Germany’s biography from ancient times to the present
IN the 1990s, an American academic, Mike Godwin, came up with a tongue-in-cheek law stating that in any political debate the probability that someone will mention Hitler is equal to one. Meaning that, at some point, it’s inevitable.
The same is often true of books on German history. Even though their subject is a cultured people and a liberal democracy, when the Nazis strut their way onto the page, Durer, Goethe, and jazz-age Berlin barely get a mention.
