This is the first booklength study to consider Ricarda Huchs historicalpolitical thought and assess Huchs place within the lively historiographical discourses of the 1920s. One of the most famous writers of her day Huch 18641947 was known for her poetry fiction and histories of German Romanticism and the Thirty Years War. Like many of her generation Huch was shaken by Germanys defeat in the First World War and this shock motivated her to use her historiography to address Germanys postwar situation. Convinced that the German nation possessed an identity best expressed by the ideals of Romanticism Huch attributed Germanys decline to the westernization of German political culture absolutism and centralization had replaced the theoretical perfection of the decentralized early Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Her Weimar histories of medieval and nineteenthcentury Germany urged a defeated and traumatized nation to return to a path that had been abandoned during the Wilhelmine Empire. Topics explored include Huchs use of Nietzschean monumentalism a comparison with popular historians of the period e.g. E. Kantorowicz the echoes of her political thought in her poetry and fiction and her complex relationship to German nationalism.