Germany in the Age of Bismarck by W. M. Simon

Author:W. M. Simon [Simon, W. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Historiography
ISBN: 9781000393521
Google: 7h0vEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-25T16:04:03+00:00

B.

Foreign and domestic problems between 1866 and 1871

14. Adolf Schmidt, Prussia’s German Policy, 1867: from Preussens deutsche Politik, pp. iii-iv, 215–6, 279, 281–3, 287–8. Schmidt, Adolf (1812–87), historian and publicist.

… Last year, justifiably and in character, I desired peace to be maintained so long as I judged it possible. But as early as April the decisive struggle seemed to me hardly avoidable, by May I regarded it as necessary in principle and from the beginning of June as demanded by the situation. The possibility of such rapid and magnificent successes as actually occurred was not within my capacity to estimate, since I was neither familiar with the Prussian means and forces nor, as a layman, able to evaluate them. But I never for a moment doubted Prussia’s ultimate victory since it seemed to me to be a postulate of history, in other words, because I had always regarded the way of German national unification by Prussia as the only possible way and the one ordained by history…

We know that the recent experiences of 1866 were in fact of a quite different nature from those of the past and therefore evoked quite different interpretations. But this metamorphosis was clearly not, at any rate among intelligent, enlightened, and politically educated men, a matter of ‘adulation of success,’ a phrase currently much abused; it is, rather, a matter of recognizing an actual reversal of Prussia’s German policy, of acknowledging its energetic alignment with the great tendencies of history So long as there is history, success will, must, and should determine historical judgment, as it has done through the centuries. But only he can be counted great in history who consciously wills and carries out the will of history. And historical greatness consists not in a temporary but in an enduring success, not in the achievement as such but in sustaining and building on what has been achieved…

Every future historian of the German nation will proclaim the events of the year 1866 as a tremendous step forward in the progress of world history; he will at the same time acknowledge the year of Prussia’s independent action in its German policy as the year of the most magnificent and momentous upheaval that German history has ever known; he will, we hope, be able to prize it as the year in which German unity and freedom were bom. In this year Count Bismarck entered upon the fourth phase of his activity and his transformation, the one most filled with actions and expectations…. It will serve to scatter or to lighten even the darkest shadows that lie over all his earlier phases if it continues with unshakable determination to be directed toward the further united and free development of Germany. For both form part of the will of history, and only that statesman is great who wills the will of history….

The most urgent need is for us all to cease our grumbling and complaining and indignation at the catastrophe of ‘blood and iron.’ We have all been

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