Germany: The Long Road West: Volume 1: 1789-1933

Vivid, succinct, and highly accessible, Heinrich Winkler's magisterial history of modern Germany offers the history of a nation and its people through two turbulent centuries. It is the story of a country that, while always culturally identified with the West, long resisted the political trajectories of its neighbours.

This first volume (of two) begins with the origins and consequences of the medieval myth of the 'Reich', which was to experience a fateful renaissance in the twentieth century, and ends with the collapse of the first German democracy. Winkler offers a brilliant synthesis of complex events and illuminates them with fresh insights. He analyses the decisions that shaped the country's triumphs and catastrophes, interweaving high politics with telling vignettes about the German people and their own self-perception.

With a second volume that takes the story up to reunification in 1990, Germany: The Long Road West will be welcomed by scholars, students, and anyone wishing to understand this most complex and contradictory of countries.


Author: Heinrich August Winkler, Alexander Sager
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 03/29/2023
Pages: 624
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.04lbs
Size: 9.29h x 6.13w x 1.31d
ISBN: 9780192884619

About the Author

Heinrich August Winkler, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Humboldt University, Berlin

Heinrich August Winkler was born in 1938 in Königsberg. He studied history, philosophy, and public law in Tübingen, Heidelberg and Münster. He was associate professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin in 1970-72 and then professor of modern history in Freiburg until 1991. He has been at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin since 1992, and has been a visiting scholar in Princeton, at the Wilson Center in Washington, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, and at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich.