Giulia Pines tackles Simon Winder’s Germania and finds lashings of self-indulgence with a side of history…

Simon Winder’s Germania is two parts history and one part memoir with a bit of bemused ranting thrown in for good measure. It’s difficult to read a book like this without wondering what exactly the author was thinking – about both his subject and himself – while writing it.

It starts off with an anecdote about a family vacation on an Alsatian canal that cemented the author’s lifelong, die-hard love for Germany, and then continues with a caveat about his lack of language skills. As a matter of fact, we learn by page 10, Winder has cycled through nearly ten languages since schoolboyhood, without managing to get a full handle on even one of them.

This comes along with a hilariously apt description of that moment in life we all have when we realize the capacity of our brain is finite: “As I loaded up those Merovingian and Capetian kings I felt my brain, like some desperately rubbish, home-assembled bathroom shelf, lurch suddenly to one side, and all the Arabic alphabet fell off the other end.”

And just like that, you’re sucked in by his British wit, and down the German rabbit hole you go, until you get to the last page (that would be page 441, by the way) and wonder where your time went.

Winder seems to have the right idea when he says on the first page, “Germany is sort of a Dead Zone today. Its English-speaking visitors tend to be those with professional reasons for being there – soldiers, historians, builders.”

Indeed, the book itself shares what Winder perceives to be Germany’s obscurity: only those English-speakers who already live here, or are unhealthily obsessed with the historical minutiae of countries that barely affect them, would pick up this book in the first place.

Only a madman would actually finish it. The book, in the charming, nonchalant manner that only a writer who works in publishing could possibly pull off, is high on content but low on form. It has no plot at all, and the organization of it seems to be taken directly from the addled mind – and perpetually messy desk – of a writer in his first throes of inspiration.

It is obvious that Winder has been kicking around many of the ideas he espouses in this book for much of his life, but – although he claims to have thrown out ten times the amount of material that ended up in the book – that still doesn’t mean he needs to publish all of it.

While the contents of this book may seem somewhat esoteric to the general reader, however, there is a small, select audience Winder is guaranteed to hold captive: me, and anyone like me who has lived in Germany for more than a year and has grown perplexed, and ultimately either enraged or enchanted, by its many quirks.

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