ABSTRACT
The deep anti-Western feeling of the Germans was a poor soil for allowing democracy to take root. In fact, Germany was seemingly at the zenith of triumph and power, after having destroyed European civilization all over central and western Europe and having helped Stalin to destroy European civilization in Poland and in the Baltic republics. Prussia rose as a power in the eastern marches of Germany by an almost total concentration on a Spartan way of life. German romanticism and historicism, fusing with Prussian concepts of the authoritarian power-state, coloured much of German thinking in the War against the West, which started around 1812 and reached its climax after 1933. The break with standards of Western liberal thought occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century, when many of its foremost thinkers were still under influence of common European tradition.
