Romania's real tragedy

What passes in this country for political discussion has an increasingly paranoiac tone. I have found that venom between political personalities and groups generally reflects (a) an absence of significant policy differences between political parties and (b) their being "on the make" and committed to personal enrichment rather than (even the pretence of) the public good.

The result is those who lose elections are envious of every day the opposite lot has its snout in the trough (as distinct from theirs). Thus it has been with the two parties in America (the recent differences have been cultural rather than policy) - which are simply conduits for the cash which is needed in that country for candidates to stand.

Romanian political parties are opportunistic devices; they come and they go – and those elected often change their allegiance when they see the way voter opinion is going. Europe too easily assumed that Romania had an operational democracy!  

Citizens in Romania face rising prices and falling wages – but the political class has no time for such issues. For several weeks, all its efforts and time has been spent on power games. But parliamentary elections come in a few months. The people will not forget. We can expect the extreme parties – such as they are - to garner votes.

There seems a total absence of any independent voice of reason in this situation. Senior civil servants and those on a whole variety of state bodies are servants of the party which appointed them. Those who have been sacked in the past few days were the political appointments of “the other lot” – not the independent souls we imagine. Many of those in civil society (who signed the letters to Europe) have attachments. It is very difficult to survive without them. The media is part of the power struggle. And Universities are corrupted. And so it goes on. This is a systemic problem – not just the case of a crazy Prime Minister (or President) – and needs a systemic solution.

Romania has an incredible number of bright people – more intellectuals than any other country I know. At the moment they seem struck dumb. And, sadly, they are all highly competitive if not arrogant – and don’t seem capable of making alliances with one another to help pull the country out of its downward spiral. That’s the real tragedy!

If in fact there is a referendum later this month which asks citizens whether their President should be impeached, voters actually should be encouraged to score out the word “Basescu” on the ballot paper and replace it with “politicians”. That is the simplest way to tell them to start focusing on public problems and opportunities rather than on their own.

In the meantime, someone needs to start a discussion about the qualities Romania needs in its politicians and what sort of mechanism is needed to start recruiting and sustaining a new breed of serious people (on lower salaries and benefits) with some integrity.        

Is the Rule of Law under attack in Romania??

A couple of weeks ago, my blogpost heading read that Bucharest was becoming more like Budapest - in the insidious and autocratic way the new prime Minister (Ponta) was removing possible sources of challenge to his authority. This trend has now become positively unconstitutional - with, for example, procedures being altered overnight to allow the President to be impeached on a simple majority of citizens actually voting (rather than a majority of those entitled to vote) - and the Constitutional Court no longer being allowed to comment on parliamentary decisions. Parliament is now being invited to impeach the President - with a referendum scheduled on the matter for later this month (Basescu has already survived one such attempt a few years back). 
On the face of it, this is the replacement of politics by thuggery on a scale we haven't really seen since the 1930s. 
However, there is another point of view - that President Basescu's egotistical hyperactivity is preventing government; that institutions such as the Constitutional Court are still inhabited with a mixture of "place-men" (placed to do the bidding of those who placed them) and of old-Communists who are available to the highest bidder; and that, with the summer holiday almost upon us emergency decisions are needed to get rid of the President and allow some government.......It was, I am told, Basescu himself who changed the law to require a Presidential impeachment to have the support of 50% of citizens entitled to vote.
Another expat living in Romanian has done the "devil's advocate" bit much better than me.
So far we seen only a few people on the streets - compared with the numbers in the early months of the year (it's 40 degrees anyway) - but at least some prestigious organisations have been active in their protests. The following letter describing the most recent attacks has been sent to the Secretary General of the European Commission, Ms. Catherine Day

Bucharest, July 3rd , 2012

Civil society warning: the rule of law under unprecedented attack in Romania

Dear Mr President

Dear Commissioners

This is the third warning in less than two months, issued by a list of reputable Romanian civil society organizations, since the current Socialist-Liberal ruling coalition took power. The drift towards a non-democratic regime has continued, with serious steps taken in the last few days which will potentially affect the independence of institutions and the separation of powers.

