Breakneck and lurid, subtle and momentous, the story of the German empire is the sort of subject that could overwhelm a seasoned television don with 1,200 pages to play with, let alone a debut writer with 239 ... Yet in Blood and Iron Katja Hoyer, a German-born historian living in Sussex, more or less pulls it off, rattling stylishly through the long century from the humbling of Napoleon to the abdication of Wilhelm II in a book so short you could wolf it down in six or seven hours, were you so minded ... Hoyer renders a vivid account of Wilhelm’s overweening ineptitude ... The book’s brevity results in a certain breathlessness. Inevitably many things are missing or too lightly touched on...Complex scholarly debates over questions such as the Schlieffen plan and the causes of the First World War are sometimes concertinaed more than I would like ... These forgivable shortcomings aside, Hoyer has mastered an intimidating jungle of material and written a balanced and hugely accessible introduction to the age when Germany became Germany.
There’s nothing particularly new in this assessment. The most impressive feature of this book is not its thesis but its brevity. Until now, I didn’t realize that it was possible to write a short book about Germany. Succinctness is an impressive and sadly undervalued quality in an author. A strict word count is a cruel tyrant; difficult decisions about what goes in have to be made and creativity inevitably curtailed. Hoyer nevertheless manages to pepper her trim narrative with some lovely frills. The mark of a really good short book is its ability to inspire curiosity. Blood and Iron achieves just that.
The themes of political fragility, social cleavages and pervasive militarism give an impressive depth and coherence to Hoyer’s tightly written narrative ... a book that has the merit of treating imperial Germany as an era on its own terms rather than as an inevitable prelude to the horrors of 1933-1945.
Hoyer takes the tale by the scruff of the neck and gives it a good shake for the less demanding general reader ... her thesis is bold and simple. It is also one fit for these days, when the great nations seem to be putting up the shutters again ... while this is an entertaining enough read, if you seek true insight into the Prussian-German empire, Clarke’s Iron Kingdom remains the place to go.
While failing to relate the full complexity of that war’s outbreak as other historians now understand it, the author astutely portrays how, by the early 20th century, budding German democracy was sidelined in favor of 'a silent dictatorship of the military.' But this superb book isn’t simply about government and war ... The author covers social, cultural, and religious developments under two Hohenzollern monarchs, especially Bismarck’s path-breaking social legislation of the 1870s and ’80s. She also deftly analyzes the emergence of Germans’ sense, not yet fouled by racial assumptions, of themselves as a distinct people, although her resistance to the argument that Bismarck’s and his successors’ aspirations and achievements led inexorably to the future rise of Hitler will be rejected by some ... It’s hard to imagine a better, more up-to-date history of its subject.
... accessible if abbreviated ... In Hoyer’s telling, Bismarck emerges as the far more complex figure; she documents his harsh repression of Germany’s Catholic and socialist leaders, as well as his enactment of some of the West’s first progressive social legislation. Unfortunately, Hoyer glosses over many noteworthy if distressing elements of this story, including Germany’s genocidal practices in southwest Africa and the rise of anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She makes excellent use of secondary sources, however, and lucidly explains how regional and political differences helped foster the 'internal strife, division and stagnation' that Wilhelm hoped to overcome by going to war. The result is a solid introduction to how modern Germany came into being.
