Word: bismarcks
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...that "it is the duty of the opposition to oppose." It was Dizzy who wrought the Reform Bill of 1867, giving the vote for the first time to large numbers of the emerging industrial class in Britain. He shaped and dramatized the Tory sense of larger world responsibilities. With Bismarck at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, he headed off a potential clash among European powers in the Balkans, creating the Continental peace that lasted until...
...year history, Germany's Krupp industrial complex has often seemed as much a sovereign state as a business enterprise. Bismarck, the Kaisers and Hitler all courted the house of Krupp. Kaiser Wilhelm I called it "a national institution." Five generations of Krupps have made a proud point of imperiously waving away even bankers' questions about company finances...
...liked it." Adenauer had been in and out of Nazi prisons since 1933, when Hitler booted him from the lord-mayoralty of Cologne. At war's end, he was a tough, uncompromising democrat of 70, unfazed by the horrors of defeat (he had witnessed the decline of both Bismarck and the Kaiser). When the Gestapo released him during the Götterdämmerung of the Allied advance, Adenauer trekked circuitously through the flooded Rhineland to his home at Rhöndorf, then sat out a vicious artillery duel between U.S. troops at the Remagen bridgehead and Wehrmacht gunners...
...there is no immortality, I shall hurl myself into the sea," wrote Tennyson. Bismarck was calmer. "Without the hope of an afterlife," he said, "this life is not even worth the effort of getting dressed in the morning." Freud called the belief that death is the door to a better life "the oldest, strongest and most insistent wish of mankind." But now death is steadily becoming more of a wall and less of a door...
...Despite all the words expended on the subject, the phenomenon essentially remains a mystery. But part of the answer had to do with national identity. Though Hitler behaved like a nationalist possessed. Germany's sense of nationhood was always a fragile and insecure state of mind. In 1871, Bismarck belatedly forged German unity under Prussian hegemony from the anachronism of myriad principalities, but he sent Germany marching into the 20th century as little more than a feudal relic in modern dress. German society never experienced a nationalist, middleclass, democratic revolution or evolution comparable to those of France or Britain...