Customer Reviews

Imperial Germany, 1871-1914: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics (History)

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Its great to see this valuable book back in print. This is a concise, combined historical overview and structural analysis of the Wilhelmine state. This book is structured in an unusual way. While it provides the basic narrative history, most of it is devoted to describing the basic features of Imperial Germany and how it changed over the period from its foundation to demise at the end of WWI. Berghahn covers basic demography, economic history, and the structures of politics. Unusually for a historian, Berghahn presents a great deal of the information in tabular form. This allows a more concise presentation. Berghahn is superb on the internal strains of the Wilhelmine state, an odd hybrid of traditional authoritarianism with some democratic elements. How these internal strains contributed to the often reckless foreign policies of Imperial Germany is discussed particularly well. The book concludes with the best concise description and analysis of the outbreak of WWI I've read. Recommended strongly for those interested in modern European history.

Berghahn's books offers a different way of looking at the German Empire; he offers clear and thorough topical readings on German economy, society and culture and closes his book with a description of how politics worked (or didn't) in Imperial Germany. Other historians tend to write chronologically, but Berghahn chooses differently and, in my humble opinion, this was a good decision, given the breadth of the material offered. Whereas Wolfgang Mommsen puts more stress on the role of the radicalizing middle class in the escalation of German foreign policy with a devastating war as a result, Berghahn paints a more general picture of a German government not being able to contain a pending conflict, while at the same time the interal situation is polarizing.
The many statitics in the book were insightful and I am going to enjoy this book in the future as an important reference book.

This book gives the reader a look at the statistical aspect of germany before the "Great War." It shows the reader why Germany thought it could win the war and also why it fought so well in the war. The book is a little hard to read because it throws quite a few numbers at you, but is still a bit interesting, espescially in the second half.