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 politicaltrajectories 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 decisionsthat 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 andcontradictory past.

Heinrich August Winkler was born in 1938 in Konigsberg. He studied history, philosophy, and public law in Tubingen, Heidelberg and Munster. He was associate professor at the Freie Universitat in Berlin in 1970-72 and then professor of modern history in Freiburg until 1991. He has been at the Humboldt-Universitat 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.