Lucas Cranach the Elder<\/a>., and perhaps the political savvy of Frederick the Wise, the prince-elector of Saxony.)<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Without Luther, a \u201cLutheran\u201d Reformation might still have occurred.\u00a0 But maybe not, and certainly in much different form.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I also spent some time on the personal relationship of Richard Wagner with King Ludwig II of Bavaria.\u00a0 It may well have been much deeper on Ludwig\u2019s side than on that of the constantly indebted (and supremely egotistical) Wagner but, without it, Neuschwanstein Castle might not have existed at all, the Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee castles would be very different, Wagner\u2019s Festspielhaus<\/em> in Bayreuth might never have been built, his \u201cRing Cycle\u201d \u2014 Der Ring des Nibelungen<\/em>, consisting of Das Rheingold<\/em> (\u201cThe Rhinegold\u201d), Die Walk\u00fcre<\/em> (\u201cThe Valkyrie\u201d), Siegfried<\/em>, and G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung<\/em> (\u201cTwilight of the Gods\u201d) \u2014 might not have been staged or even completed, and his B\u00fchnenweihfestspiel<\/i><\/span> (\u201cFestival Play for the Consecration of the Stage\u201d) Parsifal<\/em>, his last major work, might not have been written.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And would the Third Reich ever have arisen without the talents for oratory and demagoguery and the demonic personality of Adolf Hitler?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
But I\u2019ve also been thinking, lately, of how the absence<\/em> of certain people can affect history.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I recall reading, many years ago, about Gustav Stresemann, who served as\u00a0chancellor of Germany in 1923 (for 102 days) and as German foreign minister from 1923 to 1929.\u00a0 He is best known for his work toward the reconciliation between Germany and France in the wake of the First World War, for which he and the French prime minister Aristide Briand received the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize. The Weimar Republic was a mess, political unstable and perpetually fragile, with short-lived governments (including his own as chancellor), but he was the most influential cabinet member during most of the Weimar period.\u00a0 He was especially devoted to making the war reparations imposed upon Germany by the punitive Treaty of Versailles less onerous; their oppressive burdensomeness, and Germany\u2019s resentment of their harshness and perceived injustice, loomed large among the grievances out of which Nazism emerged.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Stresemann died suddenly, of a stroke, at the age of fifty-one.\u00a0 Some have wondered whether, had he lived, the rise of the Nazis might never have occurred.\u00a0 As the late Scottish-American diplomatic historian Gordon Craig is quoted by Wikipedia as saying,<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
No German statesman since Bismarck\u2019s time had demonstrated, as brilliantly as he [Stresemann] was to do, the ability to sense danger and to avoid it by seizing and retaining the initiative, the gift of maintaining perspective and a sense of relative values in the midst of a changing diplomatic situation, and the talent for being more stubborn than his partners in negotiation and for refusing to allow their importunities to force him to accept second-best solutions.<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another of the examples that has come to my mind in recent days is Pope Adrian VI \u2014 Hadrian or Hadrianus \u2014 a Dutch-born reformist priest who came to the papal throne in January 1522 when the Lutheran Reformation was in its early stages, only to die in September 1523.\u00a0 (There would not be another non-Italian pope until the election of John Paul II in 1978.). Adrian was unwilling to compromise theologically with Martin Luther, but he acknowledged that the Roman Curia bore much of the responsibility for the Lutheran troubles and he sought to make appropriate changes.\u00a0 When he was succeeded by the Medici pope Clement VII, however, Adrian\u2019s proposed reforms were largely buried with him.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s yet another, which has been on my mind since our tour bus began to near Berlin:\u00a0 There were only three emperors or Kaisers who ruled from Berlin.\u00a0 The first of them, of course, was Kaiser Wilhelm I (1797-1888).\u00a0 He was succeeded by his only son, Kaiser Friedrich III.\u00a0 Frederick, to give him the English form of his name, hoped to move the Empire in the direction of greater democracy and greater participation of common citizens.\u00a0 He and his wife, the Kaiserin Victoria, daughter of the British Queen Victoria, hoped to rule jointly in a constitutional monarchy just as her mother and father, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, had sought to do.\u00a0 Moreover, Frederick hated war, and he was loved by many for his humane nature.\u00a0 But by the time he inherited the German throne, he had been fatally stricken with cancer of the larynx, and he died at the age of fifty-six after a reign of only ninety-nine days \u2014 most of them bedridden and gravely ill.\u00a0 His son and successor, the militaristic Kaiser Wilhelm II, rejected essentially all of his proposed reforms and ultimately led Germany into the First World War.\u00a0 Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate in 1918.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
My father, incidentally, always remembered a little jingle about Kaiser Wilhelm II that I can only imagine he had heard from an American veteran of World War One.\u00a0 I offer it here for its unparalleled historical importance:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France.<\/span><\/p>\nKaiser Bill came down<\/em> the hill with bullets in his pants.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve mentioned Queen Victoria and her beloved German-born consort, Prince Albert.\u00a0 He\u2019ll serve as my last example of what the absence of a great personality can mean:\u00a0 I need to write a longer entry about Albert sometime, but, as I\u2019ve noted, he and Victoria were also working toward a shared constitutional monarchy.\u00a0 (She wanted him to bear the title of king<\/em>, but Parliament refused to authorize it.)\u00a0 Unfortunately, he died at the age of just forty-two.\u00a0 The cause is generally given as typhoid fever, but it may rather have been a chronic illness such as Crohn\u2019s disease,<\/sup>\u00a0kidney failure, or\u00a0abdominal cancer.\u00a0 In any event, Queen Victoria was so completely devastated by his death that she wore black for the remainder of her long life and effectively withdrew from many public duties \u2014 thus dooming the dream that she and Albert once shared of an active constitutional monarchy.\u00a0 Today\u2019s Queen Elizabeth is essentially a figurehead.\u00a0 Beloved, of course, but merely a figurehead with no real political power.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Munich,\u00a0 Bavaria, Germany<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 During much of my life, especially during my earlier years, the so-called \u201cgreat man\u201d approach to history has been out of fashion.\u00a0 And there are good reasons for that.\u00a0 Overwhelmingly, for example, the deep, epochal, transformative changes of history \u2014 e.g., the domestication of the horse, the invention of movable type, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29343,7272,2140,29361,5445,28463,29334,29340,29337,29331,13766,29346,29312,29349,29370,29309,29306,3415,3430,3997,29367,3742,18262,8487,29364,6633,29328,7269,3412,29352,29355,29358],"class_list":["post-95508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-adrian","tag-albert","tag-bavaria","tag-berlin","tag-england","tag-frederick","tag-frederick-iii","tag-friedrich","tag-friedrich-iii","tag-gustav","tag-hadrian","tag-hadrianus","tag-herrenchiemsee","tag-kaiser","tag-linderhof","tag-ludwig","tag-ludwig-ii","tag-luther","tag-neuschwanstein","tag-papacy","tag-parsifal","tag-pope","tag-prussia","tag-reformation","tag-richard-wagner","tag-ring","tag-stresemann","tag-victoria","tag-wagner","tag-wilhelm","tag-wilhelm-i","tag-wilhelm-ii"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>