Germany

Looking beyond the usual rogues’ gallery of historical figures can help us to better understand the past.

Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was blamed for a spate of suicides during the ‘reading fever’ of the 1700s. It set a trend for manufactured outrage that is with us still.

Peter Schröder highlights key publications on Germany’s contribution to the history of ideas from the Enlightenment to the present day.

The archetypal image of the Weimar Republic is one of political instability, economic crisis and debauched hedonism. The cliché is being challenged.

Wagner's opera was first performed in Munich on June 10th, 1865.

The physician died on March 5th, 1815. 

Historic attachments to heroic leadership combined with a mastery of propaganda techniques to mesmerise Germany into acceptance of the charismatic authority offered by the Führer. 

Harold Nicolson assesses the impact of the German minister in the post Bismarck era.

Hitler had taken enthusiastically to his years in the army during the first World War. D.C. Watt describes how, afterwards, the future führer worked with equal zeal — and served his political apprenticeship — as a propagandist for a Bavarian counter-revolutionary army group.

The conflagration of the Reichstag provided Hitler with a heaven-sent opportunity. But the theory that the Nazis had planned it themselves now appears to be entirely baseless.