ABSTRACT
In the prolonged struggle for supremacy in Germany between Austria and Prussia, the north German beast turned out to be the stronger one. Otto von Bismarck's Prussia unified the German nation state with "blood and iron" in the wars of 1866 and 1870-1871. The Germans discarded their tendency to exercise varied forms of hegemony in the political arena, as had been their inclination between 1870 and 1945. The exclusion of Austria from Germany, as a balancing factor against Prussian predominance, can be seen as a crucial element in the origins of the German problem. Non-German territories of the Habsburg Empire such as Galicia and Hungary were always a thorn in the flesh of the German nationalists, both in Germany and in Austria. Prussia circumvented Austrian political roadblocks by unifying Germany first in the economic sphere. A few generations of German historians, starting with Sybel and Treitschke, came to view German unification as the culmination of German history.
