Count Georg Friedrich Karl von Hertling (31 August 1843 – 4 January 1919) was a Catholic-conservative German politician of the Zentrum Party who served as the Minister-President of Bavaria from 1912 to 1917 and then as Minister-President of Prussia and Reichskanzler of the German Empire from 1917 to 1918. He was the first partisan politician in German history to hold the office.
Hertling was, primarily because of his high age when he became chancellor, known for his passivity in the political arena. In hindsight, he is often perceived as a puppet chancellor of the Supreme Army Command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, who left him similarly powerless as his predecessor Georg Michaelis and to a certain degree his successor Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau in the time period 1918-1920. Hertling, already severely ill at the time, resigned in the aftermath of the 1918 September Insurrections, and did not return to the political stage in the following three months until his death in January 1919.
Biography[]
Birth and Early Life[]
Goeorg von Hertling was part of an old Catholic family of civil servants originating from the former Electorate of Mainz & the Grand Duchy of Hesse and enjoyed a Christian conservative education. Despite initially wanting to become a priest, he instead decided to study philosophy in Munich, Münster & Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1864 at age 21. During Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf, the conflict between the government of the Kingdom of Prussia and the Roman Catholic Church from about 1872 to 1878, Hertling stood on the side of Pope Pius IX, defending the papal infallibility witout any reservation - while this would prevent him to work at a university until 1880, it gave him enough free time to start a career in parliamentary politics.
Early Political Career[]
From 1875 to 1890, and again from 1893 to 1912, Hertling was a member of the Reichstag for the Catholic Zentrumspartei. A good acquitance of Ludwig Windthorst and Georg Arbogast von und zu Franckenstein, who were one of Bismarck's most ardent political opponents and without a doubt Zentrum's most influential leaders, Hertling devoted special attention to social legislation and was one of the many critics of Bismarck's social policies. Already in the 1880s, he warned against exaggerated hopes for a "socialist state of the future". Soon, he had secured himself a position among the party's highest ranks.
From the 1870s onwards, Hertling also was the chairman of the so-called "Görres Society", a learned society with the aim to foster interdisciplinarity and apply scientific principles to different disciplines, based in the Catholic tradition - all with the goal to unite the German catholic scholars under one tent organisation. At the society's annual general assembly, he commented in detail on ecclesiastical, scientific and educational issues. Hertling was viewed with suspicion especially by Bavarian government circles at the time; in 1882, he was appointed full professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, not at the suggestion of the philosophy faculty, but at the politically motivated instigation of Johann von Lutz, the Bavarian Minister of Culture and a firm proponent of the Bavarian Kulturkampf who thought that due to his new position at the university, Hertling would not meddle as frequently in politics anymore. It soon turned out that he was wrong; while Hertling indeed refrained from participating in the 1890 Reichstag elections, his influence on local Bavarian politics would soon increase dramatically.
Rise to Prominence in Bavaria & Berlin[]
Throughout the 1890s, Hertling was one of the most important mediators between the Zentrum faction in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies, where the party already had a majority since the 1860s, and the Bavarian government as well as Prince Regent Luitpold. His reputation increased by a lot and in 1895, he was even considered as a potential candidate for several government positions, most prominently as Bavarian Minister of Culture. In 1896 he returned into the Reichstag, where he became one of the party's most prominent parliamentary leaders: By championing Bavarian interests in the parliament, he won the trust of many of his former enemies and slowly adapted a more government-friendly stance, even supporting the controversial fleet bill of 1898. Mostly due to Hertling's successful efforts, tensions between the Imperial German political leadership and the German Catholic community could be vastly reduced, a process later coined as the "Zentrum's conversion to the national idea".
