From the catastrophe of Jena and the Stein-Hardenberg reforms through Fichte's Addresses, the Wars of Liberation, the Congress of Vienna and the German Confederation, the Wartburg Festival and the Zollverein, the failed revolutions of 1848 and the Frankfurt Parliament, to Bismarck's wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, and the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Slide across the decades to read the major events that turned thirty-nine German states into the second Reich.
On 14 October, in twin battles less than twenty miles apart, Napoleon and Marshal Davout annihilate the Prussian army. Within a fortnight French troops are in Berlin; Hegel, finishing the Phenomenology in Jena, sees the emperor riding past his window — 'the world-soul on horseback'.
From the catastrophe of Jena and the Stein-Hardenberg reforms through Fichte's Addresses, the Wars of Liberation, the Congress of Vienna and the German Confederation, the Wartburg Festival and the Zollverein, the failed revolutions of 1848 and the Frankfurt Parliament, to Bismarck's wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, and the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Slide across the decades to read the major events that turned thirty-nine German states into the second Reich.
On 14 October, in twin battles less than twenty miles apart, Napoleon and Marshal Davout annihilate the Prussian army. Within a fortnight French troops are in Berlin; Hegel, finishing the Phenomenology in Jena, sees the emperor riding past his window — 'the world-soul on horseback'.
Confronted with the catastrophe of Jena, Baron vom Stein and, from 1810, Karl August von Hardenberg launch a programme of reform: abolition of serfdom, municipal self-government, reform of the army under Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, opening of the officer corps to commoners, religious toleration.
In French-occupied Berlin, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivers fourteen public lectures arguing that the salvation of Germany lies in moral regeneration through national education. The Addresses inaugurate the philosophy of German nationalism.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, as minister of education, founds the new Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin on the principle of unity of teaching and research. The university — modern Germany's first — sets a global model for higher education that will dominate the nineteenth century.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm publish the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen — Children's and Household Tales — a collection of German folk stories gathered from peasant informants in Hesse. The brothers' philological work makes the German Volk an object of patriotic scholarship.
Between 16 and 19 October, half a million Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and Swedish troops surround Napoleon's army of 200,000 outside Leipzig. After four days of fighting — the largest battle in European history before the World Wars — Napoleon retreats west of the Rhine; French power in Germany is broken.
After Blücher's Prussians decide Waterloo on 18 June, the Congress of Vienna under Metternich settles the German question. The 39 surviving German states are organised into a Deutscher Bund — a loose Confederation under Austrian presidency, with no parliament, no army, and no German citizenship.
On the three-hundredth anniversary of Luther's Theses, five hundred students from across Germany gather at the Wartburg castle — where Luther had translated the Bible — and demand a free, united Germany. Reactionary books are publicly burned. The German nationalist movement enters politics.
On 1 January, the Zollverein — a customs union covering eighteen states with eighteen million people — comes into operation under Prussian leadership. For the first time goods can move freely across most of Germany. Austria, conspicuously, is excluded.
On 7 December, the Ludwigsbahn between Nuremberg and Fürth runs its first train — six kilometres, hauled by an English-built locomotive named Der Adler, the Eagle. Within twenty years the German states will have more rail track than France and Britain.
When the French prime minister Adolphe Thiers demands the Rhine frontier in compensation for setbacks in the Levant, German patriotic feeling explodes. Nikolaus Becker writes 'Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien deutschen Rhein'; the next year August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben composes the Deutschlandlied on Heligoland.
Inspired by the February revolution in Paris, German liberals rise across the Confederation. Barricades go up in Berlin and Vienna; Metternich flees to London; Frederick William IV of Prussia bareheaded follows the coffins of the March dead. In May an elected German National Assembly meets at St Paul's Church in Frankfurt to draft a constitution.
On 3 April, a Frankfurt delegation offers Frederick William IV the German imperial crown. He refuses to accept a crown 'picked up from the gutter' by revolutionaries. The Parliament dissolves, its radical rump in Stuttgart is dispersed by troops, and uprisings in Baden and the Palatinate are crushed by Prussian armies.
Amid a constitutional crisis over army funding, King Wilhelm I of Prussia appoints Otto von Bismarck — the conservative Junker ambassador who had served in Frankfurt, St Petersburg, and Paris — Minister-President. Within weeks Bismarck announces that 'the great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and majority resolutions but by iron and blood'.
When the new Danish king Christian IX tries to incorporate the German-speaking duchies of Schleswig and Holstein into Denmark, Bismarck mobilises Prussia and Austria as a Confederation army. After a brief war the Danes are crushed at Dybbøl and surrender both duchies. Bismarck has his first foreign policy victory.
On 3 July, near the Bohemian village of Königgrätz (Sadová), the Prussian army under Moltke defeats the Austrians in a single afternoon. The needle-gun, the railway, and the general staff together prove decisive. The German Confederation dissolves; Prussia annexes Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and Frankfurt and founds the North German Confederation.
On 1 September, the army of Marshal MacMahon, with Emperor Napoleon III in person, is surrounded at Sedan in the Ardennes and capitulates. Within three days the Second French Empire falls; within three weeks the German armies are besieging Paris. Bismarck has his third war, and the south German states join the cause.
On 18 January, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — Louis XIV's palace, now a Prussian headquarters — King Wilhelm I of Prussia is proclaimed German Emperor before the assembled German princes. After eight hundred years of the old Empire and sixty-five years since its dissolution, a new German Reich is born.