An innovative study of the impact of the wartime alliance between Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary on German national identity.

This book shows that German national identity has undergone considerable changes since unification in 1990. Due to the external pressures of the post-cold war world but also due to domestic developments such as recent dynamics of collective memory, Germany has re-emerged as a confident nation which is less hesitant to assert its national interest.

War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an 'anatomy of an occupation', charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war. New categories for viewing the East took root along with the idea of a German cultural mission in these supposed wastelands. After Germany's defeat, the Eastern front's 'lessons' were taken up by the Nazis, radicalized, and enacted when German armies returned to the East in World War II. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.

This original study examines the interrelationship between the construction of national identity and the transformation of political thought in Germany before the First World War. During the decade or so before the war, the German Empire was challlenged openly by both left and right for the first time since the 1870s. Paradoxically, however, this pre-war crisis of Germanys system of government occurred during a period of increasing nationalism, which created a solid cross-party basis of support for the Empire as a nation-state. This pioneering study argues that Wilhelmine debates about the reform of the German Empire can only be understood in the context of a broader discussion and comparison of European and American political regimes which took place in Germany after the turn of the century. In such contemporary debates about a German Sonderwag, France remained a principal point of reference because French-style parliamentarism had come to be viewed as the main alternative to German constitutionalism. By analysing Wilhelmine depictions of the Third Republic, Dr Hewitson revises accepted interpretations of German politics and nationalism.

Wittlinger takes a fresh look at German national identity in the 21st century and shows that it has undergone considerable changes since unification in 1990. Due to the external pressures of the post-cold war world and recent domestic developments, Germany has re-emerged as a nation which is less hesitant to assert its national interest.

As part of the Paris peace settlement imposed on a defeated Germany after the First World War, the inhabitants of three German borderland regions were to decide whether they wished to remain part of Germany. Plebiscites were held during 1920 and 1921 in areas of mixed ethnicity: Germans and Danes in Schleswig, Germans and Poles in the districts of Allenstein and Marienwerder and in Upper Silesia. In this work, T. Hunt Tooley examines the German attempt to influence the outcome in Upper Silesia in March 1921?within the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade the national states involved to make such attempts. We see the first international effort of a defeated Germany, acting through the new Weimar government, to face issues concerning the definition of the new national state, of citizenship, and of what it meant to be German. ø National Identity and Weimar Germany thereby contributes to our understanding of the Weimar period, which has been intensely scrutinized for clues to its fall and the consequent rise of Nazism. Seeing Upper Silesia as a laboratory for the question of German self-identity, Tooley also provides the valuable corrective that Silesians often voted as much in response to local and contingent issues as in response to ethnic identification.

By training his eye on the ways that people outside the halls of power reacted to the rapid onset and escalation of the fighting in 1914, Neiberg dispels the notion that Europeans were rabid nationalists intent on mass slaughter. He reveals instead a complex set of allegiances that cut across national boundaries.