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I am a historian of modern Germany at Vanderbilt University and have followed this field for more than thirty years. After a bit of respite, interest in Imperial Germany is suddenly chic again, as 2021 Germany looks back on the past 150 years of its unification in 1871. These five books, all published since 2000, are major recent contributions to the history of Imperial Germany’s prewar period; they also raise questions about the extent to which this conflict-ridden era represents a distant if imperfect mirror for our own contentious times.
People learn democracy by practicing it. The Germans practiced and practiced, and eventually got better at it. This is the main argument of Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s stunning book. Scrutinizing hundreds of contested elections, Anderson shows how Germans gradually reformed their authoritarian structures without significant constitutional reform. She demonstrates that the grassroots struggle for more democracy brought voters out of their narrow communities and helped form a wider civic culture. Alas, however, practice did not make perfect, and Germany was not saved from its own aggressive militarism.
What happens when manhood suffrage, a radically egalitarian institution, gets introduced into a deeply hierarchical society? In her sweeping history of Imperial Germany's electoral culture, Anderson shows how the sudden opportunity to "practice" democracy in 1867 opened up a free space in the land of Kaisers, generals, and Junkers. Originally designed to make voters susceptible to manipulation by the authorities, the suffrage's unintended consequence was to enmesh its participants in ever more democratic procedures and practices. The result was the growth of an increasingly democratic culture in the decades before 1914. Explicit comparisons with Britain, France, and America give us…
I am a historian of modern Germany at Vanderbilt University and have followed this field for more than thirty years. After a bit of respite, interest in Imperial Germany is suddenly chic again, as 2021 Germany looks back on the past 150 years of its unification in 1871. These five books, all published since 2000, are major recent contributions to the history of Imperial Germany’s prewar period; they also raise questions about the extent to which this conflict-ridden era represents a distant if imperfect mirror for our own contentious times.
No one has dissected the military culture of the German Army with such a sharp analytical scalpel as Isabel Hull. This book, “a study in institutional extremism,” takes us deep into the mind of the German military. Hull argues that since the Franco-German War of 1870, German military leaders began to conceive of war as not over until complete military victory was obtained. This insight led her to the controversial contention that Germany’s large-scale slaughter of the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa was not primarily a result of racism or of genocidal impulses in German culture generally, but of operational doctrine.
In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of "military…
I have been studying this period of German history for more than 40 years and teaching it at Manchester since 1991. I have no family connections to Germany, but I went on a school exchange to Hannover when I was 14 and became fascinated by the country and its history. I chose to do my PhD on this period because it seemed less researched than the Weimar and Nazi eras which followed. Contesting the German Empirewas an attempt to show how historians’ views of Imperial Germany have changed over time, and to give a flavor of their arguments. Reading it will save you from having to digest 500 books yourself!
When historians write about Imperial Germany, they tend to focus on the largest of its 25 states, Prussia. One of the many merits of Retallack’s work is its focus on the less-studied Kingdom of Saxony, which sought to stem the rise of socialism by introducing a series of restrictive electoral laws. Here the prime movers behind attempts to limit democracy were not reactionary Junkerswith vast country estates, or army officers in spiked helmets, but urban liberals, whose fear of socialism often outweighed any egalitarian impulses. The story of electoral politics in the German Empire is complex and controversial, but Retallack—from the University of Toronto—shines new light on the bourgeois face of German authoritarianism.
Red Saxony throws new light on the reciprocal relationship between political modernization and authoritarianism in Germany over the span of six decades.
Election battles were fought so fiercely in Imperial Germany because they reflected two kinds of democratization. Social democratization could not be stopped, but political democratization was opposed by many members of the German bourgeoisie. Frightened by the electoral success of the Social Democrats after 1871, anti-democrats deployed many strategies that flew in the face of electoral fairness. They battled socialists, liberals, and Jews at election time, but they also strove to rewrite the electoral rules of the game.…
I am a historian of modern Germany at Vanderbilt University and have followed this field for more than thirty years. After a bit of respite, interest in Imperial Germany is suddenly chic again, as 2021 Germany looks back on the past 150 years of its unification in 1871. These five books, all published since 2000, are major recent contributions to the history of Imperial Germany’s prewar period; they also raise questions about the extent to which this conflict-ridden era represents a distant if imperfect mirror for our own contentious times.
