A Traveller's History of Germany offers a complete and authoritative history of a country of which much of its rich past and legacy of great culture has been forgotten after the traumas of the two world wars. There were Germans long before there was Germany. Germanic peoples lived for centuries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe with similar yet not identical languages and culture. Over time these developed into regional principalities and city states under the nominal rule of first the Roman Empire, then the Holy Roman Empire, and finally the Habsburg Empire. German unification did not come until 1871 under Bismarck. Germany became a world power, fuelled not only by industrialisation but also by a new ideology of nationalism, a power that took on the rest of the world twice in the twentieth century and lost. Since 1945 it has risen from the ashes to become a major force - of a more palatable kind - within Europe.