Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification 1800-1996

by Richard J. Evans

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.

Genres: Politics, History, Germany

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 1997

About the author

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.

Reviews

[Lauro Caetano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! As a foreigner it is good to get a critical review on German history before going straight to a random German history book.

This book also made me realize how much political and economic situations, at the time of writing a book, impacts how past situations are described.

Really recommended if you are into German history.

[Martin Samuels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Evans may be best known for his book 'In Defence of History', a standard textbook on historical methods, and for his role in the David Irving libel trial, where his application of those methods exposed the wilful distortions on which Irving based his Holocaust denial. This book is more in Evans' main field as Britain's leading historian of Germany. A collection of reviews and commentaries from the 1990s, it provides an excellent overview of some key debates in the field, alongside exploration of some of the ways in which history can be (ab-)used for political ends. Evans' style throughout is very accessible, yet authoritative.