Mein Feld ist Die Welt: A Political Parvenu in the Kaiser's Court
Published in 1967, this book covers a significant portion of the career of Albert Ballin, Germany's most prominent shipping magnate. Ballin served as Generaldirektor of the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt Actiengesellschaft (HAPAG) from 1899 until his death in 1918. Ballin was thus a witness to, and a significant contributor to, the Teutonic Wirtschaftswunder—the remarkable transformation of Germany from an essentially agrarian-based, insular economy into the largest industrial power in Europe.

During the forty-odd years after the establishment of the German empire, German companies started to emerge as world-beaters in their own right. Names such as Krupp, Thyssen, Siemens, Carl Zeiss, and Blohm und Voss began to appear from the economic ferment. In shipping, two North German companies, the HAPAG and the Norddeutscher Lloyd, found themselves competing against each other for passengers, freight, and profits. In the course of their struggle for supremacy, the HAPAG providentially acquired the services of the Hamburg-born Ballin, whose independent emigration firm, Morris and Co., competed directly with the HAPAG’s passenger business. Rising quickly through the HAPAG ranks, Ballin was appointed managing director in 1899. Through Ballin’s vision and energy, the HAPAG transformed itself from a stodgy shipping line into the largest shipping combine in the world; at the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, HAPAG owned 175 capital ships and employed more than 25,000 personnel.

"Seldom if ever in Hamburg's history," in Cecil's words, "had an ascent been so rapid yet launched from circumstances of such meager promise." Ballin was a singular businessman whose inexorably expansionist predisposition with regard to the HAPAG’s fleet and operations led critics to dub him the ‘Napoleon of the Sea’, and whose friendship with, and access to, the Kaiser and members of Germany’s executive branch allowed him to believe, tragically, that the German haute bourgeoisie possessed sufficient traction in the corridors of power to influence Aussenpolitik. Not a member of the elite ‘konigliche Kaufleute’, or the entrenched business elite of Hamburg, Ballin nonetheless became the ‘poster boy’ of the German plutocracy at a time when a collision between German economic and military might and the British hegemonic machine seemed inevitable, if not predestined.

While Ballin’s career in HAPAG seemed to be an unbridled success, success at establishing a great shipping combination covering both sides of the Atlantic proved to be elusive. His attempt at establishing a New World-Europe shipping axis, with the Hamburg line at its vanguard, ultimately proved to be injurious to the HAPAG’s balance sheet. With Britain’s Cunard and France’s Compagnie Generale Transatlantique electing to abstain from the Ballin-initiated, German-led North Atlantic Steamship Association, the HAPAG’s bargaining power vis-à-vis an emerging US shipping combine, masterminded by J.P. Morgan, was predictably and manifestly impaired. The resulting HAPAG-Lloyd-Morgan agreement, Cecil writes, only managed to stiffen the resolve of the Cunard not to join in an international trust which, stripped of its gentlemanly pledges to maintain harmony in the maritime trade, constituted a menace to British shipping supremacy on the Atlantic. William II, sufficiently impressed with Ballin’s negotiating skills which were brought to the fore by the affair, rewarded Ballin with the order of the Red Eagle; HAPAG shareholders, meanwhile, had reason to question the wisdom of the entire undertaking, as the HAPAG stood to pay annual dividends to the trust which were always in excess of the fixed annual amount that Morgan paid in return.

Ballin’s ‘career’ in diplomacy was remarkable both for the enthusiasm with which Ballin took it up, and its ineffectiveness in influencing official policy. Ballin, the political parvenu, prided himself on his access to the Kaiser, but Ballin’s advice on political matters was frequently ignored. Further, the Generaldirektor’s forays in diplomacy served only to illustrate that success in business does not translate easily into success in the field of international relations. The Haldane mission in 1912, in which Ballin apparently played a central part, proved to be a dismal failure, due in part to Ballin’s inexperience and naiveté in dealing with Churchill.

Ballin’s conservative political views stood in seeming irremediable contrast to his upbringing and humble background. He reportedly did not take pleasure in dealing with men from the rank and file, but found comfort in dealing with individuals of high station. Under Ballin’s initiative, the HAPAG significantly expanded its in-house social welfare program, not to maintain and uphold the well-being of the line’s employees but apparently to keep unionism at bay. To Ballin, “the essential thing…is the throne; the republicans…are loathsome.” He despised the very idea of a Mitteleuropa, a German-dominated sphere of influence in central Europe, but evidently prided himself on his internationalist way of thinking. His notions on free trade and progressive taxation were apparently anathema to Germany’s landed aristocracy, whose traditionalist instincts tended toward agrarian protectionism and economic insularism.

Ballin’s greatest failure, it seemed, was his support for Admiral Tirpitz, the architect of Germany’s expansionist naval program and developer of the so-called risk theory, a hysterical misreading of Britain’s aims towards Germany. Ballin, in supporting Tirpitz, did not sufficiently recognize the geopolitical importance of the Anglo-German naval race. He was seemingly blind to the notion that, while the British was rightly concerned about Germany’s economic ascent, Britain’s Liberal government at the time was also concerned about its finances in view of impending social legislation, and thus could not sustainably participate in a fiscally draining arms race. Ballin dropped his support for Tirpitz only after belatedly realizing that “limitless construction…was a race which England was always destined to win because of its much greater resources.”

The outbreak of the Great War saw Ballin devising or assisting in formulating various routes to allow Germany to exit the labyrinth of conflict, efforts which either came to nothing or were ignored by the powers-that-be in Berlin. The Generaldirektor lived to see the HAPAG’s fleet dismantled through confiscation by the Entente powers and seizure by the German navy, but he did not live to see the war end. The conclusion of hostilities would lead to the dissolution of the Kaiserreich and the establishment of the Weimar Republic, events which Ballin, the monarchist, would undoubtedly find abhorrent.

Cecil’s primary source for this study, hitherto unutilized for scholarly purposes, is the collection of notes and correspondence between the Generaldirektor and Arndt von Holtzendorff, HAPAG’s Berlin agent, whose brother, Henning, was appointed in 1915 as chief of the admiral staff. The well-connected Holtzendorff served as Ballin’s eyes and ears in the German capital during the war, organizing informal, HAPAG-sanctioned soirees which also served as target-rich environments for information gathering. Data gathered from the attendees, who were comprised of the crème de la crème in the Kaiserreich, were dutifully conveyed to Ballin by Holtzendorff. Other major archives used include the HAPAG’s files, which yielded surprisingly little about Ballin; the Hamburg Staatsarchiv, which had in its possession certain papers of Johannes Merck, the HAPAG director who hated Ballin with a passion; and the Warburg Institute in London, which houses correspondence between Ballin and the banker Max Warburg. Despite the author’s highly exceptional and laudable research into the life and times of Ballin, Cecil’s investigation has yielded a book that seems only to bring to the fore Ballin’s political dilettantism, and appears to present a caricature of a man who nearly single-handedly transformed a sleepy shipping line into an enduring colossus of the maritime world. The definitive biography of Ballin has yet to emerge. ( )