The German Empire (1871-1918): A Complete Guide to the Second Reich

The German Empire was the unified German nation-state that existed from 1871 to 1918, created under Prussian leadership and ruled by a Hohenzollern emperor. In German it is the Deutsches Kaiserreich, and in English it is often called the Second Reich, counting the medieval Holy Roman Empire as the first. In its 47 years it became continental Europe’s largest economy, built the world’s first modern social insurance system, acquired an overseas colonial empire, and then collapsed in revolution at the end of the First World War.

Historical Overview

The empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, while German armies were still besieging Paris. King Wilhelm I of Prussia became German Emperor, and Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian minister-president who had engineered unification, became imperial chancellor. The new state was a federal monarchy rather than a centralized one: 25 member states kept their own monarchs, parliaments, and in some cases their own armies and postal systems, while Prussia dominated the whole through sheer size.

Era in German history spanning 1871 to 1918.

The German Empire, or Deutsches Kaiserreich

That structure explains most of what followed. A modern industrial society with mass political parties and a national parliament elected by universal male suffrage was governed by a constitution written to protect Prussian and monarchical power. The tension between those two things ran through every major episode of the period, and it was still unresolved when the monarchy fell in November 1918.

Key facts at a glance

German name	Deutsches Reich, commonly Deutsches Kaiserreich
Dates	18 January 1871 to 9 November 1918
Government	Federal constitutional monarchy under a hereditary emperor
Capital	Berlin
Member states	25 states plus the imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine
Emperors	Wilhelm I, Friedrich III, Wilhelm II
Population	About 41 million in 1871, about 68 million by 1914
Currency	Goldmark, introduced 1873
Successor state	The Weimar Republic

Why “Second Reich” and what came before

The official name of the state was simply Deutsches Reich, the German Empire or German realm. The numbering came later. Nationalist writers in the 1920s treated the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from the tenth century until Napoleon forced its dissolution in 1806, as the First Reich, and the 1871 empire as the Second. The Nazi regime then adopted the label Third Reich for itself, which is why the phrase carries baggage that the 1871 founders never intended.

Between 1806 and 1871 the German lands passed through several arrangements. The German Confederation of 1815 was a loose league of sovereign states chaired by Austria. The Zollverein, a Prussian-led customs union founded in 1834, gradually knitted those economies together while excluding Austria. The 1848 revolutions produced a parliament in Frankfurt that offered the imperial crown to the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who refused it. Unification, when it finally came, was achieved by Prussian diplomacy and war rather than by liberal assembly.

How unification actually happened

Bismarck became Prussian minister-president in 1862 during a constitutional standoff over army funding. Over the next nine years he used three short wars to remove Austria from German affairs, absorb or align the smaller states, and give the southern kingdoms a reason to join Prussia.

The Second Schleswig War, 1864

Prussia and Austria fought Denmark together over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, then administered them jointly. The shared administration was deliberately unworkable and gave Bismarck the quarrel he needed with Vienna.

The Austro-Prussian War, 1866

The war lasted seven weeks and was decided at Königgrätz in Bohemia on 3 July 1866, where the Prussian army’s breech-loading needle guns, railway mobilization, and general staff planning under Helmuth von Moltke the Elder produced a decisive victory. The German Confederation was dissolved. Prussia annexed Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and the free city of Frankfurt, and formed the North German Confederation in 1867. Bismarck imposed lenient terms on Austria, which kept it available as a future partner.

The Franco-Prussian War, 1870 to 1871

A dispute over the Spanish succession escalated after Bismarck published an edited account of a royal conversation, the Ems Dispatch, that inflamed opinion in both countries. France declared war in July 1870. A French army surrendered at Sedan in early September along with Emperor Napoleon III, Paris was besieged through the winter, and the southern German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden fought alongside Prussia. Their rulers agreed to join the new empire, in Bavaria’s case after substantial financial inducement and the retention of unusual privileges. France ceded Alsace and much of Lorraine and paid an indemnity of five billion francs, a grievance that shaped European politics until 1918.

