Volume 11, Number 7 · October 24, 1968
The Great Disturbing Element
By Geoffrey Barraclough
The History of Germany Since 1789
by Golo Mann
Praeger, 547 pp., $10.00
Germany, 1789-1919, A Political History
by Agatha Ramm
Barnes & Noble, 517 pp., $13.50
Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule
edited by Prosser Gifford, edited by William Robert Louis
Yale, 825 pp., $12.50
Germany, wrote Henry Adams in 1901, is 'the great disturbing element in the world.' He likened it to a great 'powder magazine' which 'sooner or later' must explode, and went on to predict that there would be no equilibrium, either political or economic, until its 'explosive force' had been exhausted. Adams's assessment picks out unerringly what, for the historian looking back in retrospect, is the central fact of German history between 1865 and 1945. Of the three great revolutions experienced by Europeans between 1789 and 1945, the French and Russian were constructive revolutions, in the sense that they opened the way for new societies. The distinctive feature about the German revolution was its violent, almost deliberate, destructiveness. It is surely remarkable that this orgy of destruction was predicted with uncanny foresight by the poet Heine, way back in 1832, before the first of the railways which dragged Germany from economic stagnation had begun to operate, and while the cities of the ramshackle Germanic Confederation slumbered beneath their huddled roofs and spires.
Review, 2720 words
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