With the approval of the German government, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had the painting depicting Bismarck removed from the ministry's diplomatic meeting room. The room, which until now bore the name of the first German foreign minister who created the foreign office, was renamed from the Bismarck room to the "German unity" room.
Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) is one of the most prominent European statesmen of the 19th century, perhaps the most iconic figure in German history. There is no village or town where a statue or monument to the Iron Chancellor has not been erected, where there is not a street, square or building named after him. Because he made Germany great, by uniting the many small states, he created the second German Empire, the economically and militarily unified German great power. If necessary, even with blood and iron, with wars. The colony grew into a prestigious empire, so following the spirit of the age, they occupied two and a half million square kilometers of uncolonized territory in the world. What the English and French left them. They set foot in East and West Africa, and even in the country of the Papuans, where the archipelago and the sea still bear Bismarck's name.
The rationalization of public and higher education, the introduction of social and pension insurance, a series of reforms and a fruitful foreign policy are all to the credit of Bismarck. Posterity remembered him with gratitude. Until now. Because ever since the progressive movements (#metoo, woke, cancel culture, LGBTQ+) appeared in Germany, the consistent, strict and pro-order empire organizer has been on the way. It turned out about him, what we always guessed, that Bismarck was a white, Christian, male chauvinist figure, and his Junker origin is not a good recommendation letter these days. Political distancing from the spirit of the Iron Chancellor has been going on for a long time, today's Germany cannot agree with Bismarck's policy, they only tolerated his presence in the collective memory out of tradition. Your merits must be reviewed! And now it is being investigated, for example in Hamburg, where a Bismarck statue twice the size of the former Stalin statue in Budapest is standing in the way of the red-green city government there. Fortunately, the statue is so huge that it can hardly be moved.
The situation is much easier with paintings, for example. About three years ago, the wife of the socialist Minister of State of the Merkel government invited her girlfriends to a party at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They were walking in the corridor, and the pictures of former male foreign ministers and statesmen were staring at them from the walls, perhaps a little arrogantly, with a smile that looked down on women. All men! The dominance of men in diplomacy must be abolished, the female quota must be introduced, the politician said in her toast. We still have a lot to do!
And now we can be happy about the first German female foreign minister, the green springboard champion Annalena Baerbock. He was very irritated that the ministry's large meeting room - which he had to visit every day when he was in Berlin - was called the Bismarck Room. Moreover, opposite his place is the painting of the Iron Chancellor, and when he looks up from his laptop, his gaze meets the stern, demanding gaze of his great predecessor. So, with the boundless self-confidence of Generation X, he had the portrait removed, and the room was renamed the "German Unity" room. This sort of thing does not cause Baerbock a problem at all, he has already removed the five-hundred-year-old cross from the hall of the Münster town hall, so as not to disturb the sensibilities of the G7 participants.
But Annalena Baerbock shouldn't be so afraid of Bismarck, since the Iron Chancellor was once young too. He loved women, he loved the company of good men, and drinking together. In his age, he was considered a really recalcitrant young man. He studied law for three semesters at the University of Göttingen and was a frequent visitor to the karcer, i.e. the university prison, where disruptive students were locked up from time to time. Thanks to Bismarck, today the prison is one of the most visited memorials in the city, its cheerful face in a student cap echoes from the whitewashed wall of the student hostel. According to the local collective memory, once, after a night out, he rode through Göttingen naked as a bet. He could no longer get away with this by simply being locked up, he was banned from the city. He then rented a house for himself outside the city walls, today it is the local Bismarck memorial museum. Until now, Göttingen was extremely proud of its most famous student, two observation towers were built in his honor. When the anti-Bismarck abolitionist culture rears its head in the city, how will the locals react?
Because now the ball is in Germany, every German of good sense is protesting against the removal of Bismarck. After all, Bismarck is to them what István Széchenyi is to us. Although, if I remember correctly, the Austrians and the communists wanted to forget even the greatest Hungarian. Just like the reds, so now the greens ignore history and fight against everything that does not fit into their own world view. Or, as the Bismarck family puts it: they have no knowledge of German history.
During the wave of indignation, many things came to light. For example, the red-red-green – currently illegitimate due to a series of electoral frauds – draft of the Berlin Senate on the renaming of streets. Changing the names of hundreds of streets is on the agenda, either because the person who gave them the name is in some way connected to German imperialism, Nazism, or because it does not correspond to the spirit of the woke ideology. More recently, the street names named after the great Russians have also caught the eye of those who are worried about Ukrainian freedom.
Déjà vu, we here in the Carpathian Basin have already experienced similar things. There were sonorous slogans, there were statue removals, street and institution renamings, naming ceremonies instead of christenings, pine tree celebrations instead of Christmas. There was identity-based stigmatization, racketeering, confiscation of property and displacement. The ideological rape of a people and the attempt to destroy its culture. Only then is the ideology wrapped in red, now in green.
Source: Magyar Hírlap
Author: historian Irén Rab
Cover image: Bismarck Memorial in Hamburg / Photo: DPA
