Leviathan

“Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betruebt” (exulting to heaven, disturbed even to death). These lines in Goethe’s “Egmont” seem prophetic of the fate of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.

After the solid, disciplined, hardworking prosperity of Imperial Germany came the ordeal of the First World War and the agonies of defeat and inflation. After the Second World War’s Nazi victories that recalled Napoleon’s and carried the swastika from the Pyrenees to the Volga, the Caucasus and the neighborhood of the Pyramids, followed the decline and fall. There is scarcely a parallel in European history for the state of political, military and economic collapse to which Germany was reduced by the end of that war. Yet within a decade the part of Germany which remained on the Western side of the Iron Curtain had achieved an amazing economic recovery and was, after the Soviet Union, the strongest industrial power in Europe.

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William Henry Chamberlin

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“Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betruebt” (exulting to heaven, disturbed even to death). These lines in Goethe’s “Egmont” seem prophetic of the fate of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.

After the solid, disciplined, hardworking prosperity of Imperial Germany came the ordeal of the First World War and the agonies of defeat and inflation. After the Second World War’s Nazi victories that recalled Napoleon’s and carried the swastika from the Pyrenees to the Volga, the Caucasus and the neighborhood of the Pyramids, followed the decline and fall. There is scarcely a parallel in European history for the state of political, military and economic collapse to which Germany was reduced by the end of that war. Yet within a decade the part of Germany which remained on the Western side of the Iron Curtain had achieved an amazing economic recovery and was, after the Soviet Union, the strongest industrial power in Europe.