Lotharingia: A Personal History Of Europe’s Lost Country, by Simon Winder

At first glance, this book might seem to be a whimsical and lighthearted book about a ghost nation formed out of the Treaty of Verdun in 843 between the three grandsons of Charlemagne, but as someone who has many ancestors who come from precisely this region which has long been caught in the crosshairs between mutually hostile French and German designs on the territory, in which periodic and repeated disasters have befallen the inhabitants of the small and fragmented realms that have long (and even to this day) dotted this region, reading this book filled me with a sense of both deep sadness and deep anger. It is not easy for me to write my feelings about this book, where the author mixes in tales of quirky places and people, his own travels to the region throughout the course of his life, starting from his childhood and extending to the writing of this book, and the sorrowful and tragic history that this region suffered through centuries of conflict where the people of this land were repeatedly visited by fire, sword, rapine, pillaging, and a complete denial of their freedom to decide what kind of lives they wanted to live by those imperial powers who thought that they knew better where these nations belonged to be governed from and by.

This particular volume is, like the other volumes in this series, a sprawling one of nearly 500 pages of text. It opens with an ominous quote from Thomas A Kempis, “On the day of Judgment we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done,” and from there, it proceeds through fourteen chapters to chronologically examine the history of this tormented region from prehistory to the contemporary rise of the EU. The book begins with a humorous discussion of the author’s relationship with France and a note on his inconsistent but sensible use of place names and their spellings. The first chapter then covers the scope of the region from prehistory to Charlemagne, including the region’s first appearance in recorded history under the Romans. After that, the author winds his way through early medieval history (2), the high middle ages (3), the late middle ages (4), going to the problems of Napoleon (10, 11), the Franco-Prussian War (12), World War I (13), and World War II (14), after which there is a postscript, acknowledges, a bibliography, and an index. The contents of this book range from political and military history, which for this region is pretty grim material of bloody battles, horrific sieges, and hostility towards the native inhabitants of the land by one massive army of imperialistic outsiders or another that comes off as somewhat genocidal. In addition to this, there are discussions of religion, art, literature, as well as economic history and a discussion of science and technology and its effect on the region and its people.

In reading this book, the reader is likely to have conflicting feelings. The author himself appears to feel a high degree of pride and interest in the region he discusses here. He seems to have, like many of his readers are likely to have, a wistful fondness for small states where people can be free without massive and oppressive governments. He describes his own efforts to travel and appreciate the countryside from its quirky borders, the baffling geography and history, museums, graveyards, and even the remnants that have survived from long-ago times. The bears of Bern get repeatedly mentioned, and despite my own more limited travels in the region, it is amusing to hear his takes on some of the same places in the area that both him and I have seen–especially his thoughts on the Chateau du Chillion and Montreux in general. In reading this book, one gets the sense that it is hard for small peoples and small nations to survive in a world that worships size and power, and that this area and so many others would be far better off if people did not seek to destroy the world in order that they might control it. Over and over again in this book, one sees the resourcefulness of common people of small realms seeking to make do as the world fights in their midst, trading off areas in marriages or treaties, filled with the sullen hostility of lost glory that they desire to reconquer while the regions inhabitants simply move on and persist in the face of more than a thousand years in which the area has served as the borderlands of the larger French and German world, neither of which have tended to let things remain as they are for long.