Germany : a nation in its time : before, during, and after nationalism, 1500-2000

Germany A nation in its time : before, during, and after nationalism, 1500-2000

Helmut Walser Smith, 1962-

Book - 2020

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking five-hundred-year history - the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II - challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians imagined. Smith's dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were pacific in temperament, and the p...ernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation's history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and epxlains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Smith's aim, then, is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of Germany: Is it essentially a bellicose nation that murdered more than six million people? Or a pacific, twenty-first-century model of tolerant democracy? And was it inevitable that the land that produced Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Käthe Kollwitz, would also carry out mass murder on an unprecedented scale? Combining poignant prose with an historian's rigor, Smith, for example, re-creates the national euphoria that accompanied the beginning of World War I, followed by the existential despair caused by Germany's shattering defeat. This psychic devastation would simultaneously produce both the modernist glories of the Bauhaus and the meteoric rise of the Nazi Party. Nowhere is Smith's mastery on greater display than in his chapter on the Holocaust, which looks at the killing not only through the tragedies of Western Europe but, significantly, also through the lens of the rural hamlets and ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe, which were the origin of more than 80 percent of all the Jews murdered. He thus broadens the extent of culpability well beyond the high echelons of Hitler's circle all the way to the local level. Throughout its pages, Germany also examines the indispensable yet overlooked role played by women throughout the nation's history, highlighting great artists and revolutionaries, and the horrific, rarely acknowledged violence that war wrought on women. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany for the twenty-first century. --

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Subjects
Nationalism > Germany.
Germany > History.
Published
New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Helmut Walser Smith, 1962- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvi, 590 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 479-560) and index.
ISBN
9780871404664
  • List of Maps
  • Introduction
  • Part I. The Nation Before Nationalism
  • 1. Seeing Germany for the First Time (c. 1500)
  • 2. "Germany ... As If in a Mirror" (c. 1500-1580)
  • 3. The Tears of Stoics (c. 1580-1700)
  • Part II. The Copernicanturn
  • 4. Partition and Patriotism (c. 1700-1770)
  • 5. The Surface and the Interior (c. 1770-1790)
  • 6. Be l'Allemagne (c. 1790-1815)
  • Part III. The Age of Nationalism
  • 7. Developing Nation (c. 1815-1850)
  • 8. Nation Shapes (c. 1850-1870)
  • 9. Objective Nation (c. 1870-1914)
  • Part IV. The Nationalist Age
  • 10. Sacrifice For (c. 1914-1933)
  • 11. Sacrifice Of (c. 1933-1941)
  • 12. Death Spaces (c. 1941-1945)
  • Part V. After Nationalism
  • 13. A Living Concept of Fatherland (c. 1945-1950)
  • 14. The Presence of Compassion (c. 1950-2000)
  • Epilogue: The Republic of the Germans at the Beginning of the Twenty-Second Century
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Illustration Credits
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

This coherent survey of Germany from 1500 to 2000 moves away from seeing the nation's saga as a transhistorical concept and instead skillfully centers on what historians have long titled the "German Question" when exploring different forms of the German nation. Structured in sections that look at the country before, during, and after nationalism, the book retraces efforts to "[see] Germany for the first time" and takes readers on a journey through shifting understandings of what makes a nation before discussing the post-Napoleonic era. Two world wars, the rise of Nazism, and the Holocaust then define "the nationalistic age." The book concludes with the age "after nationalism" as Smith (Vanderbilt Univ.) wonders whether Germans "still live in the nationalist age." This last section centers mostly on West Germany, and Smith's overall narrative favors well-known voices. Regardless, exceptional maps, countless anecdotes, and nods to historiographical discussions make this a thoughtful examination of Germany throughout the ages, especially because of the author's ability to remain accessible to a broader audience. Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty. --Martin Kalb, Bridgewater College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

