William Tyler
Bismarck and Unification

Bismarck is the outstanding Prussian/German of the mid 19th century. It was Bismarck who saw through German Unification in 1871. He famously remarked that unification would not be brought about ‘by speeches and the resolutions of majorities but by blood and iron’. And so Bismarck took Germany to war, firstly with Denmark, then with Austria, and, finally, with Napoleon III’s France. Bismarck’s aim was the consolidation of Germany under Prussian rule. He had no wish to drive eastwards towards the German lands of Austria as Hitler did. Hitler’s dream was different- it was of a Greater Germany encompassing Austria and other lands where Germans were living in significant numbers.

The idea of German unification had been around since Napoleonic interventions in the political structures in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century.

Bismarck changed the history of Germany (and of Europe), and his legacy lives on in today’s Democratic German state, and arguably in Germany’s leading role within The EU.