Georg Michaelis was the chancellor of Imperial Germany for just under four months in 1917. He was the first chancellor not of noble birth to hold the office. With an economic background in business, Michaelis’ main achievement was to encourage the ruling classes to open peace talks with Russia. Contemplating that the end of the war was near, he encouraged infrastructure development to facilitate recovery at war’s end through the media of Mitteleuropa. A somewhat humorless character, known for process engineering, Michaelis was faced with insurmountable problems of logistics and supply in his brief period in office.
EARLY YEARS
Born on September 8, 1857 in Haynau (in Prussian Silesia), Georg Michaelis grew up in Frankfurt am Oder. From 1876 to 1884, he studied jurisprudence at the University of Breslau, the University of Leipzig and the University of Würzburg, eventually earning his doctorate in law.
From 1885 to 1889, Michaelis lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan as a professor of the “Law School of the Society for German Sciences”. The East Asian culture and Buddhism made a lasting impression on him. After returning to Germany, he became a member of the Prussian administration.
Michaelis worked at various positions in Berlin, Guben and Schneidemühl. Throughout the following two decades, he would rise rapidly through the ranks in the administrative hierarchy. Michaelis eventually relocated to the Rhineland… and due to the predominant Rhenish Catholic culture, the region was entirely foreign to him, and Michaelis never really felt at home.
In 1900, now a deputy Regierungspräsident, Michaelis finally returned to Silesia… to the city of Liegnitz. There he came into close contact with the Gemeinschaftsbewegung, a Pietistic Lutheran regional church which preached a basic lifestyle in harmony with the Bible.
Promoted in 1902 to the position of Oberpräsidialrat and deputy to the Oberpräsident in Breslau, Michaelis earned a reputation as an able official of the old Prussian school. In 1908, his far-reaching administrative skills became apparent in the aftermath of the Oder floods, when he was responsible for implementing far-reaching flood protection measures in the Oder Valley with the help of tributary rivers. In retrospect, Michaelis described his time in Silesia during the 1900s as the best part of the entire career, claiming that Silesia “is the most interesting Prussian province for an administrative official” due to:
“…a rich, striving forward agriculture, a flourishing industry with unparalleled strength in Germany […], the effects of confessional and national antagonisms on official life, the difficult border conditions, the magnates of the giant agricultural estates […] on one side and the starving handloom weavers in the mountains on the other side […] – all subject to the supervision and care of the state authorities, opportunities to promote, to help, but also to make mistakes and do harm.”
In 1909, Michaelis won an appointment as a state undersecretary to the Prussian Treasury in Berlin. He also worked briefly in the Bundesrat as a voting representative of Waldeck-Pyrmont, where he became acquainted with the Empire’s legislative work.
When the war began in the summer of 1914, Michaelis became chairman of the supervisory board of a grain company, which was responsible for the purchase, storage, milling and sale of wheat and rye. His position there would be the springboard for his later career at the Reichsgetreidestelle. In 1915, Michaelis was appointed the body’s chief administrator.
Without a doubt, Dr. Michaelis one of the most knowledgable men on the topic of state-organized food supply during the war. He even advised the governments of Germany’s closest allies: Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey.
At the beginning of 1917, Michaelis was appointed Prussian State Commissioner for People’s Nutrition, without a doubt a key moment in his career. On March 7th, he held an energetic speech on nutritional issues in the Prussian House of Representatives, which was well-received by the conservative media. It gave Michaelis the image of a strong, determined man. It even won him the trust of Erich Ludendorff himself!
On the other hand, left-leaning journalists would make fun about Michaelis’ behavior, going as far to call him a “chancery clerk who would like to play Caesar”. Nonetheless, the name Georg Michaelis had now appeared on the radar of Germany’s right-leaning elites. It would pay off only four months later, when Reichskanzler Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg offered the Kaiser his resignation.
THE ARMY CHANCELLOR
After the Reichstag and the High Command (OHL) precipitated the resignation of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in mid July 1917, Dr. Georg Michaelis emerged as the surprise candidate for both the German chancellorship and Minister-President of Prussia. Even the Kaiser himself had never heard about the inconspicuous man. The German Army commander Paul von Hindenburg supported the candidacy, because Dr. Georg Michaelis was “the army’s man”.
Michaelis had visited the OHL on several occasions in his position as Undersecretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Finance and Commissioner of Food Supplies, when his brusque manner had made a good impression on the present officers staff:
“The truth was that anyone more radical than Bethmann would have been unacceptable to the High Command as Chancellor, while anyone more reactionary would have been unacceptable to the Reichstag; the only way out was to choose a nonentity.”
Michaelis was described as “Germany’s first bourgeois chancellor,” as he was the only non-titled person to serve as chief minister during the Hohenzollern monarchy’s 400-year rule over Prussia and Germany. Behind the scenes however, the army ‘dictatorship’ of Hindenburg and Ludendorff remained in control.
