Three hundred odd pages of text can't fully cover two millennia of history, but Ozment makes interesting the topics he chooses to write about. I learned how germanic tribes were sometimes courted by and sometimes taken advantage of by the Romans, the importance of Martin Luther, how the French revolution affected Germans, why the Germans did not really have their own revolution, what post cold war reunification was like, and much much more. Also, I learned the difference between historiography and history and why it is important.
The pages, like many history books, are long on rulers, battles, regime changes, and short on what was happening to ordinary people, leaving me wondering what really changed and what didn't sometimes.
There are interesting references to the history of ideas, including a chapter about nineteenth century philosophers and political thinkers. Hitler and the Nazi's got their chapter, one that explained much to me.
I was looking for a book that especially clarified early germanic history as well as the last two centuries, and this one filled the bill. The fourteen page introduction is worth reading on its own. ( )

A disappointment. Not much here. ( )

Chapter 7 especially well describes the evolution of German thought: from the dualistic view of man implicit in Luther's dilemma through the "classical" discussion of the duality of may raided in "Dr. Faust", continuing through the German Idealists Kant, then Hegel, then Feuerbach's criticism of individualism in Christian thought described in "The Essence of Christianity," on to Marx's more harsh (and politicized) condemnation of individualism, the underlying premise of Christianity, whose ultimate end is property and the depersonalization of mankind. Similar currents in philosophy regarding the inclusion of God into man's mind...essentially making God a construction of man, even Luther's intimation that the mind open to God will hear God, used to justify the premise that God is a mental construct. Finally the apotheosis a la Nietsche, of a Superman. Culturally, analogous to the super Volk.

Summarizing the people: "A historically informed, mature German polity will likely be more limiting of freedom than are the egalitarian democracies of France and the United States, which have arguable forgotten how to discipline freedom and consequently lost control of the individual. In the evolution of Rousseau's and Robispierre's France, and Jefferson's and Emerson's America, individual freedom appears to have become a right of self-absorption, threatening the citizen's responsibility to the public sphere and the believer's obligation to God. The Germans do not believe that true freedom must be untidy, or that a free people have the right to run amok. The new German democracy will likely tolerate more radical, but shorter-lived, dissent and resistance to the state. To the extent that the waning of authority and order has become more problematic to the world's older democracies than the expansion offreesom and equality, the new German democracy may offer a solution for liberal democracy's modern ills."

history of the German peoples from Roman times to the present; rather patchy in content and quality; skips huge chunks of time; very superficial on some subjects, while detailed and articulate on others

One of the best surveys of German history and contains interesting details and compelling prose. Ozment writes in a lively, engaging style and manages to find insights throughout German history. If you are reading one general survey text this should be high on your list.