German Society and Culture without the World Wars?

Don't put double posts. It's against the rules here. I should know, I also did this, when I was new , and was warned against it.
 
I'll answer your question , when I have the time , in your other thread, as it is an interesting question.
 
The other is German cultural influence internationally. This is more focused towards within Germany
Oh. Sorry , they look the same and are by the same username, so I thought it would be the same. So, let's see. Without the world wars, I imagine German society may be more aristocratic. The monarchies across it would remain and so would the Junkers. There's more stuff , but I honestly don't understand the intricacies of cultural change in the sense of how culture changes outside of economic or military events.
 
Oh. Sorry , they look the same and are by the same username, so I thought it would be the same. So, let's see. Without the world wars, I imagine German society may be more aristocratic. The monarchies across it would remain and so would the Junkers. There's more stuff , but I honestly don't understand the intricacies of cultural change in the sense of how culture changes outside of economic or military events.
I think Germany would stay militaristic but slowly remove the monarch later on due to the military constant growth which eventually leads to a coup when a Kaiser becomes too incompetent. I don't know how likely this is but I see a Kaiserriech eventually being overthrown by the military leaders then replaced by a military government for a short time before switching into a hybrid regime where daily life and matters are usually handled by a elected civilian government but when it comes to military, national security, and foreign relations it is handled by the head of the military and advisors. The military only steps in or stops the elected government when they think they are too extreme or causing them issues. Similar to military coups Turkey use to have or maybe military has veto power but rarely uses it. Other interesting take could Germany ever become like the Starship Trooper government. I imagine Junkers are still very influential even if Germany becomes a republic but I think meritocracy would still become big in Germany but full modern democracy not so much. I imagine Junkers adapting to a republic government is possible especially in one dominated by military leaders.
 
I think Germany would stay militaristic but slowly remove the monarch later on due to the military constant growth which eventually leads to a coup when a Kaiser becomes too incompetent. I don't know how likely this is but I see a Kaiserriech eventually being overthrown by the military leaders then replaced by a military government for a short time before switching into a hybrid regime where daily life and matters are usually handled by a elected civilian government but when it comes to military, national security, and foreign relations it is handled by the head of the military and advisors. The military only steps in or stops the elected government when they think they are too extreme or causing them issues. Similar to military coups Turkey use to have or maybe military has veto power but rarely uses it. Other interesting take could Germany ever become like the Starship Trooper government. I imagine Junkers are still very influential even if Germany becomes a republic but I think meritocracy would still become big in Germany but full modern democracy not so much. Imagine adapting to a republic government is possible especially in one dominated by military leaders.
I don't think they would overthrow the Kaiser as that's too big and dramatic. At most, they'll make them live in a guided cage, where the Kaiser basically acts as a public face for big announcements, but who will be ignores by the military whenever they feel like it. Publicly, the monarchy and it's trappings still matter, but in reality, they don't. A full blown republic is unlikely.
 
I don't think they would overthrow the Kaiser as that's too big and dramatic. At most, they'll make them live in a guided cage, where the Kaiser basically acts as a public face for big announcements, but who will be ignores by the military whenever they feel like it. Publicly, the monarchy and it's trappings still matter, but in reality, they don't. A full blown republic is unlikely.
I just don't see a monarch lasting throughout the whole century in Germany. I think the Kaiserreich will last to the late 30s at earliest and late 50s at most. A Kaiser will eventually do something stupid especially considering who the Kaiser will be without ww1. Didn't he not die until the 1940s? I also feel like incase of a military coup the military will just take over many of the rights and privileges the Kaiser use to have over government. It would be a republic but not a fully democratic one.
 
What would it even mean to be German without the world wars?

A German nation in pre WWI borders? An 2nd Reich that never ended? A modern federalized constitutional democracy? A communist regime done right or wrong? What about the colonies?

Would such a scenario still include persecution of minorities as it did under the Nazi regime just without the war? Would it include involvement in minor wars if there are no worldwars?

Most scenarios here and in similar places either like to show what might have happened and have it turn out into a near utopia or a near dystopia, because those are the most interesting bits. A more realistic scenario would be somewhere in between.