• There were open threats to dismiss and replace the judges of the Constitutional Court, which by Constitution are irremovable during their term of office, coming from the top government officials (the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice). On July 3rd all the judges of the Constitutional Court have signed an open letter and sent a protest to the Venice Commission, signaling the political pressures on the institution.
• The ruling coalition has dismissed the independent Ombudsman during the parliament plenary of July 3rd , without due cause. The Ombudsman is the only Romanian institution entitled to challenge the emergency ordinances of the Government before the Constitutional Court. Presumably, it is by emergency decree that the dismissal of the Constitutional Court judges before the end of their mandates will take place. Though by law the Ombudsman may be replaced only if s/he breaches the Constitution or the laws, the speedy proceedings used in the present case show that no consideration was given to the legal requirements. The Ombudsman is an essential institution in any rule of law country.
• In the notorious case of the ex-prime minister Adrian Nastase, who was convicted to two years in jail for corruption, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Mr. Rus, unusually called Mr Nastase after the verdict to negotiate with him the terms of the imprisonment. Political pressure was put on the police and the medical authorities in the hospital were Mr Nastase was taken after his failed suicide attempt, to extend his stay in the emergency hospital for about a week, with no medical reason, as the court has established subsequently. The prosecutors have started criminal investigations against three police officers and one doctor (who happens to be a former Socialist senator and under criminal investigation for corruption himself). The Minister of Justice called upon the Superior Council of Magistracy, the guarantor of the independence of justice, to refrain from taking position against the threats of Social-Liberal politicians to the judges and prosecutors. Fortunately, the Superior Council of Magistracy took a firm position against all interferences in the justice system.
• The Prime Minister acted against the Constitutional Court decision which stated clearly that the prerogatives of external representation of Romania belongs to the President, not to the Prime Minister. This equals contempt of the constitutional court which in itself undermines the basis of democracy and the separation of powers.
• The Official Gazette was shifted also by emergency ordinance, from Parliament to Government’s control, for the first time in Romania’s modern history. It cannot be a coincidence that among the first acts published in the Official Gazzette was the resignation of Mr. Voiculescu (one of the leaders of the ruling coalition) from the Senate, so that the High Court lost competence to judge upon his criminal file regarding graft allegations. The Government is known for its appetite for speedy legislation, when all acts enter in effect upon publication. This is why the legislator intended to put the Official Gazzette under the Parliament as a form of control between powers. Since the change, the relevant documents are published overnight in the Official Gazzette.
• Two members of the Parliament from the ruling coalition were declared by final court decision as incompatible with their mandate, because of conflicts of interests. In spite of this, they refuse to step down. Their colleagues from the Standing Legal Committee of the parliament seem to protect them, without offering any plausible explanation.
• On top of all, Mr Crin Antonescu, senator, president of the National Liberal Party and co-president of the ruling coalition, has declared publicly on July 2nd that all institutions that are “blocking the coalition from ruling”, and in particular the Constitutional Court, must be changed.

These are serious threats against the underlining elements of a rule of law state. Therefore we, Romanian civil society organizations, ask the European Commission to strongly urge the Romanian government and ruling coalition to stop their current actions against the rule of law and separation of powers.

We emphasize that the EU institutions have vigorously reacted previously, in the case of Hungary. We believe similar actions are necessary in our case. One such action would be to consider starting infringement procedures against Romania, based on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, Art. 47.

We also want express our strong belief that the Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification (MCV) should continue, as an effective instrument for preserving democracy in Romania.

Group for Social Dialogue (GDS); Expert Forum (EFOR); Freedom House, Romania; Romanian Center for European Policy (CRPE); Romanian Helsinki Committee (APADOR-CH); ActiveWatch – Media Monitoring Agency (MMA); Romanian Independent Journalists’ Association (AZIR); Center for Independent Journalism (CJI); Center for NGO Assistance (CENTRAS); and Resource Center for Public Participation (CeRe)

One thing is for sure, Ponta (the PM) doe not seem to understand that, in the absence of a coherent statement to the external world about his actions, we are bound to believe that he is undermining the rule of law. 
The outside world does not properly understand the extent to which Romanian institutions which, in the old member states, are bastions of freedom are here sinecures occupied by placemen. For example who can respect a body which, asked to judge the constitutionality of a 25% cut in the salaries of public servants, ruled that it was legal - apart, that is, from itself!!

Koestler

I’m spending a fair amount in the past these days. Not my own but of historical figures – eg the incredible group assembled by Peter Watson in his German Genius; Miklos Banffy’s novels and diaries about life and events in Translyvania andAustro-Hungary in the first few decades of the 20^th century (I have just received his diaries); and some portraits of Berlin in the 1920s (by Otto Friedrich and Count Harry Kessler).

One thing it brings home is the exceptional nature of the normality in which I grew up and lived (the last 50 years). Now we face the turmoil which was normal for central Europeans in the first half of the twentieth century and have, I suspect, become so spoiled as to be unable to cope with what the future holds. 

One man perhaps embodies (by his life and open writings) that older generation - and that is Arthur Koestler (born in Hungary in 1905 and died in London in 1983). I have just finished his remarkable biography Koestler – the indispensable intellectual by Michael Scammel. This is a masterly account and analysis of the life of a brilliant polymath, a deep and restless thinker, first, about the political and ethical problems of his time, and, later, about the place of humanity in the universe. He was an ex-Hungarian, an ex-Communist, an ex-Zionist. He was exuberantly "continental", a cosmopolitan, frequently moving homes from one country and even one continent to another; a journalist, a campaigner against capital punishment, a hectoring controversialist, a political novelist, a voluminous autobiographer. He was usually (but not always) selfish, financially generous, arrogant but self-critical, introspective, neurotic, a manic-depressive, mercurial, sparkling, hot-tempered and uninhibited in behaviour, competitive, both repellent and charismatic

His writing made a powerful impact on me in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His book against hanging is one of these rare books (like Zola’s) which changed public policy (it certainly convinced me). And his essay on why we laugh was, for me, the first example of popular science.

Koestler rose from the lowest rung of the journalism profession, to a threadbare starving novelist, and finally to a man of distinction and of letters. While still in his 20s, he was appointed to a senior position in the prestigious Ullstein publishing company - but was sacked in 1932 just after he joined the communist party.
He migrated to Israel, became a Zionist and lived briefly in a Kibbutz. But later, as he did with Communism (after Stalin's "Show trials"), gave them both up. He was imprisoned by Franco in Spain, the Vichy French in France, barely escaped being caught by the Gestapo there, and served eight months in a British internment camp as a suspected communist agent and alien. He caroused with Albert Camus, Andre Malreaux, Jean Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Simone de Beauvoir, to name just a few. He interviewed Albert Einstein and published with Sigmund Freud.
After Stalin's Show trials punctured his utopian ideas about the Communist revolution, Koestler spent the rest of his life in search of the political and philosophical Holy Grail of a revolutionary political system that would not yield to the morally bankrupt "means-ends" calculus of absolute power. And although he never found it, most of his books, including his magnum opus "Darkness at Noon" were spent in search of a solution to this and similar overarching philosophical problems. Here is an interesting article written about his writing by one of his many friends - George Orwell which is, of course, as fresh today as then.

Koestler's intellect range over such a wide range of subjects, that today, being able to do so, would never be though of. He was equally at home in discussing Quantum Physics, Political Science, Psychology or art and Anthropology. It is the depth and breadth of his knowledge that makes Koestler seem like the last of the Twentieth Century Intellectual Renaissance men.

His autobiographical writings (eg The Invisible Writing) probably give the most powerful insights into the first part of the 20th century - but, suddenly, in the mid 1950s, he put politics behind him and turned to science and para-science. You feel that he had lived such an incredible life by the time he turned 50 that he needed to reinvent himself.    

Milk Festival

Yesterday was Sirnea's mid-summer festival - traditionally a competition to choose the best milker of cows.
I'll lwt the pictures speak for themselves.......

Romanian wine and history

Decided to leave my laptop behind this week as I toured one of Romania’s less-well known areas which just happens to have a lot of vineyards. Located in the Carpathian foothills between Ploiesti and Buzau - with the village of Pietroase as the main centre of production of very good quality stuff. I remember from the early 1990s the narrow bottles with the etiquette of the old gold vase unearthed from the village – an etiquette which, unfortunately was filched by a new company (Bachus). 

A significant proportion of the village households make their own wine for sale at the door – so we had fun knocking doors to try to find the appropriate door; and wine. By late June, of course, the best stuff is no longer available – but we were lucky to find the last few litres of a great Merlot in one village – and a superb (sweet) Tamaioasa in another. And that was before we visited the cellars of Pietroase’s vinicular research institute from which I emerged with 10 litres of demi-sec Riesling and also of merlot (sec).    

