The German Genius

in all France. His name “came to signify purely and simply a particular implement of destruction. From being hated by just one nation in 1871, Krupps over the next seventy-four years were to become an object of loathing on an international scale such as perhaps no other industrial organisation has ever attracted.” 14
    For Krupp, Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War, whatever the underlying reason for it, was wonderful publicity. Orders came flooding in. He turned down an honor, saying he preferred to be the first among industrialists than the last among knights. 15
    What emerged from the victory of 1871 was the Prussian Empire. Wilhelm, the Prussian king, now became the German emperor; Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister, became the German chancellor. Prussia took over all of Germany except for Austria, and part of France too: Alsace and Lorraine, rich in coal and iron ore. Though there were still other kingdoms (Bavaria, Saxony), Prussia was now the most powerful state on the Continent. Moreover, she had a convenient, just-defeated neighbor. Both Bismarck and Krupp were to trade on the anxiety that France would always hanker after a war of revenge.
    The Prussian victors imposed on France an indemnity of five milliards of francs. * This payment, and the speed with which it was paid off (just thirty months), produced an extraordinary boom in Germany—the so-called Gründerzeit . The new Imperial German Government spent these francs on two things—on armaments and on repaying their debts to individual Germans who had helped fund hostilities with war loans. These individuals suddenly found themselves awash in great swaths of capital, which they promptly reinvested. Some twenty new companies had been registered each year during the two decades before the war, but in 1871 alone there were over 200 such registrations and in 1872 more than 500. 16 The boom benefited Krupp as it did every other manufacturer in Germany. As many new iron works, blast furnaces, and machine-manufacturing factories were built during the three years after 1871 as had come into being during the previous seventy.
    However, Krupp, like many others in the Gründerzeit, had overreached himself, buying in just one year, 1872, more than 300 iron-ore mines and collieries and two entire ironworks; he also had commissioned four transport ships to bring to Germany the new iron-ore deposits acquired in Spain. And so, when the stock market crashed in 1873, hundreds of businesses went bankrupt, and Krupp was short by half a million pounds, more than £50 million at today’s levels. The banks moved in and their representative, Karl Meyer, took over day-to-day running of the firm. The company paid off the last mark of its debt fifteen years later, the year Krupp died. 17
    Krupp’s personal lifestyle was not, however, curtailed in any significant way (Meyer was an old friend). Notably, his gunnery tests continued to be great social occasions. This was still the era of the great railway expansion in America, and huge numbers of steel rails were bought from Krupp by the American railroad companies. Nevertheless, Krupp’s last years were bleak. Since being sidelined by the banks, he had turned grumpy and spent his days lost in his great monstrosity of a house, the Villa Hügel, “where he hired a pianist to play to him during meals, but where no one would play dominoes or skat because he was such a bad loser.” 18 When he died of a heart attack on July 14, 1887, at the age of seventy-five, only his valet was at hand. The year before he died, his first grandchild, Bertha, had been born. This was the Bertha after whom the huge gun that devastated the Belgian forts in 1914 was named. Krupp’s notoriety did not die with him.
    None of the other great steel giants of Germany—August Borsig (1804–54, locomotives), Hugo Stinnes (1870–1924, mining, shipping, newspapers), or August Thyssen (1842–1926, mining, steel), shared Krupp’s notoriety, though their wealth more than equaled his. Thyssen and Krupp merged in 1999.
    T HE A GE OF THE A UTOMOBILE
     
    As early as the 1860s, in Switzerland, France, and Britain, several “horseless” vehicles were produced, though none of them went anywhere, so to speak. Only in 1885 did Karl Benz, in Mannheim, construct a machine that would lead to the automobile age.
    The son of an engine-driver and the grandson of a blacksmith from the Black Forest, Karl Benz had engineering in his blood. 19 Born in 1844,