2023-01-07 08:00:00
What one can still learn from Bismarck
Von
Discarded memory: the Lenbach portrait in the former Bismarck room of the Federal Foreign Office Bild: Picture Alliance
The Federal Foreign Ministry disposed of the memory of the former Reich Chancellor. Three of Bismarck’s outstanding skills might also be useful in contemporary foreign policy. A replica of Eckart Conze.
The foreign ministries of some important states still bear traditional names, some of which have been in use for several centuries. In London, British foreign policy is not made in a “Ministry of Foreign Affairs”, but in the Foreign Office, and American foreign policy in the State Department in Washington. In Paris, the precise designation Ministère des Affaires Étrangères has been a tradition since 1789, and in Germany the Foreign Office has existed since the founding of the German Empire in 1871, which has also retained this name through all the serious historical upheavals of the 20th century to this day.
To this day – because recently the current management of the office seems determined to erase the last remnants of the memory of its founder Otto von Bismarck. So far, the memory of him has always been maintained, for example, by pictures or the naming of meeting rooms – even following the office moved from Bonn to Berlin. But now the Bismarck room has been renamed, and the Lenbach portrait that had hung there until recently has been taken down. Should we now also expect the renaming of the office itself, since its founder apparently no longer seems to be sustainable from the perspective of today’s political correctness of the current government?
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Hans-Christof Kraus holds the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Passau. Most recently, he published a collection of essays by Duncker & Humblot entitled “Paths and Deviations of Ideas – Studies on the Political Intellectual History of the Germans”.
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