adjust the budget to the growing needs of the Empire without disarranging the finances of its constitutent states. The crisis became acute when the estimates for the year 1909 showed that some £25,000,000 would have to be raised by additional taxes, largely to meet the cost of the expanded naval programme. The budget presented to the Reichstag by Prince Bülow, which laid new burdens upon the landed and capitalist classes, was fiercely opposed by the Agrarians, and led to the break-up of the Liberal-Conservative bloc on whose support the chancellor had relied since the elections of 1906. The budget was torn to pieces in the committee selected to report on it; the Liberal members, after a vain protest, seceded; and the Conservative majority had a free hand to amend it in accordance with their views. In the long and acrimonious debates that followed in the Reichstag itself the strange spectacle was presented of the chancellor fighting a coalition of the Conservatives and the Catholic Centre with the aid of the Socialists and Liberals. The contest was from the first hopeless, and, but for the personal request of the emperor that he would pilot the Finance Bill through the House in some shape or other, Prince Bülow would have resigned early in the year. So soon as the budget was passed he once more tendered his resignation, and on the 14th of July a special edition of the Imperial Gazette announced that it had been accepted by the emperor. The post of imperial chancellor was at the same time conferred on Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the imperial secretary of state for the interior.[1] (W. A. P.)
Bibliography of German History.—Although the authorities for the history of Germany may be said to begin with Caesar, it is Tacitus who is especially useful, his Germania being an invaluable mine of information about the early inhabitants of the country. In the dark and disordered centuries which followed there are only a few scanty notices of the Germans, mainly in the works of foreign writers like Gregory of Tours and Jordanes; and then the 8th and 9th centuries, the time of the revival of learning which is associated with the name of Charlemagne, is reached. By the end of this period Christianity had been firmly established among most of the German tribes; the monks were the trustees of the new learning, and we must look mainly, although not exclusively, to the monasteries for our authorities. The work of the monks generally took the form of Annales or Chronica, and among the numerous German monasteries which are famous in this connexion may be mentioned Fulda, Reichenau, St Gall and Lorsch. For contemporary history and also for the century or so which preceded the lifetimes of their authors these writings are fairly trustworthy, but beyond this they are little more than collections of legends. There are also a large number of lives of saints and churchmen, in which the legendary element is still more conspicuous.
With regard to the Annales and Chronica three important considerations must be mentioned. They are local, they are monastic, and they are partisan. The writer in the Saxon abbey of Corvey, or in the Franconian abbey of Fulda, knows only about events which happened near his own doors; he records, it is true, occurrences which rumour has brought to his ears, but in general he is trustworthy only for the history of his own neighbourhood. The Saxon and the Franconian annalists know nothing of the distant Bavarians; there is even a gulf between the Bavarian and the Swabian. Then the Annals are monastic. To their writers the affairs of the great world are of less importance than those of the monastery itself. The Saxon Widukind, for instance, gives more space to the tale of the martyrdom of St Vitus than he does to several of the important campaigns of Henry the Fowler. Lastly, the annalist is a partisan. One is concerned to glorify at all costs the Carolingian house; another sacrifices almost everything to attack the emperor Henry IV. and to defend the Papacy; while a third holds a brief for some king or emperor, like Louis the Pious or Otto the Great.
Two difficulties are met with in giving an account of the sources of German history. In the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries it is hard, if not impossible, to disentangle the history of Germany from that of the rest of the Frankish empire of which it formed part; in fact it is not until the time of the dissensions between the sons of the emperor Louis I. that there are any signs of demarcation between the East and the West Franks, or, in other words, any separate history of Germany. The second difficulty arises later and is due to the connexion of Germany with the Empire. Germany was always the great pillar of the imperial power; for several centuries it was the Empire in everything but in name, and yet its political history is often overshadowed by the glamour of events in Italy. While the chroniclers were recording the deeds of Frederick I. and of Frederick II. in the peninsula, the domestic history of Germany remained to a large extent unwritten.
Among the early German chroniclers the Saxon Widukind, the author of the Res gestae Saxonicae, is worthy of mention. He was a monk of Corvey, and his work is the best authority for the early history of Saxony. Lambert, a monk of Hersfeld, and Widukind’s countryman, Bruno, in his De bello Saxonico, tell the story of the great contest between the emperor Henry IV. and Pope Gregory VII., with special reference to the Saxon part of the struggle. But perhaps the ablest and the most serviceable of these early writers is Otto of Freising, a member of the Babenberg family. Otto was also related to the great house of Hohenstaufen, a relationship which gave him access to sources of information usually withheld from the ordinary monastic annalist, and his work is very valuable for the earlier part of the career of Frederick I. Something is learned, too, from biographies written by the monks, of which Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni is the greatest and the best, and Wipo’s life of the emperor Conrad II. is valuable, while another Carolingian courtier, Nithard, has a special interest as, almost alone among these early chroniclers, being a soldier and not a monk.
The monastic writers remain our chief authorities until the great change brought about by the invention of printing, although a certain amount of work was done by clerical writers attached to the courts of various rulers. Parallel with this event the revival of learning was producing a great number of men who could write, and, more important still, of men who were throwing off the monastic habits of thought and passing into a new intellectual atmosphere. The Renaissance was followed by the fierce controversies aroused by the Reformation, and the result was the output of an enormous mass of writings covering every phase of the mighty combat and possessing every literary virtue save that of impartiality. But apart from these polemical writings, many of which had only an ephemeral value, the Renaissance was the source of another stream of historical literature. Several princes and other leading personages, foremost among whom was the emperor Maximilian I., had spent a good deal of time and money in collecting the manuscripts of the medieval chroniclers, and these now began to be printed. The chronicle of Otto of Freising, which appeared in 1515, and the Vita of Einhard, which appeared six years later, are only two among the many printed at this time. The publication of collections of chronicles began in 1529, and the uncritical fashion in which these were reproduced made forgeries easy and frequent. There was, indeed, more than a zeal for pure learning behind this new movement; for both parties in the great religious controversy of the time used these records of the past as a storehouse of weapons of offence. The Protestants eagerly sought out the writings which exposed and denounced the arrogance of the
- ↑ He was born on November 29, 1856, the son of a wealthy Rhenish landowner, and grandson of Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg (1795–1877), professor of law at Bonn, ennobled in 1840, and from 1858 to 1862 minister of education and religion at Berlin. Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg studied law at Strassburg, Leipzig and Berlin, entered the Prussian civil service in 1882, and, passing successfully through the various stages of a German administrative career, became governor (Oberpräsident) of the province of Brandenburg in 1899. In 1905 he became Prussian minister of the interior. Two years later he succeeded Count Posadowsky as imperial secretary of state for the interior and representative of the imperial chancellor, and was at the same time made vice-president of the council of Prussian ministers, an office and title which had been in abeyance for some years and were now again suppressed.
