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0:00Every morning, that's a good one. You followed the rules, man. You followed the rules. I'll need that joke. Come on. See, you got two into the characters and got her. Oh, wait. Oh, we got to come over, so? How about the interview? We didn't draw any of you. We just would be in silence. OK, we'll come back and we act like adults. Yeah, because my mom told me I got it. I wanted she wants me to do a good, proper interview. So we'll be right back. We'll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for our next comedian from Philadelphia PA. Give it up for Will Smith. What's up? What's up? Hey, how y'all doing out there? I'm a little tired, though. You know, I had a rough date last night. I went out with this girl who ain't have no arms.

1:00I took her to the Arsenio Hall Show and she was like, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Well, that's cool. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. I should be mad at my cousin, Carlton, though, because he sent me out with her. But he ain't no prize itself. He kind of looked like a miniature bright and gumball on a bad hair day. That's cool, check it out. But actually, my cousin, Carlton, he don't have no problem buying clothes. Because he's so short, he just rips him off his GI Joedah on and wears him right out the box. Will is really bombing up there. We should do something. A good idea. Boom! That's great. You want our money back? Go back where you came from.

2:20Hey, what's up everybody? You've been listening to this Black Music program on Lesson's 104.4 FM. We'll concept your Black Music show. We like to deal with Black culture and Black music and the culture that it springs from. My name is Arteri. I'm your curator and host. And we will give you a new tip and a new response to the slap. To the slap. Yeah, so this is our playlist. We just heard Will Smith bombing on a comedy routine on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Before that, we heard Will Smith on the RC Neal Hall show taking the piss out of somebody

3:23with Appalachia. And for that, we heard Zana Johnson talking about how fine she is in her bald hair. And we heard Chris Rock doing two jams. One was Tippy Attawide, pineapple and the middle Tippy Attawide, sugar cane. Yeah, then we had one of the sites. I call her a comedian. She could be called it. I mean, my furture is a comedian. But these comedians are like grihots in our culture. They tell the storytellers and they tell them in funny ways. And they tell them in a way that hopefully shows us as we are. And how much we love each other as we are. And before that, we started with Jelly Rob Morton doing his dirty dozens thing.

4:26The original song was written by Spekorea. So that's our show for you tonight. I just want to encourage everybody to physical violence isn't a way for us to communicate to each other. It's only you to believe in yourself, but physical violence. Thank you for listening. I'm a rock music resident. One of four point four FM. My name is Art Terry. My single will be out on Friday, April 8th. Make it because you're all going to make it. And of course I got to get props to Sunrise Orchestra with their, with giving us our theme song. I wait for you. Boom, boom, boom. So let's wait for each other now. Here it comes. This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM.

5:54If you like what you heard, please support or work by making a donation at Resonance FM.com slash donate. Thank you.

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33:04Thank you. Thank you. The beginning of a modern state, a modern nation state, the surgical operation to get rid of osher. The first word has to liberate itself from the Austrian preeminence and Germany was considered to be the smaller sibling as it were. The scales were tipped against the Austrians, not against the Germans, the other round, as Bismarck had understood. The scales were tipped against the Germans, the other round, as it was considered to be the smaller sibling as it were.

34:10The scales were tipped against the Germans, the other round, as it was considered to be the smaller sibling as it were. And of course there's that really threatening spike on top of the helmets of the Prussian army. For me, 1866 is not a war of unification, it's a war of division because actually that's the moment when Austria, which has always been part of Germany, is finally thrown out. So it's not really a moment of unification. I think it's much more a war of division and then what emerges is a Germany which claims to be the continuation of an earlier Germany. But it's actually in lots of ways a very different thing. In these three programs about Germany and where it came from, we've only really mentioned Austria in passing. And yet the Austrians speak German. More than that, Austrian Habsburg's in Vienna had been emperor's for centuries of that ghostly medieval institution, the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.

