PoD that would get rid of Bismarck's social reform's.

So I am beginning to write my first TL's, and one of the main focus point's is a communist Germany, I seek to achieve this by having Bismarck not have the social reform's, and have a longer WW1. If anyone has a better suggestion or improvement, please say.

but anyway, I need a PoD which would stop Bismarck from putting them into practice, and since this is my first TL, I find myself unable to find one...
 
Well, IOTL in 1848 after failing to rally the common man to march on Berlin to put down the revolutionaries, and was told in no uncertain terms by the King's government the only way he could help would be to arrange food supplies from his personal estates to the Army in Berlin, he attempted to convince King Frederick William IV's brother's wife Augusta (the future William I having fled to England) to place their teenage son (the future Frederick III) on the Prussian throne in King Frederick William IV's place - Augusta would have none of it IOTL, but ITTL things go differently and end with Bismark put up against the wall ;)
 
You could just kill Bismarck off. That would do it.

If you do that, do you get a German Empire at all? A non-Austrian one I mean.

A fair chance you might, but if the point is that Bismarck is an Irreplacable Man whose absence would mean no one smart enough to do as he did OTL was running things when the political crises hit that persuaded him OTL to go for mildly progressive reform, then presumably he was just as irreplacable back in 1871.

I guess you might mean he pulls off German unity, and then dies. But why would his replacement(s) be persistently stupider than he was?

A more solid POD would be to have some good reason for Bismarck to decide not to do the reforms, and carry that off without the Empire getting torn up by the immediate crisis. And none of his later successors do them belatedly before things blow up completely. For that you need to research the detailed political history of the Second Reich, and consider the repercussions of this divergence on how that might evolve. Including management of other crises that would arise in the interim without this safety valve.

Without the reforms, I guess Germany has to in some combination get very lucky with economic developments which is pretty unlikely given that the whole world was plunged into depression at least once (I'm guessing, the very crisis Bismarck faced for this POD, the long crisis of the 1870s and '80s) and on a lesser scale more often than that. Or be more repressive, and somehow successfully so.

A more repressive Germany that nevertheless manages to do better economically at least on the domestic front will probably be that much scarier from a British point of view. Almost certainly that combination would result in bigger military buildups sooner, especially of the Fleet. OTOH I can sort of see how the German HSF might get built sooner, but the form the British panic takes is not yet to seek alliances against Germany but simply to rebuild her own navy, with the outcome that Britain's navy is more modern than the new German one, which either has to be rebuilt from scratch all over again (thus slowing them down) or is less threatening on the high seas than the later one OTL. Find the right mix and despite a stronger Germany Britain is not on the whole more panicked than OTL and so the Great War starts more or less on schedule.

France hates and fears Germany regardless of what they do, of course. I don't think a more autocratic Germany would have substantially different relations with Russia. The French will still seek to win over Russia by offering lots of loans for industrial development as OTL.

Then again, some accounts give the impression that Kaiser Wilhelm's firing Bismarck and then proceeding to mess up the good relations with Russia the Iron Chancellor had so carefully cultivated was an egregious act of sheer stupidity. I am not sure, I tend to assume things happen in history for good reasons more or less and that there were deep factors tending to rip the alliance of eastern autocrats apart.

Hey, if Wilhelm really was that much of a willful idiot, perhaps Bismarck does institute the reforms--but then the new Kaiser maneuvers them out again at the same time as he is mucking up relations with Russia? Say in the interim conservatives have been more unsettled and outraged than OTL at the same time as the economy in general has been doing better and working-class politics is weakened. (Actually a stronger economy would probably tend to strengthen working-class movements--so say they have been so relatively successful, this feeds the outrage of the better off, including a lot of middle-class types). Wilhelm cracks down, including taking the already-established reforms back off the table. The workers are the ones outraged by now but various forces of repression break their movement, and their wages stagnate or even decline even as German industry continues to grow, so the profits accruing to the better-off classes are downright obscene. And they don't want to give up a pfennig of it! And so Germany struts maniacally toward the Great War with a bloated military-industrial complex, a more blatantly anti-democratic political order, and a sullen but cowed working class smoldering underneath.

There are no Social Democrats in the Reichstag to vote the war credits; that's all done by the conservative minority allowed representation. Individuals who are more or less supporters of Social Democracy but don't dare say anything about it get drafted or volunteer to join the armies when war is looming, they serve loyally and well, but when things go south, SDs are in no way to blame for Germany's disasters and appear that much more appealing to broad sectors--including some of those middle class types who disdained the masses a generation or two before, and who knows, maybe a lot of industrialist types who see a rationalistic Social Democracy as a new lease on life for their industrial schemes, if only they can win over the Socialist leadership to keeping them on as design bureau heads?
 

Beer

Banned
Hi, Marix!
When I see the distortions some other users here do to get your ops line, I have to laugh. That Bismarck would not be Bismarck! I am German and, like most of us here, a history fan.
If you want a communist Germany use a later PoD, because the reforms will come with any Bismarck being at least halfway Bismarck. His reforms are the culmination of several developments, not only inside Germany, but some outside influences too.
Bismarck´s social laws were the first on such an encompassing level and made because of the ugly sideeffects of the rapid industrialisation in Europe back then. He had some political goals in sight, sure, but there was some serious compassion for his fellow Germans in the mix as well.
Even a more repressive Bismarck won´t work, since other nations did no social legislation or only trinkets for many more decades and did not fall to communism. Bismarck´s reforms were a good part about social conscience.

As a whole Germany, despite Marx and engels coming from here, has or had no real communist/socialist leanings (GDR as special case since it was forced on them at first). Some circles and newspapers in the US today might think otherwise when they write about socialist France or Germany, but this causes just amused headshaking here.
The only time communism really had a shot at winning Germany over was after WW1, when Germany was unjustly gutted by the hidebound idiots in Versailles.
If you start at that time, after WW1 and the Weimar-time, changing events there, you can get a communist Germany.
Scratching Bismarck´s reforms is implausible given the developments and Persons involved at making them and more important, it would not make a communist take-over much more likely.
Focus on Weimar, there you can get a good turning point.
 
I can see your point Beer, and a Weimar PoD Would be easier, but the problem is that any socialist-working class movement's in the Weimar era also deeply effect the far-right, there is very few PoD's that would allow me to strengthen the left and weaken the right, most would even have the opposite effect.

I will do some research into your proposal Shevek, but you have pretty much given me an ideal way to make it happen. If I ever manage to produce a pilot for it then I will be sure to give you credit.
 
Please do research it; I don't know if that off-the-cuff repeating of a caricatured image of Wilhelm II does him any justice. You might still get similar results after some Hamlet-like dithering though. Certainly the Second Reich was not a simple absolute monarchy and there were other social players than the SDs who might have taken issue with a rightward shift of that magnitude and a complete discarding of liberal nuance from both domestic and foreign policy. They might not prevail if the other factions wanted an Imperial strong hand enough. It is not clear that German industry could prosper enough with that kind of high-handed social repression in the mix. But that after all is the state of things you stipulated. Maybe German industry doesn't prosper relative to OTL but they don't know that of course, and the industrial owning classes figure they have the best deal they can get. Of course if Germany is not stronger industrially it is hard to see how the war goes on longer, another stipulation. The idealist in me does not want to see repression prosper even in the short run; the realist suggests probably it can. Especially if I know there is a whirlwind up time to be reaped!
 
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