German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation by William W. Hagen (review)

William Hagen’s work in both early modern and modern German history is well known and highly regarded, and this new survey of German history reflects Hagen’s broad previous experience. This book has a double aim. It is an introductory text for students that “assumes no prior acquaintance with the subject” (xvii). But it is also addressed “[t]o the guild—women and men—masters, journeymen, apprentices!” of professional German historians, and offers a new “architecture of analysis and interpretation” for their consideration (xviii, 1).

Teachers of German history will find the book’s architecture distinctive in two ways. The text is organized thematically into four sections around the idea that there have been four successive German “nations.” Within each section a sequence of chronological chapters is accompanied by additional chapters on separate themes. In addition, the main text is supplemented by over a hundred illustrations, twenty-one maps, and seven tables, and each of these comes with an extended analysis, many running to hundreds of words. The topics vary. Some are short histories of political movements, some illustrative biographies, some dramatic moments. Some are short histories of artistic styles, while some concentrate on a particular painting or building to illustrate surrounding social developments. These “sketches of the house of German history’s separate rooms” (xvii) will quite likely engage students, who may skip from picture to picture but will stop to read these extended captions. Some are fascinating, but not all are equally successful. Some appear to be doing the work that the main text should be doing, e.g., “Austria’s Postwar Path” (381–82). And, inevitably perhaps, but still a bit too often, some overlap with the main text, notably the sections on liberalism before 1848, on Weimar politics, and on the structures of the Nazi regime (chapters 15 and 16). There is some chance for confusion. Are the sketches supplementary—or illustrative? Should the reading of the main text be interrupted to follow one of them over a couple of pages, or should the whole text be read through first for context?

The four sections—the four “nations”—are the Germany of the Old Reich before the French Revolution; the Germany of the “Long Nineteenth Century” from 1789 to 1914; the Germany of World War I, the interwar period, and World War II; and, finally, the Germany of the post-1945 era, extending to the present. Hagen’s long nineteenth century will be particularly contentious. Giving equal chapters and number of pages to the entire nineteenth century, on the one hand, and to Weimar and the Nazi regime, on the other, appears to undermine his own commitment to a non-determinist view, forcefully expressed in his introduction. “Collective self-understandings” revolving around nationalism, liberalism, and socialism (6) certainly did mark successive decades of the nineteenth century, but the weight of presentation leaves them—I believe against Hagen’s intention—looking like precursors of the Holocaust. The period itself is not nearly as neatly coherent as Hagen’s presentation makes it. Political historians might prefer a break at 1848 or 1871, for instance. Some economic historians will find the simple “rise of industry” approach inadequate for the entire 125 years. Literary specialists may be equally uncomfortable with a single section that conflates Romanticism, Realism, Neo-classicism, and the first waves of Modernism.

Further, despite the short introductory sections, the breaks between the four “nations” are not well defined. Hagen does not identify a single propelling force, and one could argue properly so, for, as he says, “The historian enjoys the freedom . . . of precisely not privileging” any one dimension or any one explanatory framework (4). Yet, the student with no prior acquaintance with the subject could have been offered more in the way of articulating precisely which dimension, or which explanatory framework, best explains the most significant developments in each of the periods, and what best...