In my last post, I noted how I'd set about to reading Eric Cline's 1177 B.C. Ah, but the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. I stopped a couple of chapters in to pick up Hans-Ulrich Wehler's The German Empire: 1871-1918. Wehler takes a very straight line approach from Bismarck to Hitler, and his treatment of the period specifically under discussion is pretty relentlessly Marxist. That said, with the exception of some purely economic sections on GDP, defense spending, etc., that are pretty dry, The German Empire is a pretty swift read (approx. 300 pages) and a fairly thorough discussion of how and why Bismarck forged together the empire, where the loci of power lay over the empire's 47-year history, and how World War I and the subsequent revolution that ushered in the Weimar Republic were the logical culmination of the attempts by entrenched military and agricultural interests in the north and east of the country to hold onto authoritarian power in the face of rising democratic and socialist thinking.
The other book I've been reading as part of brushing up on German history pre- and post-Third Reich is Michael Frayn's play Democracy, which covers pretty much the whole tenure of Willy Brandt as Chancellor of Germany (1969 to 1974), from his election at the head of the first leftist government in postwar West Germany to his resignation in the face of the discovery that one of his top aides, Günter Guillaume, was a spy for East Germany. This was a story with which I was wholly unfamiliar until a few weeks ago, and in seeking sources on the topic, I came across Frayn's play relatively early and thought it would be a quick way to get myself familiar with the story before diving into something more substantive on the Brandt period generally. I've got a lengthier Brandt bio on deck, as well as some other stuff on the 1953 workers uprising in East Germany.
Still waiting on a decision letter to decide my future course on graduate studies. More on that eventually, I assume...
