Blood and iron The rise and fall of the German Empire, 1871-1918

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. (Dec.)

A concise history of one of the most fateful developments in modern history: the creation of a united Germany from a clutter of smaller existing jurisdictions. At the center of the first half of Hoyer's story is Otto von Bismarck. The head of state of the nation created in 1871 after the German states had crushed France in the brief Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck was the driving force behind the governing of Germany until 1890. Born in that conflict under Prussian leadership, a newly united Germany, gradually ridding itself of regional loyalties, built itself into Europe's most powerful industrial and military power in a mere 40 years. Then, Hoyer argues that because of the failure of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers to prevent his nation's march toward another war, it suffered the devastating carnage of World War I. While failing to relate the full complexity of that war's outbreak as other historians now understand it, the author astutely portrays how, by the early 20th century, budding German democracy was sidelined in favor of "a silent dictatorship of the military." But this superb book isn't simply about government and war. Hoyer roots the gathering unity of the German states in a "defensive nationalism" caused by the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century and skillfully unveils how nationalism can come into being out of a sense of comparative inferiority. The author covers social, cultural, and religious developments under two Hohenzollern monarchs, especially Bismarck's path-breaking social legislation of the 1870s and '80s. She also deftly analyzes the emergence of Germans' sense, not yet fouled by racial assumptions, of themselves as a distinct people, although her resistance to the argument that Bismarck's and his successors' aspirations and achievements led inexorably to the future rise of Hitler will be rejected by some. It's hard to imagine a better, more up-to-date history of its subject. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.