Goethe, the presiding genius of German literature, once wrote: “Only where you were on foot / have you ever truly been.” Like so much of his work, this thought has gathered new resonance with the passage of time. In an age of city breaks and stopovers, we need more than ever to hear from people with a real feel of the world, people who have walked the beat.
From the first page of his new book, you know that Peter Millar, a foreign correspondent who has reported on Germany for the likes of The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph, knows his territory well, and has found real tales to tell. This is “not a traditional linear history” of Germany, but “a personal frontline” tour, organised by place and topic, and held together by anecdote and lived experience.
Millar knows the long history of everywhere he treads. How refreshing, for instance, to have somebody who clearly loves Berlin point out that for most of German history the idea of Berlin one day becoming the capital of the whole country would have seemed “preposterous”.
However, this discursive and chatty approach does come with problems — not least because Millar the memoirist keeps popping off mid-flow. Again and again, he leaves us, sitting alone and looking at sheaves of straight history, much of it lacking any sort of style or pace. Chapters on The Germans and Beer or The Germans and Music promise entertainingly insightful evocation; but they deliver only lists and information. Long sentences, meanwhile, chug wearily across the page (“that … that … that …”).
Then there are the errors and odd misinterpretations. Frederick the Great didn’t just “correspond with Voltaire”, but installed him in Prussia as court favourite. Dresden didn’t suffer “the greatest number of human beings to be burned alive in a single night before the apocalypse of the atom bombs”. That was Tokyo.
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Millar asks whether he might “dare use that word [Holocaust] in reference to a German city as opposed to its usual context referring to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews”. His editor should have answered no. Saying Bonn was never bombed (it was, heavily, twice) because it was twinned with Oxford is pure fantasy, with curious implications.
One and a half cheers, then, for a book that could have been excellent had the author recalled another saying of Goethe’s: “It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.”
Arcadia £20 pp460
James Hawes is the author of The Shortest History of Germany