Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the 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

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

But Britain and the USA saw another Germany in the smouldering ashes of the Second Reich. The seeds of democracy and economic prosperity that had been sown by Bismarck had led to the slow and tender growth of a different national vision for Germany, one that would find its identity and its place amongst the nations of the world through trade, stabi

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 peo

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 its first years and decades, the German Empire busied itself to build monuments to ancient legends that were supposed to give meaning and collective memory to the newly formed Germany.

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

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 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