‘Germany in the World’ Review: Reichs, From First to Third

Five hundred years ago, the land we now call Germany existed as the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” It wasn’t a real empire and certainly wasn’t holy or Roman or even particularly German. It was rather a hodgepodge of fiefdoms, creeds and nationalities. Napoleon put an end to this “empire” in 1806.

Modern Germany, a babe among the classic nation-states, was born in 1871, when Prussia pounded together 25 little Germanys. Unification triggered growth, then ambition, then two horrifying world wars. Amputation cut the behemoth down to size. Reunified today, Germany is Europe’s largest economy and an admired citizen of the world.

Yet there are continuities, which is the main theme of David Blackbourn’s “Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000.” These continuities, though, aren’t of the facile character-as-destiny sort—from Luther to Hitler, as a 1941 tome had it. Mr. Blackbourn bids us to look through a “wider lens,” which reveals that Germany was not Europe’s odd-man-out.

Take German nationalism. He reminds us that the “1860s were a pivotal decade” in the annals of nationalism. Invented by Revolutionary France, the ideology gripped all new nation-states: Germany, Italy and Japan. America, too, went on a nationalist binge in the 1890s.

The Kaiser’s Germany was not on a Sonderweg, a separate poisoned path. Nor was the Reich before 1914 less liberal than France or Britain by the standards of the time. Germany was beholden to the rule of law and boasted a strong parliament and a vigorous press. Why did its regime turn to genocide? In spite of the growing literature on the Holocaust, the cosmic riddle remains unsolved.

Mr. Blackbourn counsels that “we should challenge the persistent idea that landlocked Germany was wrapped up in its own affairs”—an unto-itself—“while others transformed relations between Europe and the non-European world.” In fact, he contends, the “Holy Roman Empire was a world in motion.” Over the next 150 pages, he recounts how Germany’s sailors manned the ships of the seafaring nations, its soldiers served in the British and Dutch empires, and its restless inhabitants struck out from Eastern Europe to the Western Hemisphere.

Even so, the global wanderlust of German sailors, savants and settlers doesn’t quite compare to what the real globalizers did, conquering and peopling the four corners of the earth. Diaspora isn’t empire, never mind how many millions of Germans settled in the United States; and anyway the few possessions Germany grabbed were lost in the 1919 Versailles settlement. The defeated Germans should thank the victors who spared them countless wars against the locals, which drained the blood and wealth of the colonial powers after World War II.

The German (or German-speaking) “empire” was a lot cheaper. It was a cultural dominion. We can’t think about modernity without Goethe and Schiller, Bach and Beethoven, Marx and Hegel, Kant and Wittgenstein, Rilke and Mann, Freud and Jung, Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg. Germans like G.W. Pabst and Fritz Lang wrote the first chapters of the cinematic canon. Carl Laemmle invented Hollywood.

Mr. Blackbourn reminds us that American higher education was “remade” in the image of the “German model.” Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins (“Göttingen in Baltimore”) adopted the German concept of the research university. Later they profited from a tragic windfall gain, when thousands of German academics found refuge in the U.S.—Hitler’s “gift.”

Curiously missing from a section of the book titled “The Triumph of German Culture,” spanning the 60 years between Bismarck and Hitler, is the momentous Jewish role. Something like 39 Jewish Nobel laureates hailed from Germany and Austria during this period, and more from the rest of Mitteleuropa. And then there were the writers of fiction, like Franz Kafka, and composers, like Arnold Schoenberg, who broke the mold.

Mr. Blackbourn’s commendable passion for evenhandedness sometimes gets the better of him. Thus he depicts the boundless slaughter after the Final Solution was formulated in 1942 as, though “German-directed,” a “pan-European operation” by peoples under the German knout, especially in Eastern Europe. This complicity doesn’t obliterate the difference between rider and horse. Nazi Germany designed the project and built the death factories. Some Poles, Ukrainians et al. were willing collaborators. But they were not masters.

We get a similar whiff of “yes, but” in Mr. Blackbourn’s account of the two world wars. Yes, unrestricted U-boat warfare brought the U.S. into the first, but German civilians suffered under the blockade. And, yes, in the second, German war-making was indiscriminately cruel, but area bombing inflicted terrible misery on German innocents.

How, other than loss and devastation, did Germany go so fast from fascist dictatorship to peaceable republic? The U.S. solved postwar Germany’s security dilemma by extending its nuclear umbrella. Safety breeds good things: prosperity, democracy and self-containment. The rest of Europe no longer fears the nation that is again No. 1.

So is the “German Problem” a thing of the past? Not quite. Twelve years ago, as Mr. Blackbourn points out, Poland’s foreign minister remarked that he feared German power less than German inactivity. Sometimes lessons are too well learned. Passivity no longer works as a grand strategy, as Russia made clear when it invaded Ukraine last year and forced Germany to lend its might to the victim.

Too much of a good thing might also hold for “Germany in the World,” which runs close to 800 pages. The research is magnificent, with 80 pages of endnotes. But the central idea—Germany as a Western nation like the others—is often submerged beneath a torrent of names, details and digressions. That said, the book is superbly written, and even Germany buffs will find a surfeit of riches.

Mr. Joffe teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.