In the autumn of 1923, with Mussolini on the loose in the Mediterranean, talk of a division of Germany, a new Westphalian peace and Franco-German rapprochement on the Rhine, with Nazis and Communists contending for power, and Stresemann, Ludendorff, Hitler and Adenauer all on the scene simultaneously, it was as though the entire drama of western European history for the next two generations was to be compressed into a matter of months.
