I have only dipped into reference 3, which was OK in its way, but I found this new book (new-to-me that is, actually picked up from Raynes Park platform library) much more satisfactory: perhaps the difference is that we get thirty topics in 600 pages rather than a hundred objects in 700 pages.
One of the topics was that touched on at reference 2. Another is the sort of handcart used by many of the refugees and otherwise displaced Germans at the end of the second war. Another is the invention of the printing press. Another is the iron cross and its originally austere and decent symbolism. And with nearly all of these topics full of interest.
But some of the early ones which really caught my notice were about important German cities which are no longer German: Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, a Russian naval enclave on the Baltic), Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), Strasbourg (now French) and Prague (now Czech). Not to mention Aachen which the French coveted along with Charlemagne and all the Germans who settled, by invitation, along the Volga. The first of these was badly damaged during the second world war, but the Soviets, while getting rid of most traces of the Germans, did restore the German cathedral. And, from an amusing aside, I learn that the Soviets did not bother to replace all the drain covers, embossed with the name of their German maker to this day.
I was reminded of the French aggression against Germans and Germany running from the time of Louis XIV to Napoleon I, not to mention the lesser Napoleon, the Napoleon III vanquished by the Germans at Sedan in 1870. Which goes some way to explaining what happened subsequently - and we should be grateful that the French and Germans are trying very hard to have a grown up relationship.
Aggression which is partly balanced by the fact that the victories which put the 'great' into Frederick were victories against other Germans. Better liked in the England of his day than in Saxony or Bavaria. Which reminds me that many higher class Germans in these last two spoke French rather than German right through the nineteenth century. For which see the novel noticed at reference 9.
Another sort of growing up is the way the Germans have tried hard to moderate the sort of triumphalism of which there is a great deal in the UK and in France - a triumphalism which seems rather out of place now. The monument snapped above excepted. One example being the blank restoration of one of the large panels on the triumphal arch at Munich, otherwise the Victory Gate. Although I don't suppose President Macron would get much more support for renaming all the big roads in Paris presently named for Napoleonic marshals than he got for his save-the-planet policy of jacking up the price of petrol.
Next move: revisit reference 7. Will I find it more irritating than informative? Will I give up and reread the present book instead?
PS: reference 4 is a venture along the same lines by a Frenchman, noticed at reference 5. A book which I continue to dip into from time to time.
Reference 1: Germany: Memories of a Nation - Neil MacGregor - 2014
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/10/tombstone.html.
Reference 3: A History of the World in 100 Objects - Neil MacGregor - 2010.
Reference 4: Histoire Mondiale de la France - Patrick Boucheron - 2017.
Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/metermorphosen.html.
Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/03/mainly-germania.html.
Reference 7: Germania - Simon Winder - 2011. The book of reference 6.
Reference 8: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/03/monument.html. An appendage to reference 6. With the superior picture of the monument to the Battle of Leipzig above taken from the museum reference therein. Must have been a bit lazy last time around.
Reference 9: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/04/health-safety.html.
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