How the German Empire was governed

The 1871 constitution created a system that looked parliamentary from a distance and was not. The emperor appointed and dismissed the chancellor, commanded the armed forces, and directed foreign policy. The chancellor answered to the emperor, not to the Reichstag. There was no cabinet of ministers responsible to parliament in the British sense.

• The Reichstag was elected by all men aged 25 and over by secret ballot, which was unusually democratic for 1871, and it could pass or reject legislation and the budget. It could not appoint or remove the government.
• The Bundesrat represented the state governments with 58 votes. Prussia held 17, enough to block any constitutional amendment on its own.
• Prussia contained roughly two thirds of the empire’s territory and population, and its own parliament was elected under a three-class franchise weighted by taxes paid, which kept conservative landowners in control.
• The Prussian king was always the German emperor, and the Prussian minister-president was usually also imperial chancellor, fusing the two offices in practice.
• Alsace-Lorraine was governed directly as a Reichsland rather than as a member state, and only received a limited constitution of its own in 1911.

The 25 member states included four kingdoms, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, and the three free Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. Bavaria and Württemberg kept peacetime control of their own armies, and Bavaria kept its own postal and railway administration and diplomatic representation.

The three emperors and their chancellors

Emperor	Reign	Chancellors
Wilhelm I	1871 to 1888	Otto von Bismarck
Friedrich III	March to June 1888	Otto von Bismarck
Wilhelm II	1888 to 1918	Bismarck to 1890, then Leo von Caprivi, Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Bernhard von Bülow, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Georg Michaelis, Georg von Hertling, and Prince Max von Baden

1888 is remembered in German as the Dreikaiserjahr, the year of three emperors. Wilhelm I died in March aged 90. His son Friedrich III, a liberal who had married Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter and who might have moved the empire toward parliamentary government, was already dying of throat cancer and reigned 99 days. His son Wilhelm II came to the throne at 29 and dismissed Bismarck in March 1890 after a series of clashes over labour policy and access to the monarch.

Bismarck’s domestic campaigns

The Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church

Roughly a third of the empire’s population was Catholic, concentrated in the Rhineland, Bavaria, Silesia, and Polish-speaking areas. Bismarck viewed Catholic loyalty to Rome and the new Centre Party as threats to national cohesion. From 1871 the state expelled the Jesuit order, took over school inspection, made civil marriage compulsory, and required state approval of clerical appointments under the May Laws of 1873. Bishops were imprisoned or exiled and many parishes were left without priests. The campaign backfired: the Centre Party’s vote grew, and Bismarck wound the conflict down from the late 1870s so he could turn against the socialists instead.

Repression and the invention of the welfare state

After two assassination attempts on Wilhelm I in 1878, Bismarck pushed through the Anti-Socialist Law, which banned social democratic organizations, meetings, and publications while still allowing candidates to stand for the Reichstag as individuals. It stayed in force until 1890. Alongside repression he offered inducement, creating the first national social insurance system anywhere in the world.

1. Health insurance, 1883, funded jointly by workers and employers.
2. Accident insurance, 1884, funded by employers.
3. Old-age and disability insurance, 1889, with pensions from age 70.

The design was copied across Europe and remains the ancestor of Germany’s contribution-based social insurance today. It did not achieve its political aim. The Social Democratic Party won the largest share of the popular vote from 1890 onward and became the largest party in the Reichstag by seats in 1912.

Industry, science, and everyday life

The French indemnity and unified national markets set off a construction and company-founding boom known as the Gründerzeit, whose ornate apartment blocks still define large parts of Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich. A stock market crash in 1873 ended the speculative phase but not the underlying growth. Currency was unified as the Goldmark in 1873, the Reichsbank opened in 1876, and a single civil code, the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, took effect on 1 January 1900 and remains the basis of German civil law.

