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 neighbors.

This first volume (of two) begins with the origins and consequences of the medieval myth of the "Reich," which was to experience a fateful renaissance in the twentieth century, and ends with the collapse of the first German democracy. Winkler offers a brilliant synthesis of...