When the new cultural history began to be applied to modern German history in the 1990s, many of its practitioners focused on myths, rituals, and symbols. This produced new insights into how national identity was constructed and transmitted, how it was connected to local and regional identities, and how this process impacted the cohesion or division of German society and politics. Empirical studies have tended to concentrate on the Second Empire, somewhat at the expense of the Weimar years. One case in point is the Bismarck myth. Several authors have elucidated how and why the “Iron Chancellor,” who after all had lost some of his popularity when he was dismissed by the new Emperor Wilhelm II in 1890, was celebrated as a heroic personality and political role model in numerous publications as well as hundreds of monuments before the First World War. We have, however, thus far lacked a book-length study on how this important aspect of German political culture influenced the period post-1918. Robert Gerwarth's solid monograph now fills this gap.

The author's starting point is the observation that in Wilhelmine Germany, the Bismarck myth stabilized the political system, whereas after 1918, it served to undermine the Weimar Republic. The bulk of the book describes how this undermining took place: politicians of the German Nationalist People's Party as well as conservative journalists skillfully used Bismarck's accomplishments as a positive foil that made defeated post-war Germany appear all the weaker. The occupation of the Ruhr area by France and Belgium in 1923 gave a particular boost to this myth-making. Bismarck constituted a powerful frame of reference in a society that lacked a political consensus. This is evident in the popularity of publications, monumental projects, and films on the “Iron Chancellor” as well as in the efforts by historians and schoolbook authors to provide historical foundations for the myth and to instill it in the German public. The year 1925 saw the election of the “new Bismarck,” Hindenburg, to the presidency. Meanwhile Gustav Stresemann attempted to justify his moderate foreign policy by alluding to the founder of the Reich. But in the context of economic and political crisis after 1929, the myth radicalized and contributed to the demand for a charismatic leader. Thus it paved the road for Adolf Hitler who repeatedly and astutely placed himself in a Bismarckian tradition. This helped him appeal to the middle classes which otherwise had qualms about the rowdy and uneducated Nazi movement; however, they were soon to realize that the Third Reich had little in common with Imperial Germany. In an epilogue, the author points out that in contrast to the Weimar years, the Nazi regime defined and enforced a basic consensus, as did the GDR after 1945; in the Federal Republic, such a consensus was achieved by democratic means. Either way a resurgence of the Bismarck myth was prevented in the absence of fundamental political divisions.

The author deserves credit for filling an important empirical gap with a competent, well-researched and -written monograph. To specialists of Weimar Germany, however, he does not offer much beyond this. His book presents a mostly familiar parade of right-wing Bismarck admirers in politics, journalism, and historiography, alongside an equally familiar critical minority. Those who haven't spent much time reading Erich Marcks or Hermann Oncken may appreciate a brush-up but will hardly be surprised by what has, in principle, long been established by Bernd Faulenbach and others. That Social Democratic as well as moderate politicians frequently felt compelled to argue within a framework defined by the right and failed to come up with a successful Republican countermyth is not a new insight, either. With respect to method, a less hands-on approach to the study of myth in the notoriously open, competitive, and utopian field of references that was Weimar culture might have prompted Gerwarth to venture beyond collecting references to Bismarck and integrating them into the familiar chronology of the Republic. Furthermore, even though the movie Bismarck is briefly mentioned, the mediatic aspects of the myth would have warranted further inquiry and interpretation.

Most importantly, the monograph suffers from a simplistic view of the German right, in which there seem to be only old-school conservatives, the Pan Germans (who had already lost much of their pre-war appeal) and the Nazis. As Peter Fritzsche, Helge Matthiesen, and others have demonstrated, the real (and largely local) dynamic of the 1920s took place between these currents, in the radical nationalism that managed to fuse conservative references and a fascination with modernity. It would have been worthwile to bring out the precise role of the Bismarck myth in this development. The same goes for the capacity of the myth to build a bridge between the otherwise so strongly highlighted “generations.” It was certainly no accident that the völkisch historian Hans Rothfels was able to rejoin the conservative mainstream as a respected Bismarck specialist after 1945. To address these issues would have required a broader and more imaginative contextualizing of the topic, especially with regard to the middle classes which appear all too backward in this book. Instead, the author connects rhetorical references to Bismarck in order to back up his suggestion that the myth of the “Iron Chancellor” was the prime reason for the end of the Weimar Republic and the advent of Hitler—a strong claim, but neither a convincing nor a stimulating one as it stands.