Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire

Nonetheless, it was a vast expansion of power, resources and people that would add weight to Prussian dominance in the decades to come. The year 1815 thus marked a momentous turning point in the history of the emergent German Empire.

Wilhelm quickly found out that the perpetual dividing factors of religion, class, geography, culture and ethnicity – to name but a few – could not just be erased by the sheer force of personality and royal charisma he undoubtedly thought he possessed. Socialists kept on striking, Catholics still looked at the Prussian king with suspicion, and Polis

When Queen Louise tragically died in 1810 at the young age of 34, she became the icon of a German patriotic movement that would pressurise successive Prussian governments to rally all Germans behind a common cause. The image of the young Louise standing up for Prussia and Germany, not afraid to confront…

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On the bright, cold winter morning of 17 January 1871, Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, had a moment of crisis. Eventually, the old man lost what self-control he still had and began to sob, ‘Tomorrow will be the unhappiest day of my life! We are going to witness the burial of the Prussian monarchy and this, Count Bismarck, is all your fault!’ The 73-yea

In addition, religion seemed another useful battleground. Two-thirds of the population within the German Empire were Protestant and one third Catholic. By secularising German society, Bismarck sought to replace religion with national sentiment, thereby creating new identity references and reducing differences between Germans. Lastly, the internatio

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm was initially shocked. The Balkan war he had hoped for had suddenly turned into a large-scale European conflict. Nonetheless, he still saw an opportunity to finally bring all Germans together. On 1 August 1914, he declared, ‘today we are all German brothers and only German brothers’. While

As Bismarck himself pointed out in his famous 1862 speech, it would take war to unify the German people. That proved as accurate before 1871 as it did after. When Bismarck decided to forge a brand-new nation state in the fires of war against Denmark, Austria and France, he created a Germany whose only binding experience was conflict against externa

The ‘Old Fritz’ had earned his affectionate nickname in a series of successive military victories (including against France in 1757), often leading his men into battle in person, putting himself in such danger that several horses were shot from under him.

The German Empire was perpetually plagued by the conflicts inherent in the process of its creation. On the one hand, Bismarck acknowledged liberal traditions by introducing universal male suffrage, which allowed for the evolution of a genuinely pluralistic multi-party system, but on the other hand, this system came under constant strain from the Pr

The Iron Chancellor was an astute politician, perhaps one of the greatest statesmen of all time, and he understood how fragile the so-called Concert of Europe was in 1871. To introduce a new major power into the very heart of it was akin to placing a child with a trumpet into the midst of a world-class symphony orchestra. He knew the newcomer had t