• Coal and steel in the Ruhr made Krupp, Thyssen, and Gelsenkirchen household names, and German steel output passed Britain’s around the turn of the century.
• Synthetic chemistry gave BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst near-dominance of global dyes and pharmaceuticals, with aspirin marketed by Bayer from 1899.
• Electrical engineering built Siemens and AEG, and Berlin gained an electric tram network and, from 1902, an U-Bahn.
• Universities exported the research doctorate and the seminar model, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, founded in 1911, became today’s Max Planck Society.
• Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895 and won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, Robert Koch identified the tuberculosis and cholera bacilli, Max Planck introduced the quantum hypothesis in 1900, and Albert Einstein moved to Berlin in 1914.

Emigration, which had sent millions of Germans to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, fell sharply as industrial jobs multiplied at home, and internal migration from the eastern provinces to the Ruhr reversed the flow. Cities grew fast: Berlin passed two million residents by 1905.

The colonial empire and the Herero and Nama genocide

Bismarck had little interest in overseas colonies, but from 1884 the empire claimed territory quickly, and Berlin hosted the 1884 to 1885 conference that set the rules by which European powers partitioned Africa. German holdings came to include German South West Africa, now Namibia, Togoland, Kamerun, German East Africa covering modern Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, German New Guinea, Samoa, and the leased port of Kiautschou in China, now part of Qingdao.

Colonial rule was violently coercive. The suppression of the Herero and Nama uprisings in German South West Africa between 1904 and 1908 killed an estimated 80 percent of the Herero and about half the Nama population through battle, extermination orders, driving survivors into the Omaheke desert, and concentration camps. It is widely recognized as the first genocide of the twentieth century, and the German government formally acknowledged it as genocide in 2021 as part of a reconciliation agreement with Namibia. The Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa from 1905 to 1907 also cost hundreds of thousands of African lives, largely through famine caused by scorched-earth tactics. Any honest guide to the empire has to hold these events alongside the industrial and scientific achievements.

Foreign policy: from Bismarck’s balance to Weltpolitik

Bismarck’s aim after 1871 was to keep France isolated and avoid a war on two fronts. He built an overlapping alliance system: the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, the Triple Alliance adding Italy in 1882, and the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887 that promised neutrality if either was attacked. He described the empire as a satiated power and generally acted like it in Europe.

Wilhelm II and his advisers replaced that caution with Weltpolitik, a claim to global standing and what the emperor called a place in the sun. The Reinsurance Treaty was allowed to lapse in 1890, and Russia signed an alliance with France in 1894. Naval laws in 1898 and 1900, driven by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, set out to build a battle fleet capable of threatening the Royal Navy, which pushed Britain toward agreements with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907. Two crises over Morocco in 1905 and 1911 were intended to split that grouping and tightened it instead. By 1914 the empire’s reliable partner was a multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary struggling with its own nationalities.

The First World War and the collapse of 1918

After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, Berlin gave Vienna unconditional backing against Serbia. When Russia mobilized, German war plans required an immediate strike westward. Germany declared war on Russia and France and invaded neutral Belgium on 4 August 1914, which brought Britain in. The plan for a quick victory failed at the Marne in September, and the western front settled into trench warfare for four years.

• From 1916 Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff exercised such control over war policy and the economy that historians describe it as a silent military dictatorship, with the chancellor and emperor increasingly sidelined.
• The British blockade caused severe civilian hardship, remembered as the turnip winter of 1916 to 1917, when potato harvests failed and turnips became a staple.
• Unrestricted submarine warfare, resumed in February 1917, brought the United States into the war in April.
• The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 took Russia out of the war on harsh terms, but the resulting spring offensives in the west exhausted the German army without breaking the line.
• By late September 1918 Ludendorff told the government the war was lost and pressed for an armistice request and a parliamentary cabinet, shifting responsibility for defeat onto civilian politicians.