And then a detour via the wine village of Urlati to visit the fascinating home of polymath - Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940) - in Valenii de Munte. 
Iorga’s life gives a profound insight into the Romania of these times.  He

was an historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, poet and playwright. Co-founder (in 1910) of the Democratic Nationalist Party (PND), he served as a member of Parliament, its President and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly (1931–32) as Prime Minister. A child prodigy and polyglot, Iorga produced an unusually large body of scholarly works, consecrating his international reputation as a medievalist, Byzantinist, Latinist, Slavist, art historian and philosopher of history. Holding teaching positions at the Universities of Bucharest and Paris and several other academic institutions, Iorga was founder of the International Congress of Byzantine Studies and the Institute of South-East European Studies (ISSEE). His activity also included the transformation of Vălenii de Munte town into a cultural and academic center.
In parallel with his scientific contributions, Nicolae Iorga was a prominent right of centre activist, whose political theory bridged conservatism,nationalism and agrarianism. From Marxist beginnings, he switched sides and became a maverick disciple of the Junimea movement. Iorga later became a leadership figure at Sămănătorul, the influential literary magazine with populist leanings, and militated within the Cultural League for the Unity of All Romanians, founding vocally conservative publications such as Neamul Românesc, Drum Drept, Cuget Clar and Floarea Darurilor. His support for the cause of ethnic Romanians in Austria-Hungary made him a prominent figure in the pro-Entente camp by the time of WW1, and ensured him a special political role during the interwar existence of Greater Romania. Initiator of large-scale campaigns to defend Romanian culture in front of perceived threats, Iorga sparked most controversy with his antisemitic rhetoric, and was for long an associate of the far right ideologue A. C. Cuza. He was an adversary of the dominant National Liberals, later involved with the opposition Romanian National Party.Late in his life, Iorga opposed the radically fascist Iron Guard, and, after much oscillation, came to endorse its rival King Carol II. Involved in a personal dispute with the Guard's leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and indirectly contributing to his killing, Iorga was also a prominent figure in Carol's corporatist and authoritarian party, the National Renaissance Front. He remained an independent voice of opposition after the Guard inaugurated its own National Legionary dictatorship, but was ultimately assassinated by a Guardist..

The Deserts of Transition?

For all the talk of European Commission transparency, it’s none too easy to get useful information about the projects on which its various Structural Funds and Operational Programmes spend so many thousands of millions of euros.

Nor, incidentally, have I seen anyone look at the role which such funding has played in the socio-economic development of this Region. A lot of money is spent on consultants evaluating the projects but their availability seems to be very restricted. And those who write these evaluations have no interest in biting the hand that feeds them – so no fundamental critique will emerge from that quarter.

I might expect journalists and academics to tackle such basic questions – except that they too have their reasons for not wanting to upset a gravy-train.

I have lived in central Europe for much of the past 20 years – and don’t need to worry about offending the powerful interests in the EC. So let me clearly say what I think about the contribution of Structural Funds  

It has helped into place the systemic corruption here – not least by adding to the incentives to pull the wrong sort of people into the political systems.

I doubt that a credible case can be made for its economic contribution.

Bulgaria and Romania have been able to spend less than 10% of the monies allocated to them.

That’s a pretty dismal picture – and a poor reflection on European journalism that no journalist seems to have posed, let alone explored, the question of what it has all really achieved for these countries. The opportunity was there in the past 2 years while the whole future of the Structural Funds was being reviewed – I rather belatedly woke up to this(rather inward if not incestuous) discussion at the end of January     

All this is by way of a preface to praise for one report which I stumbled across last week - Narratives for Europe from the European Cultural Foundation.Don’t be put off by the “deconstructionist” verbosity at the beginning – this was an interesting venture using EC funding to link up ordinary people in a lot of peripheral areas of Europe whether at weddings, playing music or in the final stages of their life in remote villages.

We are not looking to collect either official discourses or isolated individual stories. We are trying to identify common ground and shared representations, yes, but it is also about identifying diverging perspectives, conflicting desires, grey zones: the questions and even doubts expressed by people in Europe of all generations and backgrounds, particularly those engaged in arts and culture

Coincidentally, The Economist also published this picture of life in North East Bulgaria - whose poverty I saw for myself this time last year.

But the media I was reading hadn’t told me about the fascinating and sophisticated protests in Zagreb (Croatia) in the first half of the year

In February, March, and April 2011 up to ten thousand people assembled every other evening in Zagreb, and up to a couple thousand assembled in other cities. Besides a rhetorical shift (a strong anti-capitalist discourse unheard of either in independent Croatia or elsewhere in the Balkans), the crucial point was the rejection of leaders, which gave citizens an opportunity to decide on the direction and the form of their protests. The “Indian revolution,” previously limited to public squares, soon turned into long marches through Zagreb. It was a clear example of how “invited spaces of citizenship,” designed as such by state structures and police for “kettled” expression of discontent, were superseded by “invented spaces of citizenship,” in which citizens themselves opened new ways and venues for their subversive actions, and questioned legality in the name of the legitimacy of their demands. This was not a classic, static protest anymore and, unlike the famous Belgrade walks in 1996–97, the Zagreb ones were neither aimed only at the government as such, nor only at the ruling party and its boss(es). They acquired a strong anti-systemic critique, exemplified by the fact that protesters were regularly “visiting” the nodal political, social, and economic points of contemporary Croatia (political parties, banks, government offices, unions, privatization fund, television and media outlets, etc.). The flags of the ruling conservative Croatian Democratic Union, the Social Democratic Party (seen as not opposing the neo-liberal reforms), and even the European Union (seen as complicit in the elite’s wrongdoings) were burned. The protesters even “visited” the residences of the ruling party politicians, which signalled a widespread belief that their newly acquired wealth was nothing more than legalized robbery.And this is precisely the novelty of these protests. It is not yet another “colour revolution” of the kind the Western media and academia are usually so enthusiastic about (but who are otherwise not interested in following how the “waves of democratization” often do little more than replace one autocrat with another, more cooperative one). The U.S.-sponsored colour revolutions never put into question the political or economic system as such, although they did respond to a genuine demand in these societies to get rid of the authoritarian and corrupt elites that had mostly formed in the 1990s. The Croatian example shows that for the first time protests are not driven by anti-government rhetoric per se, but instead are based on true anti-regime sentiment. Not only the state but the whole apparatus on which the current oligarchy is based is put into question by (albeit chaotically) self-organized citizens. No colour is needed to mark this kind of revolution which obviously cannot hope for any external help or international media coverage. It did the only thing the dispossessed can do: marched through their cities. The emergence and nature of these Croatian protests invites us also to rethink the categories used to explain the social, political, and economic situation in the Balkans and elsewhere in post-socialist Eastern Europe.

In the general bemoaning of the small number of people who seem to be aware of (let alone sympathetic to) their European neighbours (now or in the past) let me salute and help shine a light on the writings of Clive James whose Cultural Amnesia is a unique and amazing set of vignettes of European.

European public space

I’m European in perhaps a rather perverse sense – that I love the differences between the countries which make it up. Given the scale of EU activities (let alone EC programmes – such as Erasmus) which bring together officials, academics, students across national boundaries, you would have thought there would have been a market for journals and books to help ease the cross-cultural dialogues taking place. But I’ve mentioned several times on this blog (for example here; here; and here) how few titles there are (at least in the English language) dedicated to deepen mutual understanding of each other’s cultures and ways of doing things.

I referred in the last post some of the British books which try to do this. And it would be an interesting exercise for a national of each EU member state to make a similar list of material available in their respective language!! I would exclude from those lists the conventional country histories which are written by the various country specialists at Universities – largely on the ground that they are not written for the purpose I have mentioned.      

Of course, there are the pop books which reduce it all to tongue-in-cheek stereotypes – for example We, The Europeans - or the Xenophobe series. Some of this stuff can actually be quite insightful – for example, this good expose of the phrases we Brits use; what our European partners generally understand them; and what they really mean by them 

At the opposite extreme, are those who try to understand cultures using comparative sociology for example Geert Hofstede and Frans Trompenaars. Richard D Lewis’s When Cultures Collide – leading across Cultures  (1996) is perhaps the most readable treatment.

In my days, we had the magazine Encounter (Der Monat in Germany) which gave me stimulating articles by renowned French, German and Italian writers, for example, but was then discovered to have been funded by the CIA. Where its equivalent these days? Le Monde Diplomatique and Lettre International perhaps - except there is, sadly, no English version of the latter - and only a short version in English of the former (whose language is, in any event, a bit opaque) 

In 2004 Carl Fredrikkson wrote an article about the need for a proper European public space where ideas were exchanged across national boundaries and Jan-Werner Muller returned to the issue earlier this year with an important article entitled The Failure of European Intellectuals? in which he argued that

Up until the 1930s at least, there existed a genuine European Republic of Letters, in which writers and philosophers engaged with each other easily across national borders – and in which they also explained other national cultures to their readers. And, in a somewhat different vein, it continued, at least for a while, after the Second World War, when the imperative of reconciliation loomed large. Figures like Alfred Grosser and Joseph Rovan explained the French and the Germans to each other. These weren't just glorified apologists for national quirks, or mediators who would quietly disappear when rapprochement was complete: they had standing in their own right. But, effectively, they did perform the role of sophisticated culturaltranslators and political mediators.

And now? One might be forgiven for thinking that the more Europe integrates politically, legally and economically, the more provincial and inward-looking its individual nation-states become culturally. Easyjet and the Eurovision song contest are not a substitute for a Republic of Letters, where intellectuals have a genuine feel for at least two or three different European cultures. Of course, there are exceptions: Eurozine http://www.eurozine.com/ is one of the major websites where Europeans can learn about the debates taking place in other countries (and, not least, about how intellectuals in other countries perceive their neighbours).

There is no panacea, as far as creating a genuinely European public sphere is concerned. One can only hope that individuals will become more curious, more willing to see the rewards in the work of translation and mediation. It might seem all very humdrum – but it is actually an urgent task, not only, but especially at this critical juncture. To take an obvious example: Germans (and other "northerners") need to understand the history of the Greek civil war, the ways the Greek state was used to pacify a deeply polarized society, and the way European money served to create a middle class which helped parties stay in power, but also diminished the dangers of renewed social conflict (none of this is an excuse for corruption and a generally dysfunctional state – tout comprendre ce n'est pas tout pardonner).

Conversely, it would be helpful if observers outside Germany got a grip on the particular strand of liberal economics that has been animating policy-making in both Bonn and Berlin for a long time: that strange thing called Ordoliberalismus, whose representatives conceived of themselves as the real "neoliberals" – liberals who had learnt the lessons of the Great Depression and the rise of dictatorships in the twentieth-century, and who precisely did not want to equate liberalism with laissez-faire. For them, soi-disant neoliberals like Ludwig von Mises were simply "paleoliberals" who remained stuck in nineteenth-century orthodoxies about self-correcting markets. The German neoliberals, on the other hand, wanted a strong state able and willing not only to provide a framework for markets and society, but also to intervene in the former for the sake of ensuring competition and "discipline".

Again, an understanding of such ideas is not the same as accepting them (with Ordoliberalismus, in particular, there are good reasons to be suspicious of its illiberal, perhaps even authoritarian side). The point is that a more productive and sophisticated debate cannot ignore the profoundly different national starting points for thinking about politics (and economics, of course). In that sense, what I have called clarifiers and the mutual explicators of national traditions need to work together. 

Perry Anderson is one of the few Anglo-Saxons with such knowledge and skills. Muller himself is a great example

The painting is a recent one by a good Bulgarian friend of mine - Yassen Gollev     

Understanding Germany

First - on the eve of the German-Greek football match - have a look at this side-splitting Monty Python clip of a German-Greece football match - whose members consist almost entirely of .....philosophers!!
Who do you read when you want to get under the skin of a country – and don’t have the opportunity to go and live there? In the 1960s we had Alistair Cooke for the USA and Luigi Barzini for the Italians; in the 1970s Richard Cobb and John Ardagh for France; 
in the 1980s Theodor Zeldin for France, John Ardagh for Germany - and Eric Newby and Norman Lewis for the rest of the globe!

France and Italy have become popular tourist destinations for the reading classes since then and created the market for a lot of books – most of the slightly mocking sort about rural life pioneered by Peter Mayle (Ginsborg's 1990 History of Contemporary Italy; society and politics 1943-1980; The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones; and The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour are honourable exceptions).

But HOW do you best get under the skin is perhaps an even more important question.
Through historical recitations? 
Through literary and cultural explorations? 
Through textbooks on political systems? 
Or perhaps by a combination of these – eg the superb Peter Robb’s "Midnight in Sicily" (which focussed on politics, the mafia and food); or "Molotov’s Magic Lantern"on which I commented recently?

