‘Judged purely by its success in creating a nation-state, German history has to be deemed a failure until the nineteenth century.’ This familiar view of the historical relationship between power and the German nation gains added significance from the context in which it here appears: in a recent introduction to the political development of late medieval Europe. The book's co-authors do, it is true, distance themselves at once from such a narrow perspective. But taken on its own, it seems to encapsulate a piece of well-established common ground among historians of pre-modern and modern Germany – and particularly those writing within the broad Anglophone historiographical tradition. Generally speaking, historians of the modern and the pre-modern nation have been hampered by a failure to pay enough regard to each other's findings and approaches. In the case of Germany, however, the problem has traditionally been, in a way, almost an opposite one, with loosely framed grand narratives and vague, sometimes unvoiced, assumptions and connections being traded freely back and forth between students of different epochs of the German past. Not uncommonly, medievalists have fashioned their accounts with at least half an eye on events far distant in time. Modernists seem at first glance less encumbered, with their bold insistence on the German nation's quintessential modernity. Some are even at pains to declare that there is nothing to say on their subject before, at earliest, the closing years of the eighteenth century.