In November 1918, a parliamentary republic was proclaimed in Germany. The Weimar Republic, as it came to be known after the town in which its constitution was developed, was associated with a progressive political system, and a set of social compromises including a relatively advanced welfare state. Yet it was born out of turmoil and defeat, under near civil-war conditions; it was hampered by a harsh peace settlement, and an unstable economy; it was consistently subjected to attacks from both left and right, as large numbers of Germans rejected democracy as a form of government; and little over fourteen years after its inception, the Weimar Republic was ended when Adolf Hitler, as a constitutionally appointed chancellor, inaugurated one of the worst regimes known in human history. The disastrous demise of Weimar democracy has cast an inevitable shadow over interpretations of its course: whatever one may make of long-term interpretations of German history, it is in the Weimar Republic that the immediate causation of Hitler's rise to power has to be sought. Some accounts tend to suggest Weimar democracy was foredoomed from the start; others place far greater weight on the mistakes and decisions of individuals in the closing months in 1932–3, or on the effects of the slump after 1929. Some historians emphasise the contribution of individuals; others stress the importance of constraining, structural factors, and the limitations placed on freedom of manoeuvre and decision-making, particularly in the closing stages.

THE CREATION OF THE TWO GERMANIES

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins. The people of Germany, war-weary and concerned for an uncertain future, eked out an existence amidst the rubble and debris of the collapsed Reich. No-one – not even the occupying powers – was at this time certain what the future would hold. Yet, in the course of the next four decades, two very different Germanies emerged. In the west, the Federal Republic of Germany developed into a politically stable and economically prosperous capitalist democracy; in the east, the German Democratic Republic proved to be economically the most productive state in the communist bloc, and, until the Gorbachev era of the late 1980s, one of the Soviet Union's most reliable supporters and allies. Considering the turbulent past of these two Germanies, this double transformation, into two such different political and socioeconomic systems, is all the more remarkable.

Initially, the Allies were unsure and divided over their plans for Germany's future. War-time discussions in Teheran (1943) and Yalta (February 1945) had produced agreement that Germany should be divided into zones of occupation; and at the latter conference it was agreed that France should have her own zone, in addition to those of Britain, the USA and the USSR. Disagreements were already becoming apparent between the Soviets and the western powers on the issues of reparations and of the western frontiers of a reconstituted Poland.

After this brief summary of the main patterns of German history, we may turn to the wider questions of overall interpretations of the ‘peculiarities’ of German history.

The problems of German history have frequently been held to lie at least partially in its ‘geopolitical location’: its position in central Europe, without natural boundaries defining its frontiers, in contrast to the island kingdom of England/Britain. Thus in Germany there was perpetual warfare, and a concomitant militarisation, in contrast to the trading nation of England which substituted a navy and control of the seas for a standing army. But this view is grossly oversimplifying in its lack of consideration of detailed differences in political, economic and social structures (even leaving aside the view of English history it presupposes). The central European location of the German lands is not in itself a particularly illuminating factor in seeking to explain the peculiar paths of German history. The recently popular appeals to Germany's mid-European situation represent merely a superficially meaningful substitute for explanation: they do not in fact take serious exploration of the range of diverse historical factors involved at any time very far. On the other hand, it is also clear that it is an international system with which we have to deal, and that interactions among the different elements jostling for space, position, power and status in central Europe must be taken fully into account in addition to internal factors in any particular region or territory.

The enlarged Federal Republic of Germany that emerged on 3 October 1990 as a result of the accession of the five new Länder (federal states) created out of the former GDR was a distinctively new and somewhat lop-sided entity. It differed considerably from its West German predecessor, however much the latter had determined the conditions of unification and provided the basic constitutional and institutional framework for the unified Germany. The differences had to do with an uneven domestic economic, social and political profile, and with the dramatic changes in the wider international scene consequent on the collapse of communism and the end of a bi-polar Cold War world. The Berlin Republic represented, for a range of reasons, a distinctively new stage in German history.

The dislocations of the unprecedented historical experiment of integrating a collapsed communist state into a successful capitalist economy in the event proved far greater than the optimists in the hour of unification had expected. Major and unanticipated costs of reconstruction fell on West Germans in the form of increased competition for jobs in an era of rising unemployment, and increased taxation to help fund the modernisation of the East German infrastructure. The old, affluent, relatively self-satisfied West Germany which could agonise over its own past and proclaim it was the first ‘post-national nation’ found, too, that it was expected to take a more proactive role not only on the European, but also on the international, stage.

The years from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the end of the First World War and the collapse of the German Empire in 1918 saw fundamental changes both in Germany and in Europe more generally. From an agrarian society, Germany was transformed into a booming centre of industrial capitalism; and competition among states in Europe became competition among imperial powers for colonies across the world. The attempted solutions to the European balance of power embodied in the Vienna settlement were relatively successful in maintaining European peace for the better part of the nineteenth century; but with the unification of a ‘small’ Germany, under Prussian domination, in 1871, and with Germany's rapid industrialisation and entry into competition for empire at the turn of the century, this balance was shattered. The First World War which erupted in 1914 inaugurated changes which were to have implications throughout the twentieth century, rendering Germany a very different place from what it had been in the eighteenth century.

