Paul Sullivan chats to historian Katja Hoyer about her debut book, the Rise & Fall of the German Empire (1871-1918)
“My best anecdote about Berlin is a family outing to the TV tower when I was a child. It was a public holiday and an unseasonably warm and sunny day. My mum and dad had the day off so we decided to make the most of it, driving into Berlin in the old Trabi. I remember being very excited when we went up in the elevator and reached the viewing platform of the TV tower.
Everyone on the streets seemed so little, like ants. I pointed down excitedly and shouted that there were more and more ants coming out of houses and side streets. When my dad saw what I was pointing at, he went white and said we had to go. He had spotted armed police among the mass gatherings in the streets around the Alexanderplatz and was afraid the situation might escalate.
This was the 7th October 1989 and the GDR regime had staged its celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the founding of East Germany. Honecker had invited Gorbachev, and the atmosphere in Berlin was reaching fever-pitch with counter demonstrations gathering and armed police sent in to step in if things escalated. There was no telling what would happen. Would the protests turn violent? Would police and army be ordered to shoot? We drove home and watched the events unfold on the TV over the next days and weeks – there was a palpable feeling of history happening. That view from the TV tower has burnt itself into my mind like an old photograph.”
It was growing up in East Germany that made Katja Hoyer become a historian: “My country was wiped off the map practically overnight, and my generation has been urged to forget its history and legacy. When you grow up with a fractured sense of national identity, you have questions. In a way I am still grappling with the same problem that gave my 19th-century forebears headaches: Was ist deutsch?”
While Blood & Iron is not about the GDR or the Cold War, it certainly gets at the foundation of the problems of German national identity. It traces the history of the German nation state in 1871—“a game-changer in the history of modern Europe”—whereby Otto von Bismarck merged 38 individual states to create “a new power block right in the heart of the continent”. The book’s publication this year marks the 150th anniversary of the historic event.
The decades in question were not only hugely significant for Germany, but had major repercussions for European politics. While the book’s main emphasis is on the years 1871-1918, as per the subtitle, the initial chapters do a great job of sketching out the slow but gradual rise of German nationalism that led to unification.
This includes events such as Friedrich Wilhelm III’s famous 1813 ‘To My People’ speech (an appeal to rise up against Napoleon during the Wars of Liberation), the battle between Prussia and Austria for German dominance (the ‘small’ vs ‘big’ Germany question), and the growing political movement promulgated by a mix of student associations, intellectuals like Fichte and Hegel, and cultural aficionados such as the Brothers Grimm and the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Hoyer reminds us that 19th century ‘nationalism’ had liberal connotations, as opposed the right wing undertones the word carries today,
Then, of course, there was the 1848 revolution—“the turning point in German his…