Germany: The Long Road West: Volume 2: 1933-1990

Vivid, succinct, and highly accessible, Heinrich Winkler's magisterial history of modern Germany, offers the history of a nation and its people through two turbulent centuries. It is the story of a country that, while always culturally identified with the West, long resisted the political trajectories of its neighbours.

This second and final volume begins at the point of the collapse of the first German democracy, and ends with the joining of East and West Germany in the reunification of 1990. Winkler offers a brilliant synthesis of complex events and illuminates them with fresh insights. He analyses the decisions that shaped the country's triumphs and catastrophes, interweaving high politics with telling vignettes about the German people and their own self-perception.

The two volumes of Germany: The Long Road West, exploring the history of the German lands from the final days of the Holy Roman Empire to the very first of a reunified state in the late twentieth century, will be welcomed by scholars, students, and anyone wishing to understand a most complex and contradictory past.


About the Author
Heinrich August Winkler was born in 1938 in Königsberg. He studied history, philosophy, and public law in Tübingen, Heidelberg and Münster. He was associate professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin in 1970-72 and then professor of modern history in Freiburg until 1991. He has been at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin since 1992, and has been a visiting scholar in Princeton, at the Wilson Center in Washington, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, and at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich.