War Without Policy: Clausewitz and the German Army 1866-1914

This thesis examines German civil-military relations during imperial period through the Clausewitzian lens. It is found that despite the veneration of Clausewitz successive heads of the German Army rejected the primacy of policy. Sound military theory was subordinated for the desire for institutional independence. The German way of war is in this way founded on the rejection of the role of the civilian state in waging war and is in this way fundamentally anti-Clausewitzian.