THE NEW EUROPE
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politik" and "Weltpolitik," these ideas becoming the stock ideas of Pangerman policy.
William 11. officially inaugurated tlle Pangerman imperialistic world-policy, Very soon one of his ministers, Bronsart Von Schellenhof (Minister of War 1883–89), voiced the Pangerman scheme of Central Europe; the Kaiser himsolt rejoiced over Germany as a "Weltreich." William II, was not only a pupil of Lagarden, but at the later Pangerman philosophers and historians, notably of Houston Chamberlain; he himself went to Constantinople and to Asia Minor in order to strengthen the German financial and economic penetration of the Orient. Pangerman Central Europe was practically extended to Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf, and the Union of Germany and Austria-Hungary was augmented by Turkey, these three states forming the real Triple Alliance long before the Dreibund was broken off. Berlin-Bagdad became under William II. the general watchword. The Germans took up the previous plans for opening up Mesopotamia by means or a railroad; English engineers had already jonned such a plan in 1875, the French and Russians followed. The Germans joined in and soon acquired concessions for building railroads (the line Haidar Pasha-Angora is German). Within a year of William lI.'s visit to the Sultan in 1898 the line to Bagdad was approved and the aid of the Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions secured. My present object is not, however, to tell the story of German penetration in Asia Minor, but simply to show that the Pangerman plan is anything but Utopian.
Even long before the nor Pangerman imperialism dominated not only intellectual circles, but also wider classes of the population of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and supplied them with their political education. It is simply not true that only a few people participated and cooperated
in Pangerman propaganda. The number of such writers is very great; Pangerman books and pamphlets had and still have today a very large circulation and run through many editions. The Pangerman plan of "Berlin-Bagdad" has been upheld by men like Moltke, List, Rodbertus, W. Roscher, Lassalle, Lagarde, C. Frantz, Windhorst, &c. Pangerman ideas were propagated by energetic societies and clubs,notably the Allgemaine deutsche Verband (Pangerman League), 1890, Mitteleuropaeischer Wirtschaftsverein (Central
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