35:16You've just heard Abigail Green of Oxford University, together with Michal Sturma and Thomas Keelinger of developed newspaper, talking about the seismic events of 1866, when Prussia decided that there was only room for one top dog amongst German speakers. Prussia in Bismarck's famous phrase, unified Germany by blood and iron. Austria was left out. But there was nothing inevitable about this process. In fact, the peculiar mechanism by which Germany moved from some 400 separate states to a single unit on the European map had huge implications for what came next, namely two world wars. This program is about that build up and Germany's attempt to define itself indeed to stamp itself on the map. Norman Davis is the author of vanished kingdoms. Everything was decided by military strength, but also by a revolutionary idea that there were parts of the map which were reserved as it were by the Almighty for particular nations.

36:27Blood and Borden, a blood and soil, and they really believed that there is something called German soil. If you pick up a handful of soil, that this is German and it's different from the soil, 50 yards to the other side of the border which is called French soil. This idea is extremely strong. But should your neighbour not agree with your definition, then the prospects for war were also extremely strong. We've travelled some 400 miles by road from Germany's eastern flank where Prussia clashed with Austria in 1866 to the greatest point of friction in the West. This area now French has been called both Alsace Lorraine and Elzace Laute-Ringen. I'm in front of a Shakuterie, but if I look at the road signs, they're pointing to places like Obersteinbach, Niederssteinbach, Wert, and there's even a shadow de Fleckenstein here as well, just before a sign pointing to the Maginot line.

37:37We spoke to one expert for this programme who called the endless fight between France and Germany over this borderland, a classic piece of pseudo-medievalist map-filled idiocy. Bismarck, flushed with his triumph over Austria, took it over in 1871. The first French act of World War I was a suicidal charge to get it back, which they eventually did in 1918, lost it again in 1940 before retaking Mets and Strasbourg, just how German to those names sound, in 1944. My point? Well, the process by which Germany groped for unification, the wars, the ideas, are central to understanding what Europe is today. It's first worth considering, therefore, what Germany was before this process began. A big-out green again. Well, this is a patchwork country, every time you cross a border, the uniforms change, the tolls change, the whole system of operation changes.

38:42And did they have, for example, a common currency at this point? No. So, if you were a sort of determined traveller, Germany was a bit of a nightmare. It was a nightmare, but I think that tolls and separate states, that's not something which is restricted to Germany in this period, I mean, if you think of Italy. But what I would say is, Germany is actually a political entity, it has got political functions. So, I think it's wrong to see it as just a kind of cultural language zone. It's also joined by certain political practices and reference points like the Emperor. The Habsburg emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, as bewildering a title as it sounds, had been in post with one short break since 1452. Then, in 1806, a rampaging, rationalising Napoleon abolished it overnight, and suddenly the fragmentary 400 state chaos of the Reich was reduced to 39. Chief among these was the state poised to lead the way, Prussia.

39:45Their role in defeating Napoleon at Waterloo raised them to great power status. Still far behind the British, the Russians and the Austrians admittedly, but the reshuffling of the post-Napoleonic map had huge consequences. Norman Davis again. Prussia, having been essentially a country of East Germany, became the largest state within Germany, stretching all the way to the Rhine. And the biggest industrial area of the 19th century, the Ruhr, fell into Prussia's lap, more or less by good fortune. Cologne, Catholic Cologne, was the great city of Prussia in the West. So the net effect of the Napoleon at Wars, once Napoleon's been defeated, is to pull Prussia towards the West and away from its origins in the East. Absolutely. More than 500 steps are put at the top of Cologne Cathedral's Gothic twin towers.

