ur Ruhe kam diese Streit nicht durch..

The problem of the food problem was reraised in 1912, but again, it was “tackled” by an agency whose role was to allow people to forget it.  This whole issue supports Kehr’s theory about the importance of the domestic politics of Germany in her view on the outside. Ignoring Germany’s geographical fatal flaw concerning the ease of blockading her, the interests of the East Elbians was placed at a higher level of importance than national security.  The tolls were passed in order to allow the Navy Laws to pass by means of their appeal to the agrarians.  Although 95% of the country’s meat was produced domestically, that meat production would require a good deal of grain that in the event of war would simply not be available.  Germany was nowhere near a state of autarchy so far as food was concerned, and thus extremely vulnerable to blockades.

The protection of German farming was no more, in Kehr’s mind than pandering to the interests of the nobility and had the effect of being a stab in the back for the army. Tolls were a very pro-rich way of raising capital.  Duality between the federal Reichstag and the regional government meant that the Reich had great difficulties in raising revenue as the aristocracy preferred to use the more conservative federal parliament to control tax than to levy the states, as the high suffrage regional areas would probably have instituted direct taxation to cover the payments owed to the federal government.  The aristocracy preferred indirect taxation, such as the imposition of tolls as they shared the burden across the entire nation.   In preventing the use of import licenses, the state heightened national grain shortages, and merely heightened Germany’s problems by artificially making the grain market small, inefficient and uncompetitive.