Germany 1800-1870

Germany between 1800 and 1870 is one of those historical subjects that sounds, at first glance, as though it might involve a great many earnest men in waistcoats discussing constitutions in rooms with poor heating. And, to be fair, it does. But it also contains revolution, reaction, nationalism, industrial change, social upheaval, dynastic ambition, and the slow, grinding construction of something that would eventually become modern Germany. In other words: plenty of trouble, just arranged with unusually thorough paperwork.

Germany 1800–1870 (2004) by Jonathan Sperber is a serious, muscular work of history that takes on a period when “Germany” was less a settled nation than a complicated idea in search of a map. At the start of the nineteenth century, the German lands were a patchwork of states, loyalties, rulers and confusions, all jostling under the long shadow of Napoleon. By the end, the landscape had been transformed by war, reform, liberal agitation, conservatism, economic development and the inconvenient persistence of people insisting that history ought to move in a direction. Sperber is here to explain how that happened, and why it was anything but tidy.

This is not a quaint tour of castles and composers. It is a book about change on a grand scale: political, social, economic and cultural. Old orders wobble, new classes emerge, cities grow, ideas spread, bureaucracies multiply, and ordinary life is repeatedly rearranged by forces far larger than any one person can comfortably manage. The great virtue of the book is that it does not reduce everything to a simple march toward unification, as though history were just waiting patiently for Bismarck to arrive and start rearranging Europe with a grim expression. Instead, Sperber restores all the contingency, conflict and competing possibilities that made the nineteenth century such an untidy business.

And what a cast of themes. Nationalism appears, naturally, but not in the neat, retrospective way that later generations like to imagine. Liberalism rises and struggles. Revolutions flare in 1848, as they did across Europe, full of idealism, argument and the recurring discovery that it is easier to demand change than to make it stick. Industrialisation begins to alter the social fabric. Religion, class, region and politics all tug in different directions. The result is a history less of inevitability than of pressure: pressure building, shifting, breaking and reforming across seven dense decades.

There is also the delicious irony that this was an era obsessed with order while repeatedly generating upheaval. Bureaucrats filed things, professors theorised things, princes defended things, radicals denounced things, and the population kept stubbornly changing underneath them all. It is the kind of history that reminds you how often modernity arrives not with a clean announcement but with confusion, argument and the gradual realisation that the old world has already started to go missing.

Sperber’s reputation is for scholarship rather than showmanship, and that is very much part of the appeal. This is a book for readers who like their history substantial, intelligent and firmly opposed to being turned into a costume drama with a few dates attached. It has range, authority and depth, and it treats the German lands not as a prelude to something more famous, but as a fascinating arena in their own right. If you want to understand how Europe was remade in the nineteenth century, this is exactly the sort of book that earns its keep.

For readers of Crappy Old Books, this is a splendid slab of historical seriousness: the kind of volume that suggests you may have opinions about state formation, revolutions and the Zollverein, even if you mainly bought it because it looked wonderfully solid and faintly intimidating. Which, frankly, is part of the charm.

Condition: Near Fine, meaning it has survived the upheavals of history rather better than most nineteenth-century German governments. A handsome copy of a rich, weighty and deeply rewarding study of a world being pulled, argument by argument and war by war, into modern shape.

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