Plessner, for example, spoke of the "belated nation" (), the delayed creation of a nation-state from above. Other historians have argued that nationalism played an especially aggressive, precociously right-wing destructive role during the Second Empire. Ernst Fraenkel, the young Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard A. Ritter, M. Rainer Lepsius and others identified powerful long-term weaknesses in the Empire's system of government: the blocked development of parliamentarianism, the severely fragmented system of parties that resembled self-contained blocks, and other factors that later burdened Weimar and contributed to its breakdown. Leonard Krieger, Fritz Stern, George Mosse and Kurt Sontheimer emphasized the illiberal, antipluralistic elements in German political culture upon which National Socialist ideas could later build. Hans Rosenberg and others argued that preindustrial elites, especially the east Elbian landowners (the Junkers), upper-level civil servants and the officer corps retained great power and influence well into the 20th century. In the long term, they represented an obstacle to democratization and parliamentarianism. As Heinrich August Winkler has shown, their effort is visible in the pernicious role played by agrarian interests in the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The unification of Germany by means of "blood and iron" under Prussian hegemony expanded the political influence and social weight of the officer corps with its status-oriented claims to exclusivity and autonomy. Along with the old elites, many traditional and preindustrial norms, ways of thinking and modes of life also survived, which included the authoritarian outlook and antiproletarian claims of the petty bourgeoise as well as militaristic elements of middle-class political culture, such as the institution of the "reserve officer". The liberal Max Weber criticized the "feudalization" of the upper bourgeoisie, which seemed to accept both the disproportional representation of the nobility in politics and the aristocratic norms and practices, instead of striving for power on its own terms or cultivating a distinctly middle-class culture. Lacking the experience of a successful revolution from below, schooled in a long tradition of bureaucratically led reforms from above and challenged by a growing workers' movement, the German bourgeoise appeared relatively weak and—compared with the West—almost "unbourgeois" Another variant of the theory has been provided by Michael Stürmer, who, echoing claims of conservative historians during the Imperial and Weimar periods, argues that it was geography that was the key to German history. Stürmer contends that what he regards as Germany's precarious geographical situation in the heart of Central Europe left successive German