The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century. By Helmut Walser Smith. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. 246. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-0-521-89588-0. Paper $22.99. ISBN 978-0-521-72025-0.

摘要

Current research, writes Helmut Walser Smith, has neglected investigations ofnlong-term influences on modern German history. Emphasis on rupture, fragmentation,nand skepticism toward master narratives has foreshortened the temporalnframeworks for explaining National Socialism and the Holocaust. Recentnhistoriographical focus on biomedical racial hygiene and other distinctlynmodern aspects of the Nazi dystopia, however important, has diverted attentionnfrom longer continuities that impinge on the question of Nazi anti-Semitismnand genocidal practice. Smith identifies historians’ preoccupation with shatteredndiscontinuity as a “new orthodoxy”; fragmentation has assumed the status of an“root metaphor” that precludes “traditional historical narrative” and the possibilitynof telling stories that strive for a “coherent whole” (pp. 4–5).