Even disregarding the arguments presented in this book, it provides a fantastic review of the state of German historiography at the turn of the 21st Century, one which has proved valuable in shaping my own reading lists.

6 Key Arguments:

1. German history in the twentieth century was dominated by three "master narratives": National History, Marxist History and Progressive-Liberal History of the Weberian mould. (5-7) These histories were deeply tied into the politics, society and culture of the German nation.

2. “The manifold contradictions between ruptures and continuities, fracturing and restoring community, are therefore a central feature of German history in the twentieth century. The frightening truth of the matter is that the extremes cannot be separated from the mainstream since innocence and complicity are intertwined. Neither at large nor en detail can German history be salvaged as if a redeeming feature could be defended and then recovered after defeat in a miraculous process of self-cleansing.” (12)

3. “This basic ambivalence suggests the usefulness of a cultural approach to German history. Such a perspective does not primarily mean the study of culture as a discrete sphere or subsystem… Nor can it just be subsumed under an ethnographic look at the customs, symbols, and behaviours of continental natives… Such a perspective must also grapple with the implications of the linguistic turn, which suggest that action does not translate into social effects without the intercession of language or thought... It draws attention to public discourse, symbolic representation, and personal experience to recover dimensions of reflection and meaning, to become more sensitive to exclusions and silences in historical accounts, and to under- stand the dialogic nature of reconstructions of the past.” (14)

4. “An alternative approach, better suited to the shattered nature of this past, would start with the recognition of the very instability of the German condition and make it the pivotal concern of historical reconstruction… Dissolving the single overarching story of the nation into multiple histories permits the recovery of a sense of the nation’s fractures and of the labors in joining and orchestrating them. Such a perspective means asking where Germany was, who the Germans were, and what these diverse German subjects did in putting society together and breaking it apart. The question about how these many subjects fared puts the nation back into the center, not as a self-evident fact or normative given, but as an embattled construct of forces contending for its control.” (17)

5. There are seven “themes” of modern German history:

- War and Genocide
- The State and its Institutions
- Germany’s Role in the European Order
- Mobility and Migration
- Forming German Identity
- Gender
- Mass Consumption and Popular Culture (18)

6. “The point is not just to add previously silenced voices to the general chorus but to rethink German histories from the margins to decenter received conceptions of what it meant to be German at a given time.” (83)