[1806 - 1918] The Age of Empire

Our story begins in 1806, not with a birth, but with a burial. The Holy Roman Empire, a thousand-year-old ghost of German-speaking lands, was swept away by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. For the patchwork of over 300 kingdoms, duchies, and free cities, it was an age of profound humiliation. French soldiers marched through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; French law was imposed. Yet, from this very defeat, a new and powerful idea began to stir. For the first time, a writer in Munich, a student in Jena, and a merchant in Hamburg began to feel a common bond forged in shared language, culture, and opposition to a foreign master. This nascent nationalism erupted in the Wars of Liberation, or *Befreiungskriege*, from 1813 to 1815. It was a brutal, popular uprising that helped drive Napoleon out, creating a powerful founding myth for a Germany that did not yet exist on any map. The fall of Napoleon did not bring the unified, liberal nation that many patriots had dreamed of. Instead, the great powers of Europe, meeting at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, sought to turn back the clock. They established the German Confederation, a loose association of 39 states dominated by the conservative Austrian Empire. Under the watchful eye of Austria's cunning statesman, Klemens von Metternich, liberalism and nationalism were ruthlessly suppressed. Spies monitored university lecture halls, radical professors were fired, and the press was heavily censored. But you cannot kill an idea. Beneath the surface of this placid, authoritarian order, the currents of change flowed stronger. Railways began to stitch the states together, creating economic links that transcended political borders. A customs union, the *Zollverein*, further bound them. In 1832, at the Hambach Festival, 30,000 people gathered to demand freedom and national unity, defiantly waving the black, red, and gold colors that would one day become the German flag. In 1848, the dam broke. Inspired by revolutions in France, the long-suppressed desire for change exploded across the German states in what became known as the “Springtime of Peoples.” Barricades went up in the streets of Berlin and Vienna. In Frankfurt, a revolutionary National Assembly, the first freely elected parliament for all of Germany, convened to write a constitution. For a fleeting, miraculous year, it seemed the dream was within reach. They drafted a charter of fundamental rights and offered the crown of a new, constitutional German Empire to the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. His response was a deathblow. A monarch by divine right, he sneered that he would not accept a “crown from the gutter,” offered by shopkeepers and professors. The revolution collapsed, its leaders executed, imprisoned, or forced to flee, many finding new homes in the United States. The dream of a liberal, unified Germany, created by the people, was dead. From the ashes of this liberal failure rose a different path to unity, one not of debate and constitutions, but of “iron and blood.” This was the path of Otto von Bismarck, appointed Minister President of Prussia in 1862. A towering figure of Junker aristocracy, Bismarck was a master of *Realpolitik*—a ruthless and pragmatic pursuit of state interest. He despised liberalism but saw nationalism as a powerful tool to be harnessed for the glory of the Prussian monarchy. To unite Germany under Prussia, he would need to expel his great rival, Austria, and overcome the suspicions of the other German states and foreign powers. He accomplished this through three brilliantly executed and shockingly swift wars. In 1864, he allied with Austria to seize territories from Denmark. Just two years later, in 1866, he turned on his former ally, crushing the Austrian army in a mere seven weeks. Finally, he provoked a vainglorious France into declaring war in 1870. The combined German armies, moving with terrifying speed and efficiency on their extensive rail network, overwhelmed the French. On January 18, 1871, in an act of supreme political theatre and calculated humiliation of the defeated French, the German Empire, the *Kaiserreich*, was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. King Wilhelm I of Prussia was now German Emperor. This new empire was a marvel of the late 19th century. Its population swelled from 41 million in 1871 to nearly 68 million by 1914. It was an era of explosive economic growth known as the *Gründerzeit*, or Founder's Epoch. Germany rapidly industrialized, its steel production, led by behemoths like Krupp, overtaking Britain's by 1900. Its chemical and electrical industries, with names like Bayer and Siemens, became world leaders. The landscape was transformed. The smoke of factory chimneys hung over sprawling new cities like Berlin, Hamburg, and the industrial heartland of the Ruhr valley. But this new wealth created deep social fissures. A new class of fabulously wealthy industrialists stood opposite a vast, impoverished urban working class. Fearing the rise of socialism, Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” had the Social Democratic party outlawed. Yet, in a paradoxical move, he also created the world's first modern welfare state in the 1880s, introducing health, accident, and old-age insurance to win the loyalty of the workers. For two decades, his genius for diplomacy maintained a fragile peace in Europe through a complex web of alliances. The old chancellor's era ended abruptly in 1890. The new, young Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was ambitious, impulsive, and jealous of Bismarck's power. He dismissed the statesman and embarked on a new, aggressive foreign policy—*Weltpolitik*, or “world policy.” Wilhelm was desperate for Germany to have its “place in the sun,” to rival the British Empire. He began a massive naval buildup, directly challenging British supremacy on the seas and starting a ruinously expensive arms race. The careful diplomacy of Bismarck was replaced by bellicose speeches and clumsy interventions that alienated Germany's neighbors. Society at home was a strange mix of dynamism and rigidity. It was a world leader in science and technology, a land of philosophers and musicians, but it was also a society dominated by a militaristic, aristocratic elite. The air grew thick with a hyper-nationalism that was both a source of immense pride and a poisonously insecure aggression. This tension could not hold. In the summer of 1914, the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo provided the spark. A web of rigid alliances, military plans that could not be stopped once started, and years of simmering imperial rivalries dragged Europe into the abyss. The German people, like others across the continent, greeted the outbreak of war with a wave of patriotic euphoria, the “Spirit of 1914.” Millions of young men marched off, convinced they would be home by Christmas. They marched into a new kind of hell: the industrialized slaughter of trench warfare on the Western Front. At home, the British naval blockade slowly starved the nation. The winter of 1916-17 was the *Steckrübenwinter*, the “Turnip Winter,” where the meager diet consisted of little else. Society buckled under the strain. By the autumn of 1918, Germany was exhausted and defeated. The army's high command, which had effectively run the country as a military dictatorship, finally admitted to the Kaiser that the war was lost. As the truth set in, the imperial system disintegrated. Sailors in the port of Kiel mutinied, and revolution swept the country. On November 9, 1918, with Berlin in chaos, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and fled to Holland. The German Empire, born in the glorious Hall of Mirrors just 47 years earlier, died an ignominious death. That same day, the German Republic was proclaimed. The long, tumultuous century that had begun with the end of one empire concluded with the violent collapse of another, leaving a legacy of technological marvels, social progress, and a deep, traumatic wound that would fester and shape the dark history of the century to come.