Bismarck sold it to the king as an extension of Prussian power. They would have liked to have seen Prussia dissolve itself into a larger Germany and eventually fade away as the German states merged together into a bigger thing. He didn’t set up Germany because he had this ideal of a German state. How Prussian was the greater Germany that emerged from this complicated process?īismarck wasn’t a nationalist.
In your book you make understandable the complex story of Prussia phasing itself out and becoming Germany.
#Blood a iron wars full
You could argue that it comes full circle with the First World War also being the ultimate case of “blood and iron” to unite the Germans under one flag and one nation state, if you will. I take that and ask whether that is really the case through the book. It’s a foundational idea of this first incarnation of Germany in 1871. For Bismarck, it was blood and iron that would make first Prussia and later Germany great. Parliament was liberal so it wanted to keep them because they felt it was a guarantee that the Prussian king would never have too much power, so they had a part of the Prussian military on their side, with liberal values. The Prussian king, Wilhelm I, was trying to reform the military: make it bigger, and abolish the Freikorps elements, volunteer regiments which were loyal to a greater idea of Germany rather than Prussia as a state. It was in the context of a debate on the military. It comes from a speech that Bismarck delivered to parliament in 1862. I wanted to make sure it was as widely accessible as possible. I feel it fits into a wider understanding of where we’ve come from as Europe in terms of this German state bringing a new entity to the scene in Europe.
There have been a lot of publications on the Second World War and the First World War and Weimar but not a lot on this topic, so I felt there was room for something new. There’s a special place for German history in the English psyche. I’ve lived and worked in England for 10 years. I think it’s the complexity of it that makes it more difficult to explore. There were elements of democracy, as people like Hedwig Richter have discussed really well, but equally there is this whole question of whether it led to the events that followed. People don’t know quite know what to do with the pre-World War I stuff. If you take the Nazis and the Second World War, it’s just evil and needs to be dealt with in that way. I wouldn’t have expected a celebration but I think there should have been some form of conversation about it. I guess that’s why you wrote the book now. 2021 is the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Second Empire.
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