The loss of the first World War helped shape the German Republic and the Nazi regime and the horror of the latter helped shape the Germanies that came after that.

Without that pretty much everything is fair game.

Some point to consider though. Germany was the birthplace of Karl Marx and his ideology. Without a WWI Russia would be a lot less likeley to have revolution and Germany might be more likely to have one with perhaps less horrible results.

Germany also had some colonies pre-WWI not many compared to the other European powers, but they had them. The way they acted in those colonies are frequently overlooked, because of the much worse horrors that later happened closer to home and because other western powers aren't exactly in any position to cast the first stone from the inside of their glasshouses, but still, there is no way around the fact, that being a colonial overlord inevitably goes hand in hand with "being the bad guy".

Also the territory of the German empire pre-WWI contained a multitude of people with different languages and cultures from the French in the west to the Poles in the east. Either these gets forcibly repressed and Germanized or the country develops some sort of system where being a citizen of the empire does not automatically equate with speaking a particular language. The first road is an ugly one and the second road is quite difficult and would require reinventing what it means to be German to give everyone something in common. Difficult without some common enemy.

There is also the problem that WWI and WWII are not entirely the reason Germany developed the way it did. Anti-Semitism was a thing long before WWI for example.

Things could go in a multitude of ways. Many of them would include some quite horrible stuff. It would be a mistake to imagine that without the World Wars everything would be perfect of even just better. On the other hand it would be a mistake to somehow fall into the trap of thinking a wars a necessary evil that taught a lessons that needed to be learned.
 
What would it even mean to be German without the world wars?

A German nation in pre WWI borders? An 2nd Reich that never ended? A modern federalized constitutional democracy? A communist regime done right or wrong? What about the colonies?

Would such a scenario still include persecution of minorities as it did under the Nazi regime just without the war? Would it include involvement in minor wars if there are no worldwars?

Most scenarios here and in similar places either like to show what might have happened and have it turn out into a near utopia or a near dystopia, because those are the most interesting bits. A more realistic scenario would be somewhere in between.

The loss of the first World War helped shape the German Republic and the Nazi regime and the horror of the latter helped shape the Germanies that came after that.

Without that pretty much everything is fair game.

Some point to consider though. Germany was the birthplace of Karl Marx and his ideology. Without a WWI Russia would be a lot less likeley to have revolution and Germany might be more likely to have one with perhaps less horrible results.

Germany also had some colonies pre-WWI not many compared to the other European powers, but they had them. The way they acted in those colonies are frequently overlooked, because of the much worse horrors that later happened closer to home and because other western powers aren't exactly in any position to cast the first stone from the inside of their glasshouses, but still, there is no way around the fact, that being a colonial overlord inevitably goes hand in hand with "being the bad guy".

Also the territory of the German empire pre-WWI contained a multitude of people with different languages and cultures from the French in the west to the Poles in the east. Either these gets forcibly repressed and Germanized or the country develops some sort of system where being a citizen of the empire does not automatically equate with speaking a particular language. The first road is an ugly one and the second road is quite difficult and would require reinventing what it means to be German to give everyone something in common. Difficult without some common enemy.

There is also the problem that WWI and WWII are not entirely the reason Germany developed the way it did. Anti-Semitism was a thing long before WWI for example.

Things could go in a multitude of ways. Many of them would include some quite horrible stuff. It would be a mistake to imagine that without the World Wars everything would be perfect of even just better. On the other hand it would be a mistake to somehow fall into the trap of thinking a wars a necessary evil that taught a lessons that needed to be learned.
I agree I dislike total utopia and dystopian worlds. I find them boring and unrealistic. I like to look at the cons and pros of each situation. I imagine German Namibia becomes majority German and Tanzania also has a large white German population maybe even majority in the inlands and around Lake Victoria. In Europe I imagine Germany doesn't have to deal with many ethnic problems domestically due to having much larger numbers and makes Germanization a lot easier. Even if Austrian half of Austria-Hungary is annexed if they fall part I imagine the Czechs become a minority in their own nation and possibly Germanized. I do imagine Germans investing and building up colonies more. Also more education given to Africans too. The Germans might not treat Africans as equals at first but I see them wanting them to be good workers, fluent in German, and somewhat educated.
 
