Simon Winder

In this delightful romp through German culture and history, Simon Winder does two unexpected things: admits that he can’t speak German; and ends the narrative in 1933. Winder overcomes these potentially fatal handicaps, and his book Germania gives a solid overview of the history and culture of the Germans.

Winder, an Englishman and frequent traveller to Germany, naturally takes a travelogue approach. It’s a personal story of discovery as much as anything. I was put in mind of A Short show more History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, or Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz (both of which I also thoroughly enjoyed). There is humour throughout, but Winder also skilfully includes the serious side of things, and even hints at the dark side of German history. His choice to end the narrative when he does allows him to only ever hint at *that* dark part of the country’s history.

The great success of this book is that it brings all the incredible stories of German history to light for English-speakers in an accessible and enjoyable book.

Winder has actually done a “central European” trilogy, and I must get on to the other two volumes, which deal with the former Habsburg Empire and the Benelux nations respectively. show less

Régen olvastam ilyen felhőtlen örömmel történelmi könyvet. Winder stílusa sziporkázó és összetéveszthetetlen – úgy kell elképzelni, mintha Terry Pratchett vagy Douglas Adams állna neki megírni Közép-Európa históriáját. Van benne egy jó nagy adag tiszteletlenség, amivel minden emberi ostobaságot szemlél, köztük nem utolsósorban minden ostobaságok cárját, a vak nacionalizmust. (Legyen szó akár magyar, akár román, akár német, akár pánszláv show more nacionalizmusról.) Mindazonáltal nem fél attól, hogy egy történelmi pillanatot valamely személyes élményhez kössön hozzá – mondjuk egy kolozsvári kirándulás hangulatából kiemelkedve világítson meg egy 17. századi eseményt. Ez ugyan meglehetősen unortodox történészi hozzáállás, de gyakran megvilágosodásszerű felismerésekhez vezet. Ami pedig Winder asszociációs hajlamát illeti, hát őrületes. Túlfinomodott Habsburgokat koalákkal vet össze, hódoltsági hajdú szabadcsapatokat az Iron Maidennel… abszurd hasonlatok ezek, de valahogy mégis ott van mögöttük az igazság felvillanó fénye.

Egy csillagot szőrös szívem határozott óhajára azért vonok le, mert bár egy korszak pillanatnyi hangulatát talán Winder képes a legjobban megragadni, de néha mégis mintha elveszne saját szavainak szentkuthys áradásában – így a mélyebb összefüggések helyenként homályban maradnak. De azért ne rettentsen ez a szigor el senkit, a Habsburg birodalomról (így nem kis részben rólunk, magyarokról) magyarul megjelent könyvek közül így is magasan kiemelkedik a Danubia. (Mondjuk olyan sok könyv közül nem kell kiemelkednie…) Winder helyenként csípősen szarkasztikus, de mindig szeretve csipkelődő szavait pedig kifejezetten ajánlom azoknak, akik kíváncsiak arra, hogyan fest ez a régió egy kívülálló szemével. show less

So long as you accept that this is a rather dated book that was never meant to have a long shelf life, Winder's meanderings about the fall of the British Empire, Ian Fleming's reaction to said fall, and what it says about how the British public made "Bond" a phenomena are actually rather interesting.

Like most of the readers, I could have done with a bit less of Winder's personal history, but as a near contemporary it gave me some food for thought about what the British experience post-1945 show more was like, particularly since the Brits keep scoring "own goals" on themselves; though as an American in 2025 I'm not in a position to be too smug about it. show less

All those Philips and Ferdinands and Franzes.

Winder’s idiosyncratic account of the rise and fall of the Habsburg Dynasty is great good fun, wry, informal, erudite. By a combination of accident, luck and ruthlessness, the Habsburgs held sway in Central Europe from the Middle Ages to WWI. They were at center stage for the creation of a Spanish empire in the Americas, the Italian wars that ended the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman show more the Magnificent that was finally checked at the Battle of Lepanto, the Thirty Years War, Napoleon’s destruction of the Holy Roman Empire, the Revolutions of 1848 and the Balkan Wars. All these events look and feel different when considered from the Habsburg (and Winder’s) perspective.

Winder doesn’t really spend a lot of time on the battles and high politics that a more conventional history might emphasize; he is more interested in the eccentric, odd and peculiar bits that enliven our view of the past. Through a tour of castles, chapels, crypts, fortresses, hunting lodges, armories and provincial museums in obscure villages we encounter mummies, bear moats, devil-dolls, bezoars and glyptics. The Habsburgs put great stock in the cultic power of imperial heirlooms (a unicorn horn, the Holy Grail) and regalia (red samite gloves, gold scabbards, an imperial mantle decorated in Arabic script) and ceremony. We hear of the dodo acquired by Rudolph II from the Fuggers’ warehouse of exotic beasts in Antwerp; the ‘demented enthusiasms’ of Athanasius Kircher (a tower built to reach the moon would require 374,731,250,000,000 bricks); the supernova witnessed by Tycho Brahe in Prague in 1604; Ludwig Viktor, the transvestite uncle of Franz Ferdinand who outlived the Dynasty. The Habsburgs were patrons of great painters and composers—Titian, Bosch, Rubens, Arcimboldo; Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven—and some ‘engagingly semi-competent’ ones as well. Maximilian I’s advantage over all subsequent Holy Roman Emperors, according to Winder, was that his portrait was painted by Dürer.

Winder uses the ‘teetering plausibility’ of a basilisk preserved in a glass jar at the Vienna Museum of Natural History (actually a ray from some far-away port, cut, folded and sewn to form legs, wings and horns) to make a keen point about how difficult it is for humans of the present to really make sense of humans from the past. Not for Winder the pop-historian fallacy that they were just like us! The scientific and magical preoccupations of medieval and early modern Europe were ‘drawn from intellectual streams so rich, various and contradictory,’ writes Winder, that we can read and study and ponder but never fully grasp the assumptions and motivations that shaped their mental worlds. Winder is constantly making us aware that the history of Central Europe and the Habsburgs means something different to us than it did to the people who lived through it.

At the end of WWI, patches of the Austrian Tyrol were handed over to Italy. Outside the town of Bolzano, in a region dominated by German-speakers, Winder comes across a castle—

In Italian it is called Castel Roncolo, which implies maidens in gauzy outfits skipping about to tambourines and lutes with weedy youths in coloured tights looking on. In German it is called Schloß Runkelstein, which implies a brandy-deranged old soldier-baron with a purple face and leg-iron lurching around darkened dank corridors, beating a servant to death with his crutch. Seeing the two names everywhere side by side is deeply confusing, like having one eye always out of focus. show less