The Coming of the Third Reich
Chapter One
the legacy of
the past
german peculiarities
i
Is it wrong to begin with Bismarck? On several levels, he was a key figure in the coming of the Third Reich. For one
thing, the cult of his memory in the years after his death encouraged many Germans to long for the return of the strong
leadership his name represented. For another, his actions and policies in the mid-to-late nineteenth century helped
create an ominous legacy for the German future. Yet in many ways he was a complex and contradictory figure, as much
European as German, as much modern as traditional. Here, too, his example pointed forwards to the tangled mixture of
the new and the old that was so characteristic of the Third Reich. It is worth calling to mind that a mere fifty years
separated Bismarck's foundation of the German Empire in 1871 from the electoral triumphs of the Nazis in 1930-32. That
there was a connection between the two seems impossible to deny. It was here, rather than in the remote religious
cultures and hierarchical polities of the Reformation or the 'Enlightened Absolutism' of the eighteenth century, th ... read full excerpt from: The Coming of the Third Reich ebook
