The Ruins of the Reich

Via cathedrals and castles, statues and spas, Michael Geoghegan travels through a modern yet nostalgic landscape. Whether it's festivals or fascist marches, Bruckner or Janacek, a Strength Through Joy holiday camp or bohemian Berlin, this is a compelling and vivid exploration of German identity seen through traces of the past in the present.

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This exploration of German identity unfurls as the author journeys through the former German Reich, through the eighteen territories memorialised in the Hall of Liberation. His travels cover present-day Germany and Austria and those regions of Italy, Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania and Russia which were once German or which remain German-speaking. Geoghegan witnesses a parade of "Schutzen" in Bolzano, an Easter Monday demonstration in Frankfurt and the Festival of the Five-Petalled Rose in Cesky Krumlov. He visits monasteries, fantasy castles, Jewish ghettoes and the remains of the Iron Curtain. He is stopped by "unofficial collaborators" in a wood near Weimar, gets hopelessly lost in Swinoujscie and spends a dismal New Year's Eve in Rudesheim. There are flashbacks to an exchange visit to Dusseldorf as a schoolboy, love affairs and broken engagements, arrests at borders and a search for his Stasi file. Underpinning the contemporary travelogue are cultural-historical observations on the theme of German national identity. The author encounters the patriotic monuments of nineteenth-century Germany and the ruins and surviving fabric of the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the Communist bloc. He visits the model villages, seaside resorts, occult sites and concentration camps of National Socialism, and engages with cultural figures whose works reflect differing approaches to the idea of Germanness: the paintings of Lucas Cranach and Anselm Kiefer; the music of Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner; the sculptures of Arno Breker and the architecture of Wilhelm Kreis; and the writings of Eduard Moerike, Bertolt Brecht and Gunter Grass.