Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and their History (Simon Winder, 2010)

Winder notes that Germany is pretty much a dead zone for tourism (at least compared to France, Italy, England, etc.) yet finds that he is fascinated by the place. He ends up putting together an informal history that I found tremendously useful. Background from Fritz Stern, Frederick the Great and Bach, Goethe (and other books tagged with Germany on this blog) helped provide some perspective that made this book useful.

He admits up front that he's not a historian. For all I know many of his musings may be off target.

I've been baffled by the history of the area: late maturation to statehood; tiny independent regions for centuries; how did the area generate the super-high quality musicians, authors, scientists; how did the area generate the Nazis; etc.

My usual method is to dog-ear pages I find interesting; this book was left full of dog-ears.

Tacitus - almost a noble savage description - aimed more at uplifting Roman virtue than any attempt at accurately describing Germany. But this resonated right up to 1933.

Holy Roman Empire - fixation with medieval glory days. Perhaps as a way of legitimizing a disunited area looking at France and England with their long histories as a single nation. Building and restoring castles and monuments after other countries had moved on.

Differences between southern Catholic areas - identifying with Italy - and northern Protestant areas - identifying with Netherlands, England, Scandinavia. Amazing overlap with English monarchy.

So many available princes and princesses that they were married off throughout Europe, even sent to places like Greece and Mexico.

Prussia up in marshy northeast - Protestant - socially progressive it seems earlier than most - success in Napoleonic wars (which wiped out so many of the smaller states).

Winder points out that for all the talk of German militarism - other than a few successes in a seven year period in the 19th century (most notably the Franco-Prussian war, described here) - they never fought after that until WWI, and never really succeeded after that in any war. The short run of success probably created unrealistic expectations.

How the rush to develop a navy - in large part to service worthless, johnny-come-lately colonies - broke up a natural affinity with England and contributed to 20th century disaster.

Lots of entertaining stories about all of the small independent (or partially independent) areas. Somehow this seems to have been an incubator for the arts etc. Weird local museums, buildings, traditions.

WWI failure, the myth that the army hadn't been defeated in WWI, the Weimar republic problems, the rush to blame outsiders who must have undermined the army (Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, etc.), disaster with Nazis, disaster with Soviets. What a history.