Death in Venice – a fine adaptation of Mann's novella

It’s the last day of February – and therefore the last day of LGBT+ History Month – so to conclude my thematic viewing on that basis, a repeat watch of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice.

Gustav von Aschenbach is a German composer in the early 20^th century. Suffering ill health, grief and a crisis in his work, he journeys to Venice to recover. At his hotel, he sees a beautiful young boy, Tadzio, and becomes utterly besotted. While never making verbal or physical contact, Aschenbach follows the boy and his family around, his own personal crises increasing rapidly, while at the same time, La Serenissima faces an increasing health problem.

The film is an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, which I first read in 2001. A German friend had introduced me to Mann, recommending Buddenbrooks. Having read – and been captivated by that – I looked for more.

I knew the title of Death in Venice – but nothing more. I bought it, read the short stories that fill out most volumes and then the novella itself – albeit slowly. I was utterly blown away by the novella. Having spent the decades since my very late teens believing that Lord of the Rings was the greatest thing ever written, such a faith was utterly and irrevocably changed.

I have long attempted to write myself and, at that point, was doing so quite regularly. But I was stopped in my tracks by Death in Venice. My gods – you could do something like this in a ‘story’? The words wouldn’t come. It was some considerable time before I could even attempt fiction again.

Indeed, the Late OH and I were visiting friends on the west Irish coast, at the beginning of this century. We were walking by the sea, and I noticed that the wind was sending a fine spray of sand hovering horizontally above the beach itself – as if it were a sandy magic carpet. Desperate to describe to myself – and thereby understand – what I was seeing, suddenly the words started tumbling out of me again.

In 2010, the Late OH and I had done A Very Big Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip for his fifteeth: the Orient Express to Venice. I took a certain book by one Agatha Christie with me. When we visited again, in early 2017, I took the Mann, and sat reading it briefly on the beach in front of the hotel – Grand Hotel des Bains – in the film. It’s also the hotel in the novella, where Mann was staying when he was inspired to write it.

When my own fifteeth approached, it was a question of what I’d do. I decided that I wanted a brief trip abroad on my own, having never done so previously, for all sorts of reasons; fear and lack of money being primary.

I thought of cooking classes in Sicily and art schools in France. And found myself ultimately terrified. And then I reached a conclusion: Lübeck, where Mann himself had hailed from and where Günter Grass, another German literary laureate and personal hero, lived. And also, because the language beyond English that I know best is German, having been studying it in an – often random way – for a couple of decades now.

I recall sitting with a coffee, outside a cafe in old medieval Lübeck, blanket dove my knees (it was 'Baltic' cold!) and listening to a superb violinist play the adagiettio from Mahler's fifth symphony, an iconic piece of music that has becomes the film's theme.

That trip was a rite of passage – better late than never, I guess. But that’s an indicator of what Mann and his work means to me.

On my sixtieth birthday, in December 2022, The Late OH gave me a signed, English-language edition of three short stories by Mann. It meant – and means – so much.

I feel as though I’m going through another explosion of personal growth right now – akin with the language experience in Ireland. Watching Victim a couple of nights ago, and Death in Venice tonight, I seem to be seeing and reading more in films than I did previously. There are words in my head that would not have been in my useable vocabulary previously. Yet they’re there now. And a different way of seeing and reading is also there.

But enough of me. To the film itself. It is beautiful to watch – Pasqualino De Santis’s cinematography is wonderful. It frequently looks like an Impressionist painting. By the way, if you wonder if the green of the lagoon is accurate – yes, it is.

There are issues about how Björn Andrésen, who plays Tadzio, feels in retrospect about the film – to be clear, he has spoken of great discomfort etc, but never of any physical abuse from anyone involved in the making of it.

The film is not as subtle as Mann’s novella, but it is still a thing of great beauty – and a contemplation of beauty, and the debilitating sense of guilt about who you are at your most intrinsic level.

