In 1945 Friedrich Meinecke attempted to come to terms with the Third Reich by writing a little book entitled The German Catastrophe. The title might seem self-evidently unproblematic, but in fact it raises several issues. First, one could cynically observe that while it may well have been a catastrophe for Germany, the Third Reich was a damn sight more catastrophic for other nations and peoples. No doubt that would be a cheap shot since Meinecke, then in his middle eighties and venerated as the doyen of German historians, was arguably the best man to address in national terms the disaster he had just lived through. He was not only well informed on the basis of personal experience as to the manner in which the Nazis had come to power (he knew, as he seems keen to point out, several of the key anti-Nazi players), but he was also unusually well equipped to fold the catastrophe that followed into the long historical narrative. Quite aside from the erudition and exceptional importance of his three major works (Cosmopolitanism and the National State, 1907; Machiavellism, 1924; Historism, 1936), he could remember the celebrations that followed the victory over the French at Sedan in 1870 and the subsequent declaration of a unified Germany in the form of the Second Reich. Who knows, he may even have had some memory of the equally historic victory at Königgrätz in 1866—he would have been four years old at the time—and then the peace treaty that explicitly drove Austria out of German affairs.

Consequently Meinecke grew up in a new, unified Germany that had answered in a seemingly unambivalent fashion those great questions of national geopolitical identity that intellectuals and statesmen had fretted over for years, most famously during the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. There was to be no Großdeutschland (big Germany).