Match the following items in column A
with those in column B and choose the
correct answer from the options given
below:
Column A
Column B
(0) Frederic Sorrie (a) Feudal System
(ii) Napoleon
(6) Chief Minister
of Prussin
(iii) Friedrich Wilhelm (c) French IV
artist
(iv) Otto Von Bismarck (d)King of Prussia
tions
Answers
Answer:
Before we leave the centenary year of the outbreak of war in 1914 there’s someone we should talk about. Everyone now knows about the famous Christmas truce and football matches. But this was a war that was meant to have been “over by Christmas” 1914, not dragging on for four blood-soaked years. Plenty share blame for that, but one major culprit who seems to have been conspicuous by his absence in 2014 deserves a name check: Otto von Bismarck.
I’m astonished by this. Cynical and brilliant, an empire-builder who proclaimed the supremacy of “iron and blood” – actually it was his friend, Alfred (“Cannon King”) Krupp’s new guns made of steel that shed the blood – the Prussian chief minister turned first pan-German chancellor became the dominant European statesman of the 19th century, a near contemporary of Abraham Lincoln, a better man with a better legacy (and much better jokes).
Unlike the gentle 16th US president (1861-65) the highly aggressive Bismarck was far from a reluctant war-maker. In power from 1862 to 1890 he engineered three short wars – they’re where the word “blitzkrieg” comes from – against Denmark (1863), Austria (1866) and France (1870) to turn Prussia into the Second Reich (1871-1918) – the first had been medieval – and fatally undermined Germany’s fragile liberal institutions at a critical stage of their evolution.
What Germans got instead was a militarised monarchical autocracy sustained by rampant nationalism and supported by intellectuals of all kinds – sociologist Max Weber later repented his enthusiasm – who should have known better. Parliament was marginalised, the parties manipulated against each other, and Bismarck threatened to resign whenever he was seriously challenged. It was outrageous and it ended in the ruins of Berlin of 1945.
Yes, Bismarck spent the last 20 years of his career protecting the peace in Europe before the idiot new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, sacked him (Punch’s cartoonist famously portrayed it as “Dropping the Pilot”). But the damage was done. Bismarck had built a racing car only he could drive.