And then there is Dirk Bogarde as von Aschenbach. There is so little dialogue in the film as a whole, but Bogarde does so much with his facial expressions, including on some very, very long shots. It is a superb performance. And it is a superb film.

Politics in sport? It's not as new as wannabe culture warriors would have you think

In 1895, rugby clubs in the north of England made the decision to break away from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) to form the Northern Union. What they created became rugby league. And the reason for the split?

Well, most of the players worked for a living, in the mills and pits. To play rugby competitively, they had to forgo some of their wage.

The northern clubs wanted to make this up to them in the form of what were called broken-time payments. In other words, not some sort of profit, but compensation for wages lost.

 

However, the RFU was having none of it and in 1893, voted against a move to allow such payments.

 

Two years before that, Leeds president James Miller had noted: “It is unreasonable to expect the same ‘amateurism’ from the wage-earning classes as from public school men. It is unfair to expect working men to break time to play football without their being remunerated.”

But the cult of amateurism remained in place in rugby union until 1995 – a century of spiteful, vindictive, petty behaviour that saw players barred from union for as much as playing a single, unpaid game for an amateur rugby league club.

For instance, if someone had played the game recreationally in the north of England, while working as a doctor, and then moved to the south west of the country, they wouldn’t be allowed to play recreational rugby union.

I recall, from my own days as a sports editor (so pre-1999), a pompous ass of an ex-British Army officer defending this, intoning that if someone with such a past wanted to play recreational RU, they could jolly well ‘join the armed services’.

But the point of mentioning this now is that we find ourselves suddenly hearing the cries of ‘keep politics out of football!’ – including from, err, politicians trying to whip up a culture war in the UK.

The cult of amateurism was a political one, because class is political.

To be a successful amateur athlete, you needed time to train – and working-class people didn’t have that luxury since they had to do actual jobs in order, as old Charlie Marx might point out, to keep a roof over their (and their families’) heads and food in their bellies.

Amateurism was not exclusive to rugby. It was dominant in the UK (particularly England) in many sports. For instance, in rowing, Steve Redgrave’s achievements are all the more remarkable given that he came from a working-class background and didn’t go to public school.

In 1882, the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA) was founded and, a year later, it set out a definition of an amateur. To give just a single example of its exclusionary criteria, anyone who had ever been “employed in or around boats, or in manual labour for money or wages, was not an amateur”.

 

So you couldn’t row in ARA competitions if, for instance, you were a Thames lighterman as your job.

 

The issue around class and sport still features in the life of the UK today. How often do you see snotty newspaper stories about rugby union players or golfers or tennis players or F1 drivers – unless, in the case of the penultimate one, it’s snotty English stories about dodgy Scot Andy Murray or, in the last one, the rather non-white Lewis Hamilton?

 

Those sports are – in England at least (it’s particularly a different case in Scotland around golf) – seen as being for A Slightly Better Class of People. In other words, you probably need a bit of dosh and time to participate.

And goodness, look back at cricket and the entire concept of 'gentlemen and players' – amateurs and pros: the snobbery – and the politics – are enshrined in the language.

 

Football, however, remains culturally working class – for all the money coming into the English game from some exceptionally wealthy sources.

 

Think of the many times have there been negative stories about ‘wealthy footballers’ – the only group the UK’s Conservative government ever suggested should give up some of their pay because of COVID-19 – and also a group that routinely sees negative stories about them in the press.

 

And square that if the player in question is black – see the contrast between the Daily Mail’s reporting of how Manchester City duo Raheem Sterling and Phil Foden have spent some of the money they have been paid by their employer.

Today, the Sun, which has rubbished Sterling more than once for being 'flashy', 'unethical' etc, lauded him on its cover of Monday's edition for scoring the winning goal against Croatia in the European Championships. Glass houses spring to mind

 

Let’s be quite clear – racism and politics are interconnected.

 

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden and – of course – PM Boris Johnson are currently fannying around complaining about ‘politicising sport’. In the former’s case, commenting on the reaction of his employer to historic, racist tweets by an England cricketer, and about England players taking the knee, in the latter.

