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Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern |  | Author: Simon Winder
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: £18.99
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Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 4232
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.8
ISBN: 0330451391
EAN: 9780330451390
ASIN: 0330451391
Publication Date: February 5, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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Product Description
Mesmerized by Germany; its cuisine, and its fairytale landscape, the author is equally passionate about the region's history, its folklore, monarchs and its changing borders. In this book, he describes Germany's past afresh, taking in the story from the shaggy world of the ancient forests right through to the Nazis' catastrophic rise in the 1930s.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 49
Anecdotal facetiousness, but it works July 25, 2010
dm
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
What Mr Winder describes as his anecdotal facetiousness can be a little relentless and I made slow progress with this book. But I never thought of abandoning it, and in the end Germania works extraordinarily well - it is intensely personal, amusing and ultimately moving. I feel I now understand Germany and the Germans in a way I didn't before.
 The only book on German history you'll ever want to read July 22, 2010
Ponytail (UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
That might be because a) you'll have learnt SO much you won't need to read anything else or b) because you'll be put off any more histories of Germany because it's just too boring.
I really liked the author's style, but can imagine the regular insertions of personal thoughts might be irritating. He's quite funny and he obviously knows Germany very well (though it's curious that he says he can't speak German).
On the other hand - what a slog. Due to Germany's fractured past, there's a LOT of history to get through, and each tiny little state and kingdom gets equal time. It's not the fault of the author but Germany's history is just too much to take in one book. Having studied the period of 1848-1944 previously, I could comprehand this part of the book better, but the years between the Romans up to the 17th century were just a blur of castles, princes, forests...
For people with a longer attention span than me (I was reduced to telling myself to read a chapter a time, and soemtimes couldn't even manage that) it may be an enjoyable, informative read. If you're familiar with Germany or Austria, you may recognise some of the places and characters. For the average reader though, I'm not sure I could recommend this. Any book where you have to force yourself to read it - not good.
Excellent Overview July 20, 2010
Shove Coupler (UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Overall I really enjoyed this book. For someone with a German partner and burgeoning interest in European history, this is an ideal introduction, giving a broad outline of events from the Roman Empire to the rise of Hitler, together with personal reflections and anecdotes. Reading it on a train between Munster and Munich made it come to life even more vividly. It's written in a chatty, non-academic style - a bit like having a history lesson from Jeremy Clarkson, which may or may not be a compliment.
BUT it really needs a good edit. The author relies far too heavily on a handful of judgmental adjectives for comic effect: `baffling', `pathetic', `mad', `fun' and the ubiquitous `delusive', often several times per page, which gets very irritating. He seems to have adopted a strategy of allowing us Brits to feel smug about certain aspects of German culture in the hope that we will be be seduced the rest. As such he is bizzarely rude about the food, the weather, quite a lot of the architecture, marzipan and schnapps. Unlike some other reviewers here I don't find it offensive, you just have to screen out what are clearly some rather personal prejudices.
The author sensibly halts the book just short of World War II, but he cannot resist nudging us in the ribs whenever he describes some instance of militarism, racism, medievalism, overweening ambition etc, to point out the terrible consequences of such a mindset. As such there are few pages which don't have some allusion to Hitler, rather undermining the stated purpose of the book.
I am hoping after reading this book to be able to make a bit more sense of `Europe's Tragedy' by Peter H Wilson.
 What a disappointment July 2, 2010
jh
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Having spent over 5 years living in Germany I decided to buy this book on the back of previous reviews. I was very disappointed with what I read. The style is awful with long-winded sentences and weak attempts at humour. The writer is all over the place, with no clear line of thinking. If you are looking for a book that will give you some idea of what makes Germans tick, then don't bother with this one.
 A quirky but authoritaive compendium of German history and culture June 8, 2010
A Common Reader (Sussex, England)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book a vast compendium of German history and culture, combining anecdote, travelogue, history and personal reminiscences in a very readable style, amounting to about 450 pages.
Simon Winder seems to have acquired all the information contained in this book the hard way - by slogging through the country from north to south, year after year, visiting castles, cathedrals and museums wherever he went, collecting as much information as he could. Whereas most of us would look cursorily around such places before moving on to the next location, Simon seems to have made a personal study of each site, obviously buying the guidebooks and then working out the connections with other places and other times - in other words he is a "synthesiser" who has brought together a vast array of information in order to create this substantial volume.
His background reading was also about as comprehensive as one could expect (seven pages of bibliography), and this has led to a book which while being in places very funny (in the humorous sense), it also seems authoritative.
The amount of detail is overwhelming at times, but Simon's evident fascination with everything he sees carries the reader along in a sort of joyous fog, with fact after fact trailing along behind him (its all rather too much to take in in one go. While we read of the countless princes, kings and "tribal warlords" who ruled the land we now know as Germany (which of course barely existed as a cohesive whole until the 19th century), I found the charm of the book to lie in Simon's mandy and fascinating digressions.
Germania is one of those books I feel don't actually want to live without - its got to be there on my shelves to refer to whenever I come across some new item I want to look up when reading books by German authors or books about Germany. My only regret is that the story ends in 1933. I hope that Simon Winder now writes another volume to cover the period up to the present day. Perhaps the changes of the last 77 years were just too vast to be slotted in to Germania.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 49
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