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Title: A Concise History of Germany by Mary Fulbrook ISBN: 0-521-36836-7 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 25 January, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Plenty of Facts, Very Little on Culture
Comment: Within 252 pages, Mary Fulbrook's A Concise History of Germany describes the last 2,000 years of a region plagued by warfare, religious strife, shifting boarders, and competing fiefdoms. To be concise, Fulbrook drops facts without depicting culture.

To be fair, shoving 2,000 years of history into a couple hundred pages seems ridiculous. Any author of such a text would need to wisely choose what to leave in or out, without offending anyone: a near impossible task. And Fulbrook quickly addresses this issue in the book's introduction. However, Fulbrook unwisely chose to document every battle and economic upheaval during the past centuries, without ever introducing the reader to the personalities that shaped the notion of German-ness. Only Martin Luther and Adolf Hitler are briefly sketched, which makes the rest of the book seem flat and dehumanized. Kant, Bach, Mozart, Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche are namedropped, but never brought to life through words. (Of course, many other books make these people their sole subject matter. In the case of conciseness, a definition of history may have been needed--do terrible events or peoples' contributions to their culture define history? Probably both...)

To learn about every skirmish and famine that occurred within the German-speaking world, read A Concise History of Germany. To learn about German culture, read another book.

Rating: 4
Summary: brief summary of an important country
Comment: In A Concise History of Germany, Fulbrook gives a history of over 1000 years of German histroy starting to the miedeval era to 1989. The book gives an a great history of how Germany was formed giving information about the different states of Germany like Saxony and Bavaria and Germans living outside of Germany in areas like Poland. The book futher continues discussing Germany's importance in the Renaissnance and how Germany was unified in the 1800s. The book gives a good history of Germany in the 20th centuray especially about the World Wars and East and West Germany

A good introduction into Germany.

Rating: 4
Summary: Germany History in a Nutshell
Comment: "A Concise History of Germany"
Mary Fulbrook
ISBN 0-521-36836-7

I was interested in reading this book to get insight about places I had visited in Germany and hopefully about some I would see in the future.

Mary Fulbrook states that a history of Germany, a country which has not existed as such for so many years, is really a history of the German speaking peoples. Indeed, the history of Germany has been long, complex, and often influenced by war.

There was some of the insight that I sought in this book, for example, in the section, "The German Peasant's War". I had come across references to this conflict a few times in Germany. Fulbrook writes that by 1525, there were 300,000 peasants in armed revolt in German speaking areas. Over 100,000 were ultimately killed when the rebellions were put down. There had been other related rebellions preceding this war in the previous half century, she writes.

The Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648, was another conflict, described by the author, that I have seen references to in Germany in association with cities of Rothenburg, Noerdlingen, Heidelberg, and Seligenstadt among others.

Another part of this book that I found interesting was the account of the Weimar Republic. It lasted a little over fourteen years. In the end, large numbers of Germans from the left and right rejected democracy as a form of government. This government failed for a number of reasons. Some related to harsh peace terms after WWI and an unstable economy. The depression in the United States and the cancellation of short-term loans also played a hand.

The most well known part of German history to the reader would seem to be the Nazi times that led up to WWII and led Germany to destruction. The coverage of this aspect of German history is well-trod ground. The description of the era in this book is interesting, but it does not particularly provide fresh insight.

One of the more interesting parts of the book is the favorable comparison of certain aspects of the old East Germany with West Germany. While the latter became economically prosperous and closely aligned with the West, East Germany became the most productive satellite in the communist bloc and one of the USSR's most reliable supporters. Surprisingly, Fulbrook writes also that there was greater social mobility in East Germany with a school system that emphasized work experience. She states that East Germany had a "range of routes" to higher education, so that those who did not take the academic route through upper school could still access higher education. The price to be paid, however, was political conformism.

On the whole, the author of "A Concise History of Germany" accomplishes a difficult feat, which is to write a short book on a subject which is long, covering hundreds of years, and complex. While it is true that the focus of the book is very high-level and often oversimplified, it provides for consumption in smaller doses what otherwise might not be digested at all by readers if available only in unappetizingly larger amounts.