40:51I've got a bird's eye view over Germany's industrial heartland. I'm looking east now across the majestic Rhine at the industrial suburb of Deut. Where a certain Mr. Daimler worked on the world's first piston engine. Just around the bend to the north, there's buyers mighty pharmaceutical works in Leverkusen, beyond that the Ruhr, home to Crops, Zeemans, and all the other firms that turned Baron Little Prussia into an industrial Leviathan. Now the people of Cologne, Catholic, cosmopolitan and frankly a lot more fun than the Dua Lutherans from the East, didn't really care for the new arrangement imposed on them. The place wasn't even physically attached to Prussia because the Kingdom of Hannover lies in between. How ironic then that Western cities like this provided the economic muscle that led to Prussia's unstoppable rise. The Ruhr district becomes the most powerful iron coal industrial region of the whole of Europe.

41:58This led to coal and steel and steel means gongs. And suddenly to everybody's surprise this once peripheral German state had become the strongest power in Europe. The King of Prussia becomes the Emperor of Germany and that is the time where a sense of Germanity can really take off. But before we get carried away with the inevitability of all of this, the rise of Prussia, the defeat of Austria in 1866, and the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 71, consider this leader in the Times newspaper dated just one decade before.

43:08Prussia, it said, was always leaning on somebody, always getting somebody to help her, never willing to help herself, presenting congresses but absent in battles. It goes on, she has a large army but notoriously one in no condition for fighting, no one counts her as a friend, no one dreads her as an enemy. So what has changed? The answer is Otto von Bismarck Schernhhausen, Prime Minister of Prussia from 1862 and first Chancellor of the German Empire from 1871. Bismarck is really a political opportunist, he's not really thinking necessarily about forming a German nation state at all. He thought of nationhood as a means to an end to become an important player in world history. And it's only as things develop that he seizes his opportunity. Acknowledged as the greatest statement of the 19th century, Bismarck was in fact one of the grumpiest hyperconjects in European history.

44:11He was a Junker, part of the Prussian land-owning class and usually pictured with his trademark handle Bar Moustache under a spiked helmet. He seems like the epitome of German nationalism. But according to Thomas Keelinger, he had surprisingly little emotional interest in unification. There's a famous saying somewhere in his diaries or letters. To me a war against the king of barrier or anywhere else in Germany would be just the same as a war against France. I have no track with national identity. And it's interesting that he was really not much of a German patriot. He was very cool about identity. He had just one idea in mind which was power. Almost two decades earlier, Europe's monocles had been convulsed by events that on the surface at least have much in common with the Arab Spring of 2011. The influence on the young Bismarck was profound. The year is 1848, a time of revolution right across Europe, an explosion of rising aspirations, national, economic, democratic, that existing regimes are unable to fulfill.

45:24Simon Winder is the author of Germania. I think 1848 is a failure of government effectively. There's an overall weakness in the way that Europe's run in this period and not helped by the fact that the Emperor of Austria is himself a simpleton. And it's unable to effectively take any serious decisions. There's this growing sense of anarchy, all really to do with the fact that no one quite knows what to do next. It begins in Palermo down in Sicily, spreads to Paris and soon there are demonstrations in Cologne, Vienna, Berlin and beyond. Now in Germany, the key question that they had to answer is how are we going to unite all these disparate territories both emotionally and geographically? To answer this question, they came here to the Palskiershire St. Paul's Church for the so-called Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. Now the interior was dominated by a giant painting called Germania, a female figure crowned in oak leaves carrying a sword and with a cast of mannacle at her feet.

46:34It was the perfect symbol of a suppressed people struggling for breath and had their aspirations been met, then German unification might not have been the bloody mess it eventually became. In Frankfurt, we met Vipkasinger of writers, who moonlights now and then as a city tour guide. When the Parliament came together for the first time, they had over 600 delegates and it was really hard because the whole population was allowed to send petitions to the assembly. The idea was to come up with a constitution for the whole of Germany, of all the states to bring them together quite a difficult task really. What sort of people came to Frankfurt in 1848? It was all highly educated people from certain level, certain income, you had a lot of professors, you had a lot of lawyers. So it wasn't in inverted commas, a normal society, it wasn't you and me, it was all sort of upper class.

