Oxford Handbook of Modern German History

This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development ofGerman nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the EuropeanUnion, and on 'multi-cultural Germany.'Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germanyinto a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.

How else might we organize our thinking about the past? This question is particularly pressing at a time when many look to history for concrete answers and explanations: the media, the general public, school teachers and, last but not least, the students we teach. Oxford University Press have been at the forefront of responding to such demands for general answers by commissioning a series of new handbooks, which included, last year, a new Handbook on Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith'., Helmut Walser Smith's Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (OHMGH) is a very rich and up-to-date reference work, written by thirty-five carefully selected experts in the field. It will be invaluable not only for historians but also for scholars and teachers in Cultural Studies and literature

Helmut Walser Smith is Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History and Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of German nationalism, religious history, and anti-Semitism, he is a specialist on Imperial Germany and has written on the long continuities of German history.