Germany: Memories of a Nation
By Neil MacGregor
Neil MacGregor is director of the British Museum - boy must
he enjoy going to work - and so is well placed to add to the developing genre
of "history by artefact". This is far more than a museum catalogue; it
is an approach to history that takes as its departure point a specific
artefact, be that a building, coin or text (even a fairy tale) - and by seeking
to explicate its provenance gain fresh insights into its historical context. In
the Australian context a good example is Ochre and Rust by Philip Jones.
In Germany: Memories of a Nation Macgregor applies this approach to the
spectacular and terrible history of the big daddy of Zentral Europa -
Deutchland.
MacGregor's approach is hardly value free. For a start,
calling the book memories of a 'nation' is deliberately ironic. As anyone who
finished high school in the 1970s knows there was a thing called the
Unification of Germany, orchestrated by that wily old political operator Otto
von Bismarck who successively punched out the Danes, the Austrians and the
French to create the German empire which proceeded to give us the "short
twentieth century", two world wars, and, indirectly, Soviet Communism. And
before Napoleon did away with it, there was the splendidly ramshackle Holy
Roman Empire, land of Snow White and Rapunzel.
And this is MacGregor's point - there is a nation called
Germany; it dominates Europe - but it
has no coherent national story; the attempt to create one in the Wilhemian and
Third Reich ended very badly indeed.
Indeed it is the diversity of the German speaking territories - poorly
understood outside Germany - which
makes this a fascinating excursion.
MacGregor takes as his starting points artefacts as diverse
as "lost capitals" - the ridiculously complex and yet somehow
workable coinage of the Holy Roman Empire; and Grimm's fairy tales. The lost capitals are Konigsberg (home of
Kant and now in Russia) and Strasbourg (now in France) - which illustrate the
instability of Germany's borders. The coinage demonstrates the diffusion of
sovereignty across dozens of politically sovereign states ranging in size from
a few thousand to millions of citizens. The fairy tales tap into ideas about
German language and character. There is plenty more: Prussian iron jewellery; Saxon ceramics and
"degenerate art".
In the context of the Britex debate Germany: Memories of
a Nation has a particular resonance because despite its title it
assiduously undermines the concept of nation as Macgregor organises his artefacts to argue (for the most part implicitly) for the
inevitability of Europe as a political and economic unity.
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