47:39So it was rich people well educated and articulate and they could talk for hours and hours. And they sure did, as you can imagine. The most important new development in 1848 from a German perspective is that people are trying to solve problems nationally in a new way. So, the Frankfurt Parliament, that's the first attempt to do that. Abigail Green, the biggest problem they faced, what size should Germany be? And in particular, how would this new state accommodate the non-German speaking territories of the Austrian Habsburgs? Why is Austria such a problem? I would say it's not just Austria, as we know it today, it's all the other countries, like Hungary for example, where of course they speak a different language. And that was one of the main issues that they really wanted to have a Germany where German was spoken and not necessarily different languages. So we saw in 1848 this clash between the Austrian idea of Germany and the Prussian idea of Germany.

48:41That's right, that's right. And Austria said, we are a parade, we would join, but not if we have to split our country. 1848 is like a kind of fast forward of the problems of German unification. And the Frankfurt Parliament, they go through these questions, is it going to be a monarchy? Is it going to be a republic? Is it going to be gross-doge? Is it going to be Klein-doge? Because before 1848, everyone assumes that whatever might happen to Germany will actually look in some form like the Holy Roman Empire. It will have a Habsburg. After 1848, it becomes clear that actually the Habsburgs don't really fit in there because their interests are kind of too diverse. And so a different solution comes to the fore. Perhaps the most important character of 1848, Karl Marx, was not involved in the dealings of the Frankfurt Parliament, which ended in a state of utter disarray. In fact, all the springtime revolutions collapsed after the authorities recovered their nerve. Repression was again the order of the day. With all the monarchs once more on their thrones, a peaceful route to German unity had been lost.

49:48But for one onlooker, lessons had been learnt. Michel Sturmer, academic columnist and former advisor to Helmut Kohl. Bismarck saw what happened in Frankfurt was highly dangerous for his status as a Prussian aristocrat. He talks about the national schwindel. That's the national schwindel. Why is he against it? Nationalism comes from the left, not from the right. And every right-minded aristocrat, with very few exceptions, shared that belief. And so did Bismarck. Does he have at this early stage in his political life a vision of where Prussia and where Germany ought to be going? Or is he entirely pragmatic? In the early days, he has a vision of himself. He wants to play first fiddle, and he doesn't care who under him would be king. Now Prussia at that time was after Britain and France, perhaps Belgium, the leading industrial power. And Prussia was also modernising at a very rapid pace.

50:58And that meant that those scattered lands of Prussia, one part in the west, a bigger part, in the east had to be brought into a contiguous political landscape, not as a kind of backward agricultural state like the Daniel Monarchy. So he understood that Austria in many senses was a drain on Prussia and on modernisation. Do you think there was a moment when he woke up saying we've got to rid ourselves of the Austrian burden once and for all? Well, of course. That is when he becomes Prime Minister. Marx famously said, you know, great men are able to use events to their advantage, and that's exactly what he does. He became Prime Minister in order to defend the Monarchy against change. But he also said our borders are intolerable. And as they cannot be solved through speeches and resolutions in parliament, they have to be solved by iron and blood.

52:06Well, I've just walked up an extremely tall outlook tower, but from here I have a spectacular view of where the battle took place. Bismarck had a window of opportunity. Get rid of Austria. Show Austria out of all things German. And don't forget that this is the time of the American Civil War. There were more important things to watch. Well, he was a chancellor and he had a strong militia, a district special. So he put two to two together and said, well, I can risk it. I'm now holding an eight pound shell. These things created absolute mayhem in the Austrian ranks. Prussians, of course, were much more modern in their equipment and their strategy and their tactics. You had the genius of Moldgen. Moldgen knew much better than the Austrians. What the railways would mean.

53:09No great displays of horsepower, but railway fast movements, encirclements. So the decisive battle of Königgräts compared to battles of the 20th century was relatively speaking a modest affair, although there were 500,000 armed men on both sides. The great battle of Königgräts was in fact just one of three wars that Bismarck and the Prussians conducted. The first against the Danes and fought in collaboration with the Austrians secured the territory of Schleswig-Holstein. The second against the Austrians put Prussia in the box seat, able to dictate events. And the third against the French made Prussia the leading power on all of mainland Europe. Three wars all conducted with lightning speed. The continent would never again be the same.

