Napoleon, who died 200 years ago, was also one of the most important figures in German history. He dissolved the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806, redrew borders and turned the client states of the German Confederation into modern bureaucratic states.
And from the fight against Napoleon emerged the modern German national movement, leading to the revolution of 1848/49 and finally to the unification of what had been the German confederation and Prussia into the German nation state in 1871.
Overall Napoleon had an immensely modernizing impact on Germany: revolutionizing the state, the society and the way people thought about their smaller and larger communities. It was Napoleon who catapulted Germany from the Ancien Regime to the modern world.
That's why German historian Thomas Nipperdey started his history of modern Germany in 1983 with the famous sentence: "In the beginning, there was Napoleon."
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