ABSTRACT
As German unification proceeded on its apparently inevitable course in 1989/90, and Chancellor Kohl scrambled with almost indecent haste to write his name into the history books as the second Bismarck, images sprang to mind of that previous unification, over a century and a quarter ago, and the consequences it brought to Europe and the world in the following decades. After Charlemagne’s First Reich, Bismarck’s Second and Hitler’s Third, were we now seeing the rise of a Fourth Reich of equally imposing dimensions and equally uncertain duration? Did the new and seemingly unstoppable drive to reunify Germany in our own day mark the resumption of a submerged but ultimately ineradicable tradition of German national feeling and identity? Or did it merely register a stampede for material goods by the East Germans, their consumerist appetites whetted by years of watching West German television advertisements?
