Ever since the First World War, but especially during the Weimar period, Bismarck's dismissal has exercised a strong attraction on German historians, and has probably received more attention than any other event in the history of the Second Reich. In the troubled post-war years, 20 March 1890 seemed to stand out prominently as the fateful turning point of Germany's history. Wilhelm Schvissler, the first to exploit the unprecedented wealth of evidence available in consequence of the monarchy's collapse, did not hesitate to claim that ‘even at that time [1890] the downfall (Untergang) of the German Reich was written in the stars’. ‘Who would doubt’, he asked, ‘that our misfortune began there…and led to the catastrophe of the Imperial Monarchy and the German Reich—exactly 20 years after his [Bismarck's] death!’ This highly emotional approach to the subject was fully shared by Wilhelm Mommsen, whose standard work on the role of the political parties in the crisis appeared in 1924. Bismarck's fall, he wrote, ‘appears to us today as a turning point of German history, and it is only with deep feeling that we can recall the events of March 1890’. It is perhaps partly for this reason that these early writers tended to misinterpret the nature of Bismarck's relations with the parties in the crucial months before his fall. There was, for one thing, an inclination to idealize the bygone age in which ‘the State’ was thought to have stood incorruptibly ‘above the parties’, and as a result the party struggles of 1889 and 1890 were relegated to a self-contained compartment whence, it was held, they were able to influence the course of events only in the negative sense of providing no obstacle to the chancellor's dismissal. The influential work of Hans Rothfels probably typified this attitude, but even Mommsen warned his readers that his study of the parties could throw at best an oblique light on the crisis ‘since the parties had no direct and at any rate no significant effect on the course of those events’. According to Hans Herzfeld's summary of the present state of knowledge on the subject, this view is still widely accepted today.
