One consequence of the continuing and unhealthy fascination in this country with the Third Reich has been an ignoring of the Second, whose Faustian story had yet more terrible consequences.
At the beginning of the last century Germany could claim to lead the world; not only in industry, science and technology, but in what she proudly termed Kultur: philosophy, poetry, music, philology, historiography, law. As a welfare state Bismarck had provided a model that Britain was only beginning to follow a generation later. Germany’s constitution may have given too little power to the legislature to suit Anglo-Saxon tastes, but few people complained: the French, after all, gave rather too much. Yet 40 years later the German nation was in the grip of a psychopath who led her to utter disaster. So what went wrong?
What went wrong, of course, was that Germany lost the first world war — a war, most historians agree, that, if she did not provoke, she did nothing to prevent, and which she fought in a manner that ultimately left her friendless.
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