The Age of Unrest

Entire libraries have been published on the causes of the First World War. Yet the reasons for the German Establishment's entry into this war – provoking it, even longing for it – remain a psychological mystery. The era between the glorious foundation of the German empire until the First World War is now presented by Joachim Radkau in a new light and from new perspectives. Thomas Mann described the Age of Unrest as an epoch characterized by an almost unbearable nervous strain, that special brand of "angst" newly rediscovered as an alleged national characteristic of the Germans.

Radkau embraces a wide spectrum of topics, from medicine to politics, from daily life to technology, from mental institutions to court cliques. Anxiety and unrest as a cultural condition, as both individual ailment and national disease, become visible as primary features of an epoch that reveal dramatic historical processes.

The result, both informative and startling, is a comprehensive cultural history, the chronicle of an era in which a nation tried to exorcise its nervous unrest in the explosions of the First World War and in the obsessive ideology of power glorified by the Nazis. Radkau's book explores and interprets an epoch whose influence can still be felt and which stands out prominently and multifariously as the backdrop of modern history.