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

While William Hagen’s history of central Europe over the last 300 years is thematically focused on the nation, his book also includes discussions of the major developments of high politics, constitutional and political institutions, social and economic structures and intellectual and cultural life, as well as the main lines of historians’ debates on these topics. The work is designed to be easily understandable for a reader without any knowledge of German or German history—an undergraduate, for instance—and to contain its wide-reaching content in the short span of some 400 printed pages. This is a daunting task, but if anyone can fulfill it, then it is the author. His book sums up a lifetime of extensive, insightful scholarship in German and Polish history and an intimate personal acquaintance with central Europe.

The book is divided into four parts, the subtitle’s “four lives of the nation,” reflecting Germany’s changing geopolitical circumstances: the old regime and the Holy Roman Empire, central Europe during the long nineteenth century, 1789–1914, the age of total war, 1914–45, and the postwar era. Hagen hints that, possibly, a fifth life of the German nation may have begun in 1989. Although these four parts follow chronologically, the account in each part is arranged thematically. The 1789–1914 section, for instance, includes chapters on liberalism and nationalism, on industrialization, the labor movement and the social question, on the condition of women and gender relations, or on the Jewish population. Each chapter deals with the entire 1789–1914 era, although some chapters focus more on some decades of it than others. The book’s illustrations include useful maps, occasional tables and, above all, excellent images that underline, very effectively, the author’s points. Pervading the entire undertaking is an elegiac tone, as the author deploys German history to illuminate questions of political philosophy and to meditate on the human condition. The upshot is a fascinating work, far and away the best of its genre in the English language. Its very strengths, though, might lead to some problems with its use as a textbook, and its broad coverage belies a certain compartmentalization of its analysis.

Probably the chief issue for classroom use of Four Lives of the Nation is its rigorously structural format. The account of Nazi Germany, for instance, includes a chapter on everyday life from 1933 to 1945, then another on the Second World War, focusing on the regime’s efforts to create a genocidal, racialized empire in Eastern Europe. It is followed by a chapter on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which begins with the First World War and goes on through the Holocaust. This skipping back and forth in time, typical of all four parts of the book, would not be well received by undergraduates, who generally expect a chronological narrative from a textbook, and might have difficulty following the author’s exposition. The book would work better for graduate students, and the author’s extensive English-language bibliography, containing the very latest works of scholarship, as well as a supplement of relevant German films, available with English subtitles, would be unusually helpful for them.

Graduate students and more sophisticated undergraduates will also appreciate the author’s illustrations and the lengthy captions, sometimes page-long miniessays, with which the author interprets them. The explications of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I’s Tabakskollgeium, of scenes from the wars against Napoleon, of an allegorical representation of May Day, of Hitler and Hjalmar Schacht marching together, or of Konrad Adenauer returning from Moscow in 1955, are little masterpieces of cultural criticism. Sometimes, though, the author adds to his captions additional descriptions, not of the photos themselves, but evidently of other illustrations he was unable to include. This practice can be simultaneously illuminating and confusing.

The book’s subtitle, Four Lives of the Nation, points to what might be the chief lacuna in its clear and elegant exposition...