Therefore, at the dawn of the new century, Hertling had gained a position of trust vis-à-vis the imperial chancellors and maintained close ties with many of them. Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (Reichskanzler between 1894 and 1900) for example accommodated Hertling's intentions when he entrusted him with the preliminary negotiations on the establishment of a Catholic theological faculty at the University of Straßburg in Alsace-Lorraine. On some occassions, Hertling even acted as some kind of official envoy between Berlin and the Holy See, something that met the disapproval of many high-ranking German cardinals, most prominently the Bishopf of Breslau. Between 1909 and 1912, he was chairman of the Zentrum parliamentary group in the Reichstag and without a doubt the party's most well-known and influential speaker. Due to his efforts, Zentrum became a key coalition party during the progressive, reform-oriented chancellorship of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.
Bavarian Minister-President (1912-1917)[]
In February 1912, Hertling was more than surprised when Prince Regent Luitpold appointed him Minister-President and Foreign Minister of Bavaria - for decades, the Bavarian government had fought against political Catholicism and tried to isolate the Zentrum Party, even though the party held an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies. By including Zentrum in the government and appointing Hertling as Minister-President, Bavaria had undergone a de facto parliamentarisation process, something that was still completely unthinkable in other German federal states, most importantly Prussia, at the time. During his tenure, Hertling mainly focused on Bavarian-Prussian relations and domestic church-political issues as well as social policy; among other things, he intervened in the Bavarian trade union dispute in favor of the interdenominational Christian trade unions, which were politically aligned with Zentrum.
When war broke out in the summer of 1914, Hertling had no part in the decisions of the July Crisis, but he would nonetheless play a very important role over the coming years as one of the most determined backers of Reichskanzler Bethmann against the so-called Kanzlersturzbewegung ("Chancellor Overthrowal Movement"), which had the declared aim to oust Bethmann whose soft policy in regard to the Allies as well as his opposition towards unrestricted submarine warfare alienated the German far-right. As Munich was a major center for agitation against Bethmann since at least 1914, with important rightists such as Max von Gruber, Julius Lehmann, Alfred Ploetz and Houston Stewart Chamberlain living and operating from there, Hertling tried his best to make a sustained stand for Bethmann and put the far-right agitators in their place.
The "Bavarian Burgundy" plan of the Bavarian King & Crown Prince was eventually scrapped after Georg von Hertling's successful intervention.
From the very beginning of the war however, Hertling also became prominent as a champion of particularistic war aims; against the wishes of Bethmann Hollweg, he openend the symbolic box of pandora and kicked off a years-long debate about the kind of compensation every major German consituent state would get after the war - for Bavaria in particular he claimed parts of the Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine to redeem the "disgrace of 1868", which triggered a chain reaction in which the other major constituent states announced their own war aims agenda as well, often times leading to conflicts between Prussia and the German middle states, but also among the smaller states themselves. Hertling soon realized that the discussion he sparked could be a danger to Germany's internal unity and therefore decided to act as a mediator between the different German sovereigns; thanks to his efforts, the most radical war aims were dropped, for example King Ludwig III's and Crown Prince Rupprecht's utopian plans of a "Bavarian Burgundy", which would have included Alsace-Lorraine, all of Belgium and large swathes of France, therefore creating an empire stretching from Rapportweiler to Bergen op Zoom in which Germans would have been a minority. The Bavarian war aims were to a certain degree met after the war with the transformation of Alsace-Lorraine into a proper constituent state with the Wittelsbach Prince Franz as its sovereign.
Reichskanzler (1917/18)[]
On 13 July 1917, Reichskanzler Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg resigned after coming under pressure from all sides. At the day of his resignation, he proposed Hertling, whom he considered quite close to his own political ideology and therefore hoped that he would be able to continue his reformist legacy, as his successor. but Hertling declined due to his high age. Instead, the non-partisan conservative civil servant Georg Michaelis was chosen due to a lack of suitable successors, but the latter's government did not last long and already collapsed in autumn 1917. When Hertling was approached a second time to succeed to the position, he considered himself obliged to accept. Michaelis attempted to retain his role as Prussian Minister-President while Hertling would only have become Chancellor, in an effort to protect Prussia from the ever-growing influence of the Reichstag's & the Imperial government's progressive agenda, but without success as Count Hertling was determined that the two posts could not be separated. He would be the first partisan politician to hold the post of Reichskanzler and Prussian Minister-President; all of his predecessors had been career civil servants or military men.
