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By Root 1093 0

stiff and dull. Unless ennobled by a von, businessmen, merchants, professional men, literary and artistic people were not hoffähig, that is, not received at court and did not mix socially with the nobility. Nor did they mix among each other. Every German belonged to a Kreis, or circle of his own kind whose edges were not allowed to overlap those of the next one. The wife of a Herr Geheimrat or Herr Doktor did not speak to the wife of a tradesman, nor she to the wife of an artisan. To congregate or entertain or marry outside of Kreis borders invited disorder, the thing Germans feared most. Perhaps to compensate for social monotony, some Germans, according to one report, ate seven meals a day.

Since the unification of Germany had been accomplished under the leadership of Prussia, the ruling caste was drawn from the landowning Junkers, or Prussian nobility, who were numerous, poor and backward. Looked down on by the Catholic nobility of Württemberg and Bavaria as coarse, tasteless and unfitted for social leadership, the Junkers made up in assertiveness what they lacked in education. They dominated the Army, which in Germany dominated the State, and in the wake of Bismarck, their greatest exponent, filled most of the government offices though not the business life of the capital, which was grasping and intense. Though an anti-commercial class, they were its willing agents and their Government was the most frankly commercial in Europe. The Kaiser, who admired money, included in his circle the wealthier and more cosmopolitan non-Prussian nobility. Court life was notable for minute rules of behavior and immense state dinners accompanied by very loud music. Jews, unless converted, were not received, with the occasional exception of a Court Jew, like the Kaiser’s friend Albert Ballin. Although the Jews numbered about one per cent of the population, anti-Semitism was fashionable, stimulated by their rapid progress in science and the arts, business and the professions after legal emancipation was confirmed for the Empire in 1871. Despite the emancipation, however, professing Jews were excluded from political, military and academic posts and from the ranks of the von, an exclusion which, fortunately for Germany, did not make them feel any less devotedly German. Bleichroder, the banker who gave Bismarck the necessary credit for the Franco-Prussian War; Ballin, the developer of maritime trade; Emil Rathenau, founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, which electrified Germany; Fritz Haber, discoverer of the process for fixing nitrogen from the air, which made Germany independent of imported sources of nitrogen for explosives, were all born Jews and among them were responsible for a major proportion of Germany’s booming energies. The German ruling class was likewise supported by an intensely industrious middle and lower class who applied themselves earnestly and worked incessantly, taking few holidays. They were better educated on the whole than those of other countries. Prussia had enforced full-time school attendance for children from seven to fourteen since the 1820’s and by the nineties had two and a half times as many university students in proportion to the population as England.

The sovereign who ruled over this thriving people was busy and dynamic like them, but more restless than thorough. He was into everything and alert to everything, sometimes with useful results. When the Barnum and Bailey Circus played Germany in 1901, the Kaiser, hearing about the remarkable speed with which trains were loaded, sent officers to observe the method. They learned that instead of loading heavy equipment separately on each freight car from the side, the circus people laid connecting iron treads through the whole length of the train on which all equipment, loaded from one end, could be rolled straight through. By this means three trains, of twenty-two cars each, could be loaded in an hour. The circus technique promptly went to feed the insatiable appetite for speed of the German mobilization system. The Kaiser’s observers also noted