“A New History of German Literature” exceeds any simple, singular definition of “history,” “literature,” or even “German.” Spanning 13 centuries, the book, published by Harvard University Press, contains 200 essays from an overflowing cast (think Cecil B. DeMille, but a postmodern production) of 152 contributors, including literary historians, critics, philosophers, musicologists, and theater and cinema scholars.

Speaking recently at the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, the executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, Lindsay Waters, said each essay was like a star that could be linked by the reader into a constellation or series: “The reader nucleates the book.” The editor-in-chief, David Welbery, notes in the introduction that the book offers “multiple paths” radiating outward, so that, for example, a fascination with Hugo von Hofmannsthal can lead to an interest in Mozart.

“I feel that I have waited for this book for 35 years,” a Columbia University professor, Andreas Huyssen, said at a panel convened last month by the Goethe-Institut in collaboration with the German Book Office.

Mr. Huyssen said general readers and serious scholars alike would welcome its clear prose.

A co-editor, Dorothea von Mucke, a Columbia professor, said the goal was to involve the reader. Mr. Waters compared dipping into the book’s myriad cross-referenced essays to following the trail of bread crumbs in a forest. Every reader can find his own itinerary by following a different order of essays, each of which is constructed around a particular date and highlights literary, publishing, theatrical, cinematic, historical, technological, or other moments. The approach, Mr. Waters said, calls attention to the fact that other choices might have been made in reading or compiling the book. A Princeton professor, Anthony Grafton, poetically said the book resembles the story of Jack Horner: Wherever one reaches in, one pulls out a plum, he said.

Apparent are two influences, among others, on the book’s structure. One is a New York University professor, Denis Hollier, whose “A New History of French Literature” (1989) pioneered this prismatic approach. Another is the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, whose notions of encounter and constellation Mr. Welbery draws upon in the book’s introduction. The book, the editor notes, exploits the communicative potential of anecdotes and the discontinuous to generate sudden illumination. Like Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” the book follows a montage effect, Mr. Waters said.

It is easier to say what the book is not. Mr. Grafton said the book does not fall prey to having everything looking forward to Goethe, as in much 19th-century literary historiography, or everything looking forward to Hitler, as in much 20th-century literary scholarship that “moves in one sinuous way toward a spurious unity.”

Without making Goethe “the absolute linchpin,” Mr. Waters said, the book makes it possible to see Goethe as a mountain from another side. “You gradually see the mountain,” he said. No author was the subject of more than two entries – but Goethe, still the exception, received three.

It is not a single national history. “This book is not about Germany,” Mr. Waters said, noting the texts are all written in some version of the German language. The book is not a survey, and offers no evolution. A goal, Ms. von Mucke said, was to “shake things up” and include works both canonical and noncanonical.

The book lacks timeworn periodization of “Romanticism,” “Sturm and Stress,” “Expressionism,” “Enlightenment,” and so forth, Ms. von Mucke observed. Similarly, Mr. Huyssen said the book does not follow a “decade approach” in the 20th century: trummerliteratur (literature of the ruins), 1960s student protest, the new subjectivity of the ’70s, up to “post-unification literature of the ’90s – whatever that means.”

Mr. Huyssen said the 20th century poses many difficulties for literary history but the scholars ran no risk of glibly capturing in a single restrictive narrative a century that witnessed the collapse of four German states, two World Wars, the Shoah, a divided nation, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “It was a century of ruptures and discontinuities,” he said, yet literary history has not changed much accordingly.

Does that approach have drawbacks? Mr. Waters has cautioned that the book is “a history” and not “the history” of German literature – it complements but does not replace standard texts. But sometimes, care must be taken to prevent marginalizing major figures. Although the book addresses Hitler and the Holocaust in several essays, for example, Mr. Waters recalled polling a neighbor on whether a cultural history of Germany could be published without having Hitler as an entry. “That,” Mr. Waters said, “was our market testing.” The neighbor confirmed what he believed, too, when she said it would be crazy to omit Hitler. The book subsequently included an essay attached to the date, May 1, 1936, when German Registry Offices began systematic distribution of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to all newlywed couples.

Mr. Grafton said the new book comes at the subject from the most extraordinary angles – “like a car wreck on the Jersey Turnpike” – offering an extraordinary collision of different methods, authors, and backgrounds.

Mr. Grafton also said the book was “a wonderful kind of present from the New World to the Old.” Between the Civil War and World War I, Germany gave America the Ph.D. and the ideal of research. This monumental book is a return crossing. The book can be considered the first large-scale reassessment of German culture since World War II, Mr. Waters said. It is certain to make waves.