The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History ed. by Helmut Walser Smith (review)

Helmut Walser Smith’s Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (OHMGH) is a very rich and up-to-date reference work, written by thirty-five carefully selected experts in the field. It will be invaluable not only for historians but also for scholars and teachers in Cultural Studies and literature who may wish to have it on hand for easy reference once a less expensive paperback version is published. Given this richness, the reviewer faces an almost impossible task of doing justice to it in just a few pages. Still, let me try to offer the reader of this interdisciplinary journal what is, I hope, a fair summary of what the OHMGH is trying to do, followed by comments on the main sections, on a number of individual articles, and, finally, on the Handbook’s overall design.

Smith starts off with a fanfare by proclaiming in his first sentence that the volume “departs in significant ways from previous histories of modern Germany.” Not without some pride, he points firstly to the fact that it has been “put together by an international team of scholars, with historians from Germany, Great Britain, the United States and other nations, suggesting the diversity of scholarship and the global context of the modern discipline of history.” Secondly, he notes that the OHMGH—following the approach of Christopher Alan Bayly—“represents a novel attempt to place German history in a deeper international and transnational setting than has hitherto been the case.” This means in particular that the contributors do not have a fixation about “the Sonderweg debate—the question of whether Germany took a special and mistaken path to modernity, resulting in World War I, World War II, and the Holocaust.” Rather, the contributions “emphasize the embeddedness and the impact of German history in and on wider developments and render these qualities as central organizing principles of modern German history.” This does not “preclude showing how German history differed from other national histories, but it allows us to see these differences in a more complex and international field.” Students are therefore encouraged “to develop a catholic sense of ‘family resemblances’ to other histories.” Referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Smith wants them to see “a wider range of likeness even while retaining a concept of difference” (all quotes in paragraph from p. 1).

Thirdly, the volume is not concerned with the traditional “chronological markers” of modern German history, i.e., 1871, 1918, 1933, 1945/1949, and 1989/1990. It begins instead with the mid-eighteenth century in order to root the enterprise more deeply in the German past. The 1860s then form the next significant “marker,” with 1941 as a major “vanishing point”—or Fluchtpunkt (a term discussed later in this review). For the post-1945 decades, the periodization is more conventional, focusing on the two Germanys that became reunified in 1990. The OHMGH thus starts with three “overarching chapters on place and on people with the former showing the changing representation of German homelands and the latter focusing on gender as constitutive but historically changing,” followed by “four chronological markers which separate two long periods of time (1760–1860 and 1860–1945), and two shorter periods (1945–1989 and 1989 to the present)” (2).

These divisions are designed to make “nation-state sovereignty into a decisive marker as well as a problem of modern German history.” Thus, while the concept of a German nation can be traced back to the “early sixteenth century,” German nationalism was “at best a late eighteenth-century invention.” Although this German nationalism posited a necessary “congruence between a German nation and a German state,” it was only in 1871 that the German nation-state was created “in a world of multinational and overseas empires.” The “pull of empire, including dominion over peoples considered inferior,” is then said to have “shaped the context in which Germany’s subsequent political history unfolded.” Accordingly, the nation-state “plays a...