The 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.

Part 1 of Germany: A Nation in Its Time describes “The Nation before Nationalism,” a period between 1500 and 1700 when the name “Germany” begins to appear with growing frequency in written texts and to acquire a spatial definition on printed maps. In the first chapter, Walser Smith details how these maps expressed a significant shift taking place in spatial mentalities across all Europe. The Ebstorf mappa mundi from around 1300, for example, depicted a two-dimensional Germany, but it was not drawn according to mathematical principles, such as scale. As with other period maps, travel routes and itineraries determined geographical representation. Indeed, before May 1453, when Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, “no two-dimensional, nonitinerary descriptions or images of Germany” existed (6). That, however, would soon change. With his “Rome-Way Map” in 1500, Erhard Etzlaub produced the first scaled map of Germany, a milestone in representing the nation. This newly national way of seeing was subsequently boosted by the rediscovery of Tacitus's Germania, together with the writings of Johannes Cochlaeus who, in 1512, became the first German to write a prose description of Germany as a two-dimensional space.

The second chapter explores this deepening sense of Germany as a nation in the work of Johannes Boemus, Beatus Rhenanus, and the great Basel mapmaker Sebastian Münster, who hoped to reveal the “hidden beauties” of “our common German fatherland” (41). The third chapter shows how this sixteenth-century fatherland was decimated by organized and marauding armies, plague, and starvation during the Thirty Years’ War. Mapmakers, such as Matthäus Merian, were well-acquainted with this new landscape, but their maps did not represent it. Instead, it fell to writers—Grimmelshausen, Gryphius, and others—to invest this devastated nation space with meaning.

Germany: A Nation in Its Time relates in detail the horrific transformation of the German nation space during the Thirty Years’ War. And yet, it may be said that the early chapters of the book approach its subject in the spirit of the humanistic enterprise. For like the humanists Erasmus, Münster, and others, Walser Smith describes a German nation in terms of its customs, its landscapes, and the physical presence of its people. Because the contrast with later genocidal nationalism is always present, the book proposes a longue durée over which a kind of gentleman's history of Germany can be told. This peaceful vision is underscored by an unhurried and elegant prose, in which Walser Smith can write of the world around Germany around 1600 as one in which “discoveries across the Atlantic along the jagged coasts of Africa set off a new curiosity about the world” (3). Recent research on the transatlantic slave trade would have much say about such “curiosity,” “jagged coasts of Africa,” and the splendid isolation of Germany in the seventeenth century. To be sure, one could reply here that Germany—unlike, say, Portugal—did not have a geographically defined space in this early intercontinentally connected world. But given the priority the book grants to exploring an imagined national space, it is not easy to understand why later chapters bypass an examination of German-held colonies in West, East, and Southwest Africa. Indeed, if it can be said that the longue durée of Germany: A Nation in Its Time is one aspect of the book that yields a genteel perspective on the German nation, the choice not to consistently treat the German nation as an active global participant constitutes a second aspect. “The First World War,” as Alexander Zevin has observed, “took place over empires, for empires, and between empires.” In the imperial German imagination, power was linked to land. Nor did that disappear in the 1920s, when colony-less Germany still carried the official designation “German Empire.” In 2020, the story of the German nation is surely also the story of German overseas colonies.

That said, Germany: A Nation in Its Time serves as a reminder that it was Austria, not any individual German-speaking state, or group of those states, that was the most powerful military threat from the eighteenth century down to 1848. Part 2 shows less a decline in the ambitions of the Austrian war machine than a convergence of factors in Germany that laid the foundation for nationalism, even if the result of that convergence was still not yet the thing itself. Among these factors was a surge in affective attachment to the territorial state, especially in Prussia, Bavaria, Hannover, and Saxony, with the partition of Poland raising the stakes for this attachment. Meanwhile, a group of young intellectuals—among them the young Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich Nicolai—created an interiorized sense of the German nation that represented an emotional correlate to the mathematical projections of that nation in sixteenth-century maps.

But this was still not quite the thing itself. “Prussian patriots did not think the less of Prussia because it was nearly half Polish-speaking” (87). And while later nationalist historiography may have found in such attitudes the low tide of German history, Walser Smith convincingly argues that these patriots simply perceived the German nation differently. There may have been isolated outbreaks of “nationalism” around 1800, but it was only with the overrunning of German territories and especially Prussia, in 1806, that a new nationalism moved to the fore. Fichte struck this new nationalistic tone in his unpublished “Patriotic Dialogues,” imagining a German nation of the distant future, its border expanded to maximize economic efficiency, a nation in which “only the German can be a citizen.” To powerful cultural currents that swirl around this new nationalism, however, Germany: A Nation in Its Time devotes little space. By granting little recognition to the end of the Holy Roman Empire, for example, Walser Smith echoes the same German nationalist—ultimately, Prussian—historiography that always stressed its irrelevance. But for those many who were shocked by, and subsequently mourned, its demise in 1804, the Holy Roman Empire constituted an orientation point, a cultural and political structure from which they could present regional perspectives and criticize emerging territorial states. What does it really tell us, anyway, that the Holy Roman Empire never commissioned its own mapping (121)?

If the future of the German lands at the close of eighteenth century seemed to point toward a group of separate German-speaking fatherlands rather than a unified German-language country, new modes of nationalist writing after 1806 anticipated a different outcome. In part 3, Walser Smith shows how German nationalist discourse, jump-started in Prussia by the Napoleonic Wars, moved in fits and starts from a small group of German intellectuals to broad strata of the population. Still, German unification was not a foregone conclusion, nor was it the “only or even the predominant issue for those who thought about the nation” (197). If the age of nationalism had arrived, the nationalist age still lay ahead. Indeed, Walser Smith argues, it was not until the Second German Empire in 1871 that any German polity purposefully and consistently instilled a sense of attachment to the nation-state in its citizen-subjects. Part 4 explores how this national attachment soon metamorphosed into an ideological nationalism, as well as how such ideological nationalism manifested itself across two world wars from 1914 to 1945. Thus, during and after World War I, questions of sacrifice to the nation acquired central importance, while the years after 1933 were marked by an exclusionary principle of nation whose meaning was fully evident both in Germany and in the “death spaces” of Eastern Europe.

With its attentiveness to the discontinuities of the German nation, its masterful command of sources, and its broad scope, Germany: A Nation in Its Time seems destined to become a standard work in German national history. Part 5 presents a series of waypoints—the Eichmann trial, the generational revolt of 1968, the writings of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, and national unification, among others—that characterize the onset of a new period, “after nationalism,” of the German nation. In a hopeful epilogue, Walser Smith recalls his own recognition of this postnationalist German nation during the 2006 World Cup hosted by Germany. During these games, he writes, “Germans felt free to wave flags again, and many people including myself thought this was actually a good thing” (462). Such visual evidence of the new German nation, one might add, underscores that in recent decades Germany has become a country of images. Indeed, few other countries can rival the impact of the painters Beuys, Kiefer, and Richter; the photographers Struth and Gursky; or the filmmakers Syberberg, Reitz, and Fassbinder in their respective fields. The conclusion of Fassbinder's masterwork The Marriage of Maria Braun famously concludes with the victory of Germany in the 1954 World Cup, together with the immolation of the heroine, as the swelling image of Helmut Schmidt as the exterminating angel of the economic miracle fills the screen. Germany: A Nation in Its Time and its soccer match heralds a much different future.