Smith's robust history of German nationalism emphasizes evolving notions of nationhood and continuities that have endured despite 500 years of tumult. Once a hodgepodge of dissimilar city-states and warring principalities, Germany began the nineteenth century with an assertively defined sense of self that the twentieth century would see weaponized to devastating effect. How did this happen? Prior narratives have pointed to Napoleon's occupation of Prussia as the moment in which Germans came together under the banner of nationalism. But Smith suggests an earlier quickening, as advances in transportation and cartography, along with the shared trauma of the Thirty Years' War, gave rise to a uniquely German national identity. While perceptions of Germanness would change to meet shifting politics and outlooks, Smith argues, certain features would persist, including notions of violence, exclusion, and primacy. Powerful chapters on the losses of WWI and the "death spaces" of WWII underscore different dimensions of sacrifice, another salient expression of German nationalism. And if today's German identity seems to privilege internationalism and compassion (and perhaps soccer), uglier impulses remain. Fresh ideas, lots of maps, and vivid prose.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Vanderbilt University history professor Smith (The Butcher's Tale) traces shifting concepts of the German nation across five centuries in this dense and erudite account. Disputing the prevailing notion that WWI- and WWII-era nationalists invented the idea of the German nation, Smith details how maps drawn before and after the Thirty Years' War (1618--1648) helped to concretize an initially vague, slowly emerging conception of "German lands." Massive deforestation in the 18th and 19th centuries contributed to the decline of local and regional loyalties, Smith writes, and German nationalism, which "was from the beginning tied in complex ways to anti-Jewish sentiment," emerged with greater clarity and force during the early-19th-century Napoleonic Wars. Ultimately, the belief that "allegiances to the nation should supersede other loyalties" flourished only in the 75 years between German unification under Otto von Bismarck and the defeat of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Unfortunately, the book's somewhat underdeveloped portrait of the post-nationalist era (1945--present) contains little discussion of how visions of a "European community" and plans for Holocaust reparations gained support in West Germany. Smith's lucid prose and insightful character sketches keep the deluge of names, dates, and border realignments from becoming too disorienting. Readers with a deep interest in the evolution of modern Europe will relish this thorough revisionist history. (Mar.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Rather than focusing on politics, diplomacy, and nationalism as a lens through which to understand the origins of the German nation, Smith (history, Vanderbilt Univ.) considers the role of maps in defining German land and identity between 1500 and 2000. Many of these maps do not describe a rigidly defined border to Germany; Smith reminds readers that prior to unification (1871), many inhabitants identified themselves by their region or principality, not by ethnic nationality. After the devastation of the Thirty Years War (1618--48), some states, such as Prussia and Austria, became increasingly militarized. In the 19th century, Germany was better known for its Romantic writers than for its armed forces. But after 1918, Smith asserts, Germany struggled to justify the devastating losses of World War I, which opened the door to a new type of racialized, militant nationalism that made the Holocaust possible. VERDICT Smith rejects the notion that German history is the story of militant nationalism marching toward genocide, and instead focuses on cartographers intellectuals who, prior to 1918, often described the landscape and ethnography of Germany in pacifistic terms. This new perspective on German history should be welcomed by all libraries.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A noted historian outlines the development of the German nation in novel ways.Smith (History/Vanderbilt Univ.; German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914, 2016, etc.) begins his account in 1500, when there was no Germany as such but instead a collection of cities and mostly small principalities: "No charts drew the German lands to scale and no drawings showed its borders. And no one had described Germany as a space with a recognizable shape." Modern cartography would change this, marking German itineraries and linking German-speaking cities into a "Germania" that "was an act of discovery, not chauvinism." However, chauvinism would soon follow: Martin Luther railed that the humanism of mapmakers and scholars had "Judaizing tendencies" that yielded too much to "the enemies of Christ." In time, nationalism would replace the former German devotion to hometowns, and it found expression in the depopulating Thirty Years' War, which took decades to recover from. On that note, Smith writes, although millions of Germans lost their lives during the Hitler years, recovery was swiftand although a majority of Germans believed, just after the war ended, that national socialism was a meritorious system whose leaders had merely taken a few missteps, by the time the "economic miracle" was at work in full force, most conversely saw that Hitler had been ruinous. German nationalism today is a very different thing from its manifestations in the two centuries prior. Smith writes of a crowd of soccer fans cheering for their team against Portugal during the 2006 World Cup and finally feeling comfortable enough about being German to wave their national flag. Even though Germans are now resolute internationalists, Smith concludes, there are troubling rumblings of a reborn nationalism in opposition to the German government's comparatively open-door policy toward immigrants and refugees, so that "public discourse now seems increasingly rife with prejudice toward outsiders."Fruitful reading for students of modern European history and the rise of nationalism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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