Go into any high street bookshop and find the European history section. There’s usually a shelf or two on France and about the same on Germany, but the difference between these two categories is apparent straight away. The French stuff spans several centuries, whereas German history is confined to just 12 years.
Yes, a lifetime since the death of You-Know-Who, Britons are still obsessed with the Third Reich, and who can blame us? It remains the most bizarre and awful epoch in European history and we’re still reeling from its consequences. What’s less forgivable is our wilful ignorance about anything that came before (my son learnt all about the Nazis for his history GCSE, but it wasn’t until he did A level that he got onto Bismarck). This is the purpose of James Hawes’s compact primer. You can read it in an afternoon, but it’ll give you a good overview of German history — and even some idea of what makes modern Germans so different from modern Brits.
Hawes read German at Oxford and has lectured in German at Sheffield and Swansea universities, but he’s also a novelist and his pithy style combines the best of both trades. He knows what he’s on about and his conclusions are measured, but he favours clear, concise prose over dense academese. He has a sense of humour, and a sharp eye for similarities between then and now. I was tickled to learn that Romans used to moan about German migrants, much as Little Englanders complain about Eastern Europeans today.
Sure, we all know what happened when the Roman Empire reached breaking point, but Hawes argues that Germany was Rome’s successor, rather than its destroyer. The Holy Roman Empire (a.k.a.
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