Germany, A Nation in Its Time: Before, During and After Nationalism, 1500–2000 by Helmut Walser Smith (review)

In this eagerly anticipated work, Vanderbilt historian Helmut Walser Smith traces divergent expressions of German communality over the past five centuries. He argues that nations have different realities in different times and that there existed a Germany before, during, and after nationalism. German nationalists did not engender the German nation but temporarily transformed its essence and meaning. Interestingly for a book of this nature, it does not clearly define the "nation." At times, the author equates it with a country or fatherland (87); at other times, he differentiates between those terms (96). He comes closest when he defines nationalism as an attempt to form people into active citizens for whom the nation stands above other loyalties (157), which still leaves open, however, what this nation is.

Smith's manner of proceeding has two distinct elements. There is the terse chronological skeleton, and there are the interjected in-depth narratives, often based on innovative sources that are as illuminating as they are selective. Accordingly, the reader should not expect a coherent story of the development of German nationhood over the past five hundred years. Indeed, Smith's very argument rejects this coherency. The segmentation is reinforced by the nature of presentation, however, which focuses on individual events and processes rather than on continual development.

The study is divided into five major parts. The first two parts examine the scholarly discovery of Germany in the early modern era as well as the subsequent consolidation of territorial patriotism in individual German-speaking polities. This development toward German political polycephality was redirected by the arrival of nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars. The third part describes the gradual dissemination of this new form of allegiance, which long remained only one of several competing options. The definition of Germany, in turn, shifted from the political to the spiritual and ascribed special importance to a reified mother tongue.

Whereas the nineteenth century was the period of nationalism in the making, Germany fully entered a nationalist age between 1914 and 1945. Part 4 describes in grueling detail how this ideology exercised political power in its most extreme form. Following the total collapse of the nationalist project, a chastised postwar republic tried to create a more compassionate sense of historical memory that included taking responsibility for the suffering caused to others. In this final part, Smith rounds off his analysis with the conclusion that most Germans of the early twenty-first century have put the nationalist age behind them and have embraced what he refers to as a living instead of a deathly concept of fatherland (459).

But this structural summary cannot provide a full picture of the book's focus and design. The author demonstrates a deep interest in art and literature and an impressive command of literary theory. He immerses the reader in the intellectual and artistic trends of individual epochs, not least of all the pivotal passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. This makes for a beautiful book in both content and appearance. It also makes for an innovative study that integrates source material frequently neglected in grand historical syntheses. Much of it is an intellectual history that delineates how important thinkers have conceived of Germany.

However, the strong focus on alternative sources and narrations comes at a price. The terse summarizations of such crucial historical turning points as the Bohemian conflict that started the Thirty Years' War (63) cannot fully do justice to the complexity of both the original events and the historiographical debate that followed. They also leave room for imprecisions such as the assumption that Holstein proper contained a relevant Danish-speaking population and risked being torn asunder along linguistic lines in 1815 (203, 309). There is a noticeable shift, however, when the narrative reaches the nationalist age between 1914 and 1945, which is clearly the author's primary area of interest and thus...