pumpkinstrokemarrow

An interesting read, although I thought the editing a bit sloppy. There were plenty of sentences which I could not fathom and there were some US colloquialisms - like kid sister - which jarred. I suppose I should not complain about this last, Steinberg being a Pennsylvanian professor. Maps and index a bit thin. Long German names a bit difficult, rather like those in a long Russian novel - in which last there is often a helpful cast list at the beginning. Which would be even more helpful if it could be folded out and kept in view as one tried to read the text. No such luxury in the present work.

Like some other great men, many unattractive personal qualities, qualities which eventually finished him off. When he lost his master, the first Kaiser, he had no other friends. Those that he had had had been used and discarded, usually brutally. But I am pleased to be able to include a triple had. I wonder if I will be able to stretch to the quadruple one day?

One of the unattractive qualities was his anti-Semitism, something he shared with many Germans of his day. Which, oddly, did not stop him having very close relations with some Jews or stop him from attending the very grand inauguration of the very grand synagogue in Oranienburger Strasse in 1866. In which he did one better than me in that I only managed to sit in a bar across the street. But Steinberg has an interesting take on this anti-Semitism, in an odd way, almost a sympathy for it. German conservatives, especially the mostly not very rich squires on the poor land in the east, hated the passing of the old order. The passing of the world where everyone had their station in life and many things could not be bought or sold. They hated the new world where everything could be bought and sold. A new world of barrow-boys, hucksters and swindlers. A new world in which barrow-boys could buy up the ancestral estates of good, honest junkers. Hates which are cousins of the present hates, for some of the same reasons, of bankers and hedge funders. And the Jews, prominent in this hated new world, came to be the symbol of it. The focus and lightening conductor for some of the tensions of the time. Some of this dislike, if not hatred, of the marketplace can be found in Tolstoy.

Queen Victoria (our one that is, not one of the German ones) thought that the unattractiveness extended to wickedness. She may have had a point. And while he did not get as many people unnecessarily, if not casually, killed as Napoleon I, he did , quite deliberately and for domestic reasons, provoke three quite unnecessary wars, which must have got through 500,000 souls or so. What price his soul at the Pearly Gates? 500,000 years in the boiling oil? On the other hand, how many other politicians of his generation were in competition for the bad stakes?

Against that, one needs to bear in mind that he had many attractive personal qualities, in addition to his political skills. Not many of us manage to climb the slippery pole without any of the former.

Another topic on which Steinberg has interesting things to say is the forces of history. The crudely Marxist view in which history is propelled by rules & regulations and will march on without much regard for the deeds of individuals. There might be individuals but they have just grown up, swollen into the holes left them by said rules & regulations. If not one (individual), then there will be another. A view with which Steinberg disagrees. His view is that the history of Germany from 1850 was shaped by a number of accidents. That the first Kaiser was a weak man who lived for a very long time. That somebody like Bismark happened to be around at the right time. That the Germans won the battle of Königgrätz - which they might easily have lost.

Then there is the growth of the Prussian army. It was not that great in 1860 and it needed the ten years to become the army which defeated the French in 1870 - a defeat which was by no means a walkover. The Prussians took plenty of casualties. And one result of beating the French was that the Germans were sure that one day the French would seek their revenge - against a country without natural defences. So they launched a pre-emptive strike in 1914. When, as it turned out, they would have done much better to sit behind barbed wire entanglements along their frontiers and simply machine gunned any French or Russian armies that tried it on. For all their Prussian efficiency, they had not worked out that defence worked better than attack, given the weapons available in 1914.

And then the lack of growth of proper political institutions. Bismark's Germany might have had houses of parliament but it did not have democratic government of the sort enjoyed in places like France, UK and the US. Governance was a mess. Despite its wealth and success in other spheres. A weakness which led more or less directly to the disasters and horrors of the Third Reich.

Lots of other good stuff. Next step to reread my first edition of 1978 of Gordon Craig's study covering the period 1866-1945, and about which I presently remember nothing. Perhaps it will come back to me. A book also, as it happens, from OUP. Then back to Steinberg for a second take.