Content area
Full Text
Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert. By Ulrich Herbert. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2014. Pp. 1451. Cloth E39.95. ISBN 978-3406660511.
This lengthy volume, part of a broader series of works on Europe in the twentieth century that Ulrich Herbert is editing for the Beck Verlag, adopts a two-pronged strategy to narrating the history of Germany from 1900 through to the millennium. On the one hand, it places the nation-state at the heart of developments. It begins with Germany's uniquely dynamic form of industrial and cultural modernity in the run up to World War I; moves through the disastrous military defeat of 1918, the rise and fall of Weimar democracy, and the horrors of the Third Reich; then comes to the division between east and west after 1945 and the oil price rise shock in 1973; and finally arrives at reunification and its aftermath in the decade 1990-2000. The author also draws attention to the constant reinterpretations of the national past as a guide to Germans' ever-changing perceptions of the present, identifying conflicts between, and sometimes within, particular generations as a key part of this process. Herbert maintains that even transnational developments after 1945, such as the student/youth revolts of the late 1960s, the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s or the rise of Alltagsgeschichte as a new branch of historical studies in the 1980s, should be understood within a national framework and with reference to specific German peculiarities and experiences.
Alongside...