Word: bismarcks
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...ruins in desperate search for a single potato, and for that matter among leaders in most of the world's capitals, there were few who had much to say in those days about free enterprise. It was an idea that the Germans themselves had spurned from the moment Bismarck seized on the 19th century Economist Friedrich List's protectionist ideas to the hour that Hjalmar Schacht's totalitarian Autarkic collapsed with Hitler. U.S. experts laughed after listening to Erhard's spouting, or felt sorry for the pathetic figure so obviously lost amid the realities around...
Before the time of Otto von Bismarck, Germany was not much more than a geographical expression-a sprawling, warring collection of states, duchies and feudal enclaves where the Hessians. Thuringians and Bavarians fought among themselves but mostly against the Prussians. Under Bismarck the Prussians won, and the Iron Chancellor set up the German Reich that lasted until the defeat in World War I. Germany's first real experiment with democracy was the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. But despite the efforts of men of vision like Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Stresemann. German democracy was splintered from the start...
Career: Joined the Socialist youth movement as a 15-year-old printer's apprentice, rose in Germany's highly stratified Socialist bureaucracy to be an editor and organizer, reached the national executive committee the year Hitler took over. Hitler, like Bismarck before him, suppressed the party. After twelve years' exile in Czechoslovakia, France and wartime Britain, Ollenhauer was one of three surviving leaders who met to rebuild the party in 1946. He swung behind the fiery nationalist Kurt Schumacher against Otto Grotewohl's plan to merge with the Communists (Grotewohl wound up as Premier of Communist...
...Prussia again. The Congress of Vienna gave Poland nominal independence, but after a period of "watchful waiting" the Russians were back again with a program of wholesale executions and Russification. Napoleon had used Poland ("my second Polish war") as an excuse to attack Russia, but it was Otto von Bismarck, master of Realpolitik, who saw Poland's festering hatred of Russia as a means of keeping the great eastern power in bounds. "If one helped the Poles a little, they could rise in revolt and win their freedom," he whispered to Italy's Premier Crispi...
Eighteen years after Bismarck's death, the Germans got the chance to "help Poland a little." In World War I they gave Poland its independence under Pilsudski, on condition that it fight Russia. Germany was defeated, but the Allies at Versailles recognized the Republic of Poland. The Bolsheviks also recognized Poland, but a couple of years later Stalin bared Soviet imperialist policy in a speech to the Polish comrades in which he insisted that they must understand "the Russian problem," and consider Russia's dominance "primordial to the entire revolutionary movement . . . because Soviet power is the basis...