Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000

by Helmut Walser Smith

Overview

The first major history of Germany in a generation, a work that presents a five-hundred-year narrative that challenges our traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past.

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 500-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 have 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 pernicious 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 explains 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 over 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 genocide on an unprecedented scale?

Combining poignant prose with an historian’s rigor, Smith recreates 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, where more than 80% of all the Jews murdered originated. 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 German 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631491788
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	608
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Helmut Walser Smith is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the author of the acclaimed The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

List of Maps ix

Introduction xi

Part 1 The Nation Before Nationalism 1

1 Seeing Germany for the First Time (c. 1500) 3

2 "Germany … As If in a Mirror" (c. 1500-1580) 31

3 The Tears of Stoics (c. 1580-1700) 58

Part II The Copernican Turn 83

4 Partition and Patriotism (c. 1700-1770) 91

5 The Surface and the Interior (c. 1770-1790) 119

6 De l'Allemagne (c. 1790-1815) 150

Part III The Age of Nationalism 191

7 Developing Nation (c. 1815-1850) 199

8 Nation Shapes (c. 1850-1870) 234

9 Objective Nation (c. 1870-1914) 261

Part IV The Nationalist Age 291

10 Sacrifice For (c. 1914-1933) 308

11 Sacrifice Of (c. 1935-1941) 337

12 Death Spaces (c. 1941-1945) 367

Part V After Nationalism 407

13 A Living Concept of Fatherland (c. 1945-1950) 413

14 The Presence of Compassion (c. 1950-2000) 426

Epilogue: The Republic of the Germans at the Beginning of the Twenty-Second Century 461

Acknowledgments 475

Notes 479

Illustration Credits 561

Index 563

Editorial Reviews

01/13/2020

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.)

Publishers Weekly

"Helmut Walser Smith’s brilliant new book does nothing less than rewrite five centuries of German history.... Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a stunningly successful example of an interpretive and argumentative history."

Mary Lindemann

"There is much to like about this book. If this is an old story, it is told in a new way. Germany: A Nation in Its Time is elegantly written and distinguished by sharp insights. Anyone interested in how, during the 20th century, the history of Germany came to be so horrible will be stimulated and entertained, if periodically appalled."

Tim Blanning

"Helmut Walser Smith's Germany is an encompassing history of German efforts to define their nation in all its stunning contradictions through five centuries — pastoral, productive, exalted, for a time murderous, for longer civic, always complex."

Charles Maier

"Drawing on cartography, literature, travel narratives, and the history of politics, warfare, science, religion, and art, Helmut Walser Smith constructs a magisterial account of the German nation as a history of constant transformation and reinvention. Beautifully written and richly textured, it is essential reading for everyone interested in Germany's past, present, and future."

Sir Christopher Clark

"This magisterial study addresses the central question in modern German history: How and why did the country embrace a racial and cultural nationalism that ultimately led to war and genocide? . . . . [A] sweeping history. . . . Smith describes its excesses—from the slaughter on the eastern front to the Holocaust—in moving detail."

Foreign Affairs - Andrew Moravcsik

"Germany went from genocidal madness to a model democracy, dedicated to centrism and even pacifism, in a remarkably short space of historical time. Helmut Walser Smith painstakingly documents how all of this has happened, and why. It is hard to imagine a more analytically distilled version of German history. As Germany now begins a generational change in leadership, this book will serve as a guidepost."

Robert D. Kaplan

"In these profound meditations on Germany’s history, Helmut Walser Smith explores the changing meaning of the nation from its first emergence in the sixteenth century to its transformation in the contemporary world. Full of new insights and provocative conclusions, Germany: A Nation in Its Time challenges our assumptions about Germany’s past. This is a national history for a post-national age."

James J. Sheehan

02/01/2020

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.

Library Journal

2019-12-08
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 swift—and 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.

Kirkus Reviews