In this collection of ten essays, Fritz Stern - widely regarded as America's foremost authority on modern Germany - illustrates the 'German drama,' the story of a country whose history has comprised the promise of twentieth-century Europe and its nemesis, the greatness and the squandering of achievement, the dreams of peace and the delusions of power. Germany remains a country of immense and central complexity, where even today the past remains bitterly controversial and its interpretation uniquely important for the shaping of a national future.