(2007) and Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (2014).
Chickering applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The German Empire, 1871–1918, and reported the following:
Browsers who crack open this book on page 99 will encounter the revival of Catholic piety in German Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, which culminated during the militant pontificate of Pius IX (1846-78). These developments set the backdrop for the Kulturkampf, the famous “culture war” between the confessions during the first years of the German Empire. This passage does not do well on the Page 99 Test; but I hope this result does not speak to the quality of the whole. The passage presents only an early hint of the broader problems that inform the book.Learn more about The German Empire, 1871–1918 at the Cambridge University Press website.
The third chapter, of which the passage is part, introduces one of several central themes that give shape to the work as a whole. To put the matter in musical terms, the book is designed a little like a fugue, in which the principal themes are introduced early, then developed in their interplay in the body of the work. The main themes are confession (Catholic and Protestant), social class, and regional tension between rural and urban Germany. Along with several other motifs—gender and ethnicity (including the “Jewish problem”)—they are analyzed together as the bases of pervasive sectoral strife in Imperial Germany. The book attends to the organization and mobilization of domestic conflict, political interaction among sectoral groups, questions of integration and national unity, colonialism and foreign policy, and finally the Great War of 1914-18, in which the German Empire perished amid domestic discord—with terrible consequences. The book offers a comprehensive history of the German Empire, a contribution to debates that have raged among historians of Germany for the past seventy years.
--Marshal Zeringue
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