ABSTRACT
In Rereading German History, first published in 1997, Richard J. Evans draws together his seminal review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how and why historians – mainly German, American, British and French – have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
Rereading German History re-examines major controversies in modern German history, such as the debate over Germany’s ‘special path’ to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the discussions in the 1980s on the uniqueness or otherwise of Auschwitz. Evans also analyses the arguments over the nature of German national identity. The book offers trenchant and important analytical insights into the history of Germany in the last two centuries, and is ideal reading material for students of modern history and German studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |59 pages
Parade of the Grand Narratives
chapter |7 pages
Towards Unification
chapter |11 pages
Whatever Became of the Sonderweg? 1
chapter |21 pages
Nipperdey's Nineteenth Century 1
chapter |10 pages
From Unification to World War 1
chapter |6 pages
The View from France 1
part |49 pages
Patterns of Authority and Revolt
chapter |22 pages
Police and Society from Absolutism to Dictatorship 1
chapter |6 pages
The Catholic Community and the Prussian State 1
chapter |6 pages
Workers' Co-Operatives in the Nineteenth Century 1
chapter |11 pages
The Failure of German Labour in the Weimar Republic
part |71 pages
Ideological Origins of Nazism
chapter |4 pages
The Dynamics of Violence
chapter |26 pages
In Search of German Social Darwinism
chapter |4 pages
From Racial Hygiene to Auschwitz 1
part |25 pages
Faces of the Third Reich
chapter |5 pages
Claus Von Stauffenberg and the Bomb that Failed
chapter |5 pages
The Deceptions of Albert Speer 1
part |39 pages
Reunification and Beyond