Germany: A Nation In Its Time, Before, During, And After Nationalism, 1500 - 2000, Smith - B+

     The main theme of this book is that Germany, over the course of five centuries, should be viewed through "radically different" lenses. The second message is that, for the vast majority of the years studied, Germany was a pacific land, often derided for its lack of "martial spirit". The third is an exploration of the role of compassion in national belonging. The book is divided into five distinct eras: Before Nationalism, The Copernican Turn, The Age of Nationalism, The Nationalist Age and After Nationalism. 

     I. At the mid-point of the second millennium, there were few maps and without maps, no sense of a Germany. It was simply the place where the German language was spoken. The advent of printing, the exploration of Africa and the discovery of America "set off a new curiosity about the world." The first maps of Germany delineated its borders as the Rhine, the Alps and the Danube, the Carpathians and Vistula and the Baltic Sea. In the middle of the 16th century, Munster published a "Cosmographia"that provided great detail and accuracy on Germany, its cities, mountains, rivers and boundaries. Germany was slowly becoming divided by religion as Protestantism took hold in all the cities and throughout the north. But unlike the rest of Europe where religious distinctions led to violence, the 1555 Peace of Augsburg created a Germanic patchwork wherein the local ruler could determine his community's devotion to either Catholicism or Lutheranism. However,  "[b]etween 1570 and 1648, the German lands went from a place of flourishing learning to a decimated ruin." The Thirty Years War destroyed Germany, compelling scholars to search for comparisons. The Black Death of the 14th century and the second thirty years of war from 1914-1945 are the two most oft-cited. Probably a third of the population died from battle, siege, hunger, privation and disease. The population loss was a greater percentage than that of the 20th century and it took much longer to recover, somewhere between 60 and 100 years. The war broke out in 1620 when Protestant and Catholic forces clashed over the possibility of a Protestant assuming the Bohemian crown and voting out the Catholic Hapsburgs. Both the Swedes and the French aggressively intervened in the 'Teutsche Krieg'. A contemporary chronicler called the soldiers of the era "booty stealers, plunderers, peasant tormentors, oppressors of people, tribute mongers, torturers, cowards, and deceits." The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ended the war and brought both the Swedes and French into possession of German land. 

     II. "The German lands underwent fundamental political and ideological transitions, and these resulted in a paradigmatic shift in the way one knew and represented the German nation." The Germans turned to a new way of understanding their nation. Patriotism to the nascent nations of Saxony, Prussia, Bavaria, and Austria grew. No one envisioned a singular nation, but rather a place where German was spoken in different countries.  The War of Austrian Succession raged around the world in the 1740's. Prussia had invaded Austria and annexed Silesia to begin the contest. The price of the war was high for Prussia, which lost 10% of its population. After the war, both Austria and Prussia increased the size of their armies. Both German nations joined Russia in the 1772 Partition of Poland.  The partition caused fear in Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, the Palatinate, and Wurttemberg,  all of which began to look to France and Britain as possible protectors.  "For the development of German nationalism, the German response to the French Revolution was absolutely crucial." As France began to develop a nationalist ideal which formed people into active citizens, both Austria and Prussia were still thinking about partitioning the rest of the Germany.  In 1796, France crossed the Rhine and began two decades of war, occupation and destruction. There was no German reaction, merely a "melancholic resignation".   The invasion ended the freedoms of the innumerable small cities and eventually, the Holy Roman Empire itself.  "Yet in the protracted period of war and occupation, a genuine German nationalism did, in fact, appear for the first time."  After Napoleon's defeat of Prussia at Jena in 1806,  "a    handful of intellectuals began to write in an unmistakably nationalistic mode."  Johann Fichte wrote 'The Republic of the Germans', envisioning a vast nation from the Baltic to the Adriatic, that dominated central Europe, and honored its war heroes,  its mothers,  dedicated its children to the fatherland, and allowed only Germans to be citizens.   Prussia freed its serfs, granted citizenship to all of its people and began to reform the army.  After Napoleon's  retreat from  Russia, King Frederick William called the Prussian nation to arms to defeat the Emperor. It was a Prussian army  arriving late in the day at Waterloo that delivered the coup de grace.  Germany then reverted to her peaceful ways for half-a-century.