54:11The crowning moment 1871 sees the Prussian king a 90-liter of the new German Empire, the second Reich, not in Berlin, but in the Palace of Mirrors in Versailles outside Paris. A quite staggering event. I'm still tempted to write about the tragedy of success. Success is not good for you. Too much success is not good for you. If you want to get a physical sense of how Germany has changed, you need to come here to Turingan in the very geographical heart of Germany. And on top of a hill called Kufhäuser where I am now, there is a vast and pretty sinister monument. Down below there is a statue of Barbarossa, the 12th century Holy Roman Emperor who symbolized the last time that Germany had been defeated. But above him, riding on a huge horse, is William I, the Emperor Wilhelm who was crowned in 1871, who reunited Germany, thus reimagining Barbarossa's collapsed empire.

55:24As I said, it's not only sinister, but it's really quite threatening and people who came to visit it at the time must have been stunned by the way Germany was now projecting itself. No longer the fractured helpless split-up nation of many tongues and princes and entities, but a single nation which wanted its peace of the world and wasn't going to be stopped from getting it. Many Germans now agree that Prussia overreached, particularly with regard to that small area of borderland we mentioned earlier. Alsace Lorraine renamed Alsace Lauteringen after the Franco-Prussian War. Thomas Keelinger again. It was really the Palestinian-Israeli conflict of the 19th century. Abysmach said after he had created the Reich and Alsace Lorraine had become German again, as Alsace Lauteringen, he said, that is the last piece of expansion. I am now a satisfied Reich. Bonkers, nothing can be satisfied when your neighbor swears at turn revenge for the repacious acquisition of a piece that he considers his own.

56:34That created the mind of the French, this absolute enmity. Bysmach made a huge mistake and he knew he was making a tragic mistake by annexing Alsace and Lorraine. You have unending problems, unending problems. And Bysmach, I think, committed the cardinal mistake of Germany's history. I think you just cannot exaggerate the huge error that he committed by re-acquiring Alsace Lorraine and incorporating it into the German Reich. Well, Bysmach foresaw what might be coming. And he always warned that Germany should be a little less grandiose than it appeared. There were great temptations and especially in his criticism of William II, he was scathing. A second problem, less relevant for us perhaps, but certainly in the 19th century an issue for Germans themselves, not all of them wanted to be part of this new Prussian experiment.

57:41In fact, many of them didn't want unification at all. If you had asked the burgers of Cologne at that time whether they would rather be loyal to Vienna or to Berlin, the answer would have been very clear. To this present day, I would say, there are certain uneasy feelings about the capital in the southern and western parts of Germany and that dates back to the days of Bysmach. At the beginning of this series, we traveled to Bavaria, another region with no love for Berlin in the north. A reason, a slightly whimsical trip to see the horse of Gustavus Adolfus, the king of the Swedes. Talking afterwards to the curator Dr. Beartrick Schunovalt, I asked what she is a Bavarian thought of the unification of 1871. It was forced by Prussia, a not beloved partner who has beaten Bavaria into a Kaiserreich and they have treated Bavarian king not very diplomatical.

58:48And this was a sort of treason. Strong words, suggesting this really was a unification imposed by blood and iron. But then Bavaria should say something even more surprising, namely the Fahör, the real unification of Germany, the first unification, if you like, only occurred when the Berlin wall collapsed. I don't think that the idea of a United Germany really exists until the unification of the two states in 1989. And can we say now that the borders of Germany, which have changed so much over many centuries, are now fixed borders? I'm no prophet. I'm no prophet. As a child, my father told me amazing stories about a divided Berlin where he'd once been stationed.

59:53And it's a real comfort to me that he actually saw the wall tumble a few months before he died. And he's taken a long time to find itself.