November 1918: the German revolution

population” and the Holocaust was a footnote continues to challenge a “humanist understanding of Germany” (471), recalling Kant as well as Fichte. Smith might exaggerate the degree to which contemporary scholarship views Germany as a radically nationalist polity. His treatment of the period 1871 to 1945 is rather more traditional thematically than the rest of the book. Finally, the relative lack of attention to the Habsburg Empire and Austria, not to mention the GDR, could be construed as lacunae in a narrative aimed at reconceptualizing traditional understandings of German nationalism and nationhood. These modest caveats aside, Smith has produced a remarkably erudite, original, and beautifully written narrative history of nationalism and nationhood in German-speaking Central Europe.