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For some, the history of Germany is largely that of Nazis and Jews. In the United States, the History Channel is popularly known as the “Hitler Channel” for its constant harping on the Führer. The mentality that judges all Germans as “Nazis” is not so different from the Hitlerite mentality that judged all Jews to be moral pariahs. National Socialism nevertheless remains the defining moment in the history of the German people.

In this sympathetic history of Germany, Steven Ozment insists that the country’s record of “civility and creativity” is far greater than that of its “inhumanity and destructiveness”. One cannot judge a 2,000-year-old civilisation on the basis of one short-lived period. Ozment (a Harvard history professor) is right to make the point. Yet he concedes that there might indeed be something innately disciplined and darkly efficient in the German character. The vaunted perfectionism of today’s German workplace may have its grotesque mirror image in the Nazis’ Ordnungsliebe (passion for order).

Since the end of the second world war, Germans have tried in various ways to come to terms with their past. Some have turned guilt into a national virtue and performed Trauerarbeit (the labour of mourning); others have sought to re-create themselves spiritually on pilgrimages to Israel. The German novelist Günter Grass declared that whoever thinks about Germany today must also consider Auschwitz, and many of his compatriots would agree. Indeed, the word “Auschwitz” was never heard so often in post-war Germany as during unification. Thugs with shaved heads were again on the streets chanting Nazi slogans. Grass himself used the existence of the death camp as an argument against a unified Fatherland.

For all his erudition, Ozment does not really answer the central question: how a civilised nation was able to commit such a crime as the murder of all the Jews within its jurisdiction. Right-wing historians in Germany have tried to argue for a supposed moral equivalence between Hitler’s extermination of the Jews and the earlier Stalinist extermination of the kulaks. According to this revisionist polemic, the Final Solution merely imitated Stalin’s slaughter. While Ozment regards Auschwitz as a uniquely German crime, he insists it was committed by another Germany. Human nature may not have changed, but politics have; in today’s Federal Republic of Germany, the rascals can be voted out.

National socialism, in Ozment’s lucid analysis, was an unprecedented break with the country’s political and cultural traditions, a phenomenon beyond the bounds of imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. Yet it must have come from somewhere. In the previous century, Friedrich Nietzsche had undermined western philosophy to create new values of totalitarian dominance. Much of what the German philosopher wrote would appeal to the Nazi race engineers and encourage Hitler to scorn the Judaeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak. Inevitably, Nietzsche was made to serve as justification for Hitler’s extermination of European Jewry.

A great deal of this book is devoted to the austere, reforming personality of Martin Luther. In the Protestant theologian’s campaign to restore biblical Christianity in the 16th century, Germans were united against the Roman papacy and their territorial sovereignty strengthened. Nevertheless Luther’s virulent anti-semitism was also co-opted by the Third Reich into its racist propaganda. (Jews, in Luther’s opinion, were an “arrogant, vengeful, foreign presence”.) As far back as AD98, Tacitus had warned of the Teuton’s penchant for peril over peace; all subsequent German history may be viewed as a bloody battle for land and national supremacy.

Although lively and provocative, A Mighty Fortress is not always well written. Slang clings like grime to Ozment’s prose (“push-overs”, “deadpanned”, “lip-smacking”). In compensation, the author has much of interest to say on the militarism and chauvinism of Germany under Otto von Bismarck (the “Iron Chancellor”), whose policies throughout the 1870s aimed at consolidating and protecting the young Prusso-German empire. Where Ozment really excels is in his analysis of German cultural and intellectual movements. Luther’s circle of artist friends (Dürer, Holbein and Lucas Cranach among them) brazenly attacked the “burdens and abuses” of Rome, and thus helped to ensure that an astonishing 50 of Germany’s 65 imperial states adopted the Reformation in the late 1500s.

Five centuries on, Germany is a unified democratic republic with a model welfare state. Yet an older generation in Europe and the world continues to fear Germany as a potential warmonger. Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, wrote to his German translator in 1960: “Germany is a great hope as well as a great danger for Europe.” Nevertheless, so long as “good” Germans are at the helm of Germany today, a Fourth Reich remains hard to imagine.

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