Germany
Memories of a Nation
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- $ 39.900,00
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- $ 39.900,00
Descripción editorial
For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people understand themselves?
Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly shifted. Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Wolfgang von Geothe, Germany's greatest writer, discovered the distinctiveness of his country's art and history, now lies within the borders of France. For most of the five hundred years covered by this book Germany has been composed of many separate political units, each with a distinct history. And any comfortable national story Germans might have told themselves before 1914 was destroyed by the events of the following thirty years.
German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses, and experiences; examining some of these is the purpose of this book. MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places that still resonate in the new Germany—porcelain from Dresden and rubble from its ruins, Bauhaus design and the German sausage, the crown of Charlemagne and the gates of Buchenwald—to show us something of its collective imagination. There has never been a book about Germany quite like it.
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As with A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor, director of the British Museum, here constructs a materialist history, spinning a collection of historical vignettes from objects both ordinary and extraordinary. MacGregor's survey of German history moves erratically in its journey from the German victory over the Romans in 9 C.E. to the 21st century, but he maintains a theme in the innate fragmentation of German identity a fragmentation based as much on ideology as geography. Through artifacts as varied as a sausage, Gutenberg Bibles, and a porcelain rhinoceros, MacGregor illustrates how a composite German identity was forged and the country came to be. He argues that Germany alone among European countries is as obsessed with its future as with its past, repeatedly returning to the pull of memory and ambition among the German people; he notes the humiliations of Napoleon's conquest that once unified Germany, as well as the Nazi atrocities that haunted the divided nation generations later. MacGregor addresses the great paradox of Germany's rich humanist tradition and its fall into fascism and authoritarianism, which historians can gesture at but never resolve. His concise lessons in German history form a cogent and fluent account that gets as close to the core of German identity as any book by a non-German could.