But after his first speech in front of the Reichstag, the same people who had proposed Michaelis’ appointment just a few days prior began to regret their decision! Michaelis turned out to be a similarly weak man as Bethmann Hollweg. He was too inexperienced in the major issues of domestic and foreign policy. Michaelis even stated himself that he had “hitherto run alongside the chariot of great politics as an ordinary contemporary” and had only sought to keep himself up to date via newspapers. This was meant as an understatement, but it was immediately taken by opponents as an admission of inexperience.
Heinrich Claß, Chairman of the Pan-German League and the grey eminence of the German far-right at the time, noted after the Michaelis appointment:
“The first appearance of Michaelis convinced me that this man will not save our Fatherland – because he cannot save it. He is just a simple bureaucrat and doesn’t have any traits a statesman should possess.”
The parliamentarization efforts that started under Bethmann Hollweg continued under Dr. Georg Michaelis. He appointed a number of parliamentarians to his cabinet, but mostly conservatives and predominantly to lower ranking positions. Michaelis also agreed to the demand of the newly formed majority in the Reichstag (the SPD, Progressive People’s Party, Zentrum) to fight for a compromise peace without annexations… but added the caveat that he would do it “as I understand it.” This made Michaelis untrustworthy to the political parties, especially since he was unable to develop his own political conception. Therefore, from the very beginning, the Reichstag majority did everything possible to weaken Michaelis, in an effort to topple him in an unfortunate moment. It soon became clear that he would serve as Reichskanzler for a short transitional period.
On July 19, 1917, the Reichstag passed Matthias Erzberger’s Peace Resolution for “a peace without annexations or indemnities”, after the Chancellor’s speech “devalued” the peace. The inability of the government to impose controls on rising prices, demands for wage increases, strikes, and mounting economic chaos drove the ‘political fixers’ towards a military takeover of the reins of power. The Kaiser wanted a chancellor who could manage the Reichstag, and OHL wanted a chancellor who would bring about a ‘German peace’.
Michaelis tried not to reject the resolution outright, but he wanted to carefully distance himself from it. The Chancellor reacted similar to an offer by Pope Benedict XV to mediate a peace agreement between the Entente and the Central Powers, as it would have required the unconditional restoration of Belgium. Additionally, Michaelis was unable to force through the abolition of the Prussian three-class franchise… a decision that had already been officially approved by the Kaiser when Bethmann Hollweg was still in power.
On July 25th, Michaelis told the German Crown Prince (heir to the Hohenzollern throne) that the devil was in the detail:
“I have deprived it of its most dangerous features by my interpretation of it. One can make any peace one likes with this resolution.”
But it was a feint, and Michaelis’ role in the discreditable episode was designed to facilitate a permanent closure of the Reichstag. The OHL perceived the majority parties (namely the Social Democrats, or the SPD) as posing a threat to German stability in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, which had brought an end to the Russian war effort.
In addition, Michaelis was very “uncertain” as to the place of the Central Powers. Knowing the Austro-Hungarian Empire was bankrupted by the fighting, he understood their demand to sue for peace. However, the military was unwilling to relinquish any power to the civilian authorities. Also, the OHL hoped to destabilize the Ukraine and the Baltic States so as to bring Tsarist Russia to the negotiation table… while at the same guaranteeing Germany’s new frontiers (in more than Michaelis’ status quo ante bellum).
The Chancellor chaired the Second Kreuznach Conference on August 14, 1917. The discussion was the fate of Alsace-Lorraine. One proposal was to make the former French territory an integrated federal state coupled with socio-economic changes connecting the Prussian-Hessian railways across Germany. The Alsatian network was an extension of war policy via Aachen into the Belgian occupied zones and across neutral Netherlands, as had already been achieved in Luxembourg. Longwiy was the industrial center of the German Steel Association. Located on the Belgian-Lorraine border, it was at the contractual nexus of the Low Countries adjacent to the Dutch treaty town of Maastricht. German producers like Thyssen and Krupp wanted a guaranteed supply of coal from France and return to an answer to the ‘Belgian Question’, which monopolized the thinking on the Western Front.
On August 29th, it was in light of the Longwy-Briey Plan meeting in a railway carriage near Aachen that Michaelis was given “an impossible task” of perpetuating the war for “another ten years”. But the economic plan Mitteleuropa depended on via the Quadruple Alliance was in trouble. The brains behind the Second Kreuznach Conference were the newly-appointed German Foreign Secretary Richard von Kuhlmann, with the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin and the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Germany Prince Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst chaired in chamber by Dr. Michaelis. But the Chancellor underestimated Britain’s economic determination to stay the course until the bitter end.
The unenviable task to dispell the myth of a German victory fell to Michaelis, still obliged to the Kaiser and OHL in a report to the Conference. In the end, the government won over the Reichstag with only one small party outstanding in its continual opposition to the plan.