A brand-new gripping, revealing history of German colonialism, focused on the brutal diamond trade in Southwest Africa on the eve of World War I. With pellucid prose, Press tells how the Germans cordoned off a so-called “forbidden zone,” behind which rapacious explorers, colonial authorities, miners, and businessmen carted off these precious, if largely useless rocks, for which there was a huge, artificially created demand, especially in the United States.
Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany's ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America-at the cost of African lives.
Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds-gems extracted from war zones-has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.
I've been working on questions of identity and history for more than thirty years. It's a very personal topic for me, as I come from a working-class background – something that I was acutely aware of throughout my school and university education, where people of my background were comparatively rare. History in my view has the power to construct essentialist identities that exclude and are potentially deadly. But history also has the power to critically question this essentialism and contribute to a more tolerant, open-minded, and self-reflective society. Hence, as a historian, I've been trying to support and strengthen an engaged and enlightened historiography that bolsters a range of progressive identifications without leading to essentialist constructions of collective identities.
In the nineteenth century, no class culture was more prominent than the one by German Social Democracy. The German Social Democratic Party topped one million individual members before the outbreak of the First World War and about one-third of the electorate in Imperial Germany vote for its programme of revolution and democratization. This book is about the mental world of the party’s rank and file, their fears, wishes and desires, their dreams, and their beliefs. It talks powerfully about leadership cults, the tensions between nationalism and internationalism, working-class reading habits, and the ideals of republicanism. It is a powerful recreation of a constructed class identity with huge repercussions on politics in Germany.
The German Social Democratic Party was the world's first million-strong political party and was the main force pushing for the democratisation of Imperial Germany before the First World War. This book examines the themes around which the party organized its mainly working-class membership, and analyses the experiences and outlook of rank-and-file party members as well as the party's press and publications. Key topics of inquiry include: the Lassalle cult and leadership, nationalism and internationalism, attitudes to work, the politics of subsistence, the effects of military service, reading and the diffusion of Marx's ideas, cultural organisations, and socialism and republicanism under…
I have been studying this period of German history for more than 40 years and teaching it at Manchester since 1991. I have no family connections to Germany, but I went on a school exchange to Hannover when I was 14 and became fascinated by the country and its history. I chose to do my PhD on this period because it seemed less researched than the Weimar and Nazi eras which followed. Contesting the German Empirewas an attempt to show how historians’ views of Imperial Germany have changed over time, and to give a flavor of their arguments. Reading it will save you from having to digest 500 books yourself!
Essay collections are usually rather variable in quality, but this volume on the multiple ways in which modernity was staged, debated, and contested in Germany between the 1890s and the 1930s, is consistently good. The individual essays are all rich in interesting detail, yet it is the collectively written introduction that is likely to find the widest readership, offering not only a succinct summary of ways in which global discussions about the concept of modernity can help us to understand the course of German history, but also some pointers on how the German case can contribute to global historical discussion.
What was German modernity? What did the years between 1880 and 1930 mean for Germany's navigation through a period of global capitalism, imperial expansion, and technological transformation?
German Modernities From Wilhelm to Weimar brings together leading historians of the Imperial and Weimar periods from across North America to readdress the question of German modernities. Acutely attentive to Germany's eventual turn towards National Socialism and the related historiographical arguments about 'modernity', this volume explores the variety of social, intellectual, political, and imperial projects pursued by those living in Germany in the Wilhelmine and Weimar years who were yet uncertain about what…
I have been studying this period of German history for more than 40 years and teaching it at Manchester since 1991. I have no family connections to Germany, but I went on a school exchange to Hannover when I was 14 and became fascinated by the country and its history. I chose to do my PhD on this period because it seemed less researched than the Weimar and Nazi eras which followed. Contesting the German Empirewas an attempt to show how historians’ views of Imperial Germany have changed over time, and to give a flavor of their arguments. Reading it will save you from having to digest 500 books yourself!
As the title suggests, Smith’s recent book is not about the imperial era alone, but it is an important and thought-provoking text for anyone with an interest in modern German history. I particularly admire the book’s erudition, breadth of scope, and bold ambition, which I know I could never match. The book makes impressive use of literary and visual sources (most notably a fascinating array of maps). As with any attempt at a ‘grand narrative,’ it is relatively easy to pick small holes in the argument, but there is no doubt that this is a book that will be read and discussed for many years to come.
