerned. Two of its members, an old General von Auerswald and the vain and boastful Junker von Lichnowsky, had so far forgotten their dignity as peoples’ representatives as to ride out, on September 18, on a reconnaissance of the insurgents, and while carrying out this patrol had been killed. The National Assembly forgot its dignity even more on September 19 when, in complete safety, it thanked the troops for the ‘devotion shown in the suppression of the uprising’, and, on a motion from the Left, added the word ‘moderation’ to ‘devotion’. Scarcely eight or ten members of the Left voted against this dishonourable proposal. From now on the German Parliament had irrevocably become a mere talking shop.

In the same September days the die was also cast for the Prussian Assembly. It knew why the Truce of Malmö had been signed. Undertaken with a counter-revolutionary intention, the war for Schleswig-Holstein had threatened to take on a revolutionary character since England and Russia, the powers of European counter-revolution and the sworn enemies of German unity, had made a diplomatic intervention in support of Denmark. It was the will of the monarchy and the Junkers that the Prussian army should not do ‘service for the revolution’; in their secret opinion it ought rather to be let loose on the Prussian Assembly as the representative of the revolution. When Wrangel returned with the Guards from the Schleswig-Holstein marches to Mark Brandenburg, the counterrevolution was concentrating its forces for a decisive blow. Foreign powers were thus satisfied, the German Parliament morally ruined, and the Prussian Parliament surrounded by troops. It is understandable that the peoples’ representatives in Berlin found that blood was thicker than water. They accepted the Truce of Malmö without enthusiasm, but also without laments about Germany’s lost honour, and on the other hand referred back to the decision of August 9. Stein introduced a resolution that said it was the urgent duty of the ministry to issue immediately to the army the decree that had been decided upon on that day by the Assembly.

In fact the decree was no more than outward show. Similar decrees forbidding officials to engage in reactionary activities had been issued to various branches of the civil administration, with as much or as little success as such paper announcements usually have faced with the real relationship of forces. One can guess with what respect those hardened sinners of reactionary officials would treat warnings and hints from liberal ministers, who in any case did not dare sack a single one of them. The monarchy could issue a decree to the army that satisfied the Assembly without injuring its interests, and it actually did so a few weeks later. But what the monarchy gladly granted to a military ministry it refused to a bourgeois ministry. Hansemann could not carry out the Assembly’s decision of August 9; the fox had fallen into his own trap.

The Assembly was obliged to insist all the more emphatically on the execution of its decision. If it had no control over the army and the ministry used its decisions to fill its waste paper basket, it might as well abdicate. Basically the question at issue was that same government agreement that had been involved in the Left’s motion in June recognizing the revolution. And, as had happened then, great excitement now seized the population of Berlin. Even the tepid Bürgerwehr, through its commander and his staff, issued an address to the Assembly promising to support its decisions by all means at its disposal.

Stein’s motion was discussed on September 7. Hansemann threatened the Assembly with counter-revolution, civil war and bloodshed if it insisted on the decision. The speakers of the Right tried by means of all kinds of legal hair-splitting to show that the decision was an attack on the whole constitutional tissue. The speakers of the Left rightly said that what was at stake was less the content of the decision than whether the Ministry was obliged to carry it out. In an incisive speech, Bucher pointed out that it was a question not of right but of might. He said it was naive, in the face of the coming storm, to cavil scrupulously over written laws; that a new age needed better foundations than a sheet of paper in the law books; that the Assembly could not fulfil its vocation, perhaps unparalleled in history, of bringing about the completion of an unfinished revolution by the peaceful means of legislation, with limited juridical conceptions. He said that the powers, the principles, the institutions against which the revolution was directed stood condemned but not defeated; that all the absolutist authorities were still in action and almost all its laws were still in force. He said that the Assembly could not permit absolutism to forge in the army a tool to throw out the freedom of the people; that they would have to break the Junker obstinacy of the officers; and encourage the soldiers to fight for human rights for themselves and their comrades in suffering.

The decision lay with the Right Centre, and this time it wavered towards the Left and the Left Centre. Unruh, unlike Hansemann, had no wish simply to be the court jester of the King and the Junkers. He remained very far away from Bucher’s political position; like the dry businessman he was, he explained that, if the Assembly ‘destroyed itself morally’ by annulling its decision, there would only remain the ‘dangerous dilemma’ of choosing between the counter-revolution or a second revolution. By no means the least important factor in his decision, perhaps, was the fact that, if he decided in favour of Stein’s motion, he was the next in line to inherit the ministry that he would thus bring down. Unruh laboured under the sweet illusion that he could lead the bourgeois cause better than Hansemann.

Stein’s motion was carried by 219 votes to 143. The centre of gravity of the Assembly had thus moved to the left. But what in May could have been a prelude to its victory was in September only the start of its death agony.