RESTORATION GERMANY, 1815–48

The period from 1815 to the outbreak of the revolutions which swept the German states in March 1848 is conventionally labelled either the ‘restoration’ or the ‘pre-March’ (Vormärz) period. Both labels are to an extent misleading. Conditions after 1815 did not represent a simple restoration of pre-Napoleonic political or socioeconomic patterns; nor can the period prior to 1848 be viewed solely as a prelude to the revolutionary upheavals.

A cluster of changes occurring in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries appear to render this period an important turning point in European history. The (re)discovery of America in 1492 opened up a new world, with significant effects on the economies and politics of the old world; the ‘late mediaeval crisis of feudalism’ initiated the formation of a propertyless wage-labouring class, the harbinger of developing capitalism; the emergence of an interacting system of increasingly centralised European states began to displace the dispersed sovereignty and more localised politics of feudalism; the invention of a technique of printing with movable type by Gutenberg radically altered the character of intellectual life; and the Reformation initiated by Martin Luther shattered the religious and cultural unity of mediaeval Christendom, with a process of territorial confessionalisation both sustained by and sustaining the concomitant processes of territorial state-building.

These major changes in European history should not blind us to certain continuities, particularly in relation to Germany. The period from the mid-fourteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century was characterised by a continued – and developing – territorial particularism within a relatively weak wider Imperial framework. German society continued to be largely based on feudal agrarian relations. While the economy of England expanded, that of Germany grew less rapidly, or stagnated. And for all the elements of ‘modernity’ that historians have sought in the Reformation, there was much that was essentially ‘mediaeval’ in sixteenth-century thought and beliefs.

The German territories emerged somewhat strengthened from the Thirty Years War, at least in respect of their political position in relation to the Empire. It was quite clear that, although they still did not formally possess full sovereignty, territorial rulers rather than the Holy Roman Emperor were the key political actors. In the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire under Napoleonic rule in 1806, a unique pattern of political multiplicity existed in the German lands. The Holy Roman Empire ceased to be an active political vehicle or potential basis for the development of a centralised state; on the other hand, its continued juridical functions and rather passive political protection permitted the survival of many small units, fragments which without this wider context might easily have been submerged by larger neighbours. Viewing the Empire as a whole, this was the German pattern of ‘small principalities’ or Kleinstaaterei which has led some observers to see Germany as a petty, small-scale provincial backwater compared to the increasingly powerful western European states of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (notably of course England and France). Concomitant with this overall pattern of Imperial decentralisation was however a relatively high degree of centralisation of power at the territorial level. Individual rulers within the small states sought to gain more power for themselves at the expense of those below.

THE BEGINNINGS OF GERMAN HISTORY

The area now known as Germany shows evidence of settlement since prehistoric times: Neanderthal man is a well-known archaeological find, and there are traces of stone, bronze and iron-age settlements right across central Europe. The Roman Empire extended across the western and southern parts of what is now known as Germany, and there are Roman foundations and remains in many German towns, such as Trier, Augsburg, Mainz, Cologne, Regensburg and Passau. A frontier fortification (essentially a ditch and bank) known as the limes can still be seen between the rivers Main and Danube. The Roman Empire had considerable impact on those parts which it occupied. Beyond it lay what the Romans called ‘barbarians’ (meaning foreigners). The Roman author Tacitus (c. ad 55–116) gives us an intriguing, if not entirely reliable, glimpse of the Germanic tribes in his Germania. He describes their social and political organisation, their modes of warfare, concepts of crime and punishment, styles of housing, dress and hairstyle, their marriage practices, funerals, agricultural techniques, and habits of drinking, banqueting, quarrelling and sloth. Apart from praise for the chastity of German women, Tacitus' description of Germany and the Germans is not entirely flattering: the Germans must be a native people, not immigrants from elsewhere, for ‘who would … [want] to visit Germany, with its unlovely scenery, its bitter climate, its general dreariness to sense and eye, unless it were his home?’

A book such as this is infinitely easier to criticise than to write. The attempt to compress over a thousand years of highly complex history into a brief volume will inevitably provoke squeals of protest from countless specialists, who see their own particular patches distorted, constrained, misrepresented, even ignored. Yet a brief history of such a large topic can make no attempt at comprehensiveness. At best it can provide an intelligent guide to the broad sweep of developments.

These limitations are indeed partly inherent in the nature of historical writing, which cannot be a simple matter of recounting an agreed narrative, but rather must be a process of imposing an order on the mass of material – and on the interpretations of that material – which comes to us from the past. But it is particularly the case for a concise history of Germany that some brutal decisions about selection and omission have had to be made. While readers will all have their own views on the matter, the author has had to make particular choices. In terms of space devoted to different periods, the book operates on the landscape principle: things nearer to the observer loom larger, are perceived in closer detail, than the mistier general views of the distant horizons. Thus chapters generally deal with progressively shorter periods of time as the present is neared. Within the general landscape surveyed some features appear more important than others.

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.