Sunday, September 20, 2009
Week of 14 - 20 September Post
Most of the lectures and discussions this week seemed to center around the failings of the liberals in Germany, and their inability to keep the conservatives from pushing their radical viewpoints, leading to the creation of the so called "Second Reich". That said, I feel like it's almost too easy to just blame everything on the liberals, mostly because their failings were most noticeable. First of all, it assumes that if the liberals had the power, that they would've essentially done a perfect job in governing the country, something that I think wouldn't have happened. Later on in the Germany Empire of 1871 essay, the author seems to imply that the liberals did have a decent amount of power in the government, though they refused to work against Bismarck due to the amount of profit they were making through his trade policies. The desire for a unified Germany also seems to have worked against the liberals, it's easy to see that they might have thought that any attempt at going against Bismarck would have a negative effect on the unification. I do agree with the idea that if Germany showed any signs of trying to re-organize their government, some other European country would have probably attacked and succeded, and maybe even caused the rest of Europe feeling the need to take up arms, and starting a World War 1 conflict earlier on (I feel like we talked about this during the discussion, but it is something I think worth re-examining). Though I'm also left to wonder if a massive war in Europe centered around Germany was inevitable, and maybe starting it earlier would have been hypothetically "better". Tying in with the "Macht in der Mitte" theory, I think Germany's strategic location meant that it would be involved in any European conflict, I'm not sure how much trouble Russia and Asia were expected to cause, but I can easily see the various governments thinking that Germany would offer a strategic location. At the end, I feel like it's impossible to section out any one period of German (or European) history and claim that that particular period was where it all went wrong.
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Good point about timing playing a role in the problems of German liberals. Not only must they struggle against a conservative Chancellor and victorious military that had achieved a decades-long goal of unification, but they also had to wrestle with the rise of socialism, the spread of imperialism and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. In many ways, Germany faced perhaps unqiye challenges and arguably handled them as well as they good, given all that they were up against.
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