Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- 1 INTRODUCTION : THE GERMAN LANDS AND PEOPLE
- 2 MEDIAEVAL GERMANY
- 3 THE AGE OF CONFESSIONALISM, 1500–1648
- 4 THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM, 1648–1815
- 5 THE AGE OF INDUSTRIALISATION, 1815–1918
- 6 DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP, 1918–45
- 7 THE TWO GERMANIES, 1945–90
- 8 THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY SINCE 1990
- 9 PATTERNS AND PROBLEMS OF GERMAN HISTORY
- Suggestions for further reading
- Index
1 - INTRODUCTION : THE GERMAN LANDS AND PEOPLE
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- 1 INTRODUCTION : THE GERMAN LANDS AND PEOPLE
- 2 MEDIAEVAL GERMANY
- 3 THE AGE OF CONFESSIONALISM, 1500–1648
- 4 THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM, 1648–1815
- 5 THE AGE OF INDUSTRIALISATION, 1815–1918
- 6 DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP, 1918–45
- 7 THE TWO GERMANIES, 1945–90
- 8 THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY SINCE 1990
- 9 PATTERNS AND PROBLEMS OF GERMAN HISTORY
- Suggestions for further reading
- Index
Summary
In a famous and much-quoted verse, those two most renowned German writers, Goethe and Schiller, posed the question which has been at the heart of much German history: ‘Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiss das Land nicht zu finden.’ (‘Germany? But where is it? I know not how to find the country.’) They went on to put their finger succinctly on a further problem of the Germans: ‘Zur Nation euch zu bilden, ihr hoffet es, Deutsche, vergebens; / Bildet, ihr könnt es, dafür freier zu Menschen euch aus.’ (‘Any hope of forming yourselves into a nation, Germans, is in vain; develop yourselves rather – you can do it – more freely as human beings!’) Between them, these quotations encapsulate perhaps the most widespread general notions about Germany and the Germans – although of course Goethe and Schiller could hardly foresee, let alone be held responsible for, what was to come. A belated nation, which became unified too late, and a nation, at that, of ‘thinkers and poets’ who separated the freedom of the sphere of the spirit from the public sphere and the powers of the state; a nation which, notoriously, eventually gave rise – whatever its contributions in literature and music – to the epitome of evil in the genocidal rule of Adolf Hitler. A nation with an arguably uniquely creative culture and uniquely destructive political history; a nation uniquely problematic, tormented, peculiar, with its own strange, distorted pattern of history.
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- A Concise History of Germany , pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004