schiller had declared that Germany's greatness was an ethical one, ‘dwelling in the culture and character of the nation’ and ‘independent of any political destiny’. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the German middle classes, as a contemporary journalist put it, were ‘sick of principles and doctrines, literary greatness and theoretical existence’. Faced with apparently established nation states to their west and even eventually and humiliatingly to their south, eager for identity, security and prosperity, and anxious about revolutionary disorder, they demanded power. The history of Germany between 1848 and 1919, however, is not so much the history of the acquisition of that power as the history of the political failures of the middle classes in the course of growing national power and then, at the end of the period, of a faint success amidst national defeat and renewed humiliation.

In their manifesto for the Communist League in London in 1847, Marx and Engels had realised that the agitation in the German states, and especially in Prussia, was a liberal one, and that if the workers were to defeat the bourgeois liberals, their ‘true’ enemy, they would first have to join them against ‘the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy and the petty bourgeoisie’, only afterwards declaring their hand. But Marx and Engels did not merely over-estimate the strength and commitment of the workers. They were also too confident of the liberals. These men did not do what Marx expected.