Author Topic: Schleswig-Holstein wars  (Read 24184 times)

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Eric_Lowe

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Re: Schleswig-Holstein wars
« Reply #30 on: August 22, 2010, 09:29:08 AM »
Well...He tried his very best. It is not fair for him take all the blame for this.

kmerov

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Re: Schleswig-Holstein wars
« Reply #31 on: August 22, 2010, 09:48:28 AM »
The blame for what?

Eric_Lowe

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Re: Schleswig-Holstein wars
« Reply #32 on: August 22, 2010, 11:59:15 AM »
The previous Danish kings that put the seeds of discord for Christian to inherit it, and of course the greed of Bismark.

Naslednik Norvezhskiy

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Re: Schleswig-Holstein wars
« Reply #33 on: March 31, 2011, 06:23:08 AM »
In my opinion Alexander III's decision to realign Russia with France and England was a the fateful step that led to the all the problems that followed.  Had Russia continued it's alliance with Germany and Austria there would have been no WWI and no resulting fall of the dynasty.  His marriage to a Danish princess produced personal hostility in the Imperial family towards Germany after the war between Prussia and Denmark.  Had Alexander III married a German princess things would have turned out completely differently.

Amen!  I despair of the anti-Kaiser/anti-German feelings that run through the Imperial Family from the 1880s on.  Wilhelm may have been a pain, but he was honorable and he deeply loved both N and A-one of the most touching things I've read is an interview with him in the 1930s in which, when he was told what N and A had said about him, he broke down and cried, saying he didn't understand it and still prayed for them every night.  Wilhelm, for all of his peculiarities, just wanted to be loved and accepted by his royal relatives who, led by Marie Feodorovna and Queen Alexandra, conspired against him.  Had Nicholas not been so infused with this feeling by his mother, things might have turned out differently.

Does this perhaps mean that the Schleswig-Holstein Question was a major contributing factor in WW1? I mean, wasn't one of the reasons why the Danish RF was so eager to marry off Dagmar to the Russian heir the fact that the Russian Emperor, both as the Head of the House of Holstein-Gottorp, as a Great Power and as the greatest Baltic power was the best guarantee for the Danish status quo, both in terms of territorial integrity, the Glücksborg succession and Christian IX's reactionary regime?

It's funny, these alliances seem more likely than those that actually brought about WW1:
Russia & France vs. Germany & Britain
Russia & Germany vs France & Britain
Both scenarios seem plausible. But then you bring Glücksborg Denmark's interests into the equation and voilà: Germany feels very threatened and WW1 is unleashed!

(I don't count Austria-Hungary as an element, because all the ressources of this decaying power would be bound up in fighting off the gang of disssatisfied domestic minorities and greedy neighbours no matter who they teamed up with.)

Schleswig-Holstein's more practical role in the build-up to the war was of course the fact that while the German Army wanted a preventive strike as soon as possible, the German Navy wanted to wait untill the widening of the Kieler Canal had been completed, which happened during the summer of 1914....
« Last Edit: March 31, 2011, 06:41:08 AM by Фёдор Петрович »