Georg Michaelis

Georg Michaelis: The Chancellor Nobody Had Heard Of

When Kaiser Wilhelm II approved Germany's new chancellor on 14 July 1917, he did not know the man personally. Nor did most of the Reichstag, the press, or the German public. Georg Michaelis was a Prussian food administrator, expert in grain quotas, wholly untested in politics, whose name had been floated two days earlier as somebody the Supreme Command could live with. He became the first commoner ever to hold the office in the German Empire. He held it for fifteen weeks. It is among the strangest appointments in modern European history, and it says almost everything about who was actually governing Germany in the fourth year of the war.

Silesia, Law, and Tokyo

Michaelis was born on 8 September 1857 in Haynau, in the Prussian province of Silesia. He read jurisprudence at Breslau, Leipzig and Würzburg between 1876 and 1884, taking a doctorate in law. From 1885 to 1889 he taught German law in Tokyo at the Society for German Sciences — four years on the far side of the world, at the moment Japan was importing German legal and administrative models wholesale.

He entered Prussian state service properly in 1892 and rose through it with unremarkable steadiness, reaching undersecretary of state at the Prussian Treasury in 1909. He was a devout Protestant of increasingly Pietistic conviction, active in social welfare work, and held an economic view unusual for a Prussian official: that a profit-driven market economy should be both restrained by government intervention and animated by Christian public spirit.

The Grain Man

The war made him. In November 1914 he became chairman of the supervisory board of the War Grain Corporation; in February 1915, imperial commissioner for bread cereals and flour; by July 1915, head of the management committee of the Imperial Grain Office. In early 1917 he was appointed food commissioner outright.

This was among the hardest jobs in Germany. The British blockade had turned bread into the central political fact of German life, and the winter of 1916-17 was the turnip winter. Michaelis administered scarcity, competently and without scandal, which in 1917 was rare enough to constitute a reputation.

Fourteen Days from Obscurity

In July 1917 Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was forced out, brought down by the army command that had grown impatient with him. On 12 July, Magnus Freiherr von Braun proposed Michaelis to the Supreme Command as a successor. Hindenburg backed him; the appointment came on 14 July, and Michaelis became chancellor of the German Empire and minister-president of Prussia.

He was, in Britannica's flat verdict, totally unqualified for the chancellorship, and had been chosen by the military to serve the military's interests. Hindenburg's men called him the army's man. He had no parliamentary base, no party, no personal following, and no independent power of any kind. His administration was completely dependent on the Supreme Command, with Ludendorff retaining strong political influence over him throughout.

"As I Understand It"

Five days after he took office, on 19 July 1917, the Reichstag passed the Peace Resolution — a declaration by the parliamentary majority that Germany sought a peace of understanding without annexations. It was the most significant assertion of parliamentary will in the Empire's history.

Michaelis accepted it, with a qualification, and then explained privately to the Crown Prince what the qualification was for: "One can make any peace one likes with this resolution." He had voided the resolution by interpretation rather than by opposing it — conceding the words while keeping the substance, a manoeuvre that satisfied the army and, once understood, destroyed his credibility with the deputies who had passed it. He went on to refuse concessions in the exchanges following Pope Benedict XV's peace proposals.

The picture is not entirely one-sided. He supported Foreign Minister Kühlmann's efforts to moderate German war aims and favoured a negotiated peace in principle. But he could not cooperate with the Reichstag parties, for the simple reason that he did not believe parliament should have power, and they knew it.

The Fall

Unrest in the navy gave him his ending. Michaelis blamed the Social Democrats for the disturbances, an accusation the Reichstag majority would not tolerate. Coalition pressure built; the army, having no further use for him, let him go. He was dismissed on 1 November 1917, after roughly fifteen weeks.

It matters more than the man does. This was the first overthrow of a German chancellor initiated by the political parties of the Reichstag — the moment when the parliament of an authoritarian empire demonstrated that it could remove a head of government. The parliamentarisation of Germany, completed in October 1918, effectively began with the fall of a man nobody had wanted in the first place.

Why Georg Is Called a Genius

He is not, and the honest thing is to record that plainly rather than manufacture a case.

Georg Michaelis was an able senior civil servant. The one demonstrable competence in his record is administrative: he ran Germany's grain supply through the worst years of the blockade without collapse, which required real skill in logistics, rationing and the management of a wartime economy under conditions of severe scarcity. That is genuine, and it is the reason anyone thought of him at all. His convictions were sincere — a Pietist who believed markets needed both regulation and moral purpose is not a cynic — and he was personally honest.

But the historical judgement on him is settled and unflattering. He is usually portrayed simply as the politically failed chancellor of 1917. He was selected precisely because he lacked a base of his own, held office at the pleasure of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and his single most consequential act was to hollow out the Reichstag's peace resolution with a verbal formula while telling the Crown Prince what the formula was really for. No source records anyone, then or since, attributing genius to him. What his career illustrates is something else, and worth more than a flattering paragraph: that in the German Empire of 1917 the office of chancellor had become a position an unknown administrator could be dropped into, because the real decisions were being taken at army headquarters. He is evidence about a system, not an exceptional individual.

Legacy

Michaelis served as Oberpräsident of Pomerania from April 1918 to March 1919, joined the right-wing German National People's Party under the Republic, and published his memoirs, *Für Staat und Volk*, in 1921. He died on 24 July 1936 at Bad Saarow in Brandenburg, aged seventy-eight.

His fifteen weeks are remembered for two things. The first is the phrase "as I understand it" — shorthand ever since for a government accepting a parliamentary demand in order to nullify it. The second is his own dismissal, engineered by the Reichstag parties, which proved that the Empire's parliament had teeth and hastened the constitutional crisis that ended the monarchy the following year.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Dokkyo University
• Educated at University of Göttingen, Leipzig University and University of Wrocław
• Worked as politician, jurist and lawyer