Austria was still economically and politically the more mature and powerful German state.

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

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.

The volunteers that the Prussian king had called up in his 1813 appeal were called Landwehr units, and they made up 120,565 of the 290,000 men in the land army. They were further supported by various Freikorps units and additional volunteers from Prussia and the other German states. What made this the stuff of legend was not only the fact that thes

Bismarck and his contemporaries thus grew up in a world full of stories about the heroic effort and beautiful spirit of the Wars of Liberation, as they became known.

The new state now encompassed many ethnic minorities such as Polish, Danish and French communities, against which Bismarck could create the contrast of German citizenship. When compared to a Frenchman, Germans would see…

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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 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

The change at Vienna that had the most momentous consequences for the future formation of the German Reich was the allocation of a large block of territory along the River Rhine to Prussia. Britain wanted to ensure that there was a secure and reliable German bulwark in central Europe to keep potential French aggression at bay and to fill the power