Germany: The Memories of a Nation

Product Description

How much do we really understand Germany, and how do its people understand themselves?

German history is unlike any other. Uniquely for any European country, no coherent, over-arching narrative can be constructed for it; the jigsaw pieces, as Neil MacGregor argues in his enthralling new book, do not fit together - not least because they are so often found in cities which are no longer German. Königsberg, home to Immanuel Kant and later to the seminal German painter and printmaker Käthe Kollwitz, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Johann Wolfgang von Goethe discovered the distinctiveness of German art and history, now lies within the borders of France.

Instead, MacGregor sets out in this book to describe what the German people collectively hold in their minds about their history by telling the stories behind some of its most important objects, ideas and places. Naturally, the Second World War features, along with its background of 'degenerate' art, but MacGregor's aim is to offer an offer an unexpected and alternative view to the one commonly held. Beginning with the fifteenth-century invention of moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg, he moves through Germany's cuisine and its culture, its art and philosophy, its manufacture and design, its landscape and people, some famous (Karl Marx, Albrecht Dürer) and others not, and through the disparate figures who have helped to forge its political and national identity.

Germany: The Memories of a Nation goes to the heart of a country and a people that have remade our world again and again, for better or worse. It is a view of Germany like no other.