Steven Osment
A Mighty Fortress:
A New History of the
German People.
HarperCollins, 416 pages, $26.95

The aftermath of the Iraq War, which occasioned an unprecedented bout of transatlantic vituperation, may seem an unpropitious moment to publish a history of the German people that leans over backwards to be generous towards its subject. But was there ever a better time? It is now, with Germany tiptoeing away from its postwar Atlanticist allegiance and openly flirting with anti-Americanism, that it is most tempting for Americans to see German history reflected in the distorting mirror of the Third Reich. The United States and Britain, nations that are still quaintly identified by their Germanic origins as “Anglo-Saxon,” find it difficult to sympathize with German cousins incapable of offering at least moral support for the overthrow of a dictator whose ideology was modeled on National Socialism. The need is all the more urgent, therefore, for a book that explains why the Germans thought that, by opposing this war, they were being more faithful to the moral principles that their Anglo-American allies had drummed into them than the allies themselves.

Steven Ozment takes German anti-Americanism as his starting point. A German visitor to the U.S. tells him: “You Americans have more nice dumb people than any other country.” This echo of prewar Teutonic condescension did indeed leave Ozment dumbfounded, but he gives the reader the benefit of his esprit d’escalier: “58,000,000 Americans can claim full or partial German descent.” Later he recalls watching student protestors at Tübingen in 1968 daubing the university with “USA,” the “S” scrawled to resemble a swastika. But he sets such ugly manifestations in the context of a “penitential” post-Nazi culture which was bound to breed resentment.

Ozment’s point is that German fears, both of foreigners and of themselves, and others’ fears of the Germans are mutually reinforcing. By way of introduction to his subject, he examines its historiography, concluding that historians have been “quick to typify and slow to forgive” the Germans. His own survey makes an honest attempt to restore the balance between the twelve years of the Third Reich and some 2,000 years of recorded history. Ozment thinks that the Anglozone’s readiness to stereotype the Germans and our reluctance to forgive even the grandchildren of the Nazi generation explain the hostile reaction to Chancellor Schroeder’s decision to side with the obstructive French and Russians on Iraq. It is quite “proper,” he suggests, for a sovereign Germany to withhold support from its allies for deposing Saddam. Whether or not we agree with that decision, we should welcome it as proof of normality from a nation that is bound to become less obsequious as it regains confidence.

The Germans, he concludes, are back on course after a disastrous aberration. Rather than dwell on that failed totalitarian experiment, we should focus instead on the continuities of their history, governed by geography and characterized by conquest. The Germans, Ozment claims, are among the most cosmopolitan of peoples, borrowing from superior neighboring civilizations ever since Roman times, adapting to new circumstances with alacrity and discrimination. Freedom, equality and the rule of law were as important to the Germans as to the Americans, British, or French, but liberalism and democracy were distrusted. “Historical experience has instead left Germans more fearful of anarchy than of tyranny, inclining them to hedge, if hedge they must, on the side of good order.” Ozment’s Germans are not usually utopians but dualists, embracing simultaneously the intimations of divinity and the limitations of mortality.

How far one is persuaded by this argument depends on the author’s ability to sustain it over a much longer period than any historian can hope to know in depth. Ozment is at his most authoritative in the early modern period he knows best, roughly from Luther to Frederick the Great. His knowledge of other periods is shallower, but even so he has produced a masterly synthesis of syntheses. The great strength of the book is its readability. One is treated as a grown-up: indeed, reading Ozment gives one an inkling of what it might be like to participate in his seminar at Harvard. It fizzes with bold hypotheses and subtle allusions, conveying a vivid sense of events unfolding, of history as what he likes to call “work in progress.”

Ozment would do well to treat his own book as work in progress, too, and to correct it more carefully in the next edition. Bad enough to devote only a sentence to the Franco-Prussian War, which enabled Bismarck to unify Germany; worse to get the sequence of events back to front: “after German armies had besieged Paris, French armies surrendered at Sedan and Metz.” It is the same story with the First World War: “Avoiding the Maginot Line fortifications protecting France’s eastern flank, the Germans occupied Belgium… .” The Maginot Line did not, of course, exist in 1914; moreover, Ozment has confused the Schlieffen Plan of that year with the Blitzkrieg of 1940. It is not the military subject matter that baffles him: back in “his” period, the descriptions of the Thirty Years’ War or the Silesian wars are thorough and accurate. Unfortunately, there are similar blind spots in Ozment’s political and intellectual history. Karl Marx would have been most surprised to learn that his faithful German Social Democrats were merely “the left faction” of the political wing of the bourgeoisie, the National Liberals, and that the Social Democrats were led not by his disciples Bebel and Liebknecht, but by his enemy, Eduard Lasker, whom Ozment elsewhere correctly identifies as the leader of the Liberals.

