When in July 1944 the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, one of the leaders of conservative resistance against Hitler, visited Friedrichsruh, Bismarck's former country-seat in the Sachsenwald, no one with open eyes could doubt that Bismarck's Germany lay in its death-throes. Hassell wrote—and his words are worth quoting in full, since shock at the imminent collapse of Prussia-Germany as a Great Power also signalled the turning point in the national-conservative interpretation of Bismarck

In the East German Marxist-Leninist analysis of German history the role of Prussia, of the Prussian state and the Junkers, of Prussian militarism and agrarianism have received a great deal of attention. Since they are regarded as major causes of the catastrophes that subsequently befell Germany, this concern is of course not surprising. Moreover, class interests, special socio-economic configurations, the transition from feudal conditions to a capitalist-industrial system played so manifest a role in Prussia's rise that Marxist scholars, if only for that reason, were bound to turn to the investigation of these developments.

It is a textbook cliché that the diplomatic history of Europe between 1815 and 1914 was characterized by the increasing prominence of military men and military considerations in policy-making. It is almost as generally accepted that the Franco-Prussian War was a milestone in the development of this process, particularly in the new German Empire. What must not be overlooked in the search for future portents, however, is the consistently minor role soldiers on both sides actually played in the diplomacy of 1870. This essay offers some generalizations on the background and structure of the relationships between soldiers and statesmen during the Franco-Prussian War.

In the final years of his life, the Heidelberg historian and political journalist Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–71) was an unpopular figure in Germany. During the 1860's, the formerly prominent intellectual and revered partriot lost the respect of the German nation. His refusal to applaud the newly created German Empire and his denunciations of Bismarck's policies made him the object of scorn or pity to many of his contemporaries. Some thought the Gervinus of the 1860's had simply been “overtaken by events.” Others considered his opposition to Bismarck's unification proof of personal pettiness or political irresponsibility. Still others used Gervinus's failure to accept the glorious new age as cause to denounce everything he had done both before and after Bismarck as the work of a “writer without style, a savant without method, a thinker without depth, a politician without foresight, and a man without charm or personality.”The

The year 1971 marks the centenary of the death of Georg Gottfried Gervinus. This fact might seem to warrant attention only of antiquarians, since Gervinus appears in most textbooks (if at all) as a professor dismissed from the University of Göttingen for protesting the revocation of the Hanoverian constitution in 1837. But two facts about his reputation inspire greater attention. First, Gervinus was buried with unseemly haste by a host of unflattering necrologists, from Ranke on down, in the very year of the founding of the German Empire. Second, he has again achieved some attention recently as one of the few German democrats among the nineteenth-century professorate, thanks to publications in both East and West Germany. As an opponent of the “reactionary class compromise which underlay the unification of the Reich from above,” he has become an object of veneration in East Germany. In the west, the publication of his Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth Century and the subsequent Treason Trial against Gervinus has focused attention on the fate of those who sanctioned democratic revolution in the reactionary 1850's.3 In both cases, in obscurity and tendentious revival, Gervinus has been blamed or praised more for what he stood for than for what he was.