The big "bell the cat" challenge in any such speculation is, how the heck does one prevent WWI?

IMHO it is much easier to prevent WWII--eliminate Hitler, basically. Arguably without Hitler Germany would still go on a similar path in the 1930s but even granting that, without the specific perfect storm the Nazis brought, an authoritarian and militaristic Germany that goes so far as to openly repudiate Versailles might still be effectively hemmed in without someone so forceful and granted so much dictatorial authority as Hitler took and ran with.

More conventional German militarists might not have dared conceive of being able to break France and incorporate it along with northwestern Europe, and thus expect to be effectively checked in other schemes. Anschluss of Austria might be in the cards, which puts Czechoslovakia in a hell of a bind, but if a strong French backed alliance system holds even conquest of that country might seem infeasible. Conceivably such a not-Nazi if ugly Germany might be restricted to seeking cooperative hegemony in the Baltic states (including Finland and thus tending to draw Sweden into their sphere) with a rapprochment with Poland being key, and via Poland and Austrian bordering on nations in southeast Europe, getting influence there too. But sandwiched between skeptical and fearful Western European powers and a strong Soviet Union, the situation can be envisioned as stabilized, and Germany eventually veering back to a more liberal position with a strong internal Left.

Thus it is not difficult for me to imagine a stable and peaceful Europe for the most part from 1919 to the present day. War would rage elsewhere, notably in east Asia, and anticolonial tendencies would preoccupy the European powers which would all lose control of the colonies, at least in the sense of maintaining overt subordination--if they are smart, they could handle bowing to the inevitable in such a fashion as to leave puppet rulers in place perhaps. Some of these would wiggle out from under but have few options (seeking Soviet patronage perhaps, but that would be tricky). Or of course the colonial powers could fail to be that deft and produce nationalist blowback that much weakens their post-war hegemony, but global market conditions would tend to reinforce their indirect rule anyhow. Certainly in such a world the USA would have much less extensive projection and the question of whether the Soviet Union survives, even prospers, versus "inevitable" collapse is a hot topic.

But how to prevent WWI? The Great Powers of Europe were very much and willfully on a collision course; the particular crisis that triggered it OTL was just another in a succession of crises that were managed to barely prevent war.

Russia under Tsar Nicholas was belligerent, seeking further patronage in southeast Europe under a pan-Slavicist banner, and also driven to favor major warfare by internal factors.

Trotsky in his history of the Russian Revolution points to statistics about rising labor unrest, in which incidents of various kinds were on a steady, linear rise--truncated by the declaration of war, and the wholesale arrest of left wing agitators including all the Bolsheviks the Tsarist police could finger, with the rank and file Bolsheviks drafted into artillery battalions. (They had industrial skills and were thus deemed useful there). This appeared to work fine to suppress rebelliousness for a time, but as the war went sour for the Russians, the numerous leftists, notably the organized Bolsheviks, salted among mostly peasant draftees, propagandized the army and by 1917 units went over to revolutionary consciousness en masse. But in the short run, starting a war and drafting the rebels appeared to work like a charm and I think Trotsky is right to suggest it as a motive for being bellicose in the first place.

Similar things happened in all the participants, eventually including the USA which enabled Woodrow Wilson to have Eugene Debs jailed for instance. Same thing in Germany to my positive knowledge--hard line Social Democrats were isolated from moderates by their internationalist and anti-war stance, the moderates becoming patriotic supporters of the war. I will leave it to people with more knowledge of the details in Britain and France to fill in those blanks but as recently as the Falklands War Margaret Thatcher was able to use the same dynamic of patriotism to silence leftists and shore up the right. It seems fair to say that over the long run this tends to backfire, but in a short quick victorious war it is infamously effective, and infamously appears as a probable motive to go to war in the first place. And suppressing left wing labor agitation was a motive every great power shared!

But quite aside from this, classic histories emphasize a great many other reasons to see in retrospect (and at the time for that matter) that the Great Powers were very much on a collision course.

