Karl Dietrich Bracher
Karl Dietrich Bracher (13 March 1922 – 19 September 2016) was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.
Karl Dietrich Bracher
In a 1971 essay to mark the 100th anniversary of German unification, Bracher rejected the claim that Otto von Bismarck was the "grandfather" of the present-day Federal Republic, and argued that those historians who claimed that there was a line of continuity between Bismarck's Second Reich and the Federal Republic were entirely mistaken. Bracher maintained that the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 was a decisive break with everything had happened before in German history. Bracher stated that the Federal Republic with its democracy, respect for the individual, equality of all citizens, rule of the law and its pluralist, tolerant society owned nothing to Bismarck's vision of a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by a militaristic, authoritarian state that existed to uphold the power of the "Junkers". Bracher wrote that the success of the modern Federal Republic had nothing to do with the "Bismarckian tradition" and stated that the "destruction of the state of 1871" was "the premiss and starting point for a new German state altogether". Bracher maintained that "the second, finally successful democracy in Germany is unimaginable, impossible without the ultimate failure of the "Reich" of 1871".