Volume 28, Number 18 · November 19, 1981
The White Revolutionary
By Gordon A. Craig
Bismarck
by Edward Crankshaw
Viking, 451 pp., $19.95
In August 1978, when French newspapers were going through one of their recurrent spells of worrying about signs of renascent Nazism in West Germany, the dramatist Rolf Hochhuth, not usually an admirer of great men, wrote a curious essay in the influential weekly news magazine Der Spiegel entitled 'Bismarck the Classic,' in which he roundly criticized German historians for their inadequate appreciation of Germany's greatest statesman. He reminded them that an English historian had called Bismarck's memoirs 'an unexcelled memoir of statecraft' and 'the most authoritative statement about the art of governing since Machiavelli's The Prince.' He pointed out that the chancellor's social insurance laws antedated by at least sixty years any comparable legislation in the United States; and he described the three volumes of Bismarck's Table Talk (Gespräche), which he said should be required reading for his countrymen, as 'the only books in the German language whose human and political stature (the rarest combination that there is) places them on the level of Shakespeare's historical plays.'
Review, 2475 words
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