Modern Europe
proach downplays the strategic brilliance of Field
Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, attributing the outcome
much more to bumbling on the Austrian side, especially by General Ludwig Benedek, the Austrian commander.
As is the case with any army that suffers disaster in
war, in the Austrian army the postwar recriminations
were endless. Countless subordinates alleged that they
would have done better, and perhaps saved the day, if
not for the incompetence of Benedek or other superior
officers. In a painstaking account of the campaign that
second-guesses virtually every Austrian command decision, Wawro makes good use of their reports. Wawro
relates the action in a lively style, painting his most
vivid pictures in describing the northern theater. The
language is colorful but at times overdone, such as in
the description of the battle at Vysoko, where Austrian
troops are "sucked piecemeal into the Prussian mincing machine" (p. 143).
Wawro is on less solid ground in his analysis of the
southern theater of the war, overstating Austria's war
aims against Italy and understating Italy's war aims
against Austria. Mobilization sent most Austrian
troops to join Benedek's force in Bohemia and left a
far smaller army in Venetia, with a purely defensive
mission. The author's contention that Austria's "principal war aim in the southern theater" was "the
smash-up of united Italy" (p. 120) borders on the
fanciful. Indeed, the possibility of such an occurrence
was discussed in Viennese and Parisian diplomatic
circles, but Wawro can cite no military correspondence
indicating an offensive motive on the part of the
Austrian army against Italy. Instead, he "infers" the
sweeping aggressive war aim from scant indirect evidence, mainly the fact that the forces in Venetia
received fifty-two percent of the Austrian army's field
telegraph wire in 1866 (p. 120). The Austrians, ever
the fools in Wawro's tale, are castigated for failing to
achieve goals they never intended to pursue.
On the opposite side of the southern front, Wawro
attributes to the Italians only the most limited war
aims (the acquisition of Venetia), yet acknowledges
the fact that Austria, on the eve of the war, agreed to
cede Venetia to Italy via France in hope of securing
both French and Italian neutrality. The reader is left
guessing as to why Italy declared war at all. The
preponderance of evidence indicates that Italy took
the cession of Venetia for granted and went to war in
the hope of acquiring Trieste, Istria, and Dalmatia,
gains that would have left Austria practically landlocked. The decisive Austrian naval victory at Lissa
(July 20, 1866) not only gave a sound beating to the
Italian ironclad fleet, as Wawro acknowledges, but also
forced back to Italy transport ships carrying thousands
of troops bound for Dalmatia. The sweeping war aims
of the Italian court and cabinet, documented in published Italian diplomatic sources and discussed in
other recent works, receive no consideration in
Wawro's analysis; the matter is ignored entirely except
for a single vague reference to the abandonment of
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537
"Italy's plans to open a second front on Austria's
Dalmatian coast" (p. 279). The Italians bumbled far
more than the Austrians in 1866 and came away from
the war only with Venetia, which they would have
acquired without fighting at all. Furthermore, the
defeats suffered by their navy and army at Lissa and
Custoza (June 24, 1866) left the Italian military with an
exaggerated sense of inferiority vis-a.-vis the Austrians
that persisted until the collapse of the Habsburg
Monarchy in 1918.
Wawro should be commended for focusing attention
on a highly significant military conflict that has been all
but ignored by historians of the present generation.
Indeed, when measured in terms of scope of action and
historical relevance, Austria's war with Prussia and
Italy in 1866 was Europe's greatest military conflict
between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. The
Prussian triumph marked an important step in the
unification of Germany, and Austria's subsequent cession of Venetia helped complete the unification of
Italy. But perhaps it is a bit much to argue that the
defeat of 1866 knocked Austria from the ranks of the
great powers. The end of decades of ambiguity concerning the Austrian role in German and Italian affairs
left Austria free to turn its attentions inward and
southeastward, redefining itself constitutionally and as
a hegemonic power in the Balkans. More than the
actual peace terms exacted by Prussia and Italy, it was
the flawed form of the constitutional redefinition-the
Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, created in 1867and the manner in which Vienna subsequently misplayed its Balkan cards that sealed Austria's fate.
LAWRENCE SONDHAUS
University of Indianapolis
LAMAR CECIL. Wilhelm II. Volume 2, Emperor and
Exile, 1900-1941. (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs
Lehman Series.) Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press. 1996. Pp. x, 503. $39.95.
In 1989, Lamar Cecil published the first installment of
his biography of the last Hohenzollern, which took the
story of Wilhelm 11 down to the dismissal of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1890 and Wilhelm's first
decade as captain of the ship of state. The second
volume completes the story, beginning with a "midpassage" assessment and ending with the Kaiser's
death in 1941. As always, Cecil writes clearly and
elegantly, weaving personal anecdotes into lucid analyses of the Second Reich.
From the start, Cecilleaves no doubt concerning his
approach to and his evaluation of Wilhelm 11. It is, he
informs the reader, a "dispiriting narrative of a man
and a nation brought to needless ruin, a barren
portrait of a career that was without virtue or accomplishment" (p. ix). Given the forty-year span of the
book, the author has had to make choices concerning
the selection of topics and materials. He has chosen to
concentrate on what most concerned the Kaiser-the
high drama of foreign politics-and in the process
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Reviews of Books
was forced to omit or gloss over that which least
interested His Majesty-the humdrum of domestic
politics.
The research for the book is most impressive. Cecil
has used to great advantage the voluminous records of
the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the countless
personal papers deposited at the German Federal
Archive in Koblenz and the Federal Military Archive
in Freiburg, the remaining Hohenzollern family archive in Berlin, as well as lesser-known depositories
such as those of the Schleswig-Holstein-SonderburgGliicksburg clan in Gliicksburg and the Rijksarchief
Papers at Utrecht. Moreover, Cecil is comfortable with
the secondary works in the field and splendid at mining
the rich memoir literature of the period. My only
complaint concerns the area of military and naval
history, where the author has ignored a good deal of
the recent scholarship by Holger Afflerbach, Stig
Forster, Dennis E. Showalter, and Wolfgang J. Mommsen. The same is true with regard to records acquired
in 1990 from the Military Archive of the former
German Democratic Republic, including the critical
diaries of Erich von Falkenhayn and Hans von Plessen
and the comprehensive Special Collection W -10 of the
Army Research Institute for Military History, which
deals with the economic and financial history of World
War I.
Cecil is at his best when dealing with the personal
tragedies and absurdities, the "baffling juxtaposition of
modernity and reactionism" of the Kaiser's reign: the
Eulenburg scandal of 1906, the Daily Telegraph fiasco
of 1907, the Zabern affair of 1913, and especially the
bizarre years of exile at Haus Doorn in the Netherlands. In between, he retells the story of Wilhelm's
obsession with navalism in general and Admiral Alfred
von Tirpitz ("the greatest German since Bismarck") in
particular. The emperor's failure to resolve Germany's
relations with "perfidious Albion" was the "thread that
ran through Kaiser Wilhelm II's entire life" (p. 194).
During World War I, what Erich Eyck called the
vaunted personliches Regiment of Wilhelm II was reduced to a "backseat occupied by a neglected, illinformed, and increasingly inconsequential figurehead" (p. 219).
The portrait that emerges of the last Hohenzollern is
devastating. To his earlier biases against the British,
the Slavs, the Jews, and the "yellow race," the Kaiser in
exile added an "appalling streak of cold-bloodedness"
as well as strident calls for the suppression of Britain's
(unidentified) "Hebraic and Masonic satellites" (pp.
346,350). Cecil concludes that Wilhelm 11 failed "as a
son, as a husband, as a father, as a friend, as a
commander, as a statesman, and as an emperor." The
pattern of his official and long career descended
"through parental alienation, marital tyranny, paternal
frigidity, martial pretension, political obtuseness, diplomatic maladroitness, and finally, military inconsequence" (p. 356). It will be interesting to see whether
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Wilhelm's other current biographer, John C. G. Rohl,
is equally as damning in his final assessment.
HOLGER H. HERWIG
University of Calgary
CHRISTOPH NONN. Verbraucherprotest und Parteiensystern im wilhelminischen Deutschland. (Beitrage zur
Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen
Parteien, number 107.) Diisseldorf: Droste. 1996. Pp.
363. DM 78.
Christoph Nonn's study of party politics in pre-1914
Germany focuses on the role of the consumer protest
movement that developed in response to rising food
prices in the early twentieth century. His thesis is that
the primary conflict between German workers and the
rest of society in the Wilhelmine period ran parallel to,
and interacted with, a growing antagonism between
urban consumers and agrarian producers as the latter
sought to keep food prices artificially high by means of
tariffs and other protective measures.
In the late nineteenth century, as Germany changed
from a largely agricultural into a predominantly urban
society, depressed agricultural prices raised the standard of living in the nation's rapidly growing towns and
cities. But by 1902, when the imperial government,
under pressure from desperate farmers, abandoned
free trade and imposed major protective tariffs on
grain and other agricultural imports, the balance began to shift in favor of agricultural producers. In
response, urban consumers soon began to mobilize in
defense of their interests. Nonn notes, however, that
instead of centering their protest on the price of bread,
as in earlier times, German consumers now were well
enough off to complain primarily about the sharply
rising cost of meat.
Basing his analysis on a wide array of archival and
printed sources, Nonn shows in detail how each of the
political parties that participated in the Reichstag
elections of 1903 and 1912 was affected by, responded
to, and sought to benefit from growing consumer
discontent. The clear winner was the Social Democratic Party (SPD): by 1914, the SPD, having become
the chief advocate of consumer interests, had not only
consolidated its traditional support among Protestant
skilled industrial workers but had made serious inroads into the ranks of unskilled and Catholic workers
and had even won over many urban middle-class
employees and civil servants.
In the first part of the book, Nonn deals with the
mobilization of urban consumers. After describing the
leading role of the municipalities in getting the protest
movement started, he discusses, in turn, the mobilization of women, workers, employees, and civil servants
and describes the ambivalence of artisans and retailers, whose interests as consumers were often in conflict
with their interests as producers and as owners of small
businesses. The book's second part concentrates on
the "parties of the middle": the Catholic Center Party,
the National Liberals, and the left liberals. All changed
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