Germany: Memories of a Nation
Five hundred years of German history told through the objects, cities and memories the nation carries.
Acheter : Amazon · Place des libraires · Fnac
Le mot de POP LIVRE
MacGregor's trick is to refuse the usual shape of a national history. Instead of kings and wars in order, he picks up a gate, a printing press, a currency note, a car, and asks what Germans remember through them. It works because it matches his subject: a country whose borders and capitals kept moving, and which has had to do more work than most on what it chooses to remember. Long, but built in short chapters you can read one at a time.
Présentation
Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum and author of A History of the World in 100 Objects, turns to a country whose story resists being told in one line. His argument is that no coherent overarching narrative of Germany can be built, because both its geography and its history have never stopped moving. Königsberg, home of Kant, is now Kaliningrad in Russia; Strasbourg, where Goethe discovered what German art meant to him, lies in France. For most of the five centuries covered here, Germany was a patchwork of separate political units, each with its own past. MacGregor works instead through objects, cities and buildings, letting memory rather than chronology carry the book.