BLOOD AND IRON

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE 1871-1918

This is a ‘ brilliant account that marks the arrival of a major new talent’

KATJA HOYER

The History Press, 256pp, £14.99

Bismarck’s Germany was a federal conglomeration of 39 states ‘whose only binding experience was conflict against external enemies’ and he sought to perpetuate this fragile sense of unity by attacking internal enemies. ‘Breakneck and lurid, subtle and momentous, the story of the German empire is the sort of subject that could overwhelm a seasoned television don with 1,200 pages to play with, let alone a debut writer with 239,’ wrote Oliver Moody in his review for the Times. Yet ‘Katja Hoyer, a German-born historian living in Sussex, more or less pulls it off, rattling stylishly through the long century from the humbling of Napoleon to the abdication of Wilhelm II in a book so short you could wolf it down in six or seven hours, were you so minded.’

Saul David in the Daily Telegraph found it to be ‘fluently written and convincingly argued’, a ‘brilliant account... that marks the arrival of a major new talent’. However, James Hawes, in the Spectator, objected to Hoyer’s whitewashing of Bismarck, who becomes ‘the mere agent of this allegedly irresistible national mood, a tactical genius and a responsible European diplomat after 1871, rather than the “demonic” figure our ambassador, Lord Odo Russell, considered him... This wasn’t unification at the bidding of some vague national will, as Hoyer implies, but conquest by a polity uniquely and deliberately organised for all-out war.’ While Hoyer’s book ‘is an entertaining enough read, if you seek true insight into the PrussianGerman empire, Christopher Clark’s

Iron Kingdom [2007] remains the place to go’.