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

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

When Napoleon’s armies at last suffered a major defeat in the winter of 1812 in the Russian campaign, Friedrich Wilhelm finally found the resolve to act. His powerful speech in the spring of 1813 rallied the Prussian people behind their king and a solidifying notion of fatherland. Regardless of class, creed, gender, age or region, many ordinary

In a series of long, drawn-out confrontations, 290,000 Germans would be called upon to fight. The spectacular climax of this was the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 where 500,000 people fought on all sides – the largest land battle in Europe before the twentieth century. Later dubbed the Battle of the Nations, it went down in German history as a

Fittingly, the year that Napoleon was finally beaten conclusively at Waterloo was also the year Otto von Bismarck was born: 1815. His childhood, just like that of most Germans growing up at the time, was heavily coloured by stories of the struggle against the French. When Napoleon’s army inflicted a humiliating defeat on Prussia in the twin battles

The Second Reich would be destroyed where it was first proclaimed – in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

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

‘Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided… but by iron and blood.’ Otto von Bismarck