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Battle of Jena, also called Battle of Jena-Auerstädt, (Oct. 14, 1806), military engagement of the Napoleonic Wars, fought between 122,000 French troops and 114,000 Prussians and Saxons, at Jena and Auerstädt, in Saxony (modern Germany). In the battle, Napoleon smashed the outdated Prussian army inherited from Frederick II the Great, which resulted in the reduction of Prussia to half its former size at the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807.

Frederick William III placed 63,000 men under Duke Charles William Ferdinand at Auerstädt and about 51,000 under Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen on a 15-mile (24-kilometre) front between Weimar and Jena.

The double victory of the French cost them about 12,000 casualties to about 24,000 Prussian and Saxon casualties and about 20,000 more captured. Napoleon completed his conquest of Prussia within six weeks, before Russia could act to aid its ally.

Germany became a modern, unified nation under the leadership of the “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), who between 1862 and 1890 effectively ruled first Prussia and then all of Germany. A master strategist, Bismarck initiated decisive wars with Denmark, Austria and France to unite 39 independent German states under Prussian leadership.

Bismarck was educated in Berlin and after university took a series of minor diplomatic posts before retiring, at age 24, to run his family’s estate at Kneiphof. In 1847 he married and was sent to Berlin as a delegate to the new Prussian parliament, where he emerged as a reactionary voice against the liberal, anti-autocratic Revolutions of 1848.

William I became Prussia’s king in 1861 and a year later appointed Bismarck as his chief minister. Though technically deferring to William, in reality Bismarck was in charge, manipulating the king with his intellect and the occasional tantrum while using royal decrees to circumvent the power of elected officials.

Distinguishing himself in the Seven Years’ War, which involved the struggle for supremacy in Germany between Austria and Prussia, he became Frederick the Great’s favourite.

Made a Prussian field marshal in 1787, Charles defeated the Dutch democratic Patriots in a campaign that returned the stadtholder William V of Orange to power. His reputation as a field commander established, Charles in 1792 reluctantly accepted command of the Prussian army against Revolutionary France.

Only reluctantly did he sign the punitive “manifesto” drafted by an émigré, which warned that Paris would be subjected to exemplary punishment if Louis XVI and his family were harmed

The Battle of Waterloo, which took place in Belgium on June 18, 1815, marked the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, who conquered much of Europe in the early 19th century. Napoleon rose through the ranks of the French army during the French Revolution, seized control of the French government in 1799 and became emperor in 1804. Through a series of wars, he expanded his empire across western and central Europe. The Battle of Waterloo, in which Napoleon’s forces were defeated by the British and Prussians, marked the end of his reign and of France’s domination in Europe.

After seizing political power in France in a 1799 coup d’état, he was given the title of first consul and became France’s leading political figure.

In 1812, Napoleon led a disastrous invasion of Russia in which his army was forced to retreat and suffered massive casualties. At the same time, the Spanish and Portuguese, with assistance from the British, drove Napoleon’s forces from the Iberian Peninsula in the Peninsular War (1808-1814).

A Polish uprising in Poznania led to a partial seizure of the province, but the fate of Prussian Poland lay in the hands of the peacemakers, who had also the last word about the territorial settlement.

The borders drawn under the Treaty of Versailles (June 1919) roughly corresponded to Polish-German frontiers before the partitions, except that Gdańsk became the free city of Danzig, and plebiscites were held in parts of East Prussia and Upper Silesia to determine which nation these regions wished to join. The East Prussian plebiscite of July 1920 (at the height of the Russo-Polish War) was won by Germany.

Final recognition of Polish sovereignty came only in 1923, the delay being due to the Russian situation.

The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn

The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the Edison laboratory, used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of 12 of the 17 cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files.

Bismarck listened to recordings made in Paris and Berlin, and at his wife’s urging, he made his own. He recited snippets of poetry and songs in English, Latin, French and German. Perhaps surprisingly, given his involvement in the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to recite lines from the French national anthem. “Bismarck was a very, very witty man” and reciting the Marseillaise “would tickle him,

the elder Fest is described as “tailor-made for a career” with the Nazis. And yet some quirk in his personality made him a fierce Weimar republican, ready to sacrifice himself, even his family, to principles he knew to be right even as everyone around him was yielding to mass hysteria.

It reminds us that simple human decency is possible even in the most trying of ­circumstances.

One of the largest changes in their lives, however, was watching friends and acquaintances withdraw from them.

