The 10 Best German History Books

Readers who want the whole arc from Luther to reunification in one volume should start with Germany: A Nation in Its Time. Vanderbilt historian Helmut Walser Smith follows how Germans pictured their own country over five centuries, drawing on old maps, travel accounts and poems as much as on wars and treaties. Critics praised its fresh angle and clear prose. It's weakest on the 20th century, where its account of the Nazi turn feels thin.

The Shortest History of Germany runs from Roman frontier forts to the present in a book you can finish over a weekend. James Hawes, a novelist who once taught German at a university, argues that many of the country's troubles came from the lands east of the Elbe River that Prussia ruled. Clear maps break up the text, and the tone is lively. Treat that big argument as one strong opinion, not settled history.

Prussia built modern Germany and then vanished from the map, and Iron Kingdom is the standard one-volume account of how that happened. Christopher Clark, a Cambridge historian, traces the state from a poor, scattered territory to a military power, and he pushes back on the old idea that it was always marching toward Hitler. The book won Britain's Wolfson History Prize. It's long, and it stops in 1947, so modern Germany is outside its scope.

How did a democracy hand power to the Nazis? The Coming of the Third Reich answers that, starting with Bismarck's empire and ending in 1933. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian, mixes careful scholarship with diaries, newspapers and street-level detail, and historians widely treat his trilogy as the modern standard on Nazi Germany. This is the first part only. Readers who want the dictatorship and the war need the sequels, which is a lot of reading.

Neil MacGregor, who ran the British Museum, built Germany: Memories of a Nation around objects, from a Gutenberg Bible to the gate of the Buchenwald camp. Each short chapter opens one memory Germans still carry, so it's a good book to read in pieces rather than straight through. It grew out of a museum show and a radio series, and reviewers called it learned and readable. It jumps around in time, so it can't stand in for a narrative history.

Students and anyone short on time get a sound, sober overview in A Concise History of Germany. Mary Fulbrook, a University College London historian, moves from the medieval empire to the present and ties politics to changes in work, faith and society. The third edition carries the story into the 2010s, so check for it before buying a cheap older copy. It reads like a course text, and a new copy is pricey for so slim a paperback.

Germany's first unified state lasted under 50 years, and Blood and Iron covers that empire in a brisk, story-driven read. Katja Hoyer, who grew up in East Germany, writes with pace and keeps the cast of kaisers and chancellors easy to follow. Major British papers praised it. Some historians think it goes too easy on Bismarck and on the empire's harsher side, though, so it's worth pairing with a more critical account.

Beyond the Wall tells East Germany's story from the inside, through factory workers, athletes and party bosses as well as the secret police. Katja Hoyer argues that the state was more than a prison, and that many people built real lives there. That gives a warmer, more personal picture than the usual Cold War story. Reviewers in Germany were cooler, and some said it plays down repression, so it works best next to harder-edged accounts.

For the whole Nazi era in a single volume, The Third Reich by Thomas Childers is clear and well paced. Childers taught the subject for decades at the University of Pennsylvania, and the book has a lecturer's knack for explaining how Hitler won votes, then built a police state and waged a war of conquest. It's written for general readers. It leans on other historians' work rather than new archives, so specialists will find little that's new.

Steven Ozment's A Mighty Fortress covers the whole sweep, from tribes facing Rome to a reunified Germany, in one moderate volume. Ozment, a Harvard historian of the Reformation, gives Luther and the religious wars the richest chapters, and he writes in a calm, essay-like voice. It's an affordable way to see the long view. Later eras get quicker treatment, and the book first came out in 2004, so recent decades are missing.