Primary Course:
Nationalist Speech
By Otto von Bismarck
Gentlemen!
I have just heard from the lips of your teachers, the leaders of higher
education, an appreciation of my past, which means much to me. From your
greeting, I infer a promise for the future, and this means even more for a man
of my years than hoi love of approbation. You will be able, at least many of
you, to live according to the sentiments which your presence here today
reveals, and to do so to the middle of the next century, while I have long been
condemned to inactivity and belong to the days that are past. I find
consolation in this observation, for the German is not so constituted that he
could entirely dismiss in his old age what in his youth inspired him. Forty and
sixty years hence you will not hold exactly the same views as today, but the
speed planted in your young hearts by the reign of Emperor William I will bear
fruit, and even when you grow old, your attitude will ever be German national
because it is so today...
We
had to win our national independence in difficult wars. The preparation, the
prologue, was the Holstein war. We had to fight with Austria for a settlement;
no court of law could have given a decree of separation; we had to fight. That
we were facing French war after our victory at Sadowa could not remain in doubt
for anyone who knew the conditions of Europe.... After the war had been waged
everybody here was saying that within five years we should have to wage the
next war. This was to be feared it is true, but I have ever since considered it
to be my duty to prevent it. We Germans had no longer any reason for war. We
had what we needed. To fight for more, from a lust of conquest and for the
annexation of countries which were not necessary for us always appeared to me like
an atrocity, alien to the Germanic sense of justice...
The
men who made the biggest sacrifices that the empire might be born were
undoubtedly the German princes, not excluding the king of Prussia. My old
master, hesitated long before he voluntarily yielded his independence to the
empire. Let us then be thankful to the reigning houses who made such sacrifices
for the empire which after the full thousand years of German history must have
been hard for them to make...
I
would then--and you will say I am an old, conservative man--compress what I
have to say into these words: Let us keep above everything the things we have,
before we look for new things, nor be afraid of those people who begrudge them
to us. In Germany struggles have existed always...Life is a struggle everywhere
in nature, and without inner struggles we end by being like the Chinese, and
become petrified. No struggle, no life! Only, in every fight where the national
question arises, there must be a rallying point. For us this is the empire, not
as it may seem to be desirable, but as it is, the empire and the emperor, who
represents it. That is why I ask you to join me in wishing well to the emperor
and empire. I hope that in 1950 all of you who are still living will again
respond with contented hearts to the toast.
LONG
LIVE THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE!
-from
Louis L. Snyder, The Blood and Iron Chancellor:
A
Documentary--Biography of Otto von Bismarck