Wvs satz final indd

36

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one of the most common causes of death in those days. In the 

coming years, Mathilde Siemens would repeatedly have to spend 

extended periods in sanatoriums. Her little sons stayed with her, 

initially in Bad Reichenhall, later in Merano, Bad Rehberge and 

other places where people took the “cure”. There was no possibil-

ity that Mathilde would return permanently to the home on Mark-

grafenstraße, in the center of Berlin next to the plant site. Despite 

her illness, the couple had two more children, daughters Anna 

(born December 18, 1858) and Käthe (born September 23, 1861).

Before Käthe’s birth, Werner von Siemens had bought a coun-

try house for his ailing wife in Charlottenburg, at the time a rather 

rural suburb of Berlin. This house at Berliner Straße 36, imme-

diately past the square known as “Am Knie” (now Ernst-Reuter- 

Platz), was where the family moved in the spring of 1862, after an 

extended remodeling. But here too, it was not possible for all to 

live together permanently. Werner von Siemens kept his main 

residence on Markgrafenstraße, and his boys attended grammar 

school at the Friedrich-Gymnasium in the central district of Berlin, 

because there was no secondary school yet in Charlottenburg. 

The parents hired a nursemaid to tend their daughters: Sophie 

Wolff, a distant relative. In 1864, Werner hired a tutor for his sons, 

educator Gustav Willert. The nursemaid and tutor became impor-

tant fi gures in the Siemens children’s lives, because their ailing 

mother was hardly able to take care of them, and their father was 

often away on business.

24

 Despite the idyllic setting of the country 

house in Charlottenburg, the associated hopes for Mathilde’s 

recovery did not bear out. She suffered a relapse early in 1865, and 

by April it was clear that the doctors could do no more. Aged bare-

ly 51, she died on July 1, 1865, surrounded by her husband and 

children. 

Representative and lobbyist 

In spite of his wife’s illness and the time he was spending on the 

expansion of the submarine cable business, early in the 1860s 

Werner von Siemens began becoming politically active. He be-

came caught up in the era’s revival of the forces of liberalism and 

the German national movement. His father before him had been 

devoted to the idea of a unifi ed Germany with a constitution pro-

tecting freedoms, and he himself had entered the war against 

Denmark to fi ght for these principles in 1848. As an entrepreneur 

operating on an international scale as well, he was an enthusias-

tic adherent of the German nationalist movement. In 1860 he 

joined the Deutsche Nationalverein (German National Union); a 

year later he was one of the founders of the Deutsche Fort schritts-

partei (German Progressive Party), which had a liberal, national-

ist orientation. Even though Werner really had no time for politi-

cal work, his friends in the party persuaded him to run for a seat 

in the Prussian House of Representatives. In May 1862 he was 

elected to the Prussian legislature as a representative for the So-

lingen electoral district. 

The Fortschrittspartei now had a majority in the House of Rep-

resentatives, and was determined to prevent a planned reform of 

the army by exercising Parliament’s rights over the budget. The 

new Prime Minister, Otto von Bismarck, ignored the Parliament, 

violating the Constitution. As an offi cer of many years’ standing, 

Werner von Siemens sympathized with the army reform, but ad-

hered to party discipline.

25

 When Bismarck took the lead of the 

After 1850   

The spread of tuberculosis peaks in Europe. One out of every 

two deaths among Germans between the ages of  and  is attributed to 

tuberculosis. The causes of this “people’s plague” are not discovered 

until . 

1859  

The German National Assembly is constituted in Frankfurt on the 

Main. Its aims are to elect a national parliament and found a unifi ed German 

state under Prussian leadership.

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38

39

German national movement during the four-year constitutional 

confl ict, Werner abandoned all reservations about the Prime Min-

ister. National unity meant more to him than any constitutional 

question. It roused him to enthusiasm that Bismarck worked to-

ward a German national state under Prussian domination, with 

wars against Denmark (1864) and against Austria and the German 

Confederation (1866). Werner von Siemens was one of the liberal 

representatives who voted in September 1866 to grant the Prime 

Minister immunity from prosecution for his offenses against the 

Constitution, and thus ended what was known as the Prussian 

Constitutional Confl ict. Werner then resigned from offi ce, so he 

could again devote more time and energy to the company and his 

own experiments. His goal of achieving a German national state 

under Prussian leadership had come within reach. 

After the German Empire was founded in 1871, Werner von 

Siemens took a public role in another way. Now he strove to 

achieve politically, but from outside of Parliament, certain inno-

vations he considered necessary. He especially worked toward a 

reform of the patent laws. These laws still dated from the pre- 

industrial age, and set a priority on inventors’ interests. More-

over, patents were only rarely issued in Prussia by that time. In 

that era of liberal economic policies, they were considered an out-

dated monopoly. As early as 1863, Werner von Siemens had writ-

ten a highly regarded position paper for the Berliner Kaufmann-

schaft (Berlin commercial community). Here he argued for patent 

protection that would focus on “aspects of the national economy” 

and thus on the interests of rapidly growing industry.

26

 

On March 28, 1874, Werner von Siemens joined businessmen, 

professors and engineers with similar attitudes to found the Deut-

sche Patentschutz-Verein (German Patent Protection Association). 

With Werner as chair, the association developed proposals for a 

new patent act. It was a favorable moment: a persistent economic 

crisis had turned the government away from liberal economic 

policies. Amid that situation, Werner von Siemens once again 

made good use of his talent for writing position papers, and in 

April 1876 sent Bismarck a concise memorandum.

27

 Within a few 

months a bill had been introduced that largely matched the Deut-

sche Patentschutz-Verein’s proposals. On May 25, 1877, the Reich-

Werner von Siemens in the Prussian 

House of Representatives (center of 

the fifth row of seats), 1865

1864  

The German-Danish War is the fi rst of what will become known as the 

German Wars of Unifi cation. Upon the successful conclusion of these wars, 

the German states are unifi ed to form the German Empire.

1873  

Europe enters a decades-long period of defl ation as prices collapse 

on the stock markets.

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