¶ “Nothing,” says Wilhelm Gorlach, “can more clearly prove Bismarck’s historical importance than the fact that we are obliged to go back several centuries to understand the connection of his actions.”
BOOK THE SECOND
The German National Problem
CHAPTER V
The Great Sorrow
14
The German crazy-quilt, of many hues and colors, and how this blanket was patched and mended through the years.
¶ From the 18th Century, and indeed before that time, to say nothing of years to come as late as 1871, there was in fact no Germany. The term was a mere geographical “designation.” We shall hear more of this, as Bismarck assumes the stupendous task of German unity, in a real sense of the word; but we will never understand what Bismarck and other statesmen who hoped for German unity had to deal with, unless we take a broad survey of conditions in Germany from the year 1750; not only from the political but also from the social and domestic side, as represented in 300-odd German principalities that like a crazy-quilt were thrown helter-skelter from Hamburg on the North to Vienna on the South.
¶ Many of the holdings were gained through musty papers from rulers of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, a nation Voltaire declared “neither holy, nor empire, nor Roman.”
¶ There were free cities, great landlords, and there were great robber-barons—thieves of high or low degree.