The continuities of German history : nation, religion, and race across the long nineteenth century

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Title:

The continuities of German history : nation, religion, and race across the long nineteenth century

Author:

Smith, Helmut Walser, 1962-

ISBN:

9780521895880

9780521720250

Personal Author:

Smith, Helmut Walser, 1962-

Publication Information:

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Physical Description:

vii, 246 p. ; 23 cm.

Contents:

The vanishing point of German history -- The mirror turn lamp: senses of the nation before nationalism -- On catastrophic religious violence and national belonging: the Thirty Years War and the massacre of Jews in social memory -- From play to act: anti-Jewish violence in German and European history during the long nineteenth century -- Eliminationist racism -- Conclusion: Continuities in German history.

Subject Term:

Nationalism -- Germany -- History -- 19th century.

Jews -- Germany -- History -- 19th century.

Geographic Term:

Germany -- History -- 1789-1900 -- Historiography.

Germany -- Ethnic relations -- History -- 19th century.

Europe -- Ethnic relations -- History -- 19th century.

Copies:

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Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168025431103	943.07072 S649C 2008	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.