"Taking 1941 as the decisive culmination point in modern German history, this book offers a truly masterful analysis of the links between nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. I know of no other study that examines in a more circumspect way and within a broad comparative framework the complex and controversial subject of how earlier discourses about the exclusion of Jews are ultimately related to their mass murder. A major scholarly achievement and challenge to both pre- and post-Goldhagen historiography." -V.R. Berghahn, Columbia University "Helmut Walser Smith argues for a history of the Holocaust that recalls centuries-old forms of communal anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, ritual riots, communal expulsions, and extinctions of Jewish memory. The mobilization and radicalization of these traditions into an eliminationist racism and anti-Semitism during the long nineteenth century accompanies the remaking of nation and religion and set the stage for the holocaust - an act of mass murder that is simultaneously embedded in the past and in its destruction of humanity radically breaks with it. Smith, thus, initiates the long overdue debate on a history of humanity and the bonds of belonging that requires depth of perspective in order to make sense." -Michael Geyer, University of Chicago "A thoughtful, provocative, and extremely stimulating essay. Smith explores the strands of continuity, reaching back to early modern times, of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Germany. Not a repetition of the old "Luther to Hitler" argument, this study instead asks hard questions about how the subjects of history conceived of continuity in their own history; it seeks answers in the culture of the built environment, visual sources, the imagined nation, and the remembrance of violence and sacrifice in community ritual." -Isabel V. Hull, Cornell University "Helmut Smith's deep history of the intellectual contours and social practices of nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism in central Europe