William Hagen's new synthesis, German History in Modern Times, presents Germany not as “an organic whole—‘the German nation’” (p. 2), but rather a palimpsest of four different epochs divided by ruptures and linked by continuities. Different communal identities and experiences shaped by the search for power and material advantage and the quest for moral legitimacy (p. 3) characterize each. Beginning with the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” and concluding with the postwar Germanies (including the reunified Germany), this book draws upon Hagen's long scholarly career, one that has shown a resistance to chronological pigeon-holing and an impatience with predominantly (though by no means exclusively) liberal-democratic teleological narratives that link Nazism and the Holocaust to the pathologies of the past. Despite that, continuities are featured in Hagen's account, as he insists that one can “connect fundamental developments in the last three or four centuries, without succumbing to fallacious notions of inescapable determinism” (p. 3). Equally important to Hagen is the inclusiveness of what we understand as the history of Germany. Austria played a crucial role in German history until 1945 and remains integral to German-speaking Europe. Aspirations to an expanded German empire in the east predated the founding of the Second Empire in 1871 and culminated, infamously, in the Nazi Lebensraum project. Even within the empires and territorial states that have housed German speakers, diverse subcultures resist the imposition of a single historical narrative.

Although the violent ruptures that ended each epoch, according to Hagen, weakened or destroyed subcultural identities, important components of the past took new forms that would complicate renewed efforts to recover the “German nation.” Thus, the competing worldviews of the Holy Roman Empire (Christian estatism, state-building realism, Enlightenment utopianism, and Romanticist historicism) morphed into conservatism, liberal progressivism, and nationalism as the empire dissolved in the wake of Napoleon's conquests. At the beginning of the second epoch, which extended from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I, the meaning of the “nation” changed from its association with the political communities that composed the empire to the historical, linguistic, cultural, and eventually ethnic kinship of the “people.” Nevertheless, by 1871 the “nation” had divided between the Austro-Hungarian and German Second Empires, while competing nationalisms—conservative, liberal, social democratic, and Catholic—divided both empires internally. In Austria-Hungary the nationalisms of Germans rivaled the emerging nationalisms of the empire's polyglot populations. Domestic divisions encouraged both German entities to risk a European, and then global, war that ended in disaster for both. Subsequently the democratic republics of the German and Austrian successor states, both of them dependent on social democratic and liberal support, could not compete with racialized identities that, although present in the second epoch, grew ever more powerful in the wake of defeat and economic crisis. The result was the Third Reich. Nazi imperialist aspirations extended well beyond the central European realm of the early modern era. Its racialized nationalism envisioned not just the suppression of rival communities, but also their destruction, particularly the Jews.

The defeat of the Third Reich in 1945 was even more cataclysmic than in 1918. At first occupied and deprived of sovereignty by the Allied victors, German speakers had to assume new identities in three states: the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, and a restored Austrian republic. The first of them absorbed the majority of German speakers driven out of other parts of Europe. The end of the Cold War enabled the merger of West and East Germany, creating a new, arguably multicultural, “post-nationalist,” economic powerhouse that simultaneously dominates and depends on the European Union. Yet as in the past, there is no single or monolithic Germany, no single continuity in German history that trumps other.

The detail and complexity of Hagen's work is impressive for a single volume, and they effectively support his argument. Interwoven with Hagen's coverage of the political history of each epoch, one finds evocative descriptions of the distinct lives of monarchs, nobles, and peasants; the middle and working classes; and the experiences of gender and ethnicity (women and Jews) that transected class, and of course the regional differences that to this day remain salient in German cultures. Hagen pays particular attention to the numerous German intellectuals, who either articulated visions of an enlightened and progressive future, or warned of the dark side of modernity. The twenty-plus maps and well over 100 images, each with lengthy captions that invite us not simply to read but to explore, elegantly provide visual and cartographic evidence of different Germanies. Intended for a wide audience, German History in Modern Times should be accessible to undergraduates and educated readers who like to be challenged.

Nevertheless, scholars might be uncomfortable with Hagen's stated intention (p. 15) to undermine arguments regarding a German “separate path (Sonderweg)” to modernity, when such claims have been under sustained attack for several decades. Nevertheless, if that is true for the scholarship on more delimited periods, few with the exception of Helmut Smith (and he stresses continuities in nationalism, racism, and antisemitism as well as the discontinuities) have been ambitious enough to apply the critique to German history since the Reformation. Nor have they explicitly sought to correct the hoary truisms about the German lands that persist in popular culture. Moreover, Hagen goes beyond challenging notions of a German Sonderweg to assess the “smaller” debates that define specific periods. Nowhere is this clearer than in his discussion of the Holocaust. Rather than locating the origins of the Final Solution in the wartime decision making that has recently preoccupied historians, Hagen pleads for the integration of three key issues: Nazi antisemitic ideology, its roots in earlier variants and its radicalization of those roots, the Third Reich's Drang nach Osten, and the regime's interlocking programs of racial purification and colonization. Without the convergence of these, the Holocaust would not have occurred. Thus, in addition to giving us cogent and valuable summaries of current scholarship, Hagen offers provocative arguments of his own to stimulate further thinking about the complexities of German history.