Wrangling over the deteriorating situation of the Ottomans in southeast Europe led to unstable and tense confrontations there between the two next weakest (in terms of internal cohesion) Great Powers in the European system, Russia and Austria-Hungary. In turn the French had been courting and aggressively developing the military potential of Russia as a counterweight against Germany, a nation that the ruling circles of the day still assumed would inevitably war with France again--largely because they themselves intended war, to restore general French honor after the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian war, and specifically to seize back Alsace and Lorraine.

In 1914 this was something that had happened only 43 years before--I gather nowadays I am getting to be among the more elderly contingent of the AH fandom, but there are still a lot of us over 50 I think and I for one can distinctly recount events of 1975! I was of course just a kid then, but surely if something as traumatic as the loss of the Franco-Prussian War and loss of Alsace-Lorraine had happened to the USA that year, we'd all have it pretty much at the top of our minds today. (God knows 1974-75 was "traumatic" enough, what with Watergate culminating in the only Presidential resignation and then the utter collapse of South Vietnam as the capstone of all our efforts there, and inflation and stuff like that). In the world of politics and policy making people my age are at the peak of their careers, and people who were adults that year are pretty powerfully ensconced too. This is the France of 1914. I do like to think that if somehow the Great War had been postponed indefinitely, France might conceivably have gotten over it, but not until maybe the 1940s, and perhaps not even then.

And objectively Germany loomed as an ongoing strategic threat. On the German side, Germany was largely a satisfied power but not entirely, not with their being so far on the back foot in colonial terms.

(People argue from hindsight that colonies were some kind of mistake, but people also argue that about African slavery in the New World, and I think both views are equally fatuous; the contemporaries who struggled so hard for supremacy in each had good solid reasons. I strongly suspect all the arguments of colonies being not cost-effective are myopic bookkeeping--indeed they were a dead weight on government accounts but surely most of them were profit opportunities for private entities that of course used their leverage as the wealthy elites to shift the burden on other shoulders in their states, but also even the lower classes bearing the burden, both fiscal and with their bodies as cannon fodder colonial soldiers were easily leveraged into political supporters, both for national glory and for perceived bread and butter job opportunities, not to mention the invidious racist self-image as acolytes of the master race. Indeed by the 1910s the economics of colonialism might have been starting to shift toward maintaining Third World nations as economic client states enjoying nominal independence, though I think the day that would show in honest and comprehensive bookkeeping would be a generation or more away, just as slavery could be shown to be objectively outmoded by the late 19th century...but institutions and political relations have a certain momentum. Germans had reasons to resent their relative paucity of colonies in the 1910s and this was a factor).

Aside from colonies and their geopolitics, the Germans had reason to fear French machinations--not so much France herself, which was militarized to the hilt but posed a limited threat to larger and even more industrialized Germany, but her Russian ally. The German general staff estimated that despite per capita inferiority, the Russians had a lot of warm bodies to hurl into combat and modernization in progress would tip the balance of Russian numbers more suitably multiplied with more modern arms and logistics well past German strength in the predictable near future; this meant German militarists had a ticking time bomb to preempt and added urgency to their generally warlike bent.

The British of course were definitely a satisfied state, on top of (nearly!) everything, with the most extensive Empire, the biggest and most experienced Navy--but had to worry that both Germany and the USA were passing Britain in raw industrial capacity, and Kaiser Wilhelm had chosen to emphasize this point with an expensive but apparently very capable High Seas Fleet to challenge RN supremacy and thus threaten the colonial hegemony as well as perhaps British supremacy in the merchant carrying trade. Britain would thus be the Great Power (leaving the USA out of it) most interested in maintaining peace, but had a stake as well in achieving some leverage to check the Germans.

There were simply no disinterested parties of any size to mediate in things like the conflict over Bosnia and Serbia that triggered the war OTL, and if that had somehow been handled another way--say the assassins of the Grand Duke and heir to the Austrian dual crown (and his wife) had missed and the whole crisis mitigated somehow. Another crisis and another would surely come down the road, and the various Great Powers were itching for resolution by means of arms.

