Without being an enemy of either Prussia or Germany, one can see in this a threat to peace in this part of the world and to the security of neighbouring states...After five centuries of desiring, striving, and hoping to outgrow the military system of earlier times...a power based on the permanent use of war has emerged with a frightening superiority of which the military states of previous centuries, bent on conquest and expansion, could never remotely have conceived...This judgment on the situation would have been greatly scoffed at had it been expressed formerly. But after the experiences of 1870 one would not wish to question it. These events have rejuvenated this warrior state and have led inevitably to a rise in its self-esteem.
— G. C. Gervinus, qtd. in The German Empire 1871-1918 by Hans-Ulrich Wehler.
Since the German Workers' party expressly declares that it acts within "the present-day national state", hence within its own state, the Prusso-German Empire — its demands would indeed be otherwise largely meaningless, since one only demands what one has not got — it should not have forgotten the chief thing, namely, that all those pretty little gewgaws rest on the recognition of the so-called sovereignty of the people and hence are appropriate only in a democratic republic.
Since one has not the courage — and wisely so, for the circumstances demand caution to demand the democratic republic, as the French workers' programs under Louis Philippe and under Louis Napoleon did, one should not have resorted, either, to the subterfuge, neither "honest" nor decent, of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, already influenced by the bourgeoisie, and bureaucratically carpentered, and then to assure this state into the bargain that one imagines one will be able to force such things upon it "by legal means".
Since one has not the courage — and wisely so, for the circumstances demand caution to demand the democratic republic, as the French workers' programs under Louis Philippe and under Louis Napoleon did, one should not have resorted, either, to the subterfuge, neither "honest" nor decent, of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, already influenced by the bourgeoisie, and bureaucratically carpentered, and then to assure this state into the bargain that one imagines one will be able to force such things upon it "by legal means".
— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program
Bismarck bequeathed to his successors an unstable structure of rule. The constitution of Prussia had been thrown together in the muddle of the the revolution of 1848-9. Bismarck preserved it with its grossly unbalanced representation system. it continued to give the small class of Junker landlords a permanent veto on progress. Since Prussia amounted to three-quarters of the population, territory, and industrial power, it served as a surrogate for Germany as a whole. Prussia's House of Lords, gerrymandered and patched with difficulty, gave Hans von Kleist and his friends a place to dig in. The lower house with its three-class voting system did the rest. The fact that Germany never had its own army and Foreign Ministry (Prussia retained both) meant that the country went into the war of 1914 run by exactly the same families whose names make up the order of battle in 1870 and with the same impossible structure of rule.
[...]
...The First World War destroyed much of Bismarck's Germany and defeat ended the monarchies in all the many German states. In 1925 the citizens of the unloved Weimar Republic elected Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenberg (1847-1934), a Prussian field marshal, to be their President...He belonged to, and had grown up in, Bismarck's world and looked it. He had the same frown, the same military severity and bulk. Historians of Germany often speak of him as an 'ersatz Kaiser' or a Kaiser substitute, but I think he represented an 'ersatz Bismarck', a surrogate for the Iron Chancellor. It was Hindenburg, the last ruling Junker, who handed Adolf Hitler the office that Bismarck had created — that of Reich Chancellor. His only reservation typically had to do not so much with Hitler's policy but his rank. Hitler had been only a corporal and Hindenburg found that fact deeply distasteful...Bismarck's legacy passed through Hindenburg to the last genius-statesman that Germany produced, Adolf Hitler, and the legacy was thus linear and direct between Bismarck and Hitler.
[...]
...The First World War destroyed much of Bismarck's Germany and defeat ended the monarchies in all the many German states. In 1925 the citizens of the unloved Weimar Republic elected Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenberg (1847-1934), a Prussian field marshal, to be their President...He belonged to, and had grown up in, Bismarck's world and looked it. He had the same frown, the same military severity and bulk. Historians of Germany often speak of him as an 'ersatz Kaiser' or a Kaiser substitute, but I think he represented an 'ersatz Bismarck', a surrogate for the Iron Chancellor. It was Hindenburg, the last ruling Junker, who handed Adolf Hitler the office that Bismarck had created — that of Reich Chancellor. His only reservation typically had to do not so much with Hitler's policy but his rank. Hitler had been only a corporal and Hindenburg found that fact deeply distasteful...Bismarck's legacy passed through Hindenburg to the last genius-statesman that Germany produced, Adolf Hitler, and the legacy was thus linear and direct between Bismarck and Hitler.
— Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life, Page 474—Page 478.
"This Reich which is kept together barely by "blood and iron" is no base for civil liberty, let alone social equality! States are preserved by the means by which they are founded! The sabre stood as midwife for this Reich, the sabre shall accompany it to its grave!"
— August Bebel, SPD in a speech in the first Reichstag of the newly founded German Empire
