Summary
The public square: a continuing survey of religion, culture, and public life - Book Review
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Bach, Hitler, and the people called German.
Steven Ozment has done a remarkable thing in A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People (HarperCollins, 416 pp. $26.95). Ozment, a professor of history at Harvard, declines to see the history of Germany through the sole prism of the Third Reich. Rather, he begins with the beginning, going back to Tacitus in the first century A.D. The early story line is that of interaction with and, later, succession to the Roman Empire. In a manner reminiscent of Peter Brown's The Rise of Western Christendom, Ozment shows how the "barbarians" did not so much invade the Roman Empire as they engaged, over a long period of time, in complicated negotiations of identity and power from which Frankish and then German dominance gradually emerged.
Ozment believes that this way of telling the story is crucial to the future of the youn...See the full content of this document
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