This, to Hoyer, is far too simplistic and fails to take into account the “complexities of historical contexts” or the influence of human agency. Many historians still identify a direct link between the Prussian-dominated Wilhelmine Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet their “patriotic fervour”, argues Hoyer, “needed a constant diet of conflict to fill the holes torn into the social fabric by inequality, geographical separation and cultural differences.” Nevertheless, the majority of Germans were socially conservative and valued order, prosperity and the national union that Bismarck had built. In both endeavours he failed: by the late 1870s, he was forced into a political alliance with the Catholic German Centre Party and by 1914, the Socialist Democrat Party was the largest in Germany. Fully aware of this, and of the difficulty of holding “the conglomerate of what had been 39 individual states together under one federal government”, he sought to perpetuate this struggle by focusing on internal enemies such as Catholics, socialists and ethnic minorities.īismarck hoped to replace religion with national sentiment, and to paint the international socialist movement as a threat to the German state. Yet, as Katja Hoyer points out in her excellent debut history book, Bismarck had created a Germany “whose only binding experience was conflict against external enemies”. Nine years later, in the wake of three successful wars – against the Danes, Austrians and French respectively – a reluctant Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, was proclaimed Kaiser (or Emperor) of the newly unified German Reich.
“It is not by speeches and majority resolutions,” declared Minister President Otto von Bismarck to the Prussian parliament in September 1862, “that the great questions of the time are decided – that was the mistake of 1848 – but by iron and blood.”
0 kommentar(er)
