Rise and Fall of the Second Reich

I'm a big fan of the University of California at Berkeley course podcasts. One of the best ones the semester is History 167B (Rise and Fall of the Second Reich) taught by Margaret Anderson. I have read many books about European history, but I never really understood the rise of German nationalism, and the tangled history of all of those tiny German statelets that didn't unite into a single country until the end of the 19th century.

Professor Anderson is a dynamite lecturer. She speaks with great enthusiasm and authority, and is a great storyteller. Her portraits of the key personalities of German history (eg Frederick the Great, Bismarck), are vivid and entertaining and she narrates complex events like the 1848 revolutions in a way that makes them finally understandable.

For reasons I do not understand, the podcast appears on the web after a three-day delay for each lecture. But they're well worth waiting for.