4-02-05, 8:52 am
No insights into German history from lazy US academic
From Morning Star Online
A small volume covering German history from 100BC to the present is, as the author himself says in his introduction, 'a presumptuous task.'
Steven Ozment is concerned that German history is overshadowed by Hitler and the Holocaust and that this tends to distort one's perspective.
However, his attempt to provide an antidote offers no new insights and there is little, if anything, here which adds to our knowledge.
He appears to have no clear overall concept and lacks the requisite tools to tackle such a daunting subject.
His is an eclectic, chronological sequence of highly selected 'facts,' which hardly amount to an organic or connected whole.
He has a strong tendency to use meaningless generalisations like 'the Germans believe' or the 'Germans think' and seems to believe that the German people as a uniform body determined their own history.
There is no class analysis and no apparent understanding of the key role of economic forces in history.
His two pages on Marx will leave you more confused than enlightened and you will wonder how such opaque ideas managed to inspire millions.
He also, typically, tries to equate the nazis - always 'national socialists' in his text - and communism.
He is also cavalier with some of his selected facts.
He mistranslates the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and states that the GDR had only one party, the Communist Party, when, in fact, it had five - a Christian Democratic, Liberal, National and Peasant party - even if they were limited in their political scope.
At one point, he talks of the wall being in place in 1960 when it wasn't built until 1961.
Like so many somewhat lazy US academics, he uses secondhand sources for many of his quotes and statements, particularly when dealing with Marxism - his bibliography has no references to original sources for Marx or Engels and, although he talks about culture, Brecht, arguably Germany's greatest playwright, gets hardly a mention.
There are certainly a number of other histories of Germany which will provide an interested reader with a better understanding of this key European nation.
A Mighty Fortress, by Steven Ozment (London, Granta; New York, HarperCollins, March, 2004)
