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Title: Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918
Author: Katja Hoyer
Publication Date: 2021
Producer: Blackstone Publishing
Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
Recording Time: 8 hours, 13 minutes
Publisher’s summary
via audible
This vivid 50-year history of Germany from 1871-1918 – which inspired events that forever changed the European continent – is the story of the Second Reich from its violent beginnings and rise to power to its calamitous defeat in the First World War.
Before 1871, Germany was not yet a nation but simply an idea.
Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring 39 individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France – all without destroying itself in the process?
In this unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern history, Katja Hoyer tells the story of German Empire’s beginning to its defeat in World War I.
This often startling narrative is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval, and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron.
My Review:
I will confess that I already knew quite a bit about this topic, having studied it during my college years. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Hoyer’s book immensely. She wrote a short and thorough book on a topic that I spent an entire semester studying. She primarily achieves her succinctness, I think, by focusing the narrative on Germany’s two most prominent political figures during these years: Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II. Bismarck is the practical Prussian political genius who forged together the nation of Germany and then oversaw its rise into an empire. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the monarch who largely undid that work. Nevertheless, even after World War I which was largely a catastrophe for Germany, the idea of “Germany” not only survived, it was more firmly established than ever.
Hoyer was born in East Germany in 1985, where her mother was a teacher and her father was an East German military officer. You get a sense in her writing that this history is personal to her, as it surely must be, but I never felt like I was not reading something even-handed and academic. Her more recent work is titled Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990, and I definitely plan to read it.
The narrative thread of Germany’s rise, in the book, starts with Napoleon and the aftermath of his near conquest of Europe. This set the stage for fighting – blood and iron – in the 1840s and 1870s, the latter of which led to the founding of Bismarck’s Germany. Bismarck believed in the idea of a united Germany and he knew that the main thing which could bring together the otherwise diverse Germans was a threat from the outside. He thus used the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) to unite the country.
Once established as a unified country, Germany was an immediate threat to the existing world order. Bismarck was Prussian and instinctively militaristic, but he was also pragmatic. He did not want France, Russia, and England to form a coalition to destroy his new country before it could get going, so he spent his years as chancellor building a complex set of agreements internationally to convince Germany’s neighbors of its peaceful intentions. Kaiser Wilhelm I was content to let him do this, as he had no interest in being monarch of any place other than Prussia.
The problem with Bismarck’s rule was that it could not work without him as ruler. Famous for his belief in and mastery of realpolitik, he established complex internal and international agreements to keep Germany rapidly growing and at peace. It is unclear how long he could have sustained his efforts, even at the helm of the country, but when Kaiser Wilhelm II took power, he was pressured by the new monarch to resign. Thus began the second phase of the Second Reich.
Wilhelm II inherited a country at a young age, and he was too brash to realize how fragile it was. Germany continued to grow and prosper, but its craftily won peace eroded. This finally culminated with Wilhelm II’s inadvisable promise of full military support for Austria after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Wilhelm II thought – erroneously – that Germany’s pledge of military support would discourage Russia’s involvement on behalf of Serbia. The opposite happened and the world descended into the largest war in human history. Germany, though now a superpower, was outmatched in a war of attrition, especially once the Americans entered the war against them. Defeated and forced to go through immense suffering, something somewhat unexpected happened. Germany, though only a few decades old, survived and was bonded together by the shared trauma of blood and iron.
Hoyer does an excellent job making the story interesting with small historical details. In the section wherein seemingly everything is going wrong for Wilhelm II, Hoyer relays a story about Dietrich Graf von Hülsen-Haeseler who died on a hunting trip with the Kaiser. The military officer had donned a ballerina costume to get a laugh out of the Kaiser who had been despondent over recent events. He succeeded. Unfortunately, he then had a heart attack in that costume and created yet another scandal for the Kaiser to handle.
Hoyer’s narrative mentions often the rise of Germany’s socialist party, the SPD, however, as the story is largely from Bismarck and Wilhelm II’s perspectives, the party comes across as a growing threat, and an other, without a lot of in-depth exploration from its own perspective. The reader can understand its rise by seeing Bismarck and Wilhelm II’s respective failures, but the book does not shift the time period’s narrative to explain things from their point of view.
Hoyer notes that despite the eventual catastrophe, much of what Bismarck put in place survived. Germany developed a national identity in this time period that was cemented by the war rather than destroyed by it. Germany also developed the capacity – education, resources, infrastructure – to be a global economic power. That also survived the war (and then WW2.)
Hoyer’s book gives readers an opportunity to see the seeds that grew into Hitler rise to power a generation later, however, it does not paint a picture of that rise being an inevitability. Germany in 1918 certainly had a wound to its national pride, a growing sense of antisemitism, and a suffering and impoverished population after the war. However, the Germany of 1918 still had a long way to go to become the Germany of a generation later. There is sometimes a sense that World War I and World War II were one long war, with a pause between, but a lot of important events occurred in that pause. Hoyer’s book, to its immense credit, leaves its readers wanting to read onward rather than leaving them believing they have arrived.
I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Natasha Soudek, and her performance was excellent. She sounded so much like Scarlett Johansson (an great audiobook narrator in her own right) that I double-checked after I started the audio. I’ll share Soudek’s bio here:
Natasha Soudek is an Audie-nominated, multiple Earphones Award-winning actress and narrator who has been featured in more than 200 audiobooks and television commercials. Star Trek fans may recognize her as the first blond Vulcan in Trekkie history, Lt. Soudek, from the movie Star Trek Voyages: Phase 2. Born in Texas and also raised in Berlin and Vienna by German-Austrian parents, Natasha speaks native German, specializes in Russian/Eastern-European accents, and narrates all genres.
If you enjoy history, I absolutely recommend this book. It’s short, detailed, and well-written. I will definitely be reading her other book on East Germany.
