Introduction

Abstract In early 1921, little more than two years after the end of the Great War and the outbreak of the German of 1918-19, the left-liberal periodical “Weltbiihne devoted a two-page article to a cultural phenomenon which it referred to as the ‘Bismarck legend’. What the author of the article, the distinguished journalist Richard Lewinsohn, described in his analysis was alarming: Bismarck-dead since 1898-had become ‘a severe political danger’ for the Republic of Weimar. The Republic, so Lewinsohn insisted, had to emerge from Bismarck’s shadow if it was ever to become a state in its own historical right.1 Lewinsohn was not the only democrat who perceived Bismarck’s legacy and the way it was exploited by Weimar’s right-wing circles as a threat to the Republic. In his book Bismarcks Schatten, a liberal professor of jurisprudence, Hermann Ulrich Kantorowicz, maintained that the consolidation of democracy in Germany could only emerge ‘over the rubble of the Bismarck cult’.