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C H A P T E R F I F T E E N Conclusions Personal power, even the most inspired, has an incalculable dimension. Every good deed that issues from it is a medallion bearing on the reverse side a contrary possibility.' OST OF WHAT Bismarck created disappeared within fifty years of his death. The country he united was divided after 1945, this time into two states, each seeking its own version of the statenation . Prussia's eastern provinces, whose potential loss so concerned Bismarck, belong to Poland and Russia, and Prussia itself, like Carthage, has disappeared from the map. The Habsburg Empire, whose preservation he believed vital to German security, is no more, and likewise tsarist Russia. The constitution Bismarck drafted for a united Germany disappeared under the impact of the First World War—liquidated by the HindenburgLudendorf dictatorship in 1917, a hasty conversion to parliamentary democracy in 1918, and adoption of the Weimar constitution in 1919. The monarchical order that he believed vital to the internal stability of the three central and east European empires has disappeared, and likewise the aristocratic latifundia that were its economic and social backbone. Some members of the old aristocracy (including Bismarck's great-grandchildren at Friedrichsruh) still have land and social status in West Germany, and many others have found niches in West German business and professional life that keep them in the upper stratum of society. But the traditions that guaranteed their privileged position in government and the armed services vanished along with the society that created and preserved them. Bismarck would find little that is familiar in contemporary Germany—with one exception: The social insurance system to which his initiative gave birth is still in place, though much modified, and has been copied widely throughout the western world. And yet, ironically, this was an achievement on which Bismarck placed little store, for it failed to achieve his immediate objective. Not a line did he devote to it in his memoirs. Did Bismarck himself contribute to the ultimate destruction of his handiwork ? This is the critical and quite unavoidable question that every historian of modern Germany must face. 1 Ludwig Bamberger, "Zum Jahrestag der Entlassung Bismarcks," Gesammelte Schiften (Berlin, 1897), V, 335. Originally published in Die Nation, 1891. * 429 * 430 * After the Fall, 1890-1898 * A "White Revolutionary"? By now it should be obvious that, fundamentally, the accelerating progress of economic and social change in the modern world is what doomed the Bismarckian system. Looking backward, it is inconceivable that the social and political order of Germany in the nineteenth century could have long survived in the twentieth, even without the catastrophes of two world wars. However much they accelerated the process of change, the wars did not create it. No contemporary was more conscious than Bismarck of the forces that were transforming his world and of their potential consequences for the society in which he was born. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American president with whom he is most comparable, he sought to modify the system in order to save it. Nineteenth-century Germany has often been portrayed as the story of liberty frustrated. Repeatedly—1819, 1848, 1866—history reached a turning point and failed to turn. The authoritarian state survived when it should have expired. This concentration of interest on social, political, and ideological weaknesses of German liberalism has obscured a story of equal, perhaps greater importance—that of the strength and vitality of German conservatism , both in its institutions and its ideology. The essential Prussian establishment managed to endure long after the time when, by all the laws of dialectical materialism, it ought to have perished. A favorite way of explaining this survival is by reference to Bismarck's "white revolution" or "revolution from above."2 Implicit in the term is an assumption that Bismarck's "revolution" was unique. But was it? To understand him and his significance, one must put his career in perspective by taking a long look backward. Since the seventeenth century the Hohenzollern monarchy had been the principal instrument of change in Prussian society. Over a period of two hundred years it had transformed a backward (even by the standards of that age) social and political order by suppressing the feudal powers and liberties of the aristocracy in central governmental affairs. Suppression required creation. New military and governmental institutions were needed to create and administer the central power that the suppression of the feudal estates made possible. In its search for revenue with...

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