"Germania" by Simon Winder

 A delightful history of Germany (and Austria) from Roman times until 1933, covering the patchwork Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburgs, the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic wars, the unification of Germany under Bismarck, and the horrors of the First World War and its aftermath. It is organised, roughly, in chronological order but the author cannot help wandering off on diversions, particularly focusing on his holiday travels as he compiles this book, taking us to so many tiny little towns that were once capitals of princely microstates, expressing all the horrors of yet another provincial museum (he is simultaneously fascinated and bored stiff by exhibits - aren't we all? - and horrified by some of the naff artworks -aren't we all?), and discoursing inter alia on the food, the culture and the beer. The whole experience creates perhaps the most entertaining (at times downright hilarious) and irreverent history book I have ever read. 

And I learned that Captain von Trapp (of Sound of Music fame) was a prominent member of the international expeditionary force that destroyed the Boxer Rebellion! And the 5,4,3,2,1, blast-off sequence comes from a film by Fritz Lang made in 1929 which entranced the young Wernher von Braun.

Selected quotes:

• "for some, travel is a chance to admire the Counter-Reformation altarpieces and for others a chance for a one-on-one roughhouse with a Dortmund transsexual ... they could intersect in some of the less bustling regional museums." (Introduction)
• "It is an odd feature of so many holidays that they are structured around having far worse facilities for cooking and cleaning than at home." (Introduction)
• "Like some acne-laden Kentish Goethe, I had arrived." (Introduction)
• "There is no escaping the ugly stupidity of this room, the misguided twenty-year labour of an almost pulselessly untalented Dresden painter." (Ch 1)
• "I found myself irritably wondering why genial but essentially pointless little birds like bullfinches could bomb around in the fir trees surviving the winter whereas I would be dead of exposure within twenty-four hours." (Ch 2)
• "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 dysentery to freely and immediately express itself." (Ch 2)
• "Some fifteen million years ago, when Germany was a balmy, sub-tropical place filled with the grunts and whistles of proto-elephants and giant turtles, a nearly mile-wide asteroid smashed into Nordlingen (or at least its future site), making a crater some fifteen miles wide and having an impact comparable to an inconceivable 1.8 million Hiroshimas." (Ch 7)
• "German art has always loved corpses, guttering candles, emblems of human folly, dances of death." (Ch 8)
• "The more panoramic the view the worse the food." (Ch 8)
• "But the sheer absurdity of his court, with everyone watching the king shitting or admiring his ballet moves ... or sitting around watching pageants ... did really nobody laugh?" (Ch 8)
• "Apart from Rome, Mainz was the only town that could be referred to as 'the Holy See'." (Ch 8)
• "It would be a gloomy pedant who did not revel in The Scarlet Empress and admit that watching Dietrich dressed in a sort of satellite dish covered in pompoms eyeing up her strapping troopers brings history to life." (Ch 9)
• "A side chapel: the piece of resistance" (Ch 9) Yes!!!! Why not translate the overwhelmingly pompous piece de resistance?
• "Germany really is covered with ivy-covered turrets and the promise of solitude (Kepler staring at the planets above Prague, Faust conjuring demons) - the great majority presumably built in the nineteenth century in response to the whole literature devoted to the subject." (Ch 10)
• "Nationalism is one of the most confusing subjects of the nineteenth century, with the added bonus of becoming worse and worse the more anyone thinks about it." (Ch 11)
• "The little-known but enjoyably named Prussian Mouthful [schnapps] ...tastes like something that might be used to clean rust from girders and can be recommended to nobody." (Ch 12)
• "I have never found mountains particularly interesting ... it might be a more intelligent use of life to have ... stayed in the attractive hotel with a book and a few drinks." (Ch 12)
• "California began as a fictional country" (Ch 12) It first appears around 1510 in a popular Spanish novel by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (aka Ordóñez de Montalvo) called  The Adventures of Esplandián in which it is an island populated only by black warrior women.
• "The hidden trajectory of heroism which ends so many once glamorous careers: as a seedy, burned-out Robin Hood, in a prolix, cadging and elderly Hannibal." (Ch 12)
• "This strange formula that allowed the takeover of other people's land to be followed by speechless outrage when those people had the gall to resist, is a phenomenon not sufficiently thought through." (Ch 13)
• "Essentially the First World War did not earn that name because of Germany or Austria-Hungary, who could hardly move out of their small chunk of Central Europe, but because of the Allies, who ruled most of the world." (Ch 14)

A superbly eclectic and irreverent history. Great fun. July 2023; 441 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God