ABSTRACT
After participating in the First World War, Alfred von Martin taught mediaeval history at the Universities of Frankfurt and Munich and became professor of sociology in Gottingen in 1931. With the advent of the National-Socialist government, he resigned his position to resume his teaching in 1946 at the University of Munich. Robert Saitschick rightly stresses that Otto von Bismarck’s establishment of the Empire was ‘artificial’ creation, a reversal, by means of true Prussian organization of the process of organic growth. The National-Liberals, the predestined Bismarckian party, so to say, were those who accepted Bismarck’s principle of the primacy of foreign policy over domestic policy, at least in those circumstances where the geopolitical situation of a country leaves it open to unremitting pressure from without. The enemies of Bismarck ought to be portrayed together by someone—it would be a small German hall of fame.
