For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression, brought to a murderous apex in the Third Reich. Not so, asserts Helmut Walse Smith, who, beginning in 1500, reveals early pacific conceptions of the nation, and allows us to see the Nazis' extreme form of nationalism as an essential episode in Germany's centuries-long history of continually conceiving the nation in radically different ways. The first major history of Germany in a generation.