 

It took a passionate yet calm article from England’s football manager Gareth Southgate on the subject – and the reaction to it – to persuade Johnson that, oops-a-daisy, he should actually condemn those who were booing England players taking the knee.

 

Now, as Kenan Malik pointed out in today’s Observer, taking the knee might mean little – and it might mean virtue signalling – but the England team is not a bunch of Marxist anti-capitalists who want to end our way of life, blah blah blah.

 

Though to be fair, I doubt that anyone applauding the suggestion that they are, whichever cretinous Tory MP or shock jock suggests as much, actually has a great deal of a clue as to what ‘Marxism’ actually is. 

 

But there you go – that’s the constituency that this Conservative government’s culture war is being aimed at.

 

The reality is, that as long as sport has existed, politics has been entwined with it – and Malik’s article gives other examples.

 

Of course Dowden has dived in – this is an individual who now has himself pictured in his office, with a whopping big Union flag, much smaller flags of the constituent nations of the UK (watch out Ollie – your leader won’t like that) and a large portrait of the queen – presumably for the simple reason that he believes it to be convenient for his career.

 

He also has a similar relationship with facts as The Dear Leader. Apropos his tweet at the weekend – subsequently deleted – falsely claiming that the Minack Theatre in Cornwall (which hosted a G7 partners’ event) had received government financial aid during the pandemic.

 

It hadn’t. And he hasn’t apologised or made a correction. Just deleted the tweet.

 

But hey – taking the knee is ‘politics’.

 

For my parents, politics in sport was people trying to stop cricket tours to apartheid South Africa. Because somewhere along the line, they'd missed the idea that apartheid itself was ... ‘political’.

 

But that highlights a point: while the German Nobel literature laureate and anti-Nazi Thomas Mann said that “everything is politics”, for many, it doesn’t become so unless and until it challenges their view of the world.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when women challenge the privileged role men have in society.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when LGBT+ people dare to raise their heads about the parapet and demand equality.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when black people call for meaningfully equal treatment.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when disabled people dare to suggest that they might have their needs considered.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when a museum wants to take down an external statue of an individual who profited from slavery.

 

But of course, it’s not ‘politics’ when the secretary of state responsible threatens the museum in question over that issue.

The status quo is never ‘politics’.

 

So, if you think that removing the statues of those who profited from selling other human beings for profit is ‘politics’, you probably don’t want to really think about the history of this country.

If you think that England players taking the knee is ‘politics’, you probably don't want to spend time learning about the actual, real history of this country.

 

You want to stay in a history comfort zone – because you perhaps need, for the sake of your own sense of self, to feel that the country of the accident of your birth, is brilliant and far superior to other countries, making you superior to lots of other people.

And if you think that, if some statues are removed, history will end, then you might need help.

 

If this is the case, then the NHS can still get you counselling – even in this time of COVID.

• The photo at the top is of protestors dumping a statue of Bristolian slave trade Edward Colston into the harbour in 2020, from Kier Gravil – ksagphotos.

 

All badged up

The overarching message from today’s exercise in re-badging my leather jacket, now returned from the cleaners, seems to have been that you can make statements without appearing to do so.

I started badging it some years ago, seeing it as a very personal form of ‘rock chic’ and absolutely refusing to add any obviously ‘political’ badges.

Over the last few years, it’s attracted plenty of comment and enquiry. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think it says more about me and what I believe in than if I’d dressed the jacket in rather more obvious pins.

Loosely, there are themes. And as Thomas Mann once said: “Everything is politics”.

So here’s a guide to my newly badged jacket.

From top left (approximately) – travel is good. We start with a flag pin representing Lübeck. This was my destination as a 50th birthday ‘thang’: I’d never been out of the UK on my own before this and it was a (long overdue) rite of passage to prove I could travel to ‘Abroadland’ all on my own.

I chose Lübeck because of Mann and Günter Grass and because I’d spent around 10 years teaching myself a bit of German so felt a certain confidence in the idea that I might be able to communicate at a basic level.

