ABSTRACT
‘Revolution from above’ – that was the watchword with which people tried at the time and subsequently to master their own bewilderment and make sense of a fundamentally altered situation. The arch-conservative wing under Ludwig von Gerlach had already dissociated itself from Otto von Bismarck and what it foresaw as the revolutionary consequences of his policy before the war. Bismarck’s much-derided plan to summon a German parliament on a universal suffrage basis, a plan that kept on cropping up under various guises in the semi-official press, appeared in a quite different and for the liberal opposition distinctly ominous light. The arch-conservative wing under Ludwig von Gerlach had already dissociated itself from Bismarck and what it foresaw as the revolutionary consequences of his policy before the war. Bismarck’s chief initial criticism was to the effect that the drafts were ‘too centralistically federal for the future accession of the south Germans’.