Arms which by the way had been building up rapidly. The most recent economic crisis of global capitalism had been mitigated and reversed into another boom precisely because of arms buildups on all sides; this (I learned some decades ago in a class on Progressive Era USA) had largely reversed the drive to emigrate to the USA and elsewhere as jobs picked up in the industrial sectors due largely to the Keynesian effect of the arms buildup, going so far as to lure European immigrants to the USA back to Europe in some cases!

(In the immigration debates, it is rarely realized how often immigrants do choose to return to their homelands if the opportunity presents, and it is worth remarking that one factor in causing ballooning and irreversible immigration is if the power involved becomes bombastic about keeping the foreigners out...when they do that, people who were considering returning home think twice if they think they will be locked out of the home country if they want to go back again for a while, and commit to staying despite temptations and inducements to going home for a while. If they always felt they were free to go either way, we might well have fewer opting to stay! In the 1910s, the USA had yet to impose the draconian limits on legal immigration we would shortly adopt a decade later, and indeed immigrants did return to Europe during the pre-war arms races).

One of the wiser things Napoleon Bonaparte said was "the one thing you cannot do with bayonets is sit on them!" A cynic might support an arms buildup solely for purposes of domestic economy, without any intention to actually have a war to consume them, but by and large arms buildups are associated with actual war, partly because the expenditure on force must be justified. Our post-WWII Cold War experience where the Balance of Terror could elicit expenditure and buildup while also restraining actual use should not blind us to the factors that drive political leaders to actual confrontations, which still were in play even despite MAD...as George Herbert Walker Bush's inaugural remarks about "the statute of limitations on Vietnam is long over" and subsequent proof of his intentions to have some kind of glorious war somewhere to rebuild American confidence in our military power showed plainly.

The world was on a collision course to war in the 1910s, the powers of the world who mattered were anyway.

It will require very skilled work to defuse that with no war whatsoever.

If you want a finished TL where the job was done about as close to plausibility as I can imagine, I refer all here to carlton_bach's Es Geloybete Eretz TL. Here there is a great and terrible war between Germany (with Austria-Hungary, and various other allies and highly sympathetic neutrals along the way) and Russia (which had no friends, the French being dissuaded from military intervention and later the collapse of Russian credit cuts them off from even French financing). A key factor here is Germany, under a different Kaiser, not challenging British naval supremacy and thus avoiding alienating Britain, which is lukewarm pro German. The war is largely over Poland, which winds up a nominal monarchy with a very strong Social Democratic government under Pilsudski and with Polish Jews deemed a military and patriotic force to be reckoned with and respected (hence the title). Relative to OTL, Germany is much liberalized as is Poland--Russia comes out of it in a very fascistic and revanchist state unfortunately. The scale and horror of the German-Russian war is not a lot short of the OTL Great War, but it does avoid quite the global scope of OTL.

I'd guess butterflying away Wilhelm II, or anyway changing his mentality considerably, is probably a minimal first step toward developing a "Belle Epoque" in which the Lights Do Not Go Out all over Europe. Perhaps Bismarck getting more of his way overriding German militarists in the Franco-Prussian War settlement and either leaving Alsace in French hands, or perhaps something improbable like either spinning it off as a demilitarized buffer state or leaving it French as part of a treaty imposed demilitarized border zone might be helpful, though I daresay the French will be just as outraged by that as well. But all of this is just palliative; I suspect the drive toward massive total war is pretty deep and strong, in the nature of Westphalian nation states with dissatisfied minority populations and inevitable ethnic anomalies while being devoted to capitalist economies.

I know you want focus on what could happen if the war is avoided--and some of that is to be found in the aftermath of Es Geloybte Eretz. If someone can skillfully develop a TL with POD say 1890 or 1900 that plausibly avoids any great wars from that day to modern times, I would like to see it!
 
Like the title saids, how do you think German culture would develop without the world wars?

Pretty much like a giant version of Sweden or Denmark. It would be dominated by the Social Democrats for most of the 20th century, who would change Germany in similar manner to how the Social Democrats changed society in the Nordic countries. CDU would not be a thing, instead the right would be split between the Catholics voting Zentrum, and some other conservative party which the Protestants would support. Beside that we would see a left and right wing liberal party consolidate.

