History of Germany in the 20th Century. Volume I

Ulrich Herbert examines the history of Germany in the 20th century from two seemingly contradictory perspectives. On the one hand, the pages of this fundamental monograph will take us through great wars and political upheavals. Germany is the land where radical ideologies originated — both left and right; and it is the only land where both took on state form and left, each in its own way, a defining mark on both the first and the second halves of the century. On the other hand, the author describes the emergence of modern industrial society — an emergence that led to decades of confrontations over social and political order between different political systems. Wars and the longest peaceful period in European history, right and left terror, utopia and politics, capitalism and the welfare state, totalitarianism and democratic society, conflict of genders and generations, culture and lifestyle, European integration and globalization — this book is about how all these contradictory events, processes, and phenomena were structured and interconnected in the history of Germany throughout the 20th century.
Ulrich Herbert is a historian and honorary professor at the University of Freiburg.