Even a figure as strongly identified with political saber rattling as former minister Karl Helfferich joined in. “It was not clever,” he wrote, “to talk incessantly about the sword, thus enabling our foreign enemies to portray the most peaceful people and monarch on earth as being obsessed by war. In this way, we unintentionally promoted the myth of our warlike intentions and helped produce an international mood that provided the coalition against us with the necessary, mass-psychological underpinning.”
