HST 2022 - German History

• Explain how events in the Early Middle Ages, particularly the Investiture Controversy and Frederick Barbarossa’s war against the Lombard League, led to Germany’s political fragmentation
• Explain how the constitutional provisions of the Holy Roman Empire and later the Protestant Reformation further fragmented Germany politically in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age
• Explain how the strong line of Prussian kings and Prussia’s expansion along the Rhine River were the principal forces that led to the unification of Germany in 1871
• Explain how the Versailles Treaty and its implementation by the Allies created the instable political environment that allowed extreme political ideologies such as communism and fascism to arise
• Compare and contrast the principal tenets of fascism (particularly racial nationalism) and communism (particularly proletarian revolution) that characterized extremist political ideologies in Germany during the Weimar period
• Examine and detail the principal reasons for Germany’s defeat during World War II, particularly its economic weaknesses, relatively small population vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, and  military intelligence failures
• Explain how the Soviet Union’s revocation of the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1989 led to the Revolutions of 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990
• Explain the historiographic construct known as the “Sonderweg” or “peculiar path” and how this interpretation of Germany history dominated German historiography from the 1940s to the 1980s and the principal weaknesses of the Sonderweg that forced historians to abandon this construct

• None

• German lands and people
• Germany: Roman Period
• Germany: Early Middle Ages and Holy Roman Empire
• Germany: High and Late Middle Ages
• Protestant Reformation: early years
• Counter-Reformation and the Thirty-Years War
• Age of Absolutism and the rise of Prussia
• Enlightenment and the French Revolution
• Romanticism, nationalism, idealism
• Restoration and industrialization, 1815-1848
• German unification & Bismarck
• Germany after unification
• Wilhelmine Germany
• World War I
• Rise of Weimar Republic
• Collapse of the Weimar Republic and rise of the Third Reich
• Understanding the Sonderweg
• History of anti-Semitism in Europe
• Germany’s road to war
• World War II and the Holocaust
• Creation of the two Germanies
• Consolidation and politics in the two Germanies
• Politics, revolution, and reunification, 1949-1989
• Germany since 1990