For nearly a century, conventional historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression, its nineteenth-century ascent accompanied by militarism and brought to a murderous apex in the Third Reich. Not so, asserts Helmut Walser Smith, who, beginning in 1500, reveals pacific conceptions of the nation and allows us to see the Nazis' extreme form of nationalism not as the dark culmination point of German history but as an essential episode in Germany's centuries-long history of continually conceiving the nation in radically different ways. Whether chronicling the Thirty Years War, the German Enlightenment, the…
I have been studying this period of German history for more than 40 years and teaching it at Manchester since 1991. I have no family connections to Germany, but I went on a school exchange to Hannover when I was 14 and became fascinated by the country and its history. I chose to do my PhD on this period because it seemed less researched than the Weimar and Nazi eras which followed. Contesting the German Empirewas an attempt to show how historians’ views of Imperial Germany have changed over time, and to give a flavor of their arguments. Reading it will save you from having to digest 500 books yourself!
I have selected a non-academic title which has gained a lot of attention over the past year or so. Its author is a journalist (for titles such asThe Spectator,Daily Telegraph, and The Washington Post) and podcaster (Tommies & Jerries), but her Anglo-German background, storytelling flair, and social media presence have made her an important new voice in interpreting German history for the English-speaking world. This book is a handy starting point for those who want a concise chronological narrative of the period.
Before 1871, Germany was not yet a nation but simply an idea. Otto von Bismarck had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France - all without destroying itself in the process? In a unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern history, Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. This often-startling narrative…
I have been studying this period of German history for more than 40 years and teaching it at Manchester since 1991. I have no family connections to Germany, but I went on a school exchange to Hannover when I was 14 and became fascinated by the country and its history. I chose to do my PhD on this period because it seemed less researched than the Weimar and Nazi eras which followed. Contesting the German Empirewas an attempt to show how historians’ views of Imperial Germany have changed over time, and to give a flavor of their arguments. Reading it will save you from having to digest 500 books yourself!
I really like the work of Mark Hewitson, a historian based at University College London. This book appeared in 2018 and is one of his most ambitious to date. It looks at how Germans conceived of themselves and their place in the world in the years before the First World War. Although historians sometimes talk about the late 19th century as the first phase of globalization—and the German language certainly gained lots of new compound nouns starting with Welt (or world) Hewitson shows that most contemporaries’ interactions and horizons remained intra-European or transatlantic rather than truly global.
The German Empire before 1914 had the fastest growing economy in Europe and was the strongest military power in the world. Yet it appeared, from a reading of many contemporaries' accounts, to be lagging behind other nation-states and to be losing the race to divide up the rest of the globe. This book is an ambitious re-assessment of how Wilhelmine Germans conceived of themselves and the German Empire's place in the world in the lead-up to the First World War. Mark Hewitson re-examines the varying forms of national identification, allegiance and politics following the creation and consolidation of a German…
I was a law school graduate heading for my first job when, unable to think of anything better to do with my last afternoon in London, I wandered through the First World War galleries of the Imperial War Museum. I was hypnotized by a slide show of Great War propaganda posters, stunned by their clever viciousness in getting men to volunteer and wives and girlfriends to pressure them. Increasingly fascinated, I started reading about the war and its aftermath. After several years of this, I quit my job at a law firm and went back to school to become a professor. And here I am.
Weber is another outstanding and original historian. Here he takes apart all the myths that have accumulated around Hitler’s military service in the First World War, showing that Hitler was a mediocre soldier with a relatively safe job who got medals because the officers knew who he was. Weber also shows how crucial a (legendary) version of Hitler’s war service was to his rise to power.
Hitler claimed that his years as a soldier in the First World War were the most formative years of his life. However, for the six decades since his death in the ruins of Berlin, Hitler's time as a soldier on the Western Front has, remarkably, remained a blank spot. Until now, all that we knew about Hitler's life in these years and the regiment in which he served came from his own account in Mein Kampf and the equally mythical accounts of his comrades.
Hitler's First War for the first time looks at what really happened to Private Hitler and…
