
Germany
A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000
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Narrated by:
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Paul Woodson
For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined.
Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation's history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Smith's aim, then, is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of Germany: Is it essentially a bellicose nation that murdered more than six million people? Or a pacific, 21st-century model of tolerant democracy?
Smith recreates the national euphoria that accompanied the beginning of World War I, followed by the existential despair caused by Germany's shattering defeat. This psychic devastation would simultaneously produce both the modernist glories of the Bauhaus and the meteoric rise of the Nazi party.
©2020 Helmut Walser Smith (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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I enjoyed the narration and was able to listen for hours at a time.
An informative and thoughtful history
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Stunning book
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coverage of the Nazi period quite rightly emphasized the brutality of the Holocaust, German knowledge of it, and the ramifications. I learned much new and quite horrifying. that said, all else in post Weimar Germany got short shrift, including the discussion of German reactions to huge numbers of foreign immigrants.
there is than that to know about Germany, the German state and German people.
the impression is given that the authors discussion of modern n Germany is largely and expression of his disappointment that Germany has transitioned away from nationhood and into a progressive/left multicultural location. His favorable notice of theodor adorno and jurgen habermos of the Marxist new school for social research may be a window into the authors own yearnings.
interesting but unbalanced and somewhat biased
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