‘Mistakes in internal administration can be rectified by a change of minister. Financial errors can normally be put right within a few months, economic errors within a few years. Even defeats on the battlefield can be compensated for, if usually only after decades. But gross, flagrant errors in the field of foreign policy can often never be made good.’ With these words of warning Bernhard von Bülow, then German ambassador in Rome and soon to become Foreign Secretary and Reich Chancellor, anticipated as early as 1895 the catastrophic course of German history in the first half of the twentieth century, thereby touching on a question which will always preoccupy historians of the German nation-state: why was the German diplomatic corps unwilling or unable to guide the promising political, economic and cultural rise of Prussia-Germany as a Great Power along a peaceful trajectory; why did it participate, actively or passively, in the self-destruction of Germany – and the self-destruction of Europe – in two European civil wars?

No serious historian will wish to challenge the view that the second of these wars was deliberately unleashed by Germany. The only question here is whether the traditional ruling elites – in this instance the diplomatic corps – collaborated willingly in this second attempt to establish German hegemony over Europe, or whether instead they overlooked certain ‘excesses’ of the National Socialist régime and allowed themselves to be ‘shot dead’ for Hitler. The part played by Germany in the causation of the First World War is of course much more controversial. But even if we assume for the moment that Germany's role in July 1914 was of a similar order to that of the other Great Powers involved, the German diplomatic corps of the Wilhelmine epoch cannot escape censure for failing to prevent this war by warning in good time of its hopelessness. It is a difficult thing for me to say, but German diplomacy could also be open to censure on the grounds that, if war really was unavoidable, it should have created a more favourable starting-position, one more likely to produce a swift victory, and thus have averted the death of millions of human beings and unspeakable political catastrophes.