James Hawes on His Book About Germany

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The New Prussian Soldier After The Victories of Napoleon.

Otto von Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor.

Rachel Chrastil – Bismarck’s War.

An excerpt from, “The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes” reviewed by Ivo Dawnay, The Oldie:

Like so much else of Europe’s history, this hard-wired duality is traced back to the Romans. Tired of marauding barbarian attacks into Gaul across the Rhine, Emperor Augustus mustered the largest army Rome had ever assembled to drive the border east, stopping in AD 9 on the banks of the Elbe, later heading south to build another border along the western banks of the Danube.

Thereafter this became the defining fault line of German life – the west civilised by Roman culture and institutions, the east a dark no-man’s land of authoritarianism and instability. Fast-forward to the eighth century and it is the Franks, led by Charlemagne, who hold the fort of civilisation, in alliance with the Pope in Constantinople, creating the Holy Roman Empire and transmitting the cultural legacy of the classical era to the Middle Ages.

But Wagnerian storm clouds are gathering. A century later the Teutonic Knights emerged east of christianised Poland. Warlike, pagan heirs to the old, un-Romanised barbarians and financed by traders in the Hansa towns along the Baltic sea, these Easterlings (from which, curiously, the pound sterling derives) came to form Prussia – at first, wholly unconnected with Germans in the west.

Hawes’s history goes on to reveal that the central fact of the next millennium of German history is an endless struggle for hegemony between the quietly industrious and developing west and the atavistic and endlessly aggressive forces of Prussia and its allies east of the Elbe. It was Bismarck, the quintessential bossy Prussian Junker, who created the modern state. Through his North German Confederation, he bullied the French into the war of 1870, and the western Länder into what was essentially a Prussian empire. Thus were the seeds of the two world wars sown.

Video Title: Interview Prof. James Hawes (English). Source: ceberlin. Date Published: May 16, 2024. Description:

James Hawes grew up in Gloucestershire, Edinburgh and Shropshire. He took a First in German at Hertford College, Oxford, then did a postgrad theatre studies in Cardiff, Wales. Having failed as an actor, he worked as an English teacher in Spain. In 1985-6 he was in charge of CADW excavations at the now-UNESCO World Heritage site of Blaenavon Ironworks. He took a PhD on Nietzsche and German literature 1900-1914 at University College, London 1987-90, then lectured in German at Maynooth University (Ollscoil Mhá Nuad) in Ireland between 1989 and 1991 before doing so at Sheffield University and Swansea University.