It was a fabulous and seminal trip.

Füssen? More German stuff – Bavaria; the Alps; simply gorgeous. Ties in with the edelweiss pin.

Then Thomas Mann – I have spares ope this pin; that’s how important it is to me. I loved Buddenbrooks … but then I read Death in Venice and my mind was well and truly blown.

The travel section includes Collioure – of course – plus Vienna, Sorrento and Sicily: all are special to me.

Beethoven is crucial: I love classical music and Ludwig in particular. And his 250th birthday is next year, so it would be poor tom leave him out.

That Concorde? A lovely pin, bought in Folkstone, together with a Spitfire pin. But at present, wearing a Spitfire could send out all the wrong signals, while this suggests European co-operation.

The Royal Opera House? Well, if you read this blog regularly, you’ll know why.

The Haring ‘resist’ pin? Haring at Tate Liverpool was my art revelation this year and resisting the Establishment and racism and bigotry in general is good.

The birds? Well, I saw a kingfisher this year and interacted with a raven (my absolute top bird). I love corvids in general, including those beauties, magpies. Red squirrels – only seen in Germany and Austria – but wonderful nonetheless.

Stephen Sondheim is a god, Star Wars is a big part of my cultural life, along with The Wizard of Oz (and as some of you will know, I’m a ‘friend of Dorothy’), while Captain Haddock represents comics and cartoons, and Shakespeare … well, I ‘dig’ The Bard big time.

This is how to make comments about yourself but leave others imply enjoying the colour!

Subversive Faustian stuff

It’s four and a half years since The Other Half and I started going to the Royal Opera House fairly regularly. We’d been to the English National Opera on a handful of occasions – triggered by being able to get into Terry Gillian’s Damnation of Faust – but nursed a view that we’d ideally like to see operas in their original languages.

Since we started doing just that, one of the things I’ve learned is that it wasn’t just Wagner and Verdi who wrote long operas.

And one of the conundrums I’ve faced is how I can love opera so much when so many of the characters – not least from 19th and early 20th century works – are so unsympathetic.

Last Thursday was a perfect illustration of both points: to start the Easter weekend, we’d got tickets for Gounod’s Faust – a work that neither of us was familiar with, although both of us know the general Faust legend.

Obviously Goethe didn’t have a monopoly on telling the story and indeed, Gounod’s version takes only that which would suit a sentimental French audience, according to Rupert Christiansen in the Faber Pocket Guide to Opera.

Faust is an elderly scholar realising that his dedication to the job has cost him happiness and love (and coded within that, lust). He’s full of regret. Méphistophélès appears and offers him a second chance – if he’ll subsequently serve Méphistophélès in hell. Faust agrees.

Faust sees Marguerite, whose brother, Valentin, has just left for war. He falls in love/lust and is helped to win the virginal naif by Méphistophélès.

Then, after Faust has seemingly abandoned his pregnant love, Valentin arrives home home from war, wanting only to tell everyone about it. He learns what’s happened to Marguerite and challenges her lover. Faust, with help from Méphistophélès, kills him. As Valentin dies, he curses … Marguerite.

The pregnant Marguerite – gone bonkers in her abandonment – gives birth, kills the child and awaits the guillotine. Méphistophélès teases Faust, but then helps him enter her cell, with the possibility of aiding her escape. Marguerite remembers her love for him and decides not to flee. Faust sees her soul ascend to heaven. He, meanwhile, is abandoned by Méphistophélès.

Point one – it’s overlong. The third act in particular is self-indulgent – which is not to say that the music is bad, because it isn’t. It’s just too long. We reach a point where Gounod is simply repeating himself: albeit tunefully.

Point two – Marguerite has little real depth as a character, but in terms of our sympathy, she’s a victim of a patriarchal situation that says how she must behave. Interestingly, her neighbour Marthe is an older woman and a widow, and seems to be able to be as sexual as she likes without anyone going dotty, which suggests that sexual mores are not fixed simply in that society.

