Bismarck had raised German national consciousness with the Second Schleswig War, now it was time to put Prussia at the heart of it. But since the fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1805, it was Austria and her Habsburg kings who had been leaders of the German Confederation and Bismarck needed them out of the way. His Austro-Prussian War was a carefully planned stage in the unification of Germany.
Bismarck’s pretext for war was the Schleswig-Holstein debate that had
