ABSTRACT
The object of the Confederation was and continued to be the preservation of the status quo, the existing state of affairs in its legal, social and power-political aspects. As a result it immediately refocused on itself, as in the decades prior to the revolution, the hostility of all those forces that sought to alter that state of the affairs. In response to the challenge of the revolution Otto von Bismarck had as a matter of course seen all politics in an inner context and as a unity affecting and embracing human existence at least in all its communal forms. The policy of conservative solidarity to which the Gerlachs and their circle were so attached must as it were be pursued at the appropriate level, the level of the European great powers, far from the distractions and pettinesses of German politics.