As the further radicalization of both the German right and left continued under Michaelis’ rule, the German Fatherland Party was formed on September 2, 1917. It was a right-wing group who believed the Reichskanzler was not assertive enough to put the Reichstag Peace Resolution to a halt. Thus, the German Fatherland Party had built up a powerful mass organization capable of efficient right-wing propaganda to influence the common man with their extremist ideas, just like they had done prior to their struggle for unrestricted submarine warfare and the dismissal of Bethmann Hollweg.
The German Fatherland Party, along with the OHL, also demanded a rigorous pro-Kaiser pursuance of a Rumanian Germany. Bessarabia was a rich, fertile cereal basin. The grains were ripe for the Central Powers to pick; their peoples were starving due to the Allied naval blockade.
With regard to the political left, Michaelis was faced with a large-scale USPD-organized sailors’ mutiny throughout July, and he drew harsh criticism from Reichstag deputies when he rashly attributed responsibility for the incident to high-ranking members of the USPD party leadership. Even the MSPD under Friedrich Ebert stood by the USPD out of concern that deputies were being harassed by the government for no reason, but a vote of no confidence against Michaelis failed due to the reservation of FVP and Zentrum.
But Michaelis was the “army Chancellor”. He was widely perceived to be a mere bureaucrat than an orator or thinker… and it caused outrage in the Reichstag. Conrad Haussmann, a Social Democrat, remarked:
“We have lost a statesman and secured a functionary in his place.”
DECLINE AND DEATH
Another pressing issue during Michaelis’ tenure was the tedious question about the future of the German submarine warfare campaign. Since late 1916, the government was pursuing a policy of so-called intensified submarine warfare in total accordance with the international prize law. But German right-wing circles continued to push relentlessly for unrestricted submarine warfare, claiming that Germany should ignore the “empty threats” of the United States… and that Britain could only be brought down by Christmas with further intensified attacks on all merchant ships (Allied or neutral) that were headed towards the many ports in the British Isles.
However, an unfortunate naval incident in the Celtic Sea in late August 1917 caused yet another crisis with the United States… and it led to Michaelis shutting down the submarine campaign altogether, just like Bethmann Hollweg had done so after the sinking of the Sussex in the spring of 1916. This decision was met with harsh criticism by the German far-right and the public, and it would contribute to Michaelis’ downfall weeks later.
The Chancellor was sceptical of OHL’s avowal of the close relationship with Austria when another conference was scheduled for October 7, 1917. Dominated by the obsession with seaports for the Reich, Michaelis demanded access in Dalmatia from the Austrians, as well as those on the Belgian coast. Through the vehicle of Mitteleuropa, he sought to enable the Austrian economy to withstand the peace conditions he knew would be imposed on the German customs union.
While Michaelis was in the Balkans pleading for seaports, the National Liberal Party and three socialist parties in the Reichstag made recommendations to the Kaiser. On October 24th, the deputies hoped to replace Dr. Michaelis with a Zentrum aristocrat, Count Georg von Hertling.
Upon his return from the Balkan’s, Michaelis was already aware that he had reached the point at which he had lost the backing of literally everyone. Thus, Michaelis requested his own dismissal on October 26, 1917.
But Michaelis also requested that he would remain Prussian Minister-President, while Hertling (the Reichstag’s candidate) would only become Reichskanzler. He hoped that this would limit the Reichstag’s influence on the frozen reform on the Prussian suffrage. Hertling would be given more representative duties, while Michaelis would control imperial policy through the Bundesrat and with the help of the Supreme Army Command.
While Wilhelm II was satisfied by the plan, it was rejected by Hertling, who (sensing Michaelis’ intrigue) wanted both posts or nothing at all! And so, the Kaiser’s advisors could no longer help but recommend Hertling’s full appointment.
On November 1, 1917, Wilhelm II dismissed Georg Michaelis and appointed Georg von Hertling to succeed him in both offices. Shortly after, Hertling would relaunch restricted submarine warfare in accordance with the prize law on pressure of the Imperial German Navy, therefore redeeming Michaelis’ controversial decision.
The former Reichskanzler spent the winter of 1918 secluded in the Harz Mountains. Michaelis was more than surprised when news reached him that he had been appointed by the Kaiser as Oberpräsident of the Prussian province of Pomerania, a prestigious administrative position normally reserved for aristocrats. He took up his post in Stettin on the first of April 1918… and remained in that capacity for exactly one year.
After the end of World War I, he cooperated with the local workers’ and soldiers’ council. Nevertheless, Michaelis was forced out of office by the socialist-dominated government of Prussia.
As the 1920s dawned, Michaelis worked in the fields of economic lobbying, in student organizations, in the synod of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, and became a member of the monarchist/national conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP). In 1921, he published his memoirs, Für Staat und Volk. Eine Lebensgeschichte.
Dr. Georg Michaelis died in Bad Saarow-Pieskow (Brandenburg) on July 24, 1936 at the age of seventy-eight.