A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.” What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”
—Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, (Random House), 26
What becomes of this rooting of the Schlieffen Plan in Hegel and Fichte if the author’s understanding of the plan is fundamentally flawed? What would a Schlieffen Plan grounded in Hölderlin and Caspar David Friedrich look like? What effect did it have on several generations of Americans to be taught German culture via Hogan’s Heroes, Soviet history via Dr. Zhivago?
