Rise Of Nations Thrones And Patriots Crack
Edelira Longinotti
While traveling recently through Old Europe (to borrow Donald Rumsfelds now shopworn phrase), I was led to reflect on the obtuseness of the secretary of defenses dismissive epithet. For nations no less than wine, some things improve in the cask. Age is not simply weariness; it also connotes a sense of limits, an awareness of mortality, greater calm in dealing with recurrent dangers, concern for ones progeny, and more care for posteritys benevolent judgment. It is a season, as Shakespeare affirmed, when ripeness is all.
So I pondered following a busmans holiday in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Friends and strangers alike fixed me with anxious eyes to ask what on earth was happening in America, and why Bush II was so brashly unlike Bush I. Yet my perceptions differed from those of a valued student of foreign affairs, Robert Kagan, a Washington policy analyst now living in Brussels. He claims in a new book that Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus. We do indeed seem to dwell on different planets, but Venus? Old Europe seems less an aging coquette than a twin of Jupiter: rotund and grave, girdled by many moons, wearied by the quarrels and liaisons of younger gods, yet capable when challenged of hurling an angry thunderbolt in the form of a veto. Moreover, older Europeans have learned firsthand that the sun eventually sets on all great empires, and that every rising powers folly is to believe it sits at the end of history.
The perils of hubris struck me with peculiar force while visiting Bremen and Hamburg, from whose ports more immigrants came to the New World than from any other. These mighty Hanseatic trading cities epitomized the fast-forward expansion of the German Empire from its formation after the Franco-Prussian War (187071) until the catastrophes that flowed from Sarajevo. And nobody did more to propel Germanys rise than Prince Otto von Bismarck, whose deeds should be known to George W. Bush, since at Yale he studied Germanys past in a course taught by an astute historian, Henry Ashby Turner.
Bismarcks memory is preserved in a museum I sought out at his residence in Friedrichsruh, in the environs of Hamburg. Here one is reminded that a century ago all indicators on the bourse of power pointed to Germanys ascent: its swift victories in three European wars, its awesome military machine, its double-digit economic growth, a fertility rate that assured ample future manpower, all this plus Europes finest scientific institutes, its ablest engineers, and its most literate populace. When the Nobel Prizes were launched in 1901, Germany swept the field in medicine, life sciences, physics, and chemistry. As significant, Germany possessed Europes strongest Social Democratic Party, so well organized that Marxists confidently expected that founders of the first socialist state would speak German, not English or French, and certainly not Russian.
In 1888, the auguries for Germany were exceptionally favorable as Kaiser Wilhelm II succeeded to the throne at age 29. The new emperor exuded the outward assurance of a leader born to command. His grandmother was Queen Victoria, his uncle was the future Edward VII, and every royal in Europe, ranging from St. Petersburg and Copenhagen south to Athens, was either his kin or his favor-seeker. Yet some also noted his tendency to swagger, his love of uniforms, his intellectual shallowness, and his repeated references to Germanys providential mission. Tellingly, his first proclamation as emperor was to his soldiers: "So we are bound togetherI and the armyso we are born for one another, and so we shall hold together indissolubly, whether, as God wills, we are at peace or in storm."
It likewise soon became apparent that Wilhelm II bridled at his reliance on Bismarck, and on the complex web of alliances the aging Iron Chancellor had welded to prevent Germanys isolation. The young emperor, his courtiers and his advisorsmost especially his minence grise, Baron Friedrich August von Holstein, a crafty early edition of Karl Rove itched to make their own mark, to ensure Germany a place in the sun (Wilhelm IIs phrase). But the kaiser felt hemmed in by the Iron Chancellors Triple Alliance with Austria- Hungary and Italy, and by the Three Emperors Pact, binding Russia and Austria-Hungary to the German Reich.
Starting early in the 1890s, Germany seemed to burst assertively everywhere on the world stage. Bismarcks attempts to placate Great Britain yielded to blunt provocations, and then to a costly naval race that Wilhelm II vowed he would win. Germanys pact with Russia, the linchpin in Bismarcks structure, was not renewed. By 1893, the old chancellors worst nightmare materialized as republican France moved toward an entente cordiale with czarist Russia, an odd coupling that paved the way for the Great War.
"No one could accuse the Germans of lack of energy," writes Gordon Craig in his standard Oxford history. "In April 1894 they filed a claim for the sole possession of the Samoan Islands, in June they protested the legality of an Anglo-Congolese treaty concluded the previous month; and in the autumn of the year they quarreled with the British over the recognition of the Sultan of Morocco, the boundaries of the Sudan, the future of Portugals colonies, and the policy to be adopted toward Turkey as a result of the Armenian massacre."
