VoHter Berghahn , Professor of History in the University of Warwick, considers Fritz Stern 's Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder, and the Building of the German Republic. Fritz Stern , he argues, is among the few historians ever to have pierced the wall of silence that surrounds the history of high finance in modern times. His book is about the friendship between Bleichroder, a Jew who was the wealthiest man in Imperial Germany, and Bismarck, the founder and Iron Chancellor of the German Empire. But on closer reading it turns out to be more than tha,t ...