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Hello, today we'll be discussing the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, one of Europe's leading states in the 19th century, and credited with the unification of Germany.

Here's a Prussian Juncker, an aristocrat. He took his home state and made it indomitable among the other states in the German Confederation.

The conflict that marked the beginning of his expansionist aim was over Schleswig-Holstein, a conflict that has gone down in history as a byword for incomprehensible wars.

The British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerson, said the Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated that only three men in Europe have ever understood it.

Warner Sprints Albert, who is dead, the second was a German professor who became mad, I am the third, and I forgot all about it.

Whatever the causes of this conflict, it was just the beginning of Bismarck benefiting from regional power struggles.

After vanquishing Austria and France, he led the new industrialized Germany and managed to reign in power for a further two decades.

He introduced universal suffrage for men for tactical reasons. He founded one of Europe's first welfare states, but he was also known for his ruthless tactics, ignoring democratic institutions if they blocked his will, and he was never afraid to double in dirty politics, leaking to the press and bribing journalists.

So what's the unification of Germany a carefully planned campaign, or a series of unpredictable events that Bismarck made the most of?

Did his encouragement of nationalism bear fruit much later in Nazi Germany, and what is his legacy?

Joining me to discuss this, Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, Christopher Clark, reader in modern European history also at Cambridge, and Katherine Lerman, senior lecturer in modern European history at London Metropolitan University.

Richard Evans, can you give us an overview of how the area we now know as Germany was organized just before the middle of the 19th century?

Yes, well, I don't think organizers really quite the word. It goes back to the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne in the early Middle Ages, the famous Thousand Year Reich, which Hitler later sought to emulate.

And that was abolished by Napoleon in 1806. And in 1815, after the Battle of Waterloo, the victorious allies couldn't think of anything better to do than kind of put it back together again, but without the Emperor's, and they called it the German Confederation, slimmed it down.

Much the same boundaries, 39 states, which were independent states, they had a kind of dire to a meeting place, rather like the Council of Ministers in the EU.

But essentially it had very few central powers, and the German Confederation was not a nation state, it included substantial national minorities, it included a chunk of the Habsburg monarchy, and the Czech lands.

It excluded quite large parts of Prussia and the German speaking areas outside it. It was a very, as far as it had any kind of central power, it was quite repressive.

Famously, the Austrian Chancellor Metinich used such institutions as the war and the German Confederation to try and dampen down free speech, and generally keep a lid on the liberal nationalist aspirations, which were looming up after the French Revolution.

From what you said in the turn in which you said it, I gather you think it's a bit of a hodgepodge, and be designed to quash, to suppress the revolutionary ideas that had bubbled up in France and so on.

Yes, everyone in government in Europe, after 1815, was terrified of a resurgence of the French Revolution. At the same time there were middle class intellectuals and professionals growing in number all the time, who believed in the ideas of 1789,

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