Gordon A. Craig. From Bismarck to Adenauer

Historians have attributed the unification of Germany in 1871 along with the ensuing international balance of power that lasted until World War I to the foreign policy, or political strategy of Prussia's Minister President Otto von Bismarck. Noted historian Gordon A. Craig describes and analyzes Bismarck's diplomacy in a lecture delivered at The Johns Hopkins University in March 1958, which was published the same year along with four other lectures in the book From Bismarck to Adenauer. In the book's first chapter, "Bismarck: Diplomacy as a Vocation," Craig discusses the qualities that gave Bismarck the reputation of the model of diplomacy. His purpose is two-fold: to gain understanding of the reasons for Bismarck's successes in foreign policy, and for the failures of his successors. In so doing, Craig hopes that a greater understanding and "appreciation of the uses and the limitations of diplomacy itself" may be reached (p. 6). Craig is eminently qualified to analyze Bismarck's political theory. The J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford University, he is a specialist of modern German history.

According to Craig, Bismarck's primary intention was to unify and modernize Germany, asserting its equality with other European nations. His underlying policy to achieve this was for the state to assume the leadership a

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e term has become too obscured to discuss in relation to Bismarck, contending instead that the "essence of Bismarck's realism was his recognition of the limitations of his craftàcoupled with the passion and responsibility that he brought to his vocation, that made him a great statesman" (p. 28). Craig's overall focus is on Bismarck as the consummate professional diplomat. David Wetzel. A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. 244 pages. Wetzel's purpose in this book is to examine the diplomacy involved in the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, a war that could have been avoided as well as one that changed the shape of Europe and led to World War I. In the Preface, the author states that he intends his book to show that the determinist view of history is incorrect in explaining the Franco-Prussian War, and that "things happen because individual and discoverable people decide things and do them" (p. xiv). The "people" under consideration here are two dynamic leaders: Otto von Bismarck and Napoleon III. Wetzel employs the great leaders approach to history, as his title suggests. While most historians fault Bismarck for ca
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