Presenting the collected reviews of one of modern Germany's single most important historians, this book offers a comprehensive summary of Richard Evans' trenchant and important analytical points on Weimar, the Third Reich and revisionism.

In this text, the author draws together his review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how historians - mainly German, American, British, and French - have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past in recent years. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline and fall of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

Parade of the grand narratives
towards unification
whatever became of the Sonderweg?
Nipperdey's 19th century
from unification to world war
the view from France
patterns of authority and revolt
police and society from absolutism to dictatorship
the Catholic community and the Prussian state
workers' co-operatives in the 19th century
the failure of German labour in the Weimar Republic
ideological origins of Nazism
the dynamics of violence
in search of German social Darwinism
from racial hygiene to Auschwitz
antisemitism - ordinary Germans and the "Longest Hatred"
faces of the Third Reich
playing for the devil - Furtwangler and the Nazis
Claus von Stauffenberg and the bomb that failed
the deceptions of Albert Speer
Churchill - the end of glory?
reunification and beyond
German reunification in historical perspective
beyond the historikerstreit
rebirth of the German right?
after reunification.