Georg von Hertling

Georg Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Hertling was born 31 August 1843, a Catholic intellectual in a Prussia long suspicious of both. He rose through Bavaria's political ranks in the Centre Party, serving as foreign minister and minister president before Berlin called. On 1 November 1917, with the war grinding toward collapse, he became imperial chancellor and Prussian minister president — the first politician, not general or bureaucrat, to hold both posts. But Hertling belonged to the Centre's conservative wing: he believed power flowed from the emperor, not parliament, and he refused the reforms…