Shortest History of Germany - Hardcover

'Certainly the most comprehensive and vivid history anyone could expect to find at that length... I don't know of a better short history of this great country.'
PHILIP PULLMAN

'Here is Germany as you've never known it: a bold thesis; an authoritative sweep and an exhilarating read. Agree or disagree, this is a must for anyone interested in how Germany has come to be the way it is today.'
PROFESSOR KAREN LEEDER, Prof. of Modern German Literature, University of Oxford

'An excellent little book... [Hawes] knows what he's on about and his conclusions are measured, but he favours clear, concise prose over dense academese. He has a sense of humour, and a sharp eye for similarities between then and now.'
SPECTATOR

'The Shortest History of Germany, a new, must-read book by the writer James Hawes, [recounts] how the so-called limes separating Roman Germany from non-Roman Germany has remained a formative distinction throughout the post-ancient history of the German people.'
ECONOMIST.COM

'A daring attempt to remedy the ignorance of the centuries in little over 200 pages... not just an entertaining canter past the most prominent landmarks in German history -- also a serious, well-researched and radical rethinking of the continuities in German political life.'
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS BOYLE, Schröder Professor of German, Cambridge University

'An excellent, elegantly written overview of German history from the Iron Age to Angela Merkel's chancellorship... Authoritative and accessible'
NEW EUROPEAN

'A sparkling little book, which really does begin at the beginning... Hawes exemplifies the remarkable contribution of Anglo-Saxon scholarship to post-war German historiography... It is not accidental that some of the best minds in the Anglosphere have worried away at the German problem ever since 1945. The preceding generation had been dragged into two world wars, the Iron Curtain ran through Berlin, and getting to grips with German history was the key to preventing the Cold War from becoming a Third World War. Hawes has distilled all this into a primer that might be slipped into a prime ministerial red box.'
STANDPOINT

'Brexit and Trump have given this sweeping story of Germany's struggles with its demons an urgent topicality. For as Hawes knows better than anyone, if there is a future for liberal democracy, it will be a German one'
NICK COHEN

'Sweeping and confident... has a frightening urgency'
OBSERVER

'Engaging... I suspect I shall remember it for a lifetime'
OLDIE

'Fascinating ... as an introduction to the most important country in Europe today, this is a great read, and an ideal primer'
TRIBUNE MAGAZINE

'Yes, the Nazis are here, but so too is a history stretching from the Germanic tribes who took on the Roman Empire, right up to Chancellor Angela Merkel... Comprehensive, vivid, and entertaining... if you want to understand a country on which much of the free world is now pinning its hopes, you could do worse than start here.'
IRISH EXAMINER

'Absolutely brilliant . . . Hawes sets about tearing up the Prague picture postcard-image of Kafka with tremendous, crowd-pleasing vigour'
Ian Sansom, GUARDIAN, on Excavating Kafka

'performed with wit and finesse . . . his book is full of enlightening surprises . . . [Hawes] is an admirable guide, leading us through this tangled intellectual copse.'
THE TIMES on Englanders and Huns

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Read in an afternoon. Remember for a lifetime. The West is in full retreat. The Anglo-Saxon powers, great and small, withdraw into fantasies of lost greatness. Populists all over Europe cry out that immigration and globalisation are the work of a nefarious System, run by unseen masters with no national loyalties. From the Kremlin, Tsar Vladimir watches his Great Game line up, while the Baltic and Vizegrad states shiver -- and everyone looks to Berlin. But are the Germans really us, or them? This question has haunted Europe ever since Julius Caesar invented the Germani in 58 BC.
How Roman did Germania ever become? Did the Germans destroy the culture of Rome, or inherit it? When did they first drive east, and did they ever truly rule there? How did Germany become, for centuries, a power-vacuum at the heart of Europe? How was Prussia born? Did Bismarck unify Germany or conquer it? Where are the roots of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich? Why did it lose? By what miracle did a better Germany arise from the rubble? Is Germany now the last Western bastion of industrial prosperity and rational politics? Or are the EU and the Euro merely window-dressing for a new German hegemony?
This fresh, illuminating and concise new history, with more than 100 maps and images, makes sense of Europe's most admired and feared country.
*240 PAGES. 100+ MAPS AND IMAGES. 2,000 YEARS OF GERMAN HISTORY.*