The word "German" was being used by the Romans as early as the mid–first century B.C. to describe tribes in the eastern Rhine valley. Nearly two thousand years later, the richness and complexity of German history have faded beneath the long shadow of the country's darkest hour in World War II. Now, award-winning historian Steven Ozment, whom The New Yorker has hailed as "a splendidly readable scholar," gives us the fullest portrait possible in this sweeping, original, and provocative history of the German people, from antiquity to the present, holding a mirror up to an entire civilization -- one that has been alternately Western Europe's most successful and most perilous.

In 1919, Keynes participated in the negotiations of World War I's armistice. He strongly disagreed with terms of reparation imposed on Germany, arguing in this controversial book that German impoverishment would threaten all of Europe. This prophetic view of the European marketplace in the early 20th century represents a much-studied landmark of economic theory.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

In der Gegenwart könnte sich wieder ein Gleichgewicht zwischen Europa und Asien herstellen, wie es ähnlich im 18. Jahrhundert bestand. Auf hohem Informationsstand wurde Asien damals zugleich entzaubert und besser verstanden als in den Jahrtausenden davor. Jürgen Osterhammels Buch ist eine Synthese auf der Grundlage breiter Quellenstudien. Es schildert die Aufgeschlossenheit der europäischen Aufklärung gegnüber anderen Hochkulturen, die ab 1800 in eine neue, heute noch nachwirkende Arroganz umkippte.