Despite the role and significance of Germany over the past century and in present times, any visitor to that country who wanted a good briefing had a stark choice – heavy academic histories or the Rough Guide. Until, that is, 2010 when Simon Winder produced Germania – a personal history of Germans Ancient and Modern 

I referred to it at the end of a blog last year  but did not find it an easy book to persevere with – by virtue of its idiosyncratic approach. I’ve now been able to read it properly – and find it quite excellent. I’ve drawn on some of the Amazon reviews to give a sense of its key features.

It’s the history of Germany in the broadest sense of that name - starting with the residue of the Roman Empire and ending with the founding of the Third Empire in 1933 when the author can't bear to continue. It encompasses cities from Brussels to Gdansk to Milan and all the way down the Danube, allowing the author to potter around old castles and cathedrals to his heart's content.A higgledy-piggledy mixture of more or less independent duchies, principalities and bishoprics coalesced slowly into modern states (plural - Winder uses Germania for Austria and Germany, and doesn't hesitate to visit other countries nearby). History as folly, incompetence and grudge; the author dismisses his own work as anecdotal facetiousness but it's far better than that. A flavour - "a slice through any given month in Germany's history turns up a staggering array of rulers: a discredited soldier, a pious archbishop, a sickly boy and his throne-grabbing regent, and a half-demented miser obsessed with alchemy".
This book is a travelogue (in the Bryson style) fused with a cultural and political history of Germany. If you're looking for only one or the other, you will be disappointed. But if you just want to find out about Germany, and are ready to accept a few idiosyncrasies of style along the way, you'll love this book.

 Some themes stand out particularly well:

• The role the earliest centuries and the Middle Ages play in the imagination of the Germans in all sorts of ways; and how much medieval architecture remains in Germany
• Why the Holy Roman Emperors, with no proper capital before 1533 when Vienna was declared the capital city of the Habsburgs, never managed to overcome the extraordinary fragmentation of Germany in the way in which the English and the French managed it many centuries earlier. There are delightful vignettes of the courts of tiny principalities, often presided over by dotty or self-indulgent rulers. Due to the frequent absence of primogeniture, many of them had hyphenated names, like Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg which provided the wife for Edward VII: the more hyphenated, the tinier they were.
• How weak Prussia was between the end of the reign of Frederick the Great in 1786 and Bismarck's Danish War of 1864. Winder asserts that "Frederick's actions DID NOT LEAD (his italics) to Bismarck's empire." Winder doesn't think much of Frederick's achievements,but admires Maria Theresa and her "adorable", "fun" husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I.
• And after all the tomes that have been written about the Prussian - later German - armies, it is interesting to see Winder rather debunking their achievements "outside the delusive little seven year period [covering the Danish, Austrian and French wars between 1864 and 1871]". He also debunks the German navy. He lays into some conventional views about the run-up to and course of the First World War with a zest reminiscent of A.J.P.Taylor. He makes a case for saying that Germany between 1871 and 1914 was militarily less aggressive than Russia, Britain, France or Italy during the same period. He sees the French as the main trouble-makers in Europe from Louis XIV onwards. But then he had decided from the start that his book would "bale out" in 1933. (He does not completely manage that: reference to the Nazi period are dotted throughout the book.) He told us at the beginning that he wanted us to look at pre-1933 Germany free from the hostile mind-set which has been created by the two World Wars, and which had been quite absent from Britain for almost the whole of the 19th century. For him there was no German "Sonderweg": for him "Germany in 1914 had been a normal country, espousing much of the same racism, military posturing, and taste for ugly public buildings that bedevilled the rest of the Continent."

This is more of an impressionist account, though, like an impressionist painting, consisting of many brilliant and highly coloured individual brush strokes. It is basically, but not always chronological; and it is interspersed with digressions and bits of autobiography which increase in length as the book proceeds. Winder is having fun: "fun" used as an adjective occurs frequently in the book, which is light-hearted, often hilarious, discursive, never short of an opinion and indeed sometimes opinionated and over-the-top: he calls Weber's book on the Protestant Ethic "famously idiotic"; Napoleon III is rebuked for his "sheer childishness"; the word "mad" occurs with a somewhat maddening frequency; he describes the successor states of the Habsburg Empire as "a mass of poisonous micro-states". It is also quite serious, in many ways insightful, cultured, affectionate but also critical, and fantastically knowledgeable.

The book certainly has made me (and others- it has 100 reviews on the Amazon site) think. It has more than 100 bibliographical references and, significantly, half are literary or cultural.