Blood and Iron

November 15, 2021
Historian Hoyer debuts with an accessible if abbreviated chronicle of Germany’s Second Reich focused on its two most important leaders. Statesman Otto von Bismarck rode the “intoxicating wave of nationalist sentiment” that followed Prussia’s victory over Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War to unify 25 independent German states in 1871 and served as chancellor of the new empire until 1890. After Kaiser Wilhelm II’s grandfather and father both died in 1888, Wilhelm ruled Germany until his forced abdication in 1918, overseeing imperialist forays into Africa and other countries and the empire’s disastrous entrance into WWI. In Hoyer’s telling, Bismarck emerges as the far more complex figure; she documents his harsh repression of Germany’s Catholic and socialist leaders, as well as his enactment of some of the West’s first progressive social legislation. Unfortunately, Hoyer glosses over many noteworthy if distressing elements of this story, including Germany’s genocidal practices in southwest Africa and the rise of anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She makes excellent use of secondary sources, however, and lucidly explains how regional and political differences helped foster the “internal strife, division and stagnation” that Wilhelm hoped to overcome by going to war. The result is a solid introduction to how modern Germany came into being.