Ozment describes the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as “major spokesmen” for the Wilhelmine period; but the former had been dead for thirty years, the latter had already been driven insane by syphilis by the time the young Kaiser ascended the throne. He goes on to assert that they “dismissed the liberal-moderate Enlightenment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Kant, Hegel, and Goethe) as roundly as they did the German reform movement of the sixteenth (Dürer, Pirckheimer, and Luther).” In reality, while Schopenhauer did revile Hegel as a charlatan, he revered Kant and Goethe, regarding himself as the former’s only true disciple, and corresponding with the latter. As for Nietzsche: true, he had little time for Kant or Hegel, but Luther and Goethe were his exemplars of human greatness, while the only work of art he owned was Dürer’s etching of “Knight, Death and Devil.”

Such blemishes do not undermine Ozment’s scholarly authority. The richness of his chapter on the Reformation, based on a profound understanding of original sources, demonstrates the brilliance of which he is capable. Ozment has a gift for characterization. He evokes Luther, not an easy man to like, by depicting him through the eyes of colorful contemporaries such as Frederick the Wise, Dürer, and Cranach. Similarly, his nuanced portrait of Bismarck does justice to the man behind the iron chancellor’s mask.

I am less sure about Ozment’s Hitler, “the barbarian prince.” Hitler did indeed glory in the notion that he was a barbarian, a latter-day Attila come “to rejuvenate the world,” but the dark ages produced nothing comparable to the death camps. And in a country full of princes, Hitler was deliberately plebeian.

Ozment is right that the Nazis appealed to “New Age” or “existential” values. Their neo-pagan racism had supplanted the “old political and cultural Germany [that] had died on the killing fields of the nineteenth century,” though it was the Kaiser’s war rather than those of Napoleon or Bismarck that proved fatal. Luther’s great hymn, “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A mighty fortress is our God”), from which Ozment takes his title, is also a metaphor for the spiritual vacuum that the Nazis filled with their militarism: they almost literally worshipped Fortress Germany. But New Age (as opposed to Judeo-Christian) values were surely no less characteristic of the Weimar Republic than of the Third Reich. The Nazi goal may indeed have been “to replace a firmly principled past, which both imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic had been, with a completely experimental future,” but the nihilistic modernism of Nazi ideology was carefully disguised as a restoration of tradition and authority.

Though Ozment is right to reject Nazi pretensions to be the culmination of German history, ordinary Germans were profoundly impressed by the endorsement of the new Reich by the paragons of the old one. The path from Weimar to Auschwitz led through Potsdam, where, seventy years ago, a frock-coated Hitler and his former commander on the Western front, President Hindenburg, paid homage together to the Prussian past. And once the virtues of old Germany—order, discipline, thoroughness —were put at the disposal of the New Age utopia, the Nazi experiment became not merely a German, but a global catastrophe. The barbarians could not have overrun the German fortress if the castellan had not handed them the key.

Ozment’s treatment of the Federal Republic is full and fair, though he is perhaps just a little too impressed by communist East Germany. He is right that the survival of Lutheranism there preserved a “more positive reading of their history.” That resilience has, however, curdled into a sour nostalgia which has prevented many East Germans from adapting to the reunified republic. Germany’s communist legacy is just as destructive as the Nazi one, and is proving harder to disown.

It is harder to accept the “Tacitus challenge,” to recount the entire history of Germany, than it is to criticize Ozment’s impressive effort. With the exception of Hagen Schulze (whose excellent Germany: A New History appeared in English six years ago), German historians have been more reluctant than their Anglo-American colleagues to write for a wide audience. A Mighty Fortress is a heroic feat of scholarship, but I hope it will not be Steven Ozment’s last word on the subject.

Daniel Johnson, a historian, is a writer for the Daily Telegraph.