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Audio excerpt: Bismarck's Founding of the German Empire (North German Broadcasting, January 6, 1971)

0:21 The founding of the German Empire in 1871 was "not the achievement of a German, bourgeois revolution, but the product—one could almost say the by-product—of a dynastic war between Prussia and France. Its architect was Bismarck. And rightly so, one speaks today of the Bismarckian Empire."

1:18 Bismarck's own words after the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866: "I use the term 'North German Confederation' without hesitation because, if the necessary consolidation of the Confederation is to be achieved, I consider it impossible to draw in the South German, Catholic, Bavarian element."

1:48 Bismarck (soundbite): "What we need is Northern Germany, and that's where we intend to expand."
2:35 Bismarck on the Main Line
5:38 Bismarck on February 26, 1869: "I, too, consider it likely that German unity would be promoted by violent events. [...] Arbitrary intervention in the course of history, determined solely by subjective reasons, has always only resulted in the pruning of unripe fruit. And that German unity is not currently a ripe fruit is, in my opinion, quite obvious."
6:52 "Bismarck was a Prussian, and he feared, rightly so, as later history has shown, that Prussia could neither dominate nor assimilate the South German element, but rather that it would dissolve and be lost within Germany. Bismarck was also a conservative Junker and monarchist, and the national unification of Germany was a bourgeois-liberal, indeed, ultimately a democratic-republican idea."
8:04 "In In practice, this meant: German unification could only take place in the sober form of the accession of the four South German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt to the North German Confederation with its firmly established Prussian dominance.

9:23 "Bismarck's founding of the Reich was a kind of grandiose trick, and tricks, even the most brilliant, don't last in the long run."

12:30 Rudolph von Delbrück (soundbite): "Eight victorious battles, in which the sons of all German states had fought and bled together, had, in the minds of the army, completed the unification of Germany."

17:14 Planned meeting of princes in Versailles

18:00 About the Bavarian King Ludwig II

21:45 Bismarck (soundbite) on the negotiations with the South German states regarding the North German Confederation: "It is a very heavy responsibility for me to conclude treaties and agreements here alone that are of the most crucial importance for the future. I am in a poorly regulated "Connection with my homeland, I have no files at hand, and yet I must decide: I accept this, I do not accept that. I expose myself to the harshest criticism for the rest of my life if the agreements made with the South German states turn out badly."
25:47 "But: It was a very loose, somewhat flimsy unity, and the pompous imperial mantle was very necessary to conceal its imperfections."
26:18 "It was the renaming of the expanded North German Confederation to the German Empire and the elevation of the King of Prussia to German Emperor that stirred the imagination, offered satisfaction to national sentiment [...], and signaled to the world the birth of a new European great power."
26:44 "Therein lay Bismarck's truly ingenious trick: For he gave the bourgeois liberals, who were also romantics at the time, what had been their dream goal since 1848, and yet in doing so, he blocked the path to their actual, unacknowledged real goal, the bourgeois parliamentary nation-state; for nothing could be more monarchical and feudal than the medieval idea of ​​emperor and empire, and moreover, Bismarck ensured that no national assembly or Reichstag elected the emperor, but exclusively the German princes."
28:58 Ludwig II had to be persuaded/bribed
34:04 King of Prussia had to be persuaded/bribed
35:12 Bismarck in his own words: "I have often had the urgent need to be a bomb and explode, so that the whole edifice would have been reduced to rubble. Necessary business doesn't bother me much, but unnecessary business embitters me."
35:32 Proclamation of the Emperor on January 18, 1871 (German Empire)
37:52 "Greetings, fellow vassals!"

39:26 "Looking back today with a distance of 100 years, one can indeed clearly see in what happened back then the beginning of the end of Prussia; it was more and more absorbed into the Reich and finally perished with the Reich."