GERMANY HADN’T UNIFIED IN 1871?
The man remembered as the architect of German unification is Otto von Bismarck: a junker, or Prussian aristocrat, and a brilliant if ruthless statesman. In 1862, he became minister-president of Prussia, the most powerful – industrially, economically and militarily – of the dozens of German states, and through a series of wars, he forged a nation. The German empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871, with Bismarck as first chancellor and the reigning Prussian king, Wilhelm I, as kaiser. It would last until the end of World War I in 1918.
Bismarck, later known as
