Reviews for Learning History: Guide to Advanced Study

The average rating for Learning History: Guide to Advanced Study based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-21 00:00:00 Richard Larson A disappointing effort, overall. Here is my review for the San Francisco Chronicle: Germania In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History By Simon Winder (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 454 pages; $25) At first glance one assumes that Simon Winder has in mind with "Germania" something like an updating of the late great Gordon Craig of Stanford's "The Germans," a classic study by the onetime dean of American historians of Germany. Actually, not at all. Winder, who "works in publishing" in Britain, may in one sense have set off, as the subtitle says, "In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History," but not in any sense you'd think. For example, as he mentions several times, self-floggingly, he does not actually speak German. That is, even after many dozens of trips to Germany over the years, he seems to have no ability to carry on any kind of conversation. To call this bizarre would be an understatement. And it's not as if Winder tries to make up for this lack by treading softly. He mocks Germans regularly, puckishly and pedantically. I laughed hardest when he referred to "horror at German food," as if the Brits could possibly cop an attitude in this area. Is the man insane? Compare a banger (blah!) with a Nurnberger bratwurst (excellent!). It was only as I made it several hundred pages into Winder's alternately intriguing and wearying descriptions of many centuries of German history, as revealed through trips to small-town museums and schlosses, that I finally understood: Winder has been a Germany obsessive for years and makes the offensive put-downs in proactive self-defense, given the vitriolic anti-German sentiment that to this day maintains a robust following in Britain. So maybe only then can Winder offer such arresting thoughts as his suggestion that the world would have been better off if his country had never gotten involved in the First World War. "If Britain had been neutral in 1914 it is hard to see how Germany could not have won the war in a fairly conventional way in a couple of years, thereby sparing the unlimited disasters that followed," he writes. "After all, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War almost everyone just got on with their lives, buying stuff and having families - and a Europe dominated by the Germany of 1914 would have been infinitely preferable to a Europe dominated by the Germany of 1939." He has a point. No botched peace, no Third Reich. Still, it takes an original - and brave - thinker to write that kind of thing down. (He says early on that he's happy "not to be a professional historian.") Given the continuing glee with which the British press often resorts to hate-mongering against Germans, even at a time when, according to Gallup, Germans are Americans' favorite non-English-speaking foreigners, it's a nice change of pace to get a whiff of Winder's highly unusual honesty. "The Germans saw themselves in the Great War as sitting at the heart of European heritage, fighting against a bunch of vulgar materialists (the British), pants-down revanchists (the French) and drunken savages (the Russians)," he writes. "Until 1914 most British intellectuals would have denied being vulgar materialists, but would have been happy to agree with the descriptions of their new allies and have conceded Germany's central place in European culture. "In 1914 this was knocked on the head with an immediate campaign across British universities to expunge 'German' thinking and block out any sense at all of Germany as a major culture, except perhaps in the far-distant past. It became, for obvious reasons, suspect to have any interest in Germany at all." The book spans many centuries, but wisely chooses to break off as Hitler seizes power in 1933. Winder can be too long-winded and vapid, as when he adopts a gee-whiz tone in remarking that in many European countries, the south is warmer than in the north, with the corresponding differences you'd expect. But Winder has real passion for his subject and a nutty flair for the original, and, best of all, he finds marzipan absolutely revolting. Steve Kettmann, a former Chronicle reporter, lives in Berlin and writes a weekly column on politics for the Berliner Zeitung. E-mail him at [email protected]. This article appeared on page F - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle Read more:

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-16 00:00:00 Abraham Guerra I have so many issues with this book that I don't know where to begin--but I'm glad I didn't buy it, only borrowed it. First off, let me say that as someone brought up by a historian dad who's always had an intense interest in Germany (though he himself is Italian) I found the lack of historical accurateness or academia here quite baffling--even non-historians writing historical books usually tend to rely on history! Also, as someone now married to a German and for the past 2 years living in Germany a lot of the time (and learning German--as impossible a language as it is) I was also completely puzzled and later disgusted by Winder's utter and unapologetic lack of interest in 1) the German language (even if he does excuse this by his so-called language obtuseness), 2) 'real' Germans and 'real' German's Germany, and 3) post-Nazi Germany (which is intrinsically connected to pre-Nazi Germany: the one by which he is ostensibly so fascinated). Both of these points--his lack of historical scholarism and his lack of knowledge/interest in 'true' Germanness--put the book at a disadvantage for me from the start, and I was skeptical throughout my reading of it. That said, there ARE quite a few interesting tidbits within it and if you're at loose ends in a bookstore, say, you could do worse than reading them. However, the best reviews on these books are those by Bonnie B. Lee on Bookslut and Steve Kettmann in the San Francisco Chronicle (just found out he's posted it here, too): they both point out the obvious. That this a book written by a Brit in a self-apologetic style (you need to apologize if you're British and have an inexplicable fondness for Germany) and almost exclusively for Brits, for whom even today after 70+ years--and especially, one would think, after the 'economic miracle' that left Britain far behind--everything German leads to Hitler, Nazism, and the war 'they' (the Brits, with our help of course!) won. The truth is, in my way of thinking, that WW2 for the Brits isn't just about Nazism--it's also about the end of their empire, the passing of an imperial torch to the US, and finalization of a British way of life. To that end, Germany is always to blame, isn't it? Bottom line, though: don't trust a book about Germany written by a nerdy Brit who doesn't speak a word of German, hasn't a single conversation with a real German, and doesn't even include philosophy or psychology in his exploration of what constitutes Germanness--impossible things to avoid, really, since both are not only 100% German products but entirely connected to what IS German. Furthermore, the "Personal History" subtitle of the book has got to be simply a publishing gimmick, because we never really get to understand just why this plump little British boy becomes so obsessed by a country and culture he's never had any connection to and we're given barely any 'personal' historical facts.