Sitting on a bench at a communal table in a restaurant in Regensburg, his plate loaded with disturbing amounts of bratwurst and sauerkraut made golden by candlelight shining through a massive glass of beer, Simon Winder was happily swinging his legs when a couple from Rottweil politely but awkwardly asked: "So: why are you here?"
This book is an attempt to answer that question. Why spend time wandering around a country that remains a sort of dead zone for many foreigners, surrounded as it is by a force field of historical, linguistic, climatic, and gastronomic barriers? Winder's book is propelled by a wish to reclaim the brilliant, chaotic, endlessly varied German civilization that the Nazis buried and ruined, and that, since 1945, so many Germans have worked to rebuild.
Germania is a very funny book on serious topics—how we are misled by history, how we twist history, and how sometimes it is best to know no history at all. It is a book full of curiosities: odd food, castles, mad princes, fairy tales, and horse-mating videos. It is about the limits of language, the meaning of culture, and the pleasure of townscape.
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"Full review: 50 to 5000 charactersAs author himself says at the beginning, it is an uncategorisable tome that closely resembles an interesting and somewhat aimless ramble. Well, we happen to like this sort of thing. It gives the reader what we might call a tourist view of Germany in its widest sense, not in tedious pictures, but in words.
We like authors humour and his ramshackle literary edifice. Some bits of it do really repay reading, and it has given us some pleasure.
So, we will give it an overall rating of 5, the narrator a 4 and the content another 4.
It is a pity that the otherwise excellent narrator did not take greater pains with his pronunciation of German words and phrases; in our view, rhyming the first syllable of ratkeller with 'rat' the rodent was a little grating. In German, 'rat' is pronounced with a long 'a' as in far.
All in all, it's a good read."
—
Tarquin (5 out of 5 stars)