Germany in the World by David Blackbourn
Germany inevitably brings certain words to mind: Hitler and Beethoven, Bach and Goethe, the World Wars, the Holocaust. All of the above are treated with vivid summaries in Germany in the World 1500-2000, but the book’s particular brilliance is expressed by its subtitle, A Global History.
Author David Blackbourn, a history professor at Vanderbilt University, reveals the unsuspected activity of Germans in the wider world centuries before Germany became a nation in 1871. Germans sailed on the Spanish and Portuguese galleons that crisscrossed the globe in the 1400 and 1500s. Germans marched with the conquistadors and settled in Spain and Portugal’s New World colonies. German banks financed world trade in those years and German engineers mined the gold and silver in Spain’s colonies.
Blackbourn’s magisterial narrative integrates cultural, political, economic, scientific, philosophical and military history into a holistic account. It’s truly a global history through the perspective of one particular nationality. Blackbourn speculates on formative experiences, measuring the damage done not only to the German landscape but to the people’s cultural memory during the warfare between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the 1600s. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) killed more than a quarter of the population of German-speaking Europe through massacre and pillage on a massive scale. “Small wonder, then, that the catastrophic impact of the war lived on in memory,” Blackbourn writes, leading to “a narrative of German victimhood” that continued to manifest in the 20th century.
Germany in the World avoids the extraneous while illuminating the lives and events it catalogs with revealing details. Examples of carefully chosen facts are many, including the German-led expedition into the uncharted Amazon whose dangers are illustrated by the fate of its dog, eaten by a jaguar.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Blackbourn concludes his march across five centuries with the reunification of East and West Germany (1990), a hasty but eagerly sought marriage of incompatible systems brokered by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as the Cold War ended. As the author points out, reunification benefitted the West through a process that “created widespread unemployment and insecurity” in the East. Some of yesterday’s Communists became today’s Nazis from “the shock of transition.” Even so, a united Germany became an economic powerhouse, the engine of the European Union, even as it stepped carefully, mindful of its past, toward military and political influence in the world.
Get Germany in the World on Amazon here.
Paid link
