Introduction: The Problem of Continuity

Historians, almost by definition, search for continuity. In modern German history, the problems of continuity are perhaps more intriguing and troubling than for any other country. What, for example, happened to the old Germany of “thinkers and poets” after Bismarck's Germany of “blood and iron”? What was the link between Bismarck and the First World War? What was the continuity of foreign policy from Imperial to Weimar to Nazi Germany, from Bethmann-Hollweg to Stresemann to Hitler? Or, nowadays, what has happened to the Nazi past in the present societies of East or West Germany?

To come to our own particular preoccupation: How much continuity was there in German “aggressiveness”? Before Bismarck, no one could single out the modern Germans as uniquely aggressive, particularly by comparison with the British, French, or Russians. Bismarck himself, for all his saber rattling, carefully restricted his ambitions to a conservative version of a German national state. Even his most notable lapse, Alsace-Lorraine, figured as a traditional part of Germany acquired by France during the many wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And Bismarck did not, incidentally, start the war with France. After Bismarck came that liberal and peaceful general, Caprivi. Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century, the Germans were already thought uncommonly aggressive. Why? Bülow's theatrical Weltpolitik did, of course, lead to some minor but abrasive colonial undertakings and confrontations. Even his relatively prudent successor, Bethmann-Hollweg, had his own Moroccan crisis in 1911. A good deal of Germany's reputation for aggressiveness must probably be laid to the prevalent German style–a traditional Prussian military stiffness caricatured by middle-class imitators.