Germania In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder

Author:Simon Winder [Winder, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Western
ISBN: 9781429945417
Google: hQvf1BeF470C
Amazon: B004O0TUOY
Goodreads: 8497667
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-03-16T05:00:00+00:00

The Strong and the Fat

It is conventional in histories of Germany at this point to start talking about Prussia so that everyone can start gibbering and rolling their eyes with fear. Instead I thought I would write about Saxony. This part of Germany has always been one of my favourite places. It was one of the first I stayed in, shortly after the Wall came down, taking a room in a student flat in the south-east of Dresden, an area which, with its soot-caked late-nineteenth-century shop fronts and apartment blocks, its newspaper kiosks and battered trams, all arranged along a particularly beautiful stretch of the Elbe, seemed to me, even under the harsh conditions of the time, to maintain a vigorous argument for the wonders of urban life. A pub, placed slightly madly close to the river’s edge, was defiantly marked on its outside wall with the heights over the centuries where Elbe flooding had wiped it out. I remember drifting in a happy daze around Dresden, Leipzig and Meissen.

This happiness came in part from the sense that this was Germany profonde, an area crucial to the great cultural and political moments that define Central Europe, but also tucked away to such a degree that I felt genuinely almost alone. I’m not sure why that feeling should be desirable, but in the context of the recent collapse of East Germany (with the trains all still marked as being run by the Reichsbahn, unchanged since the Third Reich) the ground seemed historically still warm and it was exciting to be engaged – to my own satisfaction at least, if to nobody else’s – with a historical sense of what had really happened here.

The fundamental pleasure of Saxony lies in its hopelessness. It is as characteristically German as Prussia and yet as a political entity it failed in all it did. Saxony’s history appears somewhat marginal, and yet this is the place that gave us Schumann, Wagner and Nietzsche. Despite woeful frivolity, insanity and mismanagement it clung on to its independence, never quite going under, until the last wholly unmourned king abdicated at the end of the First World War. At least while within the confines of Saxony it is possible to think of an alternative Germany – wayward, self-indulgent and inept in a way that gives hope to us all.

As with all the more serious German states, the more one finds out about Saxony’s history the more absorbing it becomes, acting as a parallel and just as completely realized world, with many bizarre actors and events entirely comparable to the histories of England, say, or Spain, and impossible to go into too much detail over without accidentally writing an entire book. For all German schoolchildren, the Saxony story hinges around the Stealing of the Princes, an upbeat version of the Princes in the Tower, when in 1455 the fiendish (and brilliantly named) Kunz von Kaufungen and his confederates infiltrated the great Schloss at Altenburg, snatched Ernst and Albrecht, the two little heirs of the mighty Wettin family, Electors of Saxony, and rushed away with them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.