Religious Germany woukld have far more Protestants with them making up a majority or strong plurality,
 
Pretty much like a giant version of Sweden or Denmark. It would be dominated by the Social Democrats for most of the 20th century, who would change Germany in similar manner to how the Social Democrats changed society in the Nordic countries. CDU would not be a thing, instead the right would be split between the Catholics voting Zentrum, and some other conservative party which the Protestants would support. Beside that we would see a left and right wing liberal party consolidate.

Religious Germany woukld have far more Protestants with them making up a majority or strong plurality,
What about a party system like that of the Netherlands?
 
Long story short: I think that without getting clobbered two times in a row in a world war they started themselves, Germany would turn out like Austro-Hungary on steroids. Pretty militaristic and feudal, but overall mostly democratic with a good industrial and cultural base to boost off. Yes, they would build the biggest cannons and the most gun-packed fighter jets, but also the safest airliners and the most comprehensive set of waste recycling technology. They would continue to lead in all sciences for at least another 30 years and their entertainment industry would give Hollywood a run for their money. (There might even be something like German humor) All the while, like Austria OTL, they would be even more full of themselves, regardless of how history will deal with them.

of course, without world wars, the big question is how history in general will evolve, for instance regarding the workers movement or woman's rights, communism and colonialization/decolonialization. And this not just in Germany but in all other countries of the world as well, including-yes-probably a surviving Austro-Hungarian empire.
 
Well, the suffragette movement and the social democratic movement were already going well before the war. Women already had the vote in several places, including New Zealand and two Australian states (of particular interest here is South Australia, which was in large part settled by German immigrants, at this point many still with strong ties to their homeland), and the Sozialdemokratisches Partei was one of the largest in the Reichstag. Also, Wilhelm II was much maligned in Entente propaganda, and the echoes of that are still visible. He wasn't the brightest, but he also wasn't a warmonger, and he took great pride in being called the Friedenkaiser, the Peace Emperor. A good place to start might be to read up on prewar German society.
 
Well, the suffragette movement and the social democratic movement were already going well before the war. Women already had the vote in several places, including New Zealand and two Australian states (of particular interest here is South Australia, which was in large part settled by German immigrants, at this point many still with strong ties to their homeland), and the Sozialdemokratisches Partei was one of the largest in the Reichstag. Also, Wilhelm II was much maligned in Entente propaganda, and the echoes of that are still visible. He wasn't the brightest, but he also wasn't a warmonger, and he took great pride in being called the Friedenkaiser, the Peace Emperor. A good place to start might be to read up on prewar German society.
I suppose I could indeed be a victim of Entente propaganda here, but there are many dimensions to being a problematic Kaiser besides just warmongering as such. Lots of people attribute much of the reactionary resistance to moderate liberalization of the Second Reich to Wilhelm in particular. Looking at the situation in Elsass for instance--it was annexed (against Bismarck's wishes) as a strategic territory and also of course as a Germanophone region, but subordinated to Reich control directly instead of having its own internally chosen self-government on the usual pattern in Germany. Politically, looking at election statistics, it seems dubious to say the least to me the people were reconciled to their place in the Empire. That is not at all the same thing as saying they all yearned as one for reunification with France--I suppose by 1914 only a minority wanted that. But politically the only mainstream, pan-Reich party they voted for was the Social Democrats; more conservative people there voted for local parties mainly. And as a Reich possession, all standard accounts make out the overbearing authoritarian attitudes of the imposed rulers a major point of contention. Granted that the region could not simply be normalized as another Land of the Reich, couldn't the central authorities choose people less irritating and arrogant? Apparently not under Wilhelm II they couldn't, because he believed he could rule the annexed territories in the manner he apparently wished to rule all of Germany. It was his handpicked people who made the trouble and whom he personally shielded from consequences for trouble. It is conceivable to me that if either Wilhelm II had had different attitudes, or if he simply recognized that for the good of the Reich he had best keep hands off and have the central authorities pick more conciliatory viceroys, Elsass-Lotharingia could have been far better reconciled to being part of Germany, perhaps to the point that it would be plainly impractical for France to take the territory back.

And so on and on. The Reich system could not assimilate Social Democrats or even the Catholic Zentrum well, thanks to the bigotry of Wilhelm and his cronies.

