Speaking of his intended audience, while anyone interested in continental European history will enjoy this, Siemann has written a work of undoubtedly scholarly quality and the more you know of European history from roughly the French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848 the more you will get out of it. From what I can tell, “Metternich: Strategist and Visionary” is the first of his works to be translated and published in the United States, particularly for general readers. Siemann studied history, philosophy and political science at the universities of Minster, Vienna and Tubingen and his research focuses on Europe’s 19th century, having written books on the 1848 Revolutions in German lands and 19th century German Nationalism.
Wolfram Siemann is Professor Emeritus for Modern and Contemporary History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Between the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutions of 1848 there was a period of comparative, if not actual, peace for Europe, and Wolfram Siemann’s wonderfully crafted biography, “Metternich: Strategist and Visionary” gives us the most comprehensive and insightful modern account of one of the chief architects of this period of, again, relative peace for Europe, the Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich. Two World Wars marked the 20th century, while the 19th began with the Napoleonic Wars, saw a series of Revolutions in 1848, and the conflicts springing out of those revolutions kept parts of the continent in conflict until the outbreak of World War I. Continental Europe has been engulfed in war throughout much of its history.
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