Georg Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Hertling, from 1914 Count von Hertling, (31 August 1843 – 4 January 1919) was a German politician of the Catholic Centre Party. He was foreign minister and minister president of Bavaria, then chancellor of the German Reich and minister president of Prussia from 1 November 1917 to 30 September 1918. He was the first party politician to hold the two offices; all the others were non-partisan.
Hertling's Catholicism played an important role in both his academic and political life. He belonged to the conservative wing of the Centre party and resisted moves towards making the government dependent on the will of parliament rather than on the emperor, a stance that helped bring down his government in the final months of World War I.
Education and non-political activities
Hertling came from a Catholic family of civil servants from the Grand Duchy of Hesse. He was born in Darmstadt, the son of the Hessian court councilor Jakob Freiherr von Hertling and his wife Antonie (née von Guaita).
The religious education he received through his mother made him consider becoming a priest. He attended the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium where he was a student under a principal who preserved the institute's humanistic character against the emerging natural sciences. He then studied philosophy in Munich, Münster and Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1864.
He qualified at Bonn in 1867 to teach at the university level, but because he was a professing Catholic it was not until 1880 that he was appointed to an associate professorship. The delay was due to the Kulturkampf (culture struggle) taking place in Prussia between the government under Otto von Bismarck and the Catholic Church, primarily over issues of clerical control of education and ecclesiastical appointments. The experience contributed to Hertling taking a leading role in the 1876 founding of the Görres Society, a learned association for the cultivation of science in Catholic Germany. He remained its president until his death in 1919. Hertling received a full professorship at the University of Munich in 1882. Before that he published books on Aristotle in 1871 and Albertus Magnus in 1880.
Hertling was one of the pioneers of the movement for Catholic student fraternities. He joined the Catholic German Student Fraternity Aenania in Munich in 1862 and later the Catholic Student Association Arminia in Bonn. His speech at the 1863 Catholic Congress in Frankfurt, in which he presented religion, science, and friendship as the guiding principles of the Catholic fraternity student, is considered the catalyst for the founding of the Würzburg Federation, an association of Catholic student groups that still exists today as the .
Hertling was president of the German Society for Christian Art from its founding in 1893 until 1911.
He was married to Anna Freiin von Biegeleben (1845–1919), from an influential family of civil servants. The Hertlings had one son and five daughters, one of whom died young. Hertling was a great-nephew of the Romantic writer Bettina von Arnim and the poet Clemens Brentano. The actress Gila von Weitershausen (born 1944) is a great-granddaughter.
Member of parliament and Bavarian minister president
From 1875 to 1890 and 1896 to 1912 Hertling was a member of the German Reichstag as a representative of the Catholic Centre Party. He devoted himself first to sociopolitical issues and later primarily to foreign and financial policy. From 1909 to 1912 he was chairman of the Centre's parliamentary group, advocating the reconciliation of German Catholicism with the predominantly Protestant and Prussian-influenced national state. In 1891 Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria made him a , a life member of the House of Councillors (), the upper house of the Bavarian Landtag, or state parliament.
On 9 February 1912 the prince regent appointed Hertling chairman of the Bavarian Ministry of State and Bavarian foreign minister, i.e., as minister president, at which time the former regent, then King Ludwig III, also made him a count. The appointment of a representative of the majority party in the state parliament to the office of head of government was a first and indicated the beginning of Bavaria's parliamentarization. Unlike his more liberal predecessor Clemens von Podewils-Dürniz, he had a secure parliamentary base and formed his own cabinet.
Social issues were among the most pressing problems in politics, and in 1913 the Bavarian government drew up plans to provide state support for the unemployed, but these failed in the upper chamber. As a result, demonstrations took place across Bavaria in early 1914.