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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2024
The German Empire was born in the aftermath of one war and died at the conclusion of another. Even within its own chronological confines of 1871 and 1918, Imperial Germany’s history poses narrative challenges. The principal issue has to do with the second of these wars, which brought the German Empire to an end. This conflict weighed more heavily than the short war that began the story in 1870. The earlier war made possible the unification of the nation-state and served as a symbol of its military splendor, but otherwise, at least to judge from economic historians, it had a limited or ambivalent material impact on what followed. The Great War of 1914–18, by contrast, gave rise to the term “total war.” It left no phase of life in the German Empire unaffected. It let loose pressures so comprehensive that they challenged even the narrative coherence of German history during the imperial era itself.
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