Germany. Memories of a Nation

     I recommend that you get and read this outstanding cultural history book by Neil MacGregor, 

      Germany, Memories of a Nation. (New York:VINTAGE PAPERBACKS, 2014)

     I believe it would make a great selection for our bookclub, and would stimulate a lively discussion.

     It is without a doubt far and away the best book on Germany, past and/or present, I have ever read, (and I know whereof I speak; my specialization when I did my PhD at UC Berkeley (1965)--and studied and did my dissertation research in Heidelberg in the 1960s--was in modern German intellectual and cultural history).  

     

      Here is a brief profile of the author: Neil MacGregor was director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015. His previous books include A History of the world in 100 Objects and Shakespeare’s Restless World, between them translated into more than a dozen languages. 

    

       For his work on the BBC Radio 4 series, British Museum exhibition, and the new book on Germany: Memories of a Nation, he was awarded (in Germany) the Friedrich Gundolf  Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the German National Prize, and (in the UK) the British Academy’s Prize for Transcultural Understanding. He is now chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin

     

.    Here is a quote from a very positive book review of GERMANY. MEMORIES OF A NATION:

  

    ”Neil MacGregor’s alternative cultural history of a country uniquely difficult to pinpoint—its borders shifting, its ruling systems manifold for much of the past five hundred years —often the sense of a coherent whole, nonetheless."

        His method is Memory. His way in is through objects and people;  places and buildings; paintings, toys, and printed money; forests and single oak trees…

        MacGregor knows unerringly which objects to select, andandwhichchaptersof Germany’s enrichingly and confusingly fragmented history to bring to life through them…This book is immaculately researched, timely, and important.”  From The Independent   (London)

      "Through artifacts as varied as a sausage, Gutenberg Bibles, and a porcelain rhinoceros, MacGregor illustrates how a composite German identity was forged and the country came to be… His concise lessons in German history form a cogent and fluent account that gets as close to there of German identity as any book by a non-German could,”     From  Publishers Weekly. 

      And this is the conclusion to MacGregor’s first chapter: "It is a commonplace for all of us that some memories are so painful, so shameful, that we will suppress them, and the act of recovering them will disorient and distress…..[This is why] so many of the huge questions surrounding the Holocaust, and the role in it of so many Germans as perpetrators, went until the 1990s not just unanswered, but unasked. 

  

         And it gives a very sharp edge to the decisions by the German government over the last decades to force remembering by researching archives, by introducing vigorous programs of public education, and by the building of monuments like the Holocaust Memorial. 

     

         It is no coincidence that Joachim Gauk, who, after reunification [of the separated two Germanies]  led the commission inquiring into the Stasi records, is now the head of state, President of the German Federal Republic. 

  

     The debate about MEMORY in Germany is as much about what is not remembered as what is. Many countries, reviewing their wars, failures and losses, invoke the rubric ‘Lest we forget’. It is a phrase that today has perhaps a deeper resonance in Germany than anywhere else.” (p.37) 

  "Speaking of Strasbourg (Formerly Strassburg, when it was a German city, until Napoleon captured it in 1806)

MacGregor observes that “Since the Renaissance German cultured been dominated by models drawn from Ancient Rome and modern Italy and France. In Strasbourg in the 1770s it became clear to them (Herder and Goethe who met while studying at the university there) that that would have to change…In Goethe’s  rhapsodic outpouring to the beautiful Gothic cathedral in Strasbourg, he created the first great poetic expression of cultural nationalism."

"The light tolerant touch of the early French administration could not survive the steadily centralizing nation state of the nineteenth century. In an increasingly nationalist world Strasbourg/Strassburg could no longer be both German and French, and the several switches in control from one country to the other over the last 200 years have been increasingly oppressive, violent, and complete.”

Later on in Paris, where politicians never stopped dreaming of a return to Napoleon’s Rhine frontier, the loss of Strasbourg to the Germans in 1871 became the symbol of a monstrous wrong. The statue representing the city of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde was draped in black and famously became the object of the de Gaulle family outings where the young Charles was instructed in his duty to help to recover the lost city and France’s lost honor.

Strasbourg had been transformed into the totemic object of Franco-German enmity. The city itself became French again in 1919, German again in 1940, and French once more on 23 November 1944. Each time it changed hands, it was to a rising pitch of cultural nationalism and strident assimilation. Today, this city, so important in the cultural history of Germany, is now definitively French.”

“It is often said that the Germans achieved in four and a half years what the French had failed to achieve in the previous twenty years, which was to turn the population of Alsace into Frenchmen.”  (p.73)