Well, it is a great icon for German discussions, both because the two of them were different in some respects and alike in others and because of the way they represent different ways of approaching the question of what it means to be German that shaped the debate before and after the founding of the Reich.

See, you learn something new every day: sadly, our history lessons stopped with the end of WWI in 1919 (I think the uprising in Kiel was the last thing we covered in any detail) and my Leistungskurs did the Third Reich but not the Weimar Republic,so I had never heard the name of Brüning before this! And now I want to explore what alt!Germany would look like in more detail (if the whole thing were not so damn depressing, considering what *did* happen...)