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Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000
Maybe someday
35
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
52/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Helmut Walser Smith
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
March 17, 2020
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.
What The Reviewers Say
...invigorating.
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?.
In his absorbing and enlightening new book...the historian Helmut Walser Smith makes a convincing case that nations undergo so many complex changes that it is nonsense to assume that any particular period—including Hitler’s Third Reich—is wholly determined by the past, let alone a very distant past.
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..
