David Wetzel

Education

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.

Teaching

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.

Publications

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.

In 2012, he wrote an article entitled “Any Mouse Can Bite a Lion’s Tail: Recent Research on the Concert of Europe,” for the periodical for the Deutsches Historisches Institute, Paris.

In 2012, Wetzel published A Duel of Nations on the diplomacy of the Franco-Prussian War itself. Patricia Kollander called Wetzel's book "a superb sequel to the author’s Duel of Giants," writing that Wetzel aims, "not merely to explain the progress of these events but also to shed light on 'the motives and concepts that drove the key actors as they said and did the things that the record reveals." Matthias Schulz echoed Kollander, pronouncing the work a "major achievement ... that fills an important gap in the literature which has not seen such a lucid and well-composed case study on nineteenth century war and diplomacy in many years." Jeremy Black wrote, "[T]his exemplary work not only demonstrates the value of diplomatic history but also provides rich guidance on how it should be tackled." Alfred Kelly added: "The book is obviously a labor of love. It has the feel of a series of masterful undergraduate lectures, complete with arresting character sketches and bizarre stories stories about crackpot minor players." Said Dirk Boenker: The book is " an impressive piece of scholarship [and] a valuable English language account of the high diplomacy of the Franco-Prussian War." In the Historische Zeitschrift Ulrich Lappenküper expressed no doubt that the book would fill an “important gap in the literature addressed to this subject in the English language" and Dennis Showalter called it "the definitive account of its subject."

Media