<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Two millennia of German history
Review: "A Mighty Fortress" undertakes to narrate the history of Germany as a cohesive story, beginning at the beginning and ending today. It is a mammoth task, covering over two millennia from the days of the Roman Empire: That is ten times as long as the United States of America has been in existence. The result is a massive amount of information packed into one book, but it does give an intelligence to events, which is missing when we randomly examine short periods of historical time with the benefit, and distortion, of our knowledge of the future.Fortunately, the book spends more time on some periods of history than others. We are taken at a fast clip up to the Middle Ages and through some less pivotal times. But the author slows the pace and looks in fine detail at such critical persona as Martin Luther and Otto von Bismarck, both complex and contradictory figures. Placed in historical context, much of what seems short-sighted or self-defeating today becomes understandable when approached forwards from the past, rather than backwards from the future. In this way, familiar names develop the immediacy and vivacity that they must have had to their contemporaries: Dürer, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Beethoven, Marx, Nietzsche, Grass. The book contains eight pages of photographs and six maps. That is really not enough to follow the constantly changing borders of Europe and I found it helpful to keep a historical atlas handy. Less easily resolved was the author's practice of Americanizing names. This may have been a conscious choice to isolate us from pre-existing judgments about historical characters, but it would have been more forgiving to map in a footnote, for example, Ludwig von Yorck to Generalleutnant Hans David Ludwig Graf Yorck von Wartenburg. In addition, converting every Heinrich and Henri to Henry (or Frederick or William) made it hard to separate the players, given the lack of imagination of the European aristocracy in naming their offspring. These are, however, all very minor items. Judging from the reception "A Mighty Fortress" has received in Germany, Professor Ozment has correctly identified the frustration of modern Germans in being identified only through the dreadful years of the Third Reich. Ozment may be more willing than most to sound the all-clear on Germany's potential for belligerence, but he has served the interests of all of us in placing Germany in factual historical context.
Rating: 
Summary: Read any other book
Review: I found this book annoying. Something about the style is just not right. It jumps around way too much, if it were better I'd say it should be longer. Too many names come in for about one paragraph without sufficient background info. I frequently found myself asking "when was this?" While many historians will include a simple detail like the birth and death years of the people they're writing about, Mr. Ozment didn't find this necessary. Additionally, I would really like to have had more maps.
As a prior reviewer mentioned, Mr. Ozment has the German army avoiding the Maginot Line at the beginning of WWI. A mistake of this size is utterly unacceptable. As I am no expert on German history, I have to wonder what else is inaccurate?
On the whole, the book reads as if Mr. Ozment had procrastinated far too long, and began writing at the last possible moment to meet a deadline.
I will be looking for a different, more reliable, history of Germany.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I picked up this book because I have been taking several college level history courses in my spare time and I thought that except for Bismark and Luther, these courses give short shrift to German History until Hitler comes along. I also have been relearning German after a long hiatus. With that as background, the book seemed very difficult to read because there is an underlying tone that the reader already knows a good deal of german history and this is just a retelling. As an example, there are too many times where a name is mentioned just once in passing without any explanation as to who it is. On the other hand, I imagine a serious student of german history would be disappointed in its simplicity. So I am not sure who the intended reader is.
I do admit that I did learn some things from the book such as the importance of primogeniture in the formation, or lack of formation, of a german state. There was not enough though to justify the time spent in reading it.
Lastly, it did seem at first that at least Ozment had a vast knowledge of German history and that the problem was just getting it accross to the novice, but I soon even called that into question. In the chapter "The Last Empire" which describes World War I, Ozment states "Avoiding the Maginot Line fortifications protecting France's eastern flank, the Germans occupied Belgium ....." Seems odd since the Maginot Line fortifications weren't built until after World War I....every serious student of recent history knows this. I was shocked and shocked even more that no one else noticed this. I wondered how much more there was that was just incorrect that I was unaware of.
Overall, not worth the money or the time.
Rating: 
Summary: Simpler than world history: stuck in Europe (hostile)
Review: Oddly enough, I think there ought to be interest in a history of the German people written by an American and published in 2004, a year in which John Kerry might be famous for expecting to dominate politically by pretending that he was democratic. People in the KH4K community, who established the web page of kerryhatersforkerry.com, should be able to understand the fundamental relationship between the German people and the truth, however strange and difficult to describe such utmost confidence in their own ability to prevail in spite of whatever opposition the rest of the world might theoretically amass once the conviction that any retreat is impossible has taken hold at the appropriate level. A single page of this book offers enough parallels to the basic policy of being a superpower to provide examples of how some evil genius willing to make a pact with the devil is a better explanation of world events than anything reported in the daily papers:
"By spring 1918 the German high command privately accepted the inevitability of defeat, yet kept it from a still trusting German public completely unprepared for the harsh consequences of an unconditional surrender."
"As the military had calculated, those who signed the instruments of peace became `criminals' in the eyes of many of their fellow countrymen, who accused them of stabbing Germany in the back. The leader of the delegation, Center Party member and Acting Secretary of State Matthias Erzberger, became the hated messenger and was assassinated two years later, in 1921." (p. 243).
A few things in American history might be equally as bad. Those who have become totally paranoid about deeply secret politics involving Jack Ruby, in which Lee Harvey Oswald was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 after providing information to the FBI on former CIA undercover operations being continued after President Kennedy tried to shut them down, might even think patsy-picker J. Edgar Hoover was primed to allow Oswald to take the blame for the assassination of President Kennedy because that would be far less frightening to the American people, not to mention foreign leaders, than a messy search for a plot that would be closer to the truth. Kennedy had openly supported a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty before he was shot, and the U.S. Senate did not ratify a total ban the last time it came up for a vote, though Vice President Al Gore vowed to bring it up for another vote first thing, if he was elected president.
My impression of this book is based more on the great question: What is German? as conjured into a storm by Nietzsche than on the pallid reflection by Steve Ozment in this book, which includes Goethe's observation, "Two souls, alas! within my breast, and each withdraws from and repels his brother" (p. 195). So sorry to be one of "58,000,000 Americans [who] can claim full or partial German descent" (p. 1), but my father became a minister in the United States in 1944 to lead mainly German Reformed congregations in the great Midwest to become successful in the kind of life that those who remained in Germany could only dream of, if they were fortunate enough to survive the history that German Volk brought upon themselves by attempting to oust those who resisted "assimilation--namely, the working poor, migrant workers, Jews, and journalists." (p. 194). I am mixing up very different periods in history here, but that is the most common reaction whenever I attempt to read about my German heritage.
Religion gets plenty of attention in A MIGHTY FORTRESS, but only with the detachment that modern thinkers apply to maintain feigned respect while dismissing the abilities of German writers like Schleiermacher, David Friedrich Strauss, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Quotes contain the jargon, but few pages capture the self-righteousness of those who are saved individually by their own principles but continuously see the rest of the world going to hell. The most modern aspect of American society is the great accusation that an individual is nothing compared to the desires of millions, and this book carefully weighs the down payment Germany paid for its greatness. "On the eve of the Great War, Germany had been a great power second only to the United States, and by the war's end two million Germans had died on European battlefields." (p. 248). The rest of the world actually ganged up against Germany twice in the twentieth century, with women in Germany given the vote in between, and "In an exuberant democratic gesture and coalition-building tactic, fringe parties were given seats proportional to their share of votes." (p. 244). If people couldn't agree, a state of emergency could be declared to centralize authority. "Known as Article 48, this powerful measure would later allow President Hindenburg's chancellors to rule briefly as strongmen, and the last of them--Adolf Hitler--to do so indefinitely." (pp. 244-245). In America, democracy can still flourish because it openly maintains the power to detain hundreds or thousands of those who have no power within the existing system. Books like A MIGHTY FORTRESS might even be encouraged because they show how often people with incredible intellectual abilities can end up in a worse situation than anything that has been experience by residents in America since the year when General Sherman marched through South Carolina.
Rating:
Summary: A broad brush, unenlightning and inaccurate overview
Review: Other reviewers have also noticed the blunder of placing the Maginot line in WWI, which reminded me of the student who once referred to the nazi secret police as "the gaspacho." An earlier inaccuracy was the description of revolutionary France as having attacked the rest of Europe in 1792, when the first battles occurred on French soil.
Although familiar with the broad outlines of German history, I was hoping to find answers to such nagging questions as how the nation of Mozart, Einstein and Freud, that led the world in math and physics, and invented the automobile and the jet engine, could have given itself such disastrous leaders as William II or Adolf Hitler. The book's introduction led me to believe that the author had new answers, but I didn't find any.
Rating:
Summary: An Insightful Account of German History
Review: Professor Ozment's new book "A Mighty Fortress" was hard to put down. He writes in a very engaging manner which carried me along with great anticipation from event to event. His explanation of the lead-up to the Nazi regime and the motives and actions of Hitler is particularly excellent.
Ozment's condensed history of Germany from under the canopy of the primeval forests to its present stance against the war in Iraq with his hopeful message for the future is exactly what is needed for Germans and non-Germans alike today. Bravo!
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed, but intriguing
Review: The title to the book is somewhat misleading as there is very little in Steven Ozment's book that would be new to a student of German history and its history is not so much that of the German people, but rather of the great men of German history. Having said that, it is a very interesting read, capturing the scope and complexities of German history without being as dry as general histories often tend to be. Ozment is obviously very knowledgable about his subject matter and is able to convey that knowledge thoughtfully and succinctly. Some might argue that he does so a bit too succinctly as he seems to skim the surface of German history, never delving as deeply into any part of it as the reader might like him to. A novice to German history could easily become lost in his "Who's Who of German History" style and someone well-versed in German history could easily become frustrated by his lack of detail. Overall, it is a good read, but one might wish that he included more detail about the lives of the German people themselves and more detail on some of the events that he mentions rather than merely his theories about these events.
Rating:
Summary: Not What I Expected
Review: This book is more like a survey of German history that jumps around from one period to the next, seemingly with no set pace. Also, as already noted, some questionable observations, like the existence of the Maginot Line during WWI. All I can say is, proceed with care.
<< 1 >>
|
