"I must begin by saying something about the old Germany. That Germany, too, suffered from superficial judgment, because appearances and reality were not always kept apart in people's minds"
About this Quote
Stresemann opens with a calculated preemption: before anyone can argue with his policy, he wants to discipline the audience’s eyesight. “I must begin” isn’t throat-clearing; it’s a claim of authority over the terms of debate. He’s speaking as a Weimar politician trying to stabilize a bruised, mistrusted Germany after defeat, revolution, and the punitive logic of Versailles. In that moment, “Germany” isn’t just a country, it’s a story other nations tell themselves to justify sanctions, suspicion, and humiliation.
The phrase “the old Germany” carries double freight. It nods to the Kaiserreich and its militarist reputation, but it also performs a subtle rescue mission: even that Germany, he argues, was misread. By framing the past as a victim of “superficial judgment,” Stresemann gently redirects blame away from German character and toward perception itself. That’s diplomacy as rhetoric: if the problem is misunderstanding, the solution is dialogue, treaties, and reintegration, not perpetual punishment.
His key move is the deceptively simple contrast between “appearances and reality.” It’s a moral rebuke disguised as a cognitive one. He implies that publics and policymakers alike collapsed complex political realities into easy images - uniforms, parades, nationalist theater - and then treated those images as essence. The subtext is modern and unsettling: nations are governed not only by what they do, but by what others think they are. Stresemann is asking listeners to separate the spectacle from the state, because Germany’s future - and Europe’s peace - depends on it.
The phrase “the old Germany” carries double freight. It nods to the Kaiserreich and its militarist reputation, but it also performs a subtle rescue mission: even that Germany, he argues, was misread. By framing the past as a victim of “superficial judgment,” Stresemann gently redirects blame away from German character and toward perception itself. That’s diplomacy as rhetoric: if the problem is misunderstanding, the solution is dialogue, treaties, and reintegration, not perpetual punishment.
His key move is the deceptively simple contrast between “appearances and reality.” It’s a moral rebuke disguised as a cognitive one. He implies that publics and policymakers alike collapsed complex political realities into easy images - uniforms, parades, nationalist theater - and then treated those images as essence. The subtext is modern and unsettling: nations are governed not only by what they do, but by what others think they are. Stresemann is asking listeners to separate the spectacle from the state, because Germany’s future - and Europe’s peace - depends on it.
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| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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