And he took Schwarzschild's idea to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the next week.

The Prussian peasantry said, We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things.

Unlike football, the Olympics were always closely associated with elites amateur athletes recruited from universities, and so on. The father of the modern Olympic Games, Baron de Courbertin, was a French aristocrat who promoted sports to reinvigorate the men of France after their defeat in the Franco Prussian War of 1871.

First, when Germany refused to allow passage through the Kiel Canal to a ship carrying munitions to Poland during the Polish Prussian war of 1920, the Permanent Court of International Justice said in dicta that when a waterway has been dedicated to international use , the riparian can no longer exclude other States at its discretion.

France s current direction is a source of deep concern in Germany, whose evolution should be seen in France as a source of inspiration an example to be emulated, even if the country must not fall into self flagellation. Yet today s debate in France over the German model reminds one eerily of the discussions that followed France s defeat in the Franco Prussian War.

One of the great transformational leaders in history, Otto von Bismarck, became largely incremental and status quo oriented after achieving the unification of Germany under Prussian direction. Likewise, Franklin Delano Roosevelt s foreign policy objectives and style were modest and incremental in his first presidential term, but became transformational in 1938 when he decided that Adolf Hitler represented an existential threat.

During the Middle Ages, sports were regularly forbidden in England because they came at the expense of military training. After France s defeat by Bismarck s Germany in the Franco Prussian War, Baron Pierre de Coubertin (who re launched the Olympic Games a few decades later) recommended a renewed national emphasis on sport, which by this point was seen as a form of military preparation.