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

Abstract

It is not every day that a leading historian in the field publishes a nearly 500-page narrative spanning a half-millennium of German history. Smith’s ambitious and inventive new volume, however, is no typical survey. Rather, he has written an intellectual and cultural history of the idea of Germany, a narrative of the ‘nation’ as imagined and practised over the centuries. Smith’s key argument, stated with enviable concision, is that ‘there was no transhistorical concept of the German nation. There was only a nation in its time’ (p. xi). To this he adds two subsidiary threads. Smith seeks to remind us that Germany’s long history is one of peace punctuated by war, not the inverse. And in tracing the path of German nationalism, he seeks to inject a moral arc—one that bends, especially after 1945, towards compassion. Smith is arguably seeking to redeem five centuries of German national thinking from the...