Friedrich Meinecke in his recent book on The German Catastrophe quotes a Danish friend and historian as saying to him during the Hitler regime: “You know, that I cannot love Bismarck, but in the present situation I must say: Bismarck belonged to our world.” It would be easy to contrast this nicely balanced statement with innumerable others which, in the last years, indulged in indictments of the founder of the German Reich as a “Nazi forefather” or threw him into the line of descent which is supposed to lead from Frederick IPs attack on Silesia in 1740 to Hitler's attack on Poland in 1939. Thus the myth of the “Iron Chancellor,” of the man “in high dragoon's boots” revived and, amazingly enough, the Nazi trick of appropriating “Prussianism” as epitomized in the pageantry of the so-called “day of Potsdam,” was given full credit by many of their very adversaries. But there were also the voices of those who, in a more careful and responsible way, tried to find out what links may possibly connect the beginnings with the end of the Prusso-German Reich or may point ahead from 1866 and 1871 or from 1879 to the potentialities of the Hitler regime. Meinecke's treatise is one of the finest examples of such conscientious scrutiny carried out by Germans themselves. From whatever angle this question is raised the towering and baffling figure of Bismarck undoubtedly has won a new actuality. And it can easily be understood that in the recent crisis of statesmanship and particularly in view of the disaster which Germany brought upon herself and the world, attention turned back to the man who stands for decisive changes in the external setup as well as in the intellectual and moral, the political and social climate of nineteenth century Europe.