The German Century

Fair warning - History was one of my concentrations in college, and this is a History post, a long one at that.  Read on at your own risk.


It's common enough - at least in the US - to hear the Twentieth Century referred to as the 'American Century.'  I think there was even a PBS program with that title, maybe a book. Maybe both.  In any event, the sentiment is that because the USA seemed to dominate the world in the Twentieth Century, it belongs to us, somehow.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized the Twentieth Century is actually the German Century.  It is an undeniable truth that the USA dominated economics and foreign affairs, at least after the Great Depression.

But why?  Why did the United States come to dominate for decades, and what kept us at the top?  Germans.

Let's think this through.  Germans dominated the last twenty years of the Nineteenth Century, led by the efforts of Otto von Bismarck.  Bismarck was an expert at making alliances, but also at breaking them.  Bismarck was relieved of duty in the latter years of the Nineteenth Century, and the alliances that remained unbroken were what led to the web of treaties and agreements and pacts that started the First World War.

    Germans - World War I

Remember that the US did not enter the Great War until 1917, after it had ravaged Europe for three years.  The war concluded, with Germany saddled with reparations that crippled its economy for a generation.  These reparations set the stage for a unrest and resentment in Germany, and when the inevitable worldwide Great Depression happened, Germans saw it as a chance to regain the glory taken from them by the Weimar government.  And they gave the world Hitler.

    Germans - Weimar and economic collapse
    Germans - Hitler

Wartime expansion sparked the German spirit and its economy, and from the mid-Thirties until 1939, Germany grew its manufacturing and scientific might.  Then they invaded Poland and started the second Great War, World War II.

    Germans - World War II

Once again, Europe bore the brunt of German wartime aggression for years, until the US entered the War in 1941.  Germans lost again, and the US and Soviet Union emerged as the dominant powers.  Their main Cold War battleground?  Germany.

    Germans - partition after World War II
    Germans - Soviet blockade to establish their sphere of influence
    Germans - Berlin airlift to keep the allied sectors in control of Western powers
    Germans - Berlin Wall erected once the Soviets realize they can't take the whole city

From the immediate post-War time, 1945, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 - fully forty-four years - the divided Germany served as the main sparring point between East and West.  Germany and the Berlin Wall were the symbols on both sides.  Symbols of discarding Western ideology in the Soviet Union, and a symbol of freedom and resistance to tyranny in the West.  Germany was always in the forefront of the news and the public consciousness.
    It was only two years after the Berlin Wall fell that the Soviet system finally collapsed under its own unsupportable weight and the entire Eastern Bloc discarded the failed ideology.

    Germans - reunited, and the Soviet system collapses, robbing the US of its major military and economic opponent

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany led Europe into the European Union and was in the first group of European countries to surrender its own currency to create the Euro, the centralized European currency, in 1999.  Since then the Euro has come to rival the US Dollar in importance in the world.  Another score for Germany.

    Germans - back to economic might
    Germans - the Euro, a symbol of a brand-new political entity, sovereign states voluntarily giving up some power to form a larger political entity

Had it not been for Germany, the US would probably not come out of its isolationism in the early Twentieth Century.  Indeed, after the War, the US stayed out of the League of Nations, returning to its 'leave us alone' status.  Which it kept until a stagnant economy led it to supply both sides in the early World War II.  The US would have fallen once again back into isolationism if not for a divided Germany and the importance of keeping the Soviets from consolidating that country under their control.  The entire Cold War was contested essentially over German soil, and when Germany was once again united, the major threat to the US, the Soviet Union, collapsed.  Germans, Germans, Germans, Germans, Germans.

I think I made my point.  US power and influence was and is just a reaction to Germany's situations.  Take Germany out of the equation, and the Twentieth Century would have been very, very different.