[1806 - 1871] German Confederation and Unification

In the year 1806, an empire that had lasted a thousand years vanished. The Holy Roman Empire, a sprawling, bewildering entity of over 300 German-speaking states, was dissolved by Napoleon Bonaparte. What he left behind was not a country, but a ghost—a patchwork quilt of kingdoms, duchies, and free cities, all suddenly unmoored. This is where our story of Germany begins, not with a unified nation, but with a question: what does it mean to be German? After Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the great powers of Europe gathered at the Congress of Vienna. They tried to put things back as they were, but you can’t put a genie back in the bottle. The genie, in this case, was nationalism. For the first time, people from Bavaria to Prussia, from Saxony to Hanover, had fought a common enemy. They shared a language, the verses of Goethe and Schiller, and a burgeoning sense of a common destiny. Yet, the new "German Confederation" they created was a cruel joke. It was a toothless league of 39 states, intentionally designed by the conservative Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich to suppress any liberal or nationalist ideas. Power lay with the old aristocrats, and the dream of a single German nation was a dangerous one to have. Life for many in these decades settled into a quiet, inward-looking rhythm known as the Biedermeier period. In tidy, respectable homes, families gathered around the piano. Furniture was simple and functional. The turmoil of the Napoleonic wars was over, and people sought refuge in the domestic sphere. But beneath this calm surface, the ground was shifting. The first steam engines coughed to life in the Ruhr valley, belching smoke that heralded the dawn of an industrial age. Peasants left their fields for jobs in textile mills and ironworks, their lives now dictated by the factory whistle instead of the sun. And a different kind of engine was chugging along: the *Zollverein*, or customs union, established in 1834. Led by the ambitious kingdom of Prussia, it was a masterstroke of economic foresight. Suddenly, goods could travel between most German states without crushing tariffs. A bolt of Saxon cloth could reach a market in Bavaria without its price doubling. This economic web was quietly stitching the German states together, making them interdependent. Prussia was building the body of a nation, even if it didn’t yet have a political soul. That soul tried to burst forth in 1848. A wave of revolution, the "Springtime of Peoples," swept across Europe. In Berlin, the capital of Prussia, citizens threw up barricades of cobblestones and overturned carts. They flew a new flag—black, red, and gold—a symbol of a united, liberal Germany. Workers, students, and middle-class professionals fought against the King’s soldiers, demanding a constitution and a unified fatherland. For a moment, it seemed they had won. In the city of Frankfurt, a national assembly convened. It was a parliament of idealists—professors, lawyers, and writers who painstakingly drafted one of the most liberal constitutions in the world. They debated every clause, arguing about rights, freedoms, and the shape of the new Germany. Finally, in 1849, they made their offer. They would ask the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, to become the Emperor of a new, constitutional German Empire. The King’s reply was a deathblow to their dreams. He would not, he declared, accept a "crown from the gutter," offered by commoners and revolutionaries. He was a king by divine right, not by the will of the people. The revolution crumbled. The dreamers went home, the barricades came down, and the old order returned. It seemed that Germany would never be united by speeches and majority votes. And so the stage was set for a different kind of man. Enter Otto von Bismarck. He was no liberal idealist. A towering Prussian Junker—a member of the landed aristocracy—with a bristling mustache and a will of iron, Bismarck was a master of *Realpolitik*, the politics of cold, hard reality. Appointed Minister President of Prussia in 1862, he looked at the failed revolution and drew a very different conclusion. "The great questions of the day," he famously declared to a skeptical parliament, "will not be decided by speeches and majority decisions... but by iron and blood." Prussia, under Bismarck’s guidance, was a state transforming. Its army was equipped with the new Dreyse needle gun, a breech-loading rifle that could be fired five times faster than the muzzle-loaders used by its rivals. Its rapidly expanding railway network, the densest in continental Europe, could move entire armies to a border in days, not weeks. Bismarck had his "iron." Now he just needed to spill the "blood." He did so in three short, brutally efficient wars. First, in 1864, he drew Austria in as an ally to seize the territories of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. Then, just two years later, he turned on his ally. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 was a stunning demonstration of Prussian might. The needle gun and the railways gave Prussia a decisive edge. In seven weeks, Austria was crushed and expelled from German affairs forever. Bismarck united the northern German states into a new, powerful North German Confederation, a Germany-in-waiting, dominated by Prussia. Only the southern states—like Catholic Bavaria and Württemberg—remained hesitant, wary of Prussian dominance. Bismarck knew he needed a common, external threat to bring them into the fold. He found it in France. Through masterful diplomatic provocation, twisting the language of a telegram known as the Ems Dispatch, he goaded the French Emperor Napoleon III into declaring war in 1870. As Bismarck had calculated, the southern German states, seeing France as the aggressor, flocked to Prussia’s side. The combined German armies, moving with terrifying speed and precision, shattered the French forces. On January 18th, 1871, the story reaches its dramatic climax. In a setting of ultimate triumph and humiliation, the German princes gathered not in a German city, but in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, the hated symbol of French power. Surrounded by paintings celebrating French victories, the Prussian King, Wilhelm I, was proclaimed German Emperor—the Kaiser. A new, powerful, and profoundly militaristic nation had been born in the heart of Europe, forged not in the hopeful fires of revolution, but in the crucible of war. The German Question had been answered, not with a ballot, but with a sword.