Metternich The German Question And The Pursuit Of Peace

Despite the large number of books and studies written about Metternich, there is still a period of his political career that scholars neglect to this day, the 1840s. This book offers an analysis of Metternich's German policy in the years 1840–1848 and thus fills a gap in Metternich studies. Analysing this period is important due to the fact that over the course of those less than nine years, Metternich lost his influence within the German Confederation. He represented a certain way of behaving – moderate, calm and reconciliatory – but it was an attitude which was rejected during the period of rising mass nationalism. Nevertheless, he continued to endeavour to steer this escalating nationalism, and by applying calming policies prevent it from causing armed conflicts in Europe. Since Metternich conceived the German Confederation at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as one of the pillars of the European peace settlement, the issue is viewed from the perspective of European crises of the time, from the Rhine Crisis to the Swiss civil war. Similarly, it presents his policy in a broader context of economic and social history. The book follows revisionist research on Metternich and refutes some of the clichés still associated with his policy.

Emphasis on Metternich's relations with the German princes between 1820 & 1834.

Wolfram Siemann tells a new story of Clemens von Metternich, the Austrian at the center of nineteenth-century European diplomacy. Known as a conservative and an uncompromising practitioner of realpolitik, in fact Metternich accommodated new ideas of liberalism and nationalism insofar as they served the goal of peace. And he promoted reform at home.

Emphasis on Metternich's relations with the German princes between 1820 & 1834.

Using new archival sources, this book shows that Prussia sought not the unity of Germany but its partition into five masses loosely enough joined to assure her control of the North. Hardenberg, not Metternich, supported the feudalistic claims of the estates suppressed by Napoleon and the resurrection of ancient estates' assemblies based mainly on corporate orders. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The first major history of Germany in a generation, a work that presents a five-hundred-year narrative that challenges our traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past. For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history—the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II—challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation’s history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Smith’s aim, then, is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of Germany: Is it essentially a bellicose nation that murdered over six million people? Or a pacific, twenty-first-century model of tolerant democracy? And was it inevitable that the land that produced Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Käthe Kollwitz, would also carry out genocide on an unprecedented scale? Combining poignant prose with an historian’s rigor, Smith recreates the national euphoria that accompanied the beginning of World War I, followed by the existential despair caused by Germany’s shattering defeat. This psychic devastation would simultaneously produce both the modernist glories of the Bauhaus and the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. Nowhere is Smith’s mastery on greater display than in his chapter on the Holocaust, which looks at the killing not only through the tragedies of Western Europe but, significantly, also through the lens of the rural hamlets and ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe, where more than 80% of all the Jews murdered originated. He thus broadens the extent of culpability well beyond the high echelons of Hitler’s circle all the way to the local level. Throughout its pages, Germany also examines the indispensable yet overlooked role played by German women throughout the nation’s history, highlighting great artists and revolutionaries, and the horrific, rarely acknowledged violence that war wrought on women. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany for the twenty-first century.

Europe was forged out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars by means of a collective fight against revolutionary terror. The Allied Council created a culture of in- and exclusion, of people that were persecuted and those who were protected, using secret police, black lists, border controls and fortifications, and financed by European capital holders.

Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the 'Congress System' became the primary instrument of diplomacy in Europe. So central was the Austrian Chancellor Metternich to the political-legal Congress System that the period has often been referred to as the 'Age of Metternich'. In this book, Miroslav Šedivý analyses Metternich's policy towards the pre-united Italian states from 1830 to 1848. With an emphasis on geopolitics and international law and drawing attention to the unsettled role of the Italian states within European diplomacy in the period, this book explains why the Italian peninsula never developed into the stable region that Metternich hoped to establish at the heart of the Congress System. Owing to the self-interested policies of some European Powers as well as the larger of the Italian states. Metternich proved unable to bring about 'the transformation of European politics' in Italy. Using a thorough analysis of the role that Italy played in the Congress System and based on extensive research in 18 European archives, this book explains why it was in Italy that the first war broke out after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, an event representing the first brutal blow to the Congress System.

Though international relations and the rise and fall of European states are widely studied, little is available to students and non-specialists on the origins, development and operation of the diplomatic system through which these relations were conducted and regulated. Similarly neglected are the larger ideas and aspirations of international diplomacy that gradually emerged from its immediate functions. This impressive survey, written by one of our most experienced international historians, and covering the 500 years in which European diplomacy was largely a world to itself, triumphantly fills that gap.