Germany A Nation In Its Time Before During And After Nationalism 1500 2000

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.

Chronicles the lives of Kurt von Schuschnigg, son of the former Austrian Chancellor, and his family during the time of the Anschluss and how their faith helped them survive these difficult times.

Broken glass, twisted beams, piles of debris--these are the early memories of the children who grew up amidst the ruins of the Third Reich. More than five decades later, German youth inhabit manicured suburbs and stroll along prosperous pedestrian malls. Shattered Past is a bold reconsideration of the perplexing pattern of Germany's twentieth-century history. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer explore the staggering gap between the country's role in the terrors of war and its subsequent success as a democracy. They argue that the collapse of Communism, national reunification, and the postmodern shift call for a new reading of the country's turbulent development, one that no longer suggests continuity but rupture and conflict. Comprising original essays, the book begins by reexamining the nationalist, socialist, and liberal master narratives that have dominated the presentation of German history but are now losing their hold. Treated next are major issues of recent debate that suggest how new kinds of German history might be written: annihilationist warfare, complicity with dictatorship, the taming of power, the impact of migration, the struggle over national identity, redefinitions of womanhood, and the development of consumption as well as popular culture. The concluding chapters reflect on the country's gradual transition from chaos to civility. This penetrating study will spark a fresh debate about the meaning of the German past during the last century. There is no single master narrative, no Weltgeist, to be discovered. But there is a fascinating story to be told in many different ways.

German national identity has been constructed over the course of more than three centuries. This book examines the diverse and contested definitions of "Germaness" and covers the struggles between the democratic and non-democratic divisions, the role of foreigners and the impact of war on national identity. This comprehensive resource is a fundamental reappraisal of Germany's history from the fresh perspective of the post-Communist, reunified Germany.

The stories behind the mass exodus from Great Brittan from 1600 to modern times

Boyce examines the relationship between ideas and political and social reality. A new final chapter considers the development of nationalism in both parts of Ireland, and places the phenomenon of nationalism in a contemporary and European setting.

Kathryn Temple argues that eighteenth-century Grub Street scandals involving print piracy, forgery, and copyright violation played a crucial role in the formation of British identity. Britain's expanding print culture demanded new ways of thinking about business and art. In this environment, print scandals functioned as sites where national identity could be contested even as it was being formed.Temple draws upon cases involving Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Prince. The public uproar around these controversies crossed class, gender, and regional boundaries, reaching the Celtic periphery and the colonies. Both print and spectacle, both high and low, these scandals raised important points of law, but also drew on images of criminality and sexuality made familiar in the theater, satirical prints, broadsides, even in wax museums. Like print culture itself, the "scandal" of print disputes constituted the nation—and resistance to its formation. Print transgression destabilized both the print industry and efforts to form national identity. Temple concludes that these scandals represent print's escape from Britain's strenuous efforts to enlist it in the service of nation.

This is a new edition of From Bismarck to Hitler 1890-33. It has been extensively revised to reflect the focus of current specifications. It is aimed specifically at AS students - providing the right amount of depth and accessibility as well as encouraging the development of AS skills through the study guides. It charts the political developments of this period, from the setting up of the Weimar republic and its early challenges, through its period of relative stability to the rise of the Nazi party. Throughout the book key dates, terms and issues are highlighted, and historical interpretations of key debates are outlined. Summary diagrams are included to consolidate knowledge and understanding of the period, and exam style questions and tips for each examination board provide the opportunity to develop exam skills.