Helmut Walser Smith Livres

The first major history of Germany in a generation, a work that presents a five-hundred-year narrative that challenges our traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the boundaries that divided Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany were redrawn, challenged, rendered porous and built anew. This book addresses this redrawing. It considers the relations of three religious groups-Protestants, Catholics, and Jews-and asks how, by dint of their interaction, they affected one another.Previously, historians have written about these communities as if they lived in isolation. Yet these groups coexisted in common space, and interacted in complex ways. This is the first book that brings these separate stories together and lays the foundation for a new kind of religious history that foregrounds both cooperation and conflict across the religious divides. The authors analyze the influences that shaped religious coexistence and they place the valences of co-operation and conflict in deep social and cultural contexts. The result is a significantly altered understanding of the emergence of modern religious communities as well as new insights into the origins of the German tragedy, which involved the breakdown of religious coexistence.

Within weeks of the murder, the town was engulfed in violent anti-Semitic riots and demonstrations.".

This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development of German nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany'.Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germany into a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.

"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 five-hundred-year history - the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II - challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians imagined. Smith's dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. 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, twenty-first-century model of tolerant democracy? And was it inevitable that the land that produced Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Käthe Kollwitz, would also carry out mass murder on an unprecedented scale? Combining poignant prose with an historian's rigor, Smith, for example, re-creates 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. Nowhere is Smith's mastery on greater display than in his chapter on the Holocaust, which looks at the killing not only through the tragedies of Western Europe but, significantly, also through the lens of the rural hamlets and ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe, which were the origin of more than 80 percent of all the Jews murdered. He thus broadens the extent of culpability well beyond the high echelons of Hitler's circle all the way to the local level. Throughout its pages, Germany also examines the indispensable yet overlooked role played by women throughout the nation's history, highlighting great artists and revolutionaries, and the horrific, rarely acknowledged violence that war wrought on women. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany for the twenty-first century." -- From dust jacket

Set in a small Prussian town in 1900, the story revolves around the gruesome murder of a young boy, which ignites violent riots as the Christian community falsely accuses the Jews of ritual murder. Helmut Walser Smith meticulously reconstructs the events, exploring the themes of hatred, bigotry, and mass hysteria that lead to the persecution of the Jewish community. This compelling narrative serves as a modern parable, shedding light on the dangers of unfounded accusations and the historical context of anti-Semitism.

The author explores the intricate connections within German history, focusing on themes of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and genocide. By reexamining historical continuities, the book provides fresh insights into how these elements have shaped German identity and societal dynamics over time. Through a critical lens, it challenges conventional narratives and encourages a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding these significant issues in German history.

The book explores the profound religious divisions within the politically unified German Empire of 1871, focusing on the distinct worlds of Protestants and Catholics. Helmut Walser Smith examines how these groups were separated by an "invisible boundary" shaped by cultural differences and shared meanings. Through a comprehensive social, cultural, and political history, the author highlights the complexities of German nationalism and the impact of religious conflict during this period.

1941: Das meint den Beginn der Shoah mit der Inbetriebnahme der ersten Vernichtungslager und mit Pogromen, Massenerschießungen und Massenmorden, durchgeführt von SS-Einsatzgruppen und Wehrmachtstruppen in Polen und der UdSSR. Wenn man die deutsche Geschichte mit diesem einen statt anderer möglicher Fluchtpunkte betrachtet, dann stellt sich die Kernfrage wieder und neu: Welche Kontinuitäten der deutschen Geschichte führten zum Holocaust, welche Gründe und Vorgeschichten hat der Sturz in die Barbarei, wie konnte es geschehen, dass Deutsche zu Massenmördern wurden und eine Mehrheit von Deutschen zum Teil wissentlich, zum Teil halbbewusst duldend Komplizen dieses Völkermords waren? Vor über zehn Jahren hat der amerikanische Politologe Daniel J. Goldhagen diese Hauptfrage der Zeitgeschichte mit seiner These vom spezifisch deutschen eliminatorischen Antisemitismus beantwortet, und er stieß damit sowohl eine heftige öffentliche Diskussion an als auch auf fachliche Kritik. Aus fundiert historischer Perspektive versucht Helmut Walser Smith zu erklären, wie es in Deutschland zum Verlust der Menschlichkeit kommen konnte und welche Ideologien mit langen Traditionen – Nationalismus, Antisemitismus, Rassismus – diesen Zusammenbruch, der 1941 geschehen war, ermöglichten.