It’s complicated: ‘Germania’ by Simon Winder

This is not a new book: first published in 2010 and one of a trilogy of books about Central Europe, Germania is described as a personal history of Germans ancient and modern.

Why did I pick up a fourteen-year-old book about Germany?

Because, in my investigations into my family tree, there is one individual about whom I know very little: my mother’s 3 x great-grandfather, Christian Uebel.

In a tree made up of mainly English and Irish branches, Christian Uebel is an outlier, on a branch of his own. He emigrated from the Rhineland region of the country we now know as Germany, arriving in Australia in the 1860s. I realised that I knew so much more about British history and culture and almost nothing about Germany, so Germania was my first step to correcting this.

I quickly realised that the history of central Europe is much more complicated than I had imagined. I knew that the German nation did not exist until the unification in 1871, and in the centuries leading up to that, there were endless squabbles between and about the many, many small and large states that made up the German-speaking parts of Europe.

Germania traverses the history of this region from the days of the ancient tribes in the forests, all the way up to 1933, when the Nazis took power. I wondered about this timeframe until I realised it was for an entirely sensible reason. The dark shadows of WWII have so dominated German history, that apart from the first World War, many people know very little about what came before it.

This is not simply a book about history, although of course that is an important theme. It’s also a travelogue of a particular kind; one where the author indulges his pet loves – and hates – about a country and culture, and describes these in a very amusing – even humorously disrespectful – way.

Here’s an example: in discussing the appearance of a particular abbey, which gives a sense of an ancient and brilliant culture, but whose main interior unfortunately looks as though something has gone horribly wrong involving a collision with several trucks filled with icing sugar, having had an extreme rococo makeover to mark its seven-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. (p65)

There are plenty of gems like this, along with more serious discussions of the ups and downs of German history. On this, we are told that there were three points at which it was the worst time to be alive in central Europe’s past: the 1340s (famine and plague), the 1630s (the Thirty Years War) and the 1940s.

No prizes for guessing why that last one is on the list.

I was grateful for the map of Germany and its neighbours in central Europe at the front of the book, flipping frequently back and forth in my quest to learn more about this fascinating and (to me anyway) somewhat bewildering region.

Winder’s analysis of the themes and movements, great and small, of European history is thoughtful and thought-provoking:

But, as with so many aspects of Central European history, there is such an amazing spread of unintended consequences that only a form of political paralysis can substitute for the actual kaleidoscope of decisions which generate the oddness of European history – a small, bitter and crowded landscape somehow incapable of (indeed allergic to) the broad-ranging uniformity of the Chinese Empire or the United States. It is unfortunate that what seems in many lights so fascinating about Europe should also, as a spin-off, be the basis for so much rage and death.

Germania p273

Germania was published by Picador in 2010.