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

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.[em] (Mar.) [/em]