The end came from below. When the naval command ordered a final sortie in late October 1918, sailors at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel mutinied. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils took control of city after city within days. On 9 November 1918 Chancellor Max von Baden announced Wilhelm II’s abdication before the emperor had agreed to it, Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic from a Reichstag window, and Wilhelm fled to the Netherlands, where he signed the formal abdication on 28 November and lived until 1941. The armistice took effect on 11 November. Roughly two million German soldiers had died. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919 in the same Hall of Mirrors where the empire had been proclaimed, imposed territorial losses, disarmament, reparations, and the war-guilt clause.

Timeline of the German Empire

Date	Event
1834	Zollverein customs union begins linking German economies under Prussian leadership
1862	Bismarck appointed Prussian minister-president
1866	Austria defeated at Königgrätz; German Confederation dissolved
1867	North German Confederation founded
18 Jan 1871	Empire proclaimed at Versailles; Wilhelm I becomes German Emperor
1871 to 1878	Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church
1873	Goldmark introduced; stock market crash ends the Gründerzeit boom
1878	Anti-Socialist Law enacted
1879 to 1882	Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary, then Triple Alliance with Italy
1883 to 1889	Health, accident, and old-age insurance laws create the first welfare state
1884 to 1885	Colonial acquisitions begin; Berlin Conference on Africa
1888	Year of three emperors; Wilhelm II accedes
1890	Bismarck dismissed; Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapses
1898 to 1900	Naval laws launch the fleet build-up and the arms race with Britain
1900	Civil code, the BGB, takes effect
1904 to 1908	Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa
Aug 1914	Invasion of Belgium; the First World War begins for Germany
1917	Unrestricted submarine warfare; United States enters the war
Nov 1918	Kiel mutiny, revolution, abdication of Wilhelm II, armistice
Jun 1919	Treaty of Versailles signed

Where to see the German Empire in Germany today

Imperial-era buildings and infrastructure are still in daily use across the country, which makes this one of the easier periods of German history to visit. Check opening hours and any booking requirements before you travel, since several of these sites require timed tickets.

• Reichstag building, Berlin, completed in 1894 to Paul Wallot’s design, now the seat of the Bundestag, with free timed-entry access to Norman Foster’s dome.
• Berliner Dom and the Siegessäule victory column in Berlin, both central to how the monarchy presented itself.
• Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, for the period’s politics, propaganda, and material culture in one place.
• Zeche Zollverein in Essen, a UNESCO World Heritage colliery complex that explains Ruhr industrialization better than any text.
• Speicherstadt in Hamburg, the UNESCO-listed brick warehouse district built from 1885, and the Old Elbe Tunnel of 1911.
• Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the suspended monorail running since 1901 and still a working commuter line.
• Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig, dedicated in 1913, a monument to the 1813 battle that shows late-imperial nationalism at full volume.
• Bismarck Museum at Friedrichsruh near Hamburg, on the estate where Bismarck retired after 1890.
• Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee in Bavaria, built by Ludwig II, the king whose consent and debts helped make the 1871 empire possible.
• The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, outside Germany but essential to both the beginning and the end of the story.

How historians argue about the empire

Interpretation has shifted several times, and knowing the debate helps when you read older books. A mid-twentieth-century view, associated with Fritz Fischer and later with the Bielefeld school, treated the empire as a fatally flawed half-modernized state whose authoritarian elites made both 1914 and 1933 more likely. From the 1980s, historians including Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn challenged that, pointing to lively local politics, mass party membership, active courts, and a large press, and arguing that Germany was not uniquely deviant among European monarchies. More recent work has moved the colonial record and the empire’s global entanglements from the margins to the centre. Treat any single-cause explanation of the empire’s rise or fall with caution.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, permanent collection and online LeMO resource on the Kaiserreich.
• Bundesarchiv holdings on the Reichstag and imperial administration.
• Joint declaration of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Namibia on the events of 1904 to 1908, 2021
• Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871 to 1918, and David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, for the two sides of the interpretive debate.