Publishers Weekly
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.)
Mary Lindemann
"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."
Tim Blanning
"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."
Charles Maier
"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."
Sir Christopher Clark
"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."
Foreign Affairs - Andrew Moravcsik
"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."
Robert D. Kaplan
"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."
James J. Sheehan
"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."
Library Journal
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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.
