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A review by pikus87
The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes
3.0
This book should have a subtitle along the lines of "Or, The Unknown History of the River Elbe". Whereas the sacred status of the Rhine has long since been acknowledged, what the Elbe has come to signify throughout the centuries is both surprising and amazingly consistent: a profound divide between, from time to time, Rome and Germanic tribes, Carolingian Empire and Saxons, German Empire and Slavs, Catholicism and Reformation, Germany and Prussia, West and East... Something that the author begins to observe almost casually when Drusus retreats from the Elbe in 9BC but which he keeps remarking, continually building it up, until in the very last pages, in the light of the electoral success of Alternative für Deutschland in Saxony in 2017, he makes a striking and quite unsettling case for a renewed division of Germany where the former East Germany can be in good essence abandoned to itself and the Western and Southern Länder can finally harness their full potential, so often submitted to the whims of Prussian Junkers and army between XIX and XX century, and join West Europe as one of its legitimate members. Of course this thesis is up for debate but one cannot dismiss the argument made in this short but compelling narrative.
In other words, this book is not a neutral story as in "chronological and critical report on the state of affairs of that region" but rather a historical reconstruction of what led the Germanic region and people to incorporate in itself such profound and painful divisions. To this main thesis can also be attributed what startled me a little in the first pages, that is the "pyramidal" succession of events: the first 15 or so millennia are over by page 80, whereas the period from Bismarck to Merkel occupies the whole second half of the book. The change in pace – one realises afterwards –is due to the entrance on stage of Prussia, the element that in the author's view destabilises Germany's destiny. It is in this perspective that he interprets the unification of Germany (a Prussian conquest of the German confederation) as well as the loss of the two World Wars (an ultimately fatal tension between the Prussian urge to settle things with Russia and Slavs in the East, and the German ambition to compete with England in the West).
The author's thesis is harsh, and I would rather hope that Germany can find a way in itself of sorting out its historical differences without resorting to schisms of any kind (although as an Italian I may be biased: I love Italy and I would hate to have to read a similar book on my country where it is claimed that in order for the North to live up to its potential, the South must be abandoned, or something like that). Germany has certainly the economic and cultural power to devise some solution to the conundrum that has tormented its history and to finally heal the Zerrissenheit that already elsewhere I read as defining Germany's history and heritage. In the meantime, whenever something German comes up in the news I will certainly treasure the many hints and observations that Hawes provides to sustain his argument because – at the risk of sounding cliché – I sense that if the Elbe divide can make so much sense of the past, it can also help us understand the present and maybe anticipate the future.
In other words, this book is not a neutral story as in "chronological and critical report on the state of affairs of that region" but rather a historical reconstruction of what led the Germanic region and people to incorporate in itself such profound and painful divisions. To this main thesis can also be attributed what startled me a little in the first pages, that is the "pyramidal" succession of events: the first 15 or so millennia are over by page 80, whereas the period from Bismarck to Merkel occupies the whole second half of the book. The change in pace – one realises afterwards –is due to the entrance on stage of Prussia, the element that in the author's view destabilises Germany's destiny. It is in this perspective that he interprets the unification of Germany (a Prussian conquest of the German confederation) as well as the loss of the two World Wars (an ultimately fatal tension between the Prussian urge to settle things with Russia and Slavs in the East, and the German ambition to compete with England in the West).
The author's thesis is harsh, and I would rather hope that Germany can find a way in itself of sorting out its historical differences without resorting to schisms of any kind (although as an Italian I may be biased: I love Italy and I would hate to have to read a similar book on my country where it is claimed that in order for the North to live up to its potential, the South must be abandoned, or something like that). Germany has certainly the economic and cultural power to devise some solution to the conundrum that has tormented its history and to finally heal the Zerrissenheit that already elsewhere I read as defining Germany's history and heritage. In the meantime, whenever something German comes up in the news I will certainly treasure the many hints and observations that Hawes provides to sustain his argument because – at the risk of sounding cliché – I sense that if the Elbe divide can make so much sense of the past, it can also help us understand the present and maybe anticipate the future.