Germany a Nation in Its Time : Liveright Publishing Corporation : 9780871404664 : 0871404664 : 17 Apr 2020 : "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. An epic in the tradition of Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China and Jill Lepore's These Truths, Helmut Walser Smith's sterling work promises to redefine our perception of German history. 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 Smith, who, beginning in 1500, reveals early and even surprisingly 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 rather as an essential episode in Germany's c