This item has FREE SHIPPING to any address in NZ

NOTE: A handling time of 2-4 business days applies for all orders. Once shipped, delivery takes 1-5 working days.

Germany

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780141979786 Author(s): Neil Macgregor Format: Paperback Year: 2016 Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd Dimensions: 131 x 0 x 198 (w x l x h) Pages: 624

BUYER OFFERS: We are a retail store with set pricing and unfortunately we can't fulfil any requests to sell items for less than the listed price.

Description: From Neil MacGregor, the author of A History of the World in 100 Objects, this is a view of Germany like no other. 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 now understand themselves? Neil MacGregor argues that uniquely for any European country, no coherent, over-arching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly floated. Konigsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 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. Beginning with the fifteenth-century invention of modern printing by Gutenberg, MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places which still resonate in