Introduction Prussia: War, Theory and Moltke

Is it necessary to forever blame the sins of the sons on the fathers? Historians too often consider the past on the basis of what came later rather than on what came before.2 That is one of the problems with Prussian-German history before 4 August 1914.3 The great Fischer controversy of the 1960s hinged around it, as did the Sonderweg dispute of the 1980s and the Goldhagen disagreement of the 1990s.4 Each of these paints nineteenth-century Germany in various ways with the brush of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.