The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 10: Prince Otto Von Bismarck, Count Helmuth Von Moltke, Ferdinand Lassalle

This volume assembles three architects of modern Germany into a single collection: Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor who unified a fractured nation through diplomacy and force; Count Helmuth von Moltke, the military strategist whose campaigns reshaped European warfare; and Ferdinand Lassalle, the revolutionary socialist who challenged the foundations of industrial capitalism. The scholarship, led by Kuno Francke, examines each figure with nuanced admiration and critical distance, exploring how these men of radically different visions all claimed to speak for Germany itself. The essays probe the moral weight of power, the costs of national greatness, and the tension between individual ambition and collective destiny. What emerges is not mere biography but a meditation on how history gets made by singular, often contradictory, personalities. For readers seeking to understand the intellectual and political roots of the twentieth century's most consequential nation, this collection offers a portal into the minds that built it.