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Book Review: Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, during, and after Nationalism, 1500–2000

Book Review: Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, during, and after Nationalism, 1500–2000 sThe argument of this new book by Helmut Walser Smith is well expressed by its title: namely, that the German nation both predates and antedates the nationalist age. As a matter of situating it, then, the book might be described as qualification of the dictum of Ernest Gellner that nationalists make nations, not the reverse. For what Walser Smith shows early in his five-part, fourteen-chapter magnum opus is that the sense of a German nation existed long before nationalism claimed sole proprietorship over it. That is, the German nation is imagined differently at different times. He demonstrates this changing sense of nation using some of the “more ordinary kinds of cultural artifacts of nationhood” (xiv). These include maps, literary texts, works of art, and other objects. It is thus both the approach and the story that Walser Smith tells that is fascinating. The unordinary sources do not disrupt his overarching historical narrative but rather buoy it, as the maps, in particular, reveal a rich cartographic vision of Germany that reaches back to the fifteenth century. This is a long history of Germany, but also one that can imagine a new, post-2000 German nation of the present.sPart 1 of Germany: http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Austrian History Yearbook Cambridge University Press

Book Review: Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, during, and after Nationalism, 1500–2000

Burri, Michael
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 52: 3 – May 1, 2021
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Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota.
ISSN
0067-2378
eISSN
1558-5255
DOI
10.1017/S0067237821000199
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

sThe argument of this new book by Helmut Walser Smith is well expressed by its title: namely, that the German nation both predates and antedates the nationalist age. As a matter of situating it, then, the book might be described as qualification of the dictum of Ernest Gellner that nationalists make nations, not the reverse. For what Walser Smith shows early in his five-part, fourteen-chapter magnum opus is that the sense of a German nation existed long before nationalism claimed sole proprietorship over it. That is, the German nation is imagined differently at different times. He demonstrates this changing sense of nation using some of the “more ordinary kinds of cultural artifacts of nationhood” (xiv). These include maps, literary texts, works of art, and other objects. It is thus both the approach and the story that Walser Smith tells that is fascinating. The unordinary sources do not disrupt his overarching historical narrative but rather buoy it, as the maps, in particular, reveal a rich cartographic vision of Germany that reaches back to the fifteenth century. This is a long history of Germany, but also one that can imagine a new, post-2000 German nation of the present.sPart 1 of Germany:

Journal

Austrian History Yearbook – Cambridge University Press

Published: May 1, 2021

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