The Shortest History of Germany

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, exploited 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 powervacuum 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 makes sense of Europe's most admired and feared country. It's time for the real story of Germany.

About the Author

James Hawes was born in 1960. He read German at Oxford University, where he was allowed to hold the original manuscript of Kafka's Das Schloss. After completing a PhD on Nietzsche, he lectured in German Studies at various universities, leaving academia in 1996 when his first two novels, A White Merc with Fins and Rancid Aluminium, became bestsellers. German culture called him back with Excavating Kafka, then Englanders and Huns, which was shortlisted for the Political Books of the Year awards in 2015.