Imperial Germany united twenty-five states under a Prussian emperor
The German Empire—Imperial Germany or the Second Reich—was the German Reich from unification in eighteen seventy-one until the November Revolution of nineteen eighteen turned Germany republican. It held twenty-five states with their own nobilities: kingdoms, grand duchies, duchies, principalities, free Hanseatic cities, and more.
On eighteen January eighteen seventy-one south German states (except Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein) joined the North German Confederation. A constitution of sixteen April renamed the federation the German Empire and made Prussian King Wilhelm I of the Hohenzollerns German Emperor; Berlin stayed capital and Otto von Bismarck, Prussia’s minister president, became chancellor—the longest-serving, from eighteen seventy-one to eighteen ninety.
Bismarck began with relatively liberal reforms then hardened, waging the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. Abroad he sealed the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in eighteen seventy-nine, warmed to the Ottomans, and by eighteen eighty-two folded Italy into the Triple Alliance. His Realpolitik had already excluded Austria after crushing liberal hopes left from eighteen forty-eight, extending Hohenzollern hegemony across German states.
In World War I the quick grab for Paris failed and the Western Front froze; Allied blockade deepened food shortages even as eastern gains followed Brest-Litovsk. Restarting unrestricted submarine warfare in early nineteen seventeen helped pull the United States in. By nineteen eighteen revolution ended the imperial form—closing a forty-seven-year experiment in federal monarchy built on Prussian steel and Bismarck’s alliances.
Behind the federal façade, Prussia called the tune. It covered the northern two-thirds of the Reich and held three-fifths of the people, and with 17 of the 58 votes in the Bundesrat, the council of state deputies, it needed only a few small allies to get its way. The emperor alone hired and fired the chancellor, commanded the armed forces and could dissolve the Reichstag. That parliament was chosen by all adult men, yet its 1871 districts were never redrawn, so rural voters came to outweigh the booming cities, while Prussia itself kept a three-class franchise weighted by taxes paid. Even so, the empire grew into continental Europe's largest economy by 1913, and Bismarck, for all his hostility to socialists, launched social programs that seeded the modern welfare state.
Source: German Empire
