Politics and High Finance

In this double biography of Prince Bismarck and his banker, Columbia professor Fritz Stern paints the portrait of an era and tells the story of a grandiose failure—that of the liberal middle class in the new German Reich 100 years ago. The parameters of his study are “Germans and Jews, power and money,” and the symbol-charged protagonists of that complex relationship are the high-born first chancellor of the German Empire and the grandson of a Jewish gravedigger, Gerson Bleichro...