The Continuities of German History

This book addresses the long term of German history, tracing ideas and politics across what have become sharp chronological breaks. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the German catastrophe. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - in the concept of nation and the ideology of nationalism, in religion and religious exclusion, and in racism and violence - that are the center of the German historical experience and that have long histories. Smith explores these deep continuities in novel ways, emphasizing their importance, while arguing that Germany was not on a special path to destruction. The result is a series of innovative reflections on the crystallization of nationalist ideology, on patterns of anti-Semitism, and on how the nineteenth-century vocabulary of race structured the twentieth-century genocidal imagination.

Author: Helmut Walser Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/01/2008
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780521895880

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2009

About the Author
Smith, Helmut Walser: - Helmut Walser Smith earned his PhD at Yale. He has held the position of Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University since 1992. He is the author of German Nationalism and Religious Conflict (1995) and The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (2002), which won him the Fraenkel Prize for the best work in contemporary history and was named an LA Times Non-Fiction Book of the Year.