Otto von Bismarck 1815-1898

Diplomat, warmonger, founder of the empire - The first chancellor and the emergence of the German nation-state 1815-1898. He is arguably the most significant statesman in modern German history and one of the most controversial: Otto von Bismarck, the staunchly conservative Prussian who forged the German nation-state in 1871. Bismarck was a man full of contradictions: a hater of socialism who created the most progressive social insurance systems in the world to protect workers, a warmonger who instigated three bloody conflicts but then declared peace in Europe to be the most important goal of his foreign policy, a Junker who always longed for simple rural life, during whose tenure Germany transformed from a poor agrarian state into a land of railways and blast furnaces, telegraph lines, and electric street lighting. In 172 pages, GEO EPOCHE describes in its new issue the life and times of the nobleman born in Altmark in 1815. It recounts Bismarck's attempt to save Prussia's king from the revolution of 1848 with a handful of peasants, a failed endeavor. It reports how the failed counter-revolutionary nevertheless managed to rise to the position of Prussian Prime Minister during a state crisis in 1862 and to found the German Empire. It depicts Bismarck's foreign policy and his struggle against the Social Democrats. It documents the bitter public campaign of the chancellor dismissed in 1890 against his successors. And finally, it draws a balance of his controversial legacy.