In 1898, the kaiser toured the Middle East, entered Jerusalem on horseback, proclaimed himself champion of 300 million Muslims, and conjured visions of a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. In north China, German breweries and Lutheran churches sprang up in Shantung, the German enclave in which the fanatic Boxers first rebelled against "foreign devils" in 1899. A year later, a multinational peacekeeping force led by a German, Field Marshal Count von Waldersee, crushed the Boxer Uprising and sacked Peking. Meanwhile, German traders and agents moved deeper into east, west, and southern Africa, a forward policy underscored in 1895 by the celebrated "Kruger telegram" in which Wilhelm II implied he would back the Boer president Paul Kruger against Britain. And nervous Europeans noticed that Germany had adopted as its unofficial anthem "Deutschland, Deutschland ber alles," with its first verse celebrating the Fatherland and its four riversthe Maas, the Etsch, the Memel, and the Beltnone of them in Germany.
In all this, Wilhelm II benefited from the autocratic political system that Bismarck had devised. As defined by the historian Fritz Stern, the system combined constitutional absolutism with democratic trappings. Socialists and liberals could indeed sit in the Reichstag, but they had no voice on military and foreign policy, which were judged the province of the kaiser, the chancellor, and the general staff. Thus Prussian warlords with negligible accountability fixed the course, and then escaped the blame, for the blunders (e.g. unrestricted submarine warfare) that ordained Germanys defeat in the First World War.
For such heresies, patriots excoriated Fischer, yet over time he carried the day, winning the approval of the student generation that now governs Germany. More than anyone, by exposing the bungling adventurism of Wilhelms circle, he discredited the legend that craven civilians were to blame for Germanys defeat in 1918. Fischers name still resonates at his old university, where my wife and I met with Prof. Angelika Schaser, who has succeeded to both his academic chair and his office. Her field is contemporary history, closing a circle in Germany, where the Nazi era is now being thoroughly combed by younger scholars.
Just how thoroughly became evident during our visit to the Research Institute for Modern History in Hamburg, where every available document plus hundreds of oral histories dealing locally with Nazi times are available on open shelves crowding four large rooms. We met as well with Dr. Rolf Rietzler, a retired editor of Der Spiegel, who changed his academic focus and switched universities to study with Fischer, and who today is completing a memoir based on his paternal generations recollections of the Hitler era in Catholic southern Germany. And Fischers spirit could be sensed in the Bismarck Museum at Friedrichsruh, where the old chancellor is memorialized, warts and all, and where near the exit, one finds a blowup of that famous cartoon, "Dropping the Pilot," beside a label quoting a French member of parliament declaring in March 1890, "Germany with Bismarck was a great power with a clear direction. Germany without Bismarck is a problem." Itemized nearby are the fateful steps leading to Sarajevo.
En route to Bremen, we paused in Essen to see Villa Hgel, the hilltop castle erected by the Krupp dynasty in the 1870s, shaped in the overbearing luxe style once favored by Germanys industrial barons. The villa is more like a gusty railway terminal than a residence, and provision was made for Kaiser Wilhelm II to come directly by train to a suite kept perpetually ready for his impromptu visits. The Ruhr furnaces of Germanys major arms manufacturer from 1870 to 1945 have long since gone cold, and what remains of the Krupp fortune passed to a foundation established by Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. He was the Krupp sentenced at Nuremberg in 1947 for his war crimes, then released from prison three years later for Cold War reasons. After his death in 1967, his foundation generously funded scientific research, scholarship programs, health services, sports, and the fine artsjust the metamorphosis, one might assume, that Americans would applaud.
Instead, Donald Rumsfeld likened Germany to Cuba and Libya after Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder in an overheated election debate warned against American "adventurism" in Iraq. So irritated was the secretary of defense that he declined to shake hands with the German minister of defense at a NATO meeting. It would take a Swift to do justice to this latest turn in German-American relations. For much of the past century, Germans were with some reason stereotyped as incorrigible militarists, the willing executioners of Jews and Slavs, the martial aggressors who waged unprovoked wars against half of Europe. So wide-spread was this perception that influential Americans a decade ago opposed Germanys fast-track unification. Op-ed articles then claimed that even German children playing in a sand-box were more aggressive than non-German youngsters. Now some of the same voices decry Germanys reputed pacifism, its collusion with its historic adversaries, France and Russia, in placing too high a value on peace and compromise. (This despite Germanys peace-keeping role in former Yugoslavia, its military presence in Afghanistan, and its cooperation in tracking al-Qaeda operatives.)
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