Blood and Iron

Before 1871, Germany was not yet a nation but simply an idea. Otto von Bismarck had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France - all without destroying itself in the process? In a unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern history, Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. This often-startling narrative is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron.

Katja Hoyer FRHistS is an Anglo-German historian. She was born in East Germany and read history at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London. Her essays have featured in History Today and BBC History Extra, and she also writes for the Spectator, the Washington Post, UnHerd, Die Welt and other newspapers on current political affairs in Germany and Europe. Blood and Iron is her first book. She is based in Sussex, UK.