     III.  The years after the Napoleonic wars were peaceful and entailed progress both socially and culturally. Throughout Germany, there was an increase in books published, bookstores and libraries grew in number, and the society was on its way to total literacy.  Prussia, Baden and Saxony built up excellent elementary school systems. Both Austria and Prussia appropriated fewer funds for their militaries.  Unfortunately though, suppression of new democratic ideals was widespread, as was incarceration. Germany also remained a developing nation, trailing almost all of the countries of Europe in every economic measure. Poverty, malnutrition, and infant mortality were pervasive. The revolutions of 1848 were about poverty, political rights and nationalism. A parliament in Frankfurt tried to envision a unified Germany and even offered a crown to the King of Prussia, who refused it. As throughout Europe, 1848 aspired to a new world, but didn't budge the old order. In the 1850's, as many as two million people per year left the poverty of Germany and emigrated to America. The advent of industrialization meant more and more Germans now lived in cities, and both Vienna and Berlin grew to over a million people. Both Austria and Prussia increased the funding for, and the size of, their armies.  In Prussia, a new prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, was in favor of a stronger army, and along with the Prussian nobility officer class, he led the move toward "the militarization of the nation." 

     "In central Europe, the return of war . . . would determine the space of nations." Austria was the more formidable power, with the third largest population and vaster financial resources allocated to the police and military. But Prussia, better equipped, with better access to rail transport and immeasurably better led,  routed the Austrians in their 1866 war. Bismarck solidified Prussian control of northern Germany and made no claim on Austrian land. Four years later, Prussian victory over France led to the creation of the German Empire and the absorption of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Baden and Wurttemberg. For the next four decades, Germany would become a nation with a focus more on a type of bellicose and exclusionary nationalism.

      IV. "Nationalism became the dominant ideology of the age not during the First World War but in a Germany shattered by its fallout." "Not enthusiasm but a sense of duty" was the response to the outbreak of war in 1914. There was "a tacit social contract whose core postulate was neither hate nor expansion but rather the duty to defend and die for the fatherland." They believed in "sacrificing for" the nation. As the slaughter went on year after year, people began to despise the war and in 1917, the Reichstag renounced all territorial gains and called for the cessation of all hostilities. When it was all over, the Weimar Constitution announced that the state derived its power "from the people." For the first time in German history, there was no monarch. The Treaty of Versailles removed twenty-million German speakers from the country, saddled the country with responsibility for the war and demanded reparations. The new Germany was a broken country, filled with the disabled, war-widows, fatherless children, and torn between the right and the left and financially overwhelmed.

     Hitler believed in racial purity and that in order to reinstate itself as a world power, Germany needed to rid itself of Jews. He foisted this central theme of his on his party and eventually, the entire country. Nazi Germany quickly became a one-party police state, in which the country's Jews were completely marginalized and isolated. When Poland was invaded, the Jews and upper echelons of Polish society were brutally murdered and suppressed.

      When the USSR was invaded, the SS was no longer under Army supervision and was free to pursue total war against communists and Jews.  The east became a charnel house for Jews, as the SS, as well as local thugs, unleashed a torrent of  indiscriminate murder and thievery. The decision to completely eliminate Europe's Jewry was likely made by Hitler in December, 1941 and was organized by Heydrich a month later. Although the death camps were already being utilized, they escalated to the systemic and total "final solution" of the continent's Jews in 1942-44. The Nazis achieved genocide. 

     V.  Notwithstanding all it had been through, post-war Germany looked back favorably on the Nazi years as "a good idea gone too far." W. Germany's economic miracle pushed nostalgia for the 1930's further into the past. In the 1960's, magazines and television began to deal with the Hitler years. A 14-part tv documentary, 'The Third Reich', was seen by 60% of the population. It stated that "we" were responsible. But even in the late 60's, the ability to compassionately mourn was still a decade away. The 1979 American mini-series 'Holocaust' brought discussion of what had been done to the Jews to the fore. A 1985 speech by Germany's president told the nation that they "must take on the past." Unification in 1990 led to a massive disruption in the east and an increase in anti-immigrant violence. The response was a compassionate protestation against prejudice that could not have happened in the 30's or 50's and was possible because a modern democracy had came to grips with its past. 

     The author closes by briefly addressing Germany today and the rise of the nationalist AfD, concludes that they remain a small (10%) percentage of the country. and that the nationalism of the past cannot build a society, only destroy it.

     This is an extremely challenging read, one that presupposes a familiarity with German and European history. It enlightens, particularly in the first half of the book. But, from Bismarck through 1945, I can't say that it sheds any truly new light on the greatest tragedy of 20th-century history.