Simon Winder, Germania: A personal history of Germans ancient and modern (London: Picador, 2011 (2010))

A German friend gave me Germania as ‘background reading’ ahead of a major event in Munich. I began reading it one night, thinking it would put me back to sleep after some wakeful angst about keynote speakers and other trivia. Instead I started laughing at the wit, zest and imagination, conveyed in the kick-off quotation. Combined with razor-insight slicing through woolly misperceptions and movie-induced clichés, and a vast grasp of the subtleties and complexities of this complex country, Winder made himself one of my top three contemporary historians. And certainly the funniest; it takes deep learning to wear it lightly, and Winder skilfully distills the essence, ensuring we get the point without being bewildered by a kaleidoscopic patchwork of mini-kingdoms.

So in one of those dynastic swirls which I have generally tried to shelter the reader from, two daft and marginal bits of Lower Saxony suddenly went their different ways, with one branch, from its new bases in Hanover and London, ruling a large part of the world, and the other remaining daft and marginal. (197)

The aim of the book is to restore the full spectrum and relative sanity of Germany’s rich history before the spectre of Nazism commandeered it. Winder starts with the origins of Germany, ‘the sort of forests enjoyed by gnomes and heroes’, and ends with Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, albeit without skirting around the ‘disaster of the Third Reich’. As he puts it, he endeavours to ‘reclaim a bit of Europe which is in many ways Britain’s weird twin’ (1-2).

Twin? As a child growing up close enough to the end of the war to have effortlessly picked up chirpy anti-Hitler songs without any sense of their being peacetime insensitive (‘Whistle while you work, ‘itler is a twerp; ‘e is barmy, so’s ‘is army, whistle while you work’), and where children’s games included running around lobbing imaginary hand grenades at invisible Nazi enemies, or play-piloting a nippy Spitfire downing dastardly Messerschmidts, that gave me pause for thought, despite a number of German kings and princes having solved some crucial dead-ends in British royal heir-production.

In this richly detailed book, Winder also manages to hit the ‘refresh’ button in a multitude of pithy sentences that telescope an era, entity, movement or war into clear and memorable view.  This brings events and people to life which even when nominally familiar can feel like cardboard cut-outs on a rickety classroom-drilled timeline of dates and proper nouns.

On the Holy Roman Empire: ‘a mass of contradictions, idiocies and inspired compromises’. (27)

 

On the Crusades: Louis IX of France wandering about in a swamp in the Nile Delta, carried in a litter by four strong men with a special hole cut in the seat to allow his dysentary to freely and immediately express itself, sadly rather sums up the crusades. (67)

 

On the Mongol invasion: Hungary remained under Mongol supervision for a few years, but the invaders never returned and we will never really know why.  One ingenious and plausible suggestion was that in Mongol terms Europe was fairly marginal and boring – even the Hungarian grasslands, on the face of it ideal for their simple needs, were rather paltry when you already owned North Asia. (83)

 

On the Reformation: It is not an exaggeration to say that this was the single greatest revolt in Europe before the French Revolution. Scenes of scarcely credible savagery engulfed region after region. (140)

 

On the Thirty Years War (1618-48): It left between a quarter and a third of all Germans dead and even in relation to the 20th century must, as a percentage of the population, be the worst man-made disaster ever experienced in Europe … All the labyrinthine details of the fighting hold their distressing interest because of this futility: nobody gets what they want and everybody dies. (168-69)

People in the distant past, when constrained by relatively limited technology, can themselves appear constrained. Winder puts paid to that, giving a more nuanced and appreciative view of expertise in relation to available technology and technical knowledge. Referring to the state of mining in Germany in the Middle Ages, which we might imagine in primitive troglodyte terms, he recognizes a level of professional dignity and skill, suggesting:

That there was a level of day-to-day, sophisticated expertise entirely comparable to our own, that technology always operates in perfect synchronization with its users, and that these silver miners were just as capable, just as aware of their world and its dangers and limitations as we are. (95)

Winder also provides an entertaining exposé of his own deep but ambivalent attraction to Germany, which seems to have stemmed haphazardly from a decision by his father to change the family holiday from standard seaside fare in sunny places in Brittany and Normandy to Alsace, that ‘world-historical fault line’.  This first exposure, on a canal boat, hardly presaged a lifelong engagement with Germany:

Burping along in a tiny boat down a reeking canal through an almost featurelesss bit of scarred eastern French landscape … (5)

And he allows himself to delve into cultural sidings that are compelling, if not central to the vast historical flow, such as a form of self-hating obsession with the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ which became a craze as Europe began pillaging the world at scale:

This fuelled a sort of arms race, with Venetian suppliers pouring sacks of tropical detritus which could then have bits of precious metal and jewels stuck to it to make ever more demented table settings.  …. I am going on about these things too long – I pretend to despise them, but really I could only be happy with a nautilus-shell drinking cup. (187)

And I felt mildly reassured by his admission of a shared intellectual incapacity:

My own woeful inability to absorb abstract ideas would make me a flailing, threadbare guide to philosophy, a crucially important strand in German life. (277)

In addition to the exuberance and wit of his writing, Winder has a capacity to spring things into perspective, zooming in on apparently remote happenings and give them their full measure of impact.

Karlsruhe has the odd fame of being the town where Fritz Haber at the end of the 19th century worked out how to fix nitrogen, thereby inventing artificial fertilizers, thereby summoning into existence roughly a third of all humans alive today – a discovery that makes all others seem merely provisional and paltry. (202)

 

The Germans had invested heavily in the Boer states, but had been told by a British emissary before the war broke out that if they interfered the British would declare war on Germany, destroy all German shipping and blockade Hamburg and Bremen so that Germany would choke. This was an interesting and tactful preview of British behavior in 1914. In that single threat was all the argument that figures such as Admiral von Tirpitz needed to build Germany’s own navy to prevent this happening. (373)

This book belies the convention that scholarship needs to be dull to be serious, if you define scholarship as combining deep knowledge, thoughtful insight and meticulous attention to a subject.  In that sense, this is a scholarly book which can make you laugh as you revisit what you thought you knew about a major European country.  If ‘scholarly’ concerns detailed footnotes and related clobber, then this is probably ‘popular history’.

And if school history lessons were more frequently taught with the clear-eyed verve Winder brings to his writing, we would probably develop a stronger and more subtle grasp of our past, and so be better equipped to navigate the present.