The story of the denazification of Germany after 1945 comes in two versions. The one we know best allows us to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We turned the most powerful and frightening dictatorship in Europe into a stable, peaceable and functioning democracy for the first time in its history. This is the story we grew up with during the cold war, one that justified the partition and occupation of the country over many decades.

there is also a much less self-­congratulatory version of denazification. It dwells on the darker side by exposing once taboo subjects like the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe and the apparently countless rapes carried out by the Red Army.

there were then — and remain to this day — two mysteries in the conduct of the German people at the war’s end, mysteries that go to the heart of Taylor’s book. One was the question of why they continued to fight so resolutely, for so long, against obviously overwhelming odds, even after it must have been clear that the war was lost. Taylor stresses two completely counterproductive messages sent by the Allies: the policy of unconditional surrender, and especially the draconian Morgenthau Plan advanced by the American Treasury secretary, which called for the destruction of Germany’s industrial base and the pastoralization of the country. He also highlights the Germans’ sheer terror at the approaching Red Army, a terror that had been fanned, as he notes, by Goebbels’s publicizing of an early Soviet atrocity in an East Prussian village. Finally, there was straightforward Nazi coercion as the regime rounded on its own people, killing more and more of them.

with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about — and tempted to prevent — the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.

“the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.”

a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity

an insidious historical myth: that the reparations and other treaty measures were so odious that they made Adolf Hitler’s rise and World War II inevitable

In truth, the reparations, as the name suggests, were not intended as a punishment. They were meant to repair the damage done, mainly to Belgium and France, by the German invasion and subsequent four years of fighting. They would also help the Allies pay off huge loans they had taken to finance the war, mainly from the United States. At the Paris peace talks of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was very clear that there should be no punitive fines on the losers, only legitimate costs. The other major statesmen in Paris, Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France, reluctantly agreed,

The fact is that Germany could have managed to pay, but for political reasons chose not to.

Yet the fear of the old Prussian military spirit lingered on. It was said in the post-war years, not entirely in jest, that the reason for NATO was to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.

In 1864, riding a wave of nationalism, another former colonial power, Denmark, became engulfed in a doomed military conflict against Prussian and Austrian forces, experiencing a crushing loss that led to the surrender of around a third of its territory.

“People find the analogy interesting,” said Arni Pall Arnason, the former leader of Iceland’s Social Democratic Party, “in particular because of Britain’s total lack of realistic analysis of where its power lies and what appears to be the hubris behind the feeling that you do not need to do your research on anything.“Just like the Danes in 1864,” he said, “the Brits appear to have never analyzed the facts, just jumped off a cliff.”

Pro-Brexit politicians had expected to divide and rule among the 27 members of the European Union, and to be helped out by allies around the world, eager to strike trade deals with the British. Instead, London was confronted by an uncharacteristically united front in Brussels and outmaneuvered by Ireland, its former colony whose interests have been protected by the other member countries.

royal German family

of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century

The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg

conflict in which Frederick II the Great of Prussia blocked an attempt by Joseph II of Austria to acquire Bavaria

the Austrian emperor Joseph II and his chancellor Wenzel Anton, Prince von Kaunitz, wished to acquire Bavaria in order to restore Austria’s position in Germany

After losing Silesia to the Prussians in the 1740s

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

On June 18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleon's attempted comeback in the Hundred Days

At this point, two centuries ago, the victorious Allies – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – would determine the fate of France

The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, came from Vienna, Tsar Alexander from St Petersburg and, from Berlin, the 72-year-old Prussian Marshal Blücher

18th-century succession crisis unlocks a tale of dynastic obsession and myth-history in Austria's first family

Charles had devoted his whole adult life to maintaining the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. From 1705 when he first arrived in Barcelona he saw himself as the only rightful king of Spain. He never accepted the accession of the Bourbon claimant, Philip V, under the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and thereafter anything that smacked of a French influence was guaranteed to rouse him to fury

his brother Joseph I

original name Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte

French Revolutionary general and marshal of France (1804), who was elected crown prince of Sweden (1810), becoming regent and then king of Sweden and Norway (1818–44).

formed Swedish alliances with Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig (1813)

A provisional government of national defense was set up in 1870 and took as its first task the continuation of the war against the invaders.

That election, held on February 8, produced an assembly dominated by monarchists—more than 400 of them, compared with only 200 republicans and a few Bonapartists. The decisive issue for the voters, however, had not been the nature of the future regime but simply war or peace. Most of the monarchists had campaigned for peace; the republicans had insisted on a last-ditch fight.

Thiers had been the most outspoken critic of Napoleon III’s foreign policy and had repeatedly warned the country of the Prussian danger. He set out at once to negotiate a settlement with Bismarck; on March 1 the Treaty of Frankfurt was ratified by a large majority of the assembly. The terms were severe: France was charged a war indemnity of five billion francs plus the cost of maintaining a German occupation army in eastern France until the indemnity was paid. Alsace and half of Lorraine were annexed to the new German Empire.

In 1567 Hesse was partitioned among four sons of Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous, Hesse-Kassel going to William IV the Wise.

In the Seven Weeks’ War between Prussia and Austria (1866), Frederick William sided with Austria, against the wishes of the majority of the Diet. The country was then annexed by Prussia and the elector exiled. In 1867 Hesse-Kassel, with Nassau, some former Hesse-Darmstadt districts, and Frankfurt, was made part of the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau.