The Pity of War

England and Germany, Bitter Friends, Beloved Foes

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Pub Date Nov 01 2014 | Archive Date Oct 24 2014

Description

In 1613, a beautiful Stuart princess married a handsome young German prince. This was a love match, but it was also an alliance that aimed to meld Europe's two great Protestant powers. Before Elizabeth and Frederick left London for the court in Heidelberg, they watched a performance of The Winter's Tale. In 1943, a group of British POWs gave a performance of that same play to a group of enthusiastic Nazi guards in Bavaria. Nothing about the story of England and Germany, as this remarkable book demonstrates, is as simple as we might expect.

Miranda Seymour tells the forgotten story of England’s centuries of profound connection and increasingly rivalrous friendship with Germany, linked by a shared faith, a shared hunger for power, a shared culture (Germany never doubted that Shakespeare belonged to them, as much as to England), and a shared leadership. German monarchs ruled over England for three hundred years—and only ceased to do so through a change of name.

This vibrant and heart-breaking history—told through the lives of princes and painters, soldiers and sailors, bakers and bankers, charlatans and saints—traces two countries so entwined that one German living in England in 1915 refused to choose where his allegiance lay. It was, he said, as if his parents had quarreled. Germany’s connection to the island it loved, patronized, influenced, and fought was unique. Indeed, British soldiers went to war in 1914 against a country to which many of them—as one freely confessed the week before his death on the battlefront—felt more closely connected than to their own. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished papers and personal interviews, the author has recovered vibrant stories that remind us—poignantly, wittily, and tragically—of the powerful bonds many have chosen to forget.

In 1613, a beautiful Stuart princess married a handsome young German prince. This was a love match, but it was also an alliance that aimed to meld Europe's two great Protestant powers. Before...


Advance Praise

Most readable and compulsive. . . . By writing her book as a patchwork of individual tales, Seymour allows this story of torn loyalties and proliferating influences to retain its messiness and its colour.
The Guardian


Miranda Seymour’s . . . hugely entertaining and absorbing study . . . keeps the political, military and diplomatic dimensions as a framework and focuses on two centuries of personal relationships, families and friendships.
Daily Telegraph


Most readable and compulsive. . . . By writing her book as a patchwork of individual tales, Seymour allows this story of torn loyalties and proliferating influences to retain its messiness and its...


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Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781442241749
PRICE $34.00 (USD)

Average rating from 8 members


Featured Reviews

Timely reminder of the long standing often ambivalent yet ultimately profitable, for both nations, relationship between England and Germany.

Full review available on blog after 11th November 2014

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I’m not sure why this book hasn't received more attention, as I found it extremely interesting, and it’s a shame there are not more reviews to attract other readers. It’s an exploration of the bonds that have existed between England and Germany over the centuries and how those bonds were almost destroyed due to two devastating wars. Political, intellectual and family ties had kept the two countries firmly linked until then. In fact so many were the links that the book sometimes suffers from too many characters dropping in and out – I could have done with a handy list - and occasionally I felt the book lost focus and rambled a bit. Nevertheless it’s an impressive work of research and scholarship, presented in an accessible way, and will appeal to the general reader and amateur historian, if not to more academic readers.

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