Politics & Power Quote by Gustav Stresemann

Stresemann is warning against a particular kind of political storytelling: the tidy narrative that jumps from “once upon a time” to “and so we won/lost” as if history were a straight line rather than a contested battlefield. The target is “the youth,” not because young people are uniquely gullible, but because they are uniquely recruitable. If you can teach them that outcomes were inevitable, you teach them to stop looking for the choices, compromises, betrayals, accidents, and human costs that actually produce outcomes. Inevitability is propaganda’s favorite tense.

The phrasing is almost bureaucratically calm, which makes its bite sharper. “Misleading” sounds mild, yet he’s describing a profound civic injury: stripping a generation of causal literacy. The line “as if nothing could have taken place in between” is Stresemann pointing to the erased middle - the space where agency lives. When that middle disappears, responsibility disappears with it. Triumph becomes destiny; disaster becomes fate; leaders become mere narrators of forces beyond control.

Context matters. Stresemann governed in Weimar Germany, a society drowning in simplified myths: the “stab-in-the-back” legend, nostalgic imperial fantasies, and moralistic accounts of defeat that skipped over the political decisions and social fractures that made catastrophe possible. His own career was defined by unpopular pragmatism - reparations negotiations, the Dawes Plan, Locarno - all “in-between” work that looks like compromise until you understand the alternatives. He’s arguing for history as process, not parable, because the future depends on citizens who can see where the hinge points are.