Reddit reviews Gold and Iron: Bismark, Bleichroder, and the Building of the German Empire

I had a german history professor who seemed to go into throes of ecstasy over this book http://www.amazon.com/Gold-Iron-Bismark-Bleichroder-Building/dp/0394740343/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381099250&sr=8-1&keywords=iron+and+gold

The Prussian German Empire was an interesting country, but I'm with the others on this thread who're siding with the Habsburgs/Hapsburgs. There were three key events that led to the Prussians being paramount in Germany: the War of the Austrian Succession, the Prussians' extremely capable resistance in the Napoleonic Wars (including the invention of military reserves and the General Staff), and the Wars of German Unification, including another war with Austria. (Specifically, the Seven Weeks' War. You know that rule of thumb that the side with the fancier uniforms loses? Austria inspired it.) If it hadn't been for the War of the Austrian Succession, Bavaria would probably have been Austria's main rival, and 1871-1945 would have been a much less exciting time.

The current heir to the German Empire is Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia (Wikipedia's full list of pretenders to the world's abolished crowns is fascinating reading); I'm pretty sure that if you made him the absolute monarch of Germany, his first and last act as an absolute monarch would be to limit his own powers and re-establish the Imperial Diet. Most of the European royals (definitely including the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany) fought against the Nazis, and have a low opinion of anything too similar to the people who tried to kill their parents and grandparents. (The late Archduke Otto von Habsburg, for example, spent much of his political career as a Member of the European Parliament.)

Still, if you're interested in Imperial Germany, so much the better! I'd recomend reading Fritz Stern's Gold and Iron and Five Germanys I Have Known to get the lay of the land; Five Germanys is mostly about making sense of the Holocaust, but its first chapters are one of the best accounts of the Kaiserreich I've ever read.

And to answer your main question: I think a restored German Empire using its historical pattern of organization (an Emperor and Imperial Council with defined powers, a Parliament/Diet, an independent judiciary, and a good bit of regional autonomy) would function very well, as a normal, developed Western country...

Unless the Serbs killed an allied archduke again, that is. "The Summer Before the War" is famous for a reason; Europe was at its high water mark, and had nothing but hope to look forward to in the future, before the First World War dealt the continent a wound that it's still reeling from, and that might prove mortal. (Fritz Stern's other book, about exactly the people you'd expect it to be about, is The Politics of Cultural Despair. Also worth reading on the beginning of that cultural despair -- although not directly dealing with its worst manifestation -- is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory.)