Alon Confino Germany, Nationhood, and the Holocaust, 1500 – 2000 Germany: A Nation in Its Time, Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500–2000. By Helmut Walser Smith (New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020) 590 pp. $39.95 The leading body of work in the historiography of nationhood in the last generation has explored modern national belonging as a cultural artifact, a product of invention and social engineering. Scholars investigated the process by which (some people in) the nation—as a social group made up of different groups, identities, and affinities— constructs a past and a sense of self through a process of creation, appropriation, and conflict, and what it means to power relation- ships within society. A key problem of method and interpretation was to trace how a new, modern national belonging was crafted from the available symbolic reservoir of society, how old and new cultural symbols commingled, and how they changed their mean- ings in a process famously articulated by Renan in What is a Nation?: “The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.” 1 This research agenda becomes significantly more challenging when the topic in question extends chronologically to explore how a given national group imagined and experienced itself over hundreds of years from the early modern period to the present: the symbolic reservoir available to the group is larger; the process of remembering Alon Confino is Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, and Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Among his books are A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, 2014); Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding (New York, 2012); and Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, 2006). The author thanks Aleida Assmann, Paul Betts, Monica Black, Amos Goldberg, and Mark Roseman for their excellent critical comments on a draft of this essay. © 2021 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01630 1 See Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” (1882), in idem (ed. and trans. M. F. N. Giglioliin), What Is a Nation? And Other Political Writings (New York, 2018) 247–263. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, LI:4 (Spring, 2021), 609–621.