...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..

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'.

Vanderbilt University history professor Smith...traces shifting concepts of the German nation across five centuries in this dense and erudite account.