This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It may surprise younger readers, familiar only with a Germany that is proud to be pacific, not to say pacifist, that the Germans were once notorious as among the most militarised societies in history. The Prussians, in particular, were mentioned in the same breath as the Spartans and Romans. 

That reputation was acquired mainly between the mid-18th and the mid-20th centuries. As Peter Wilson reminds us in his formidably erudite Iron and Blood, earlier eras were more likely to admire the Austrians and Swiss for their martial prowess. Swiss guards were popular not only with popes but other potentates, whilst Austria only ceded its primacy after its defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1866.

That conflict was one of the three wars of German unification whereby the quintessential Prussian Junker (landowner) Otto von Bismarck created the first modern German state. His chosen method, which he contrasted with “speeches and majority decisions”, was “iron and blood” — a phrase that (misquoted as “blood and iron”) has echoed down the years and contributed mightily to the sanguinary myth of German militarism.

Though Bismarck’s soundbite provided Wilson with his title, he is at pains to emphasise that the Iron Chancellor, like most of his successors and compatriots, was ambivalent about warfare. For most of the five centuries covered here, ordinary Germans prayed for peace. Even for their leaders, the threat of war was more powerful than the execution. The extreme violence unleashed by the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars was reason enough for civilians to greet the recruiting drums with dread.

That existential angst finds its most eloquent expression in the Austro-German musical tradition. For example, both Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis conclude with dramatic, agonised settings of the words dona nobis pacem (give us peace) in the Agnus Dei. Before 1914, few of the greatest figures in German culture had ever glorified war. Goethe was alarmed by the anti-French bellicosity of younger writers such as Kleist and Körner. Kant proposed a system of world government to bring about “perpetual peace”. 

Frederick the Great.

Frederick the Great precipitated three European wars and invented Blitzkrieg

Even Nietzsche, though posthumously fêted by the Nazis as a nationalist and warmonger, actually hated the Franco-Prussian War, the only one he witnessed first-hand. He even mocked himself: “As the accessory of a large moustache he will give the impression of being military, irascible and sometimes violent — and will be treated accordingly.”

Yet German militarism is not merely a myth: one only has to look around contemporary Europe to see the scars it bequeathed, both physical and psychological. The war in Ukraine sometimes resembles a monstrous re-enactment of the terrible catastrophe visited upon the world by “the genius of war and the German war”, as the philosopher Max Scheler entitled his 1915 propaganda tract (which he later repudiated). What is now Germany’s shameful past was once Adolf Hitler’s vision of the future. Reimagined by Vladimir Putin, that spectral vision now haunts our present.

Hence the importance and urgency of Wilson’s investigation. He is interested not in personalities but in continuities — perhaps the most important of which is associated with one personality: Frederick the Great. 

It was he who, in 1740, launched a surprise invasion of Silesia, thereby precipitating three European wars and inventing what the Allied press would dub Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) two centuries later. As Wilson says, though, he “only narrowly escaped total defeat, his survival against such odds confirmed Prussia’s status as a great power and fostered a dangerous belief in the efficacy of launching a bold first strike”.

Frederick was the last European monarch to lead his troops in battle, with the exception of the Bonaparte emperors. His fame, both as a soldier-king and as an enlightened despot, not only dazzled and dismayed his contemporaries, but had an enduring influence on every German leader up to and including Hitler. 

Wilson attributes this to Frederick’s “self-promotion”, but his legend owed much to an irascible Scottish historian. Thomas Carlyle’s colossal four-volume biography depicted Frederick as “hitherto the Last of the Kings”, who “ushers-in the French Revolution, and closes an Epoch of World-History”. As Hitler awaited the end in his bunker, he was sustained by Carlyle’s epic of invincibility in attack and indomitability in defence, from desperate survival to ultimate victory. 

