ABSTRACT
The second German Empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871. More than a century on, having experienced authoritarianism, republicanism, Nazism and division after the Second World War, the two Germanies-the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic-united on 3 October 1990 following a peaceful revolution and the breaching of the Berlin Wall, a symbolic as well as a physical act. In contrast, in the nineteenth century the disparate German lands were unified by ‘blood and iron’, a political, diplomatic and military process culminating in Prussia’s military defeat of Austria in 1866 at Königgrätz and her victory over France at Sedan in 1870. Prussia thus established her military but also her economic and political supremacy in a small German (kleindeutsch) state under the Prusso-German Kaiser, Wilhelm I, and the Prussian prime minister and German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.