Perhaps not guilty of being a warmonger as such then, but what he was guilty of pretty much forced a militaristic turn of the nation that was tantamount to desiring war without perhaps anyone personally wishing it. To repeat, the one thing you cannot do with bayonets is sit on them, and when the bayonet-wielding institutions are deemed to be the heart and purpose of the state, sooner or later they will have to wield them.

If German society had found a way to shunt the imperial and Prussian royal monarchs to the side and to make the military an instrument of larger policy instead of the other way round, perhaps the Great War could have been avoided.

Probably not; Germany was hardly the only party at fault! The "war guilt" clauses of Versailles were inexcusable victor's justice, that is plain. France, Russia, and even Britain had much to answer for in terms of preferring war as a "solution" and really, it was just business as usual for the Westphalian state system anyway; all that had changed was the sheer magnitude and kinds of force to be employed. And the alliance systems ramified to draw all major powers into the maelstrom all at once so no one with power and presence and credibility was left to mediate any kind of settlement. "Fixing" Germany could not prevent the war all by itself.

But I think anyone who denies Germany was, along with the rest of the major belligerents, pretty broken in the "Belle" Epoque as some conservative minded people nostalgically viewed it (I personally get the term from Herman Kahn) is refusing to face the very problematic reality.
 
No German never had pillarisation and was much more a industrial society than Netherlands (at least in how the country thought of itself).
Germany was maybe not the Netherlands, but it was pretty pillarized prior to Nazism - NSDAP was the first true big-tent party in Germany. The Imperial-era and Weimar-era SPD in particular was much more of a workers' party than the post-1945 SPD.
 
What would it even mean to be German without the world wars?

A German nation in pre WWI borders? An 2nd Reich that never ended? A modern federalized constitutional democracy? A communist regime done right or wrong? What about the colonies?

Would such a scenario still include persecution of minorities as it did under the Nazi regime just without the war? Would it include involvement in minor wars if there are no worldwars?

Most scenarios here and in similar places either like to show what might have happened and have it turn out into a near utopia or a near dystopia, because those are the most interesting bits. A more realistic scenario would be somewhere in between.

The loss of the first World War helped shape the German Republic and the Nazi regime and the horror of the latter helped shape the Germanies that came after that.

Without that pretty much everything is fair game.

Some point to consider though. Germany was the birthplace of Karl Marx and his ideology. Without a WWI Russia would be a lot less likeley to have revolution and Germany might be more likely to have one with perhaps less horrible results.

Germany also had some colonies pre-WWI not many compared to the other European powers, but they had them. The way they acted in those colonies are frequently overlooked, because of the much worse horrors that later happened closer to home and because other western powers aren't exactly in any position to cast the first stone from the inside of their glasshouses, but still, there is no way around the fact, that being a colonial overlord inevitably goes hand in hand with "being the bad guy".

Also the territory of the German empire pre-WWI contained a multitude of people with different languages and cultures from the French in the west to the Poles in the east. Either these gets forcibly repressed and Germanized or the country develops some sort of system where being a citizen of the empire does not automatically equate with speaking a particular language. The first road is an ugly one and the second road is quite difficult and would require reinventing what it means to be German to give everyone something in common. Difficult without some common enemy.

There is also the problem that WWI and WWII are not entirely the reason Germany developed the way it did. Anti-Semitism was a thing long before WWI for example.

Things could go in a multitude of ways. Many of them would include some quite horrible stuff. It would be a mistake to imagine that without the World Wars everything would be perfect of even just better. On the other hand it would be a mistake to somehow fall into the trap of thinking a wars a necessary evil that taught a lessons that needed to be learned.

I will even state that the question should be reversed : what would need a change in Germany’s culture to avoid WW1 ?

You need a different unification, a peaceful one, and one that does not lead to a Germany under Prussia’s hegemony.

Prussia was the curse of Germany. It was a militaristic and colonialist State (but a State that would not colonize distant overseas lands but instead wanted to colonize european neighboring lands), or as others put a State owned by a warmongering army.

Without changing this, you will have some kind of WW1.
 
Top