The cover sets off the“mania” in “Germania” typographically, andappropriately so, for Winder, author of TheMan Who Saved Britain (about the James Bond novels), has been consumed withall things German for most of his adult life. That he has been able to ridethis hobbyhorse without also mastering the German language despite, as heruefully admits, years of trying, is evidence of the depth of his mania.
Germania is a delightfully personal and engagingbookto borrow Hollywood parlance, it is sortof Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All Thatmeets Will Cuppy’s The Decline and Fallof Practically Everybody. It is cheerfully opinionated, studded withassertions like “For Germans the Middle Ages represented an acute degree ofannoyance” that on the surface sound simply nutty but actually capture theessence of an accompanying line of reasoning.
It could be said thatthe book offers genial little asides into this or that, but more accurate wouldbe to say that it is a grab bag of asides clinging to a narrative line. In aspirited discussion of his enthusiasm for three Rhinecathedrals, he writes that on “one babyish occasion I even zoomed between allthree in one day just to see definitively and finally which one I liked best.”But then he couldn’t make up his mind.
Anecdotal detailsilluminate grand designs. For instance, in the late 19th century when amore-or-less united Germanyset out to get itself an empire from the bits and pieces left over by the otherpowers, its rulers were chagrined to find that they had to communicate with thenatives in pidgin English. Not willing to put up with such humiliation, theyinvented a vocabulary of pidgin German of about 1,000 words. But then World WarI came along and ended that effort.
He has fun with thedozens of duchies, principalities and other tin-pot royal acreages, some ofwhich existed until the end of World War I. He has a nice brief take on novelsabout imaginary countries and how they reflect the “oversupply” of Germanprinces and princesses in the 19th century. This too makes a serious point.Well into the 19th century, Winder writes, “the fundamental clock that ruledGerman life was dynastic.” Before the rise of nationalism “the glory of theruler was the point of history,” andwhole duchies were even swapped among royal houses.
His knowledge is asencyclopedic as his enthusiasm is childlike. He discourses on, among hundredsof topics, the patchwork nature of the Holy Roman Empire; “the deep-rootednature of German fissiparousness” (Germany did not develop an active,continuing, urban center early on as England did with London); the TeutonicKnights and their connection (or not) to modern German soldiers; the role of religiousconflict in German history; and the remarkable likeness of Wagner’s Nibelungdwarves to the slave laborers Albert Speer worked to death in his undergroundfactories during World War II.
However, thisfreewheeling, playful approach, while agreeable, lends itself to writing thattends to be overly windy, suffering especially from acute adjectival andadverbial overload, often of adjectives and adverbs that are neitherappropriate nor helpful. “Gaggingly claustrophobic” is how he describes a“stone cage” in Ulm.
Winder “packs up” hisbook with the Nazi takeover in 1933, “just as everybody who made Germany soremarkable a place packed up”some to exile, some to silence, some to oblivion.Of his many generalizations, it is one of the most defensible.
