The German Empire - (Modern Library Chronicles) by Michael Sturmer (Paperback)

About the Book

From one of Germany's greatest historians comes a profile of one of the most fateful periods of world history: Germany's unification and evolution into the juggernaut that would plunge the world into two world wars.

Book Synopsis

In a remarkably vibrant narrative, Michael Stürmer blends high politics, social history, portraiture, and an unparalleled command of military and economic developments to tell the story of Germany's breakneck rise from new nation to Continental superpower. It begins with the German military's greatest triumph, the Franco-Prussian War, and then tracks the forces of unification, industrialization, colonization, and militarization as they combined to propel Germany to become the force that fatally destabilized Europe's balance of power. Without The German Empire's masterly rendering of this story, a full understanding of the roots of World War I and World War II is impossible.

Review Quotes

"A concise, richly descriptive, and authoritative history." --The New York Times Book Review

"A brief yet thorough introduction to an episode of German history that has proven pivotal . . . over the past century and a half. . . . Stürmer's superlative analysis of Bismarck the man, of his motives and actions, is a masterpiece of clarity and brevity." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Clear, concise, and compelling--a welcome corrective to the view that a principle task of historiography is to assign blame." --Kirkus Reviews

"[A] concise, information-packed history of imperial Germany, from its creation in 1870 to its collapse in the aftermath of World War I, that makes one acutely aware of what-might-have-beens." --Forbes

About the Author

Michael Stürmer has been a professor of history at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg since 1973 and is currently chief correspondent for Springer-Verlag in Berlin. The author of a number of books on German history, he has been a visiting research fellow at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Sorbonne, and the University of Toronto.