Wilson shows how successive generations of the German general staff put their faith in the knockout blow. This strategy succeeded in Moltke’s campaigns of 1866 and 1871, but failed in 1914 under his neurotic nephew. Yet it was tried again in 1918, when Ludendorff tried to crush the British and French before America could overwhelm his exhausted and emaciated troops. 

The “stab in the back” legend, which claimed Germany had not been defeated in the field, led Hitler and his generals to wage a similar high-risk war of conquest in 1939. Their initial success emboldened them to embark on ever more megalomaniac campaigns — and to embrace ever more diabolical enormities of evil.

A related continuity is attributed by Wilson to the vaunted German general staff: the triumph of tactics over strategy. Ironically, this contradicted the doctrine of their bible, On War by Carl von Clausewitz, which taught the primacy of politics. But the generals never accepted their subordination to civilians. The exception, of course, was Hitler, to whom the German military swore a personal oath of loyalty. 

It cost them dearly, with 3.5 million soldiers dead between D-Day and VE Day. Even in January 1945, the Germans still had 7.5 million men fighting a war that had become futile as well as criminal. By May, 1.5 million of them were dead. 

One of them, pointlessly sacrificed in the Battle of Berlin in 1945, was Felix Hartlaub. Before he went missing, aged 31, Hartlaub had been employed as a researcher at the Führerhauptquartiere (Hitler’s HQ). He also had a secret life as writer: of literary fragments, a play (The Lost God) and his war diaries.

After Hartlaub’s writings were published in 1955 by his sister Geno, he was hailed as perhaps the strongest prose talent of his doomed generation. Unfortunately, this edition was bowdlerised and it was only half a century later that a scholarly version appeared. Now part of Hartlaub’s oeuvre is available in English as Clouds over Paris: The Wartime Notebooks of Felix Hartlaub. 

The luminous introduction by Rüdiger Görner suggests his notebooks “were intended to serve as material for novels to be written later”. One brief passage must suffice to give a glimpse of Hartlaub’s ability to evoke a stream of consciousness. He describes a German attaché’s visit to a Parisian brothel in the summer of 1941, where his character encounters the gouvernante, the madam, in black silk: 

“Where are your friends, et messieurs les soldats? Tous partis, mon dieu … ” “Avec cette chaleur, Madame … ” “Don’t say that, monsieur. All the soldiers have gone to Russia; two divisions left Paris on the train last night.” “But that’s not due to hap — Nonsense. Who comes up with this stuff? Je vous assure, Madame … ” “Encore deux jours comme ça, et je dois congédier ces dames. Nous mêmes, la direction va nous foutre dehors.” She pounds the crumpled handkerchief against her forehead, the fan whirling in front of her bust. “They say there have been significant losses on the German side. Quelle horreur cette guerre de Russie! Is that what you’ve heard, too?” “Quite the contrary, Madame. Il faut garder votre sang froid, je vous en prie. Any German losses are quite disproportionate to the overall historical magnitude of our achievements … ”

With gentle irony, Hartlaub depicts the institutionalised mendacity of the German occupiers, so wary of the wiles of the French, yet so easily seduced by the lies of their own bellicose propaganda. Now, four score years later, the German elites have fallen victim to new illusions. Having failed to recognise the danger posed by Putin’s Russia, they now seek to abdicate their responsibilities to Ukraine and to Europe.

From the self-delusions of militarism to the self-righteousness of anti-militarism is a long journey, but the flight from reality may be no less pernicious. What use banishing the Nazi mentality from one’s own nation if one cannot recognise it in the genocidal aggression of another?

The final word is that of Adolph Menzel, the great 19th century artist, whose romanticised images of Frederick the Great’s court at Potsdam remained fixed in the German imagination. Yet Menzel also sketched dead and dying soldiers in Bohemia during the war of 1866 with pitilessly modern realism. Shocked, he never again depicted war, commenting: “After all, is it necessary to paint the horror?” In the case of Ukraine, the answer is yes. Germans, like the rest of us, need to see what is happening there. To some horrors, pacifism is not an adequate response.