This may be the metaphor of the month: I keep imagining the aftermath of an explosion in a jigsaw factory. And if you have ever struggled, as I am sure you have, to master the complexities of Germany’s statelets and graf-doms before Prussia shook them down into some kind of unity, you’ll feel comforted by this metaphor.
‘But Germany had always looked on the map like an explosion in a jigsaw factory.’
Source: Simon Winder, Germania (London, Picador, 2011), p. 39