Neither the ‘Third Reich’ nor the related Second World War would have been possible without the alliance between the former petty-bourgeois Hitler, the rabble-rouser and monomaniac, and the traditional agrarian and industrial power elites who dominated both the armed forces and the diplomatic service. They ‘represented the continuity of the national-state legacy’ to a particularly high degree: ‘They had consciously experienced the rise of Germany prior to 1914, and they were contemporaneous with the economic and military springs of German Great-Power policy in all its variations. Such massive armaments and gearing of the economy to military preparedness would not have been possible without them.’ Over and above mere revision of Versailles, their general objective was the rehabilitation of the German Great-Power position, above all with ‘regard to eastern Europe, to an eastern imperium guaranteeing a self-sufficient war economy’. ‘In such a political context the use of military force was taken for granted.’122 This objective had originated during the Kaiserreich, led to the First World War, seemed to find realization in the peace of Brest-Litovsk, lay dormant during the interregnum of the Weimar republic (which continued to call itself the German Empire) and gathered momentum during the Third Reich and into the Second World War.
The pertinence of the First World War for the continuity problem in German history is that the ‘Third Reich’, together with its most significant consequence for world history, the Second World War, must be understood primarily as a reaction to the First World War, as a refusal on the part of the optimates of the German Empire to accept the outcome of the First World War. The ‘continuity of error’ or of ‘illusions’ may thus be summed up in two large complexes, each operating in turn with particular force on either the domestic arena or the external environment. On two occasions, during the Kaiserreich and in Hitler’s Reich, the dominant elites of the German Empire misunderstood the historical and political realities confronting Germany in the modern world. They failed to recognize (1) that their attempt to evade societal change in the age of industry by asserting their privileged social position at home, and by also resorting in an emergency to military expansion abroad, was doomed to failure. They failed to understand (2) that neither their European neighbours nor the USA would ever willingly accept a German hegemony based on military expansion.
Out of the manifold interaction of these two complexes emerged two catastrophic world wars. For the catastrophies of German history were not 1918 and 1945, as German tradition prefers to believe, but rather 1914 and 1933/39, as the Salzburg historian Fritz Fellner reminds us.
To recapitulate: it cannot be emphasized too often or too strongly that continuity is not to be equated with sameness, and least of all is it synonymous with unbroken homogeneity. Unquestionably, there were numerous differences in the scale of the aims, in methods and mentality between Imperial Germany and National Socialist Germany. Above all, Imperial Germany was, even in the exceptional circumstances of the First World War state of siege, a constitutional state (Rechtsstaat) with historic roots in liberalism. Hitler’s Germany had ceased to be a Rechtsstaat: witness the violent removal and outlawing of political opponents; witness the forced resettlement and genocide of Poles and Jews. But however singular the criminal and inhuman features of the Hitler dictatorship may have been, it would be an inadmissible truncation of historical reality to contemplate the ‘Third Reich’ exclusively from such a vantage-point. What is no less necessary is analysis of the on-going structures and enduring aims of the Prusso-German Empire born in 1866–71 and destroyed in 1945, together with clear identification of the continuous elements within the change and diversity of this Empire and their impact on the international system.
The analysis of these relationships is a major historical challenge which cannot be adequately met by means of Hitler biographies, however high in quality these may be. It is, at the same time, a contribution to the task of strengthening our self-consciousness and the viability of our state. Although a separate development of eighty years’ duration cannot be overcome at a single stroke, in the Federal Republic German political life has, by and large, found its way back to the federative, liberal and democratic traditions that were suppressed in the middle of the last century; it has thus arrived at a relaxed and normalized relationship with the outside world in the sense of a peaceful co-operation with all its neighbours, one that is based squarely on existing rather than imagined realities.