The Continuities of German History

The Continuities of German History
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages :
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781139471251
ISBN-13 : 1139471252
Rating : 4/5 (51 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Continuities of German History by : Helmut Walser Smith

Download or read book The Continuities of German History written by Helmut Walser Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


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