The Shortest History of Germany
From Julius Caesar to Angela Merkel-A Retelling for Our Times

Well, I see that there are many very angry one star reviews for this book on Goodreads, from those who are outraged that there is neither bibliography, footnotes nor academic references for it, but surely, written by an author who is also a university lecturer, it’s clear that Hawes is not aiming fo......more

Problematic to say the least. For half of this book, I was marvelling at the author's skill in boiling down the history of a complex subject in such a limited amount of pages. By clever use of diagrams and illustrations, I learned a lot about the broad sweep of Germany's history and was relishing th......more

It started off as a very informative read and somehow along the way turned into an anti-Prussian propaganda. Hawes' argument basically comes down to this: everyone and everything east of Elbe is rubbish and to blame for all the disasters of 19th-21st century. Don't waste your time on this.......more

Germany has always been a divided country I bought this book in the airport on my way home from Berlin because I was interested in German history and this seemed like a good place to start. And I was not wrong about that. It is a great place to start because it is so short and condensed. There were......more

I had very mixed thoughts on this book. On the one hand, he's drawn the history together very well in that he shows its continuity. This makes a much more readable and compelling history than - as so often happens - it being treated as separate events that are isolated from one another. However, Haw......more