• Complain

Simon Winder - Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country

Here you can read online Simon Winder - Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York City, year: 2019, publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2019
  • City:
    New York City
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Following Germania and Danubia, the third installment in Simon Winders personal history of EuropeIn 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.Lotharingia is a history of in-between Europe. It is the story of a place between places. In this beguiling, hilarious and compelling book, Simon Winder retraces the various powers that have tried to overtake the land that stretches from the mouth of the Rhine to the Alps and the might of the peoples who have lived there for centuries.

Simon Winder: author's other books


Who wrote Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents
Guide
Pagebreaks of the print version
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 1
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use - photo 2

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For CMJ

On the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what

we have read, but what we have done

THOMAS KEMPIS

Lotharingia A Personal History of Europes Lost Country - photo 3Lotharingia A Personal History of Europes Lost Country - photo 4Lotharingia A Personal History of Europes Lost Country - photo 5Lotharingia A Personal History of Europes Lost Country - photo 6Lotharingia A Personal History of Europes Lost Country - photo 7Lotharingia A Personal History of Europes Lost Country - photo 8I was in the Ardennes on a bus travelling from Stavelot to Spa The bus was - photo 9I was in the Ardennes on a bus travelling from Stavelot to Spa The bus was - photo 10
I was in the Ardennes on a bus travelling from Stavelot to Spa The bus was - photo 11

I was in the Ardennes, on a bus travelling from Stavelot to Spa. The bus was filled to bursting with primary- and secondary-school children and I was the only adult, aside from the magnificently stone-faced and imperturbable driver. It was midwinter and the fog was so solid that it looked as though, once outside the bus, you would have to be resigned to washing it out of your hair and brushing strands of it off your coat. The bus was, frankly, a monkey-house on wheels. One child was using a lighter to burn through a plastic handle, another had a phone app which converted a pupils photo into a demon face. At irregular intervals an inflated condom was fired over our heads to happy cries. The whole atmosphere was hilarious and you almost expected the bus to rock from side to side as it drove along, like in an exuberant cartoon. It made me feel wistful about the long-gone years spent waiting for my own children in various school playgrounds. I had forgotten the magical way in which large groups of children flicker in their moods, managing to be morose, thrilled, exhausted and hyper in perhaps less than a second.

Each stop made by the fog-bound bus was a surprise. As the doors hissed open, a clump of children would gamely launch themselves into what appeared to be a solid form of Milk of Magnesia, with just a roof-angle visible to indicate houses of some kind, and the odd skeletal branch. In all kinds of ways this bus was really in the middle of nowhere a series of rugged, thinly populated valleys which most Europeans have no need to engage with. From the air you would be able to see each valley filled to the brim with fog. But, like so many places I will write about in this book, it has had its turn as the centre of the world. Most obviously this was where the Battle of the Bulge was fought the last major attempt by the Germans to defeat the Western Allies. The little town of Stavelot of which I had previously been entirely ignorant was where the battle reached its high-water mark, in December 1944. American troops had kept destroying bridges and blocking the narrow roads by felling thousands of trees, the Germans kept rigging up pontoons and blowing up the obstacles but at Stavelot they briefly entered the town, massacred dozens of its inhabitants, could not fight their way through, tried to drive round, failed and began the retreat which only stopped with their surrender in May. A small marker in the town states: HERE THE INVADER WAS STOPPED .

I was surrounded by the same fog that had made the initial German attack through the Ardennes so successful, but this was just one part of the regions central role in the twentieth century. It was, famously, the source of the British and French armies crushing and almost instantaneous defeat in 1940, as thousands of German tanks and troop-lorries secretly wound their way through the same narrow roads. During the First World War, the town of Spa was the German military headquarters in the fightings later period. A series of photos taken in 1918 show the last weeks of imperial and aristocratic rule in Germany, as Kaiser Wilhelm II , the Crown Prince and various generals stand around hobnobbing in their immaculate uniforms in one of Spas commandeered assembly rooms. It was in these rooms that the Kaiser, hearing about the revolution breaking out in Berlin, appealed to his generals for support, only to find that they no longer trusted their men and could not even guarantee that they would not attack him. Wilhelm panicked and fled to Holland, abandoning the imperial train in case troops took potshots at it, and ending over eight centuries of Hohenzollern rule. In 1944 the same complex in Spa was in turn the headquarters of the US Army, evacuated during the temporary panic that followed the surprise, fog-bound German offensive.

I had come to Stavelot partly out of contrition and annoyance that I had not heard of the place before. It turns out to have a sensational museum in its sprawling former abbey which showed that in the first half of the twelfth century it was the only place to be. But Stavelot once I was there also showed that I really just had to stop my travelling around for this book. There was effectively nolimit to the richness and density of a region that is both the dozy back of beyond, and central to the fate of humanity. Here I was in a bus filled with the great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of those who had experienced historical events of various, terrible kinds and who were with their jolly backpacks and untiring ability to laugh helplessly when one of their number farted happily oblivious. My own children were now adults and I looked back with dismay at the immense amounts of time I had spent away from them, drifting around dozens of Stavelot-like places, face to face with the same question about why European events and ideas have swept through so many places that just wished to be left alone.


I have always wanted to write these words, but they are now true: this book is the completion of a trilogy! Germania was a history of German-speakers roughly within the modern Federal Republic of Germany. I tried to make it an evenly spread book, but the locations kept being tugged eastwards as I wallowed shamelessly in the tiny towns of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt. I then wrote Danubia because I was aware that Germania failed to deal with the Germans of Austria or of other points east. Before the twentieth century, German culture had spread into the lands across Central Europe and this opened up several other interests I had, in the nature of competing nationalisms, in the Habsburg family and its many oddnesses, and the ChristianMuslim frontiers that shaped the whole vast region for centuries. As someone who grew up in the Cold War and was, like everyone, gripped by the discovery of what was for a generation a

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country»

Look at similar books to Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country»

Discussion, reviews of the book Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.