David Wetzel

David Wetzel is an international historian who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the diplomacy of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. He has written on the Crimean War and on the three wars of German Unification. Of these he has made the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and Bismarck's diplomacy in the twenty years that followed it the focus of his scholarly concerns.

David Wetzel earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on the Crimean War.

Wetzel started working at Berkeley in 1986 in the billing and payments services department, and was hired as a lecturer in 2003 after completing A Duel of Giants. In 2012 he was one of seven Berkeley faculty members listed among America's best professors in a book published by The Princeton Review.

Wetzel's first book, The Crimean War: A Diplomatic History (1985) surveyed the conflict from a bird's eye point of view. Ann Pottinger Saab welcomed it as "a trenchantly written synthesis, understand [ing] the war in terms of the consequences for Central Europe and the national unification movements. According to D.W. Spring: Wetzel "avoids the minutiae of details....yet he reveals the substance of the negotiations with a sure grasp of their complexity." Wetzel's second work A Duel of Giants (2001) deals with the July crisis of 1870 that led to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. James F. McMillan praised it, commenting that "the book can be recommended as a useful theme in European history...which has suffered from neglect for some forty years." Michael Schmid observed: "David Wetzel's study is an extremely well crafted analysis of this dramatic episode in European history, and it is a pleasure to read." Norman Rich admired the way "Wetzel concentrated on the personalities involved in the crisis [and his treatment] of the crisis itself, which he discusses clearly and dispassionately." Arden Bucholz noted the "uniqueness" of what he termed Wetzel's "systems analysis of people". In 2005 a German translation of the book appeared as the seventh volume of the Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung Wissenschaftliche Reihe. In 2008, Wetzel debated Bismarck’s motives in the period leading up the war with the distinguished Augsburg historian, Josef Becker. In 2011, he contributed an article on this subject to the popular German magazine Damals.

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