Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg

Biography

Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was born in 1856 at Hohenfinow in Brandenburg, into a family of Frankfurt bankers and Prussian officials. He attended Schulpforta and studied law at Strasbourg, Leipzig and Berlin between 1875 and 1879. He entered the Prussian administration in 1884, became district administrator at Hohenfinow, and in 1899 was made governor of the province of Brandenburg, the youngest in Prussia.

A brief spell in the Reichstag in 1890 ended when his election was annulled, and he stayed outside party politics thereafter. He became Prussian interior minister in 1905 and, after the 1907 elections, state secretary of the interior and vice-chancellor under Bernhard von Bülow, whom he succeeded as chancellor in July 1909.

As chancellor he sought a cautious path between conservatives and reformers, giving Alsace-Lorraine a constitution in 1911 but failing to reform Prussia's three-class franchise. He tried and failed to ease the naval race with Britain during the Haldane Mission of 1912, and was censured by the Reichstag over the Zabern Affair in 1913.

In the July Crisis of 1914 he backed Austria-Hungary against Serbia and justified the invasion of Belgium, dismissing the treaty guaranteeing its neutrality as a scrap of paper. During the war he resisted unrestricted submarine warfare until 1917, offered peace talks in December 1916 and pressed for suffrage reform, but lost the support of the Reichstag majority and of Hindenburg and Ludendorff and resigned in July 1917. He died at Hohenfinow on 1 January 1921.