Already physically weakened due to his high age, Hertling faced insurmountable and growing difficulties as Chancellor. The Supreme Army Command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff had a decisive influence on political developments and de facto had made the government their puppet, but at the same time, Hertling had to deal with the Reichstag, which was pushing for parliamentarism with more and more vehemence. Soon, he got caught between all fronts: While he was not willing to allow the military to slowly usurp civilian powers, he also rejected the introduction of parliamentary democracy. At the end of the day, he had no means of taking effective action against both of these developments, and therefore he mostly limited himself to routine business in his office, while the discontent among the starving and war-weary people grew from day to day.
Nonetheless, Hertling tried to make the best of the limited possibilities he had. He managed to assert himself in regard to the Prussian three-class franchise reforms by making it clear to the reactionaries in the Prussian House of Representatives that maintaining the status quo would not be an option, while simultaneously blocking the far-reaching reformist agenda of the social democrats. Additionally, he tried his best to attend the wishes of the German constituent states for territorial compensation, which unfolded yet another chapter in the German war aims debate, namely the question of which dynasty would be allowed to put one of their family members on the throne of one of the newly created puppet states in Eastern Europe. However, Hertling failed to fulfil his vision of shaping the peace treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest in the most pro-Russian way via his foreign minister Richard von Kühlmann; in the end, Hindenburg and Ludendorff stood victorious and managed to push through Germany's maximal demands at the peace conference - something that would have severe consequences many years later and shape German-Russian relations for a long time to come.
Dismissal and Later Life[]
In late September 1918, an attempted socialist uprising in Germany threw the Empire into disarray and caused one of the most devastating government crises in German history, and Hertling found himself in the center of attention during these fateful days. The former Kanzlersturzbewegung that had contributed to the fall of Bethmann in July 1917 and shortly after began to gather as a strong and united rightist front within the newly formed German Fatherland Party (DVLP) would use this opportunity to launch an outright propaganda war against the chancellor via their newspapers, calling the Hertling administration weak and inept, and accusing Hertling of being responsible for the leftist unrest due to making concessions to the democratic parties in the Reichstag in the past. The Reichstag majority spearheaded by the SPD on the other side deemed Hertling responsible for the insurrection attempt for the exact opposite reasons, namely because of his hesitant attitude towards parliamentarization efforts. By early October, Hertling was left without any kind of support, neither in the Reichstag, nor in the military, nor within his own cabinet.
As calls for a strong, determined leadership became louder than ever, Hertling, who long had suffered from a crippling eye disease and who was completely overwhelmed by the recent events, decided to resign - a decision further sped up by the severe pressure the OHL exerted on him. Weak and sick, the old ex-Reichskanzler retired to his residence in Ruhpolding at the Chiemgau in Upper Bavaria, mostly cutting off ties to his old party, which was now dominated by progressive democrats like Matthias Erzberger, a man famous for his many overtures to the political left. Georg von Hertling died in early January 1919 at age 75. Both as Reichskanzler and as Prussian Minister-President, Hertling was eventually replaced by Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who indirectly continued Hertling's undecided domestic political cause, but calmed tensions on the streets with the introduction of various ad hoc reforms, which later would lay the groundwork for the 1920 March Constitution.
An old guard Zentrum politician with few regards to modern parliamentary democracy, Hertling became Reichskanzler during rapidly changing times which he probably never really managed to properly adapt to - perplexed by the political and social changes that occurred over only a brief time-span, he was mostly passive during his tenure and left the actual work to people with a clearer vision of the future than himself. Nonetheless, despite his rejection of the parliamentary system, Hertling's chancellorship was an important step towards the eventual introduction of non-flawed democracy - after all, he was the first Bavarian Minister-President who was appointed and who governed on the basis of a majority in the Landtag, and his careful steps towards parliamentarisation during his tenure as chancellor can at least in parts be perceived as a precedent of the eventual post-war parliamentary order.