The Continuities of German History
Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century

Smith reexamines German continuities and sheds new light on nationalism, anti-Semitism and genocide.

Helmut Walser Smith (Author)

9780521720250, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 April 2008

254 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.4 cm, 0.35 kg

"Highly recommended." -Choice

This book opens the debate about German history in the long term – about how ideas and political forms are traceable across what historians have taken to be the sharp breaks of German history. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the catastrophes at the center of German history. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - nation and nationalism, religion and religious exclusion, 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.

1. The vanishing point of German history
2. The mirror turn lamp: senses of the nation before nationalism
3. On catastrophic religious violence and the national belonging: the Thirty Years' War and the massacre of Jews in social memory
4. From play to act: anti-Semitic violence in German and European history during the long nineteenth century
5. Eliminationist racism
6. Afterword: where the Sonderweg debate left us.

Subject Areas: Second World War [HBWQ], First World War [HBWN], Social & cultural history [HBTB], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]