Clearly, Marguerite is the victim here and we sympathise with her – as much as her rather one-dimensional character allows.

Next up – Valentin. Well, what an arse. Comes home from war, full of himself, and then blames his sister because she took a lover and he cannot control his jealousy.

Okay: I do actually know that this was penned in the late 19th century, but he’s still a tit. He probably killed people, yet he’s offended that his sister has had a lover and got knocked up. And when his own impetuous stupidity leads to his death, he blames her!

So: not a shred of sympathy there.

For Faust, I can have a modicum of sympathy. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann rather more adroitly explores the idea of a life spent in dedicated work and the regret it creates, but without creating victims. Here, while one can sympathise with that aspect of Faust’s situation, one cannot sympathise with is his subsequent decision to abandon Marguerite.

Which brings us to Méphistophélès.

Frankly, I’m in love (lust) with Méphistophélès. No crap ‘morals’. No hypocrisy. Since my own faith fled – late, unexpectedly and without any real challenge, I have found myself considering the idiocy of putting the issue of who and how you shag (assuming consenting adults) over whether you lie, con, cheat etc.

I know which I consider to be what morality is about.

I would also suggest that, if god really does exist, then the devil – Méphistophélès – is going to have the best parties and the best discussions.

The ROH has assembled a magnificent cast for the fifth reveal of David McVicar’s production, which is set on the even of the Franco-Prussian War.

Michael Fabiano is a wonderful Faust, while Irina Lungo wrings as much from Marguerite as I suspect is possible. Stéphane Degout is as good as Valentin can be and Carole Wilson deserves praise for her earthy Marthe.

But what made my evening was Erwin Schrott’s Méphistophélès. A deliciously naughty, witty, sexy performance – not least in the penultimate act, when McVicar has Méphistophélès appear as a queen; in full drag.

Even in 2019, it is a fabulously subversive moment that sums up why, given the choice, I’d opt for Méphistophélès every time. And Schrott is not only a superb bass-baritone, but also a wonderful actor, who makes his role every bit as dangerous and as enticing as Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Show.

And that, my friends, is why this is such fantastic stuff.

Forget the snobbery: comics are no con

If you can’t choose one, get the set

There’s little as irritating as snobbery – in oh so many walks of life.

Now to be absolutely fair, there’s also a form of reverse snobbery – or relativism, as it’s known – that asserts, for instance, that EastEnders is just as good as Shakespeare, NWA are genuinely the equal of Wagner, and Minions is as good a film as The Enigma of Kasper Hauser.

Now: time for the declaration.

I watch no soaps. I love Bill the Bard. I do listen to and enjoy some ‘popular’ music – but not NWA. I increasingly believe that Wagner wrote the most stunning music ever. I love Minions – AND I love The Enigma of Kasper Hauser.

Both are possible, without my remotely pretending that that means that the former is equal to the latter in critical terms.
 

I also like comics. And Thomas Mann. (And Günter Grass. And Gabriel García Márquez). 

That doesn’t mean a Superman story is the same as a Thomas Mann novella. But then again, what is? And indeed, few comics (well, certainly not the ones I read) are like a Superman story.

My introduction to comics as an adult came in 1990, when I was handed a copy of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta to review, and had my mind well and truly blown.

There have been graphic novels on my shelves ever since.

Anyway, this weekend has been special: because yesterday morning, the first issue of William’s Gibson’s first ever comic slid through my letter box.

And Archangel is every bit as slyly engaging as you would expect from the founding father of cuberpunk.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Gibson is a superb and very grow-up sci-fi writer, whose dystopian novels gave rise to the label of ‘cyberpunk’. They’re literate and philosophically interesting.

So, what do we get from issue one of Archangel? Twenty pages in, I’m fully engaged. We have a tale of scientists from a dying 2016 Earth attempting to change history by sending people back to 1945.

I really want to know what happens next, complaining loudly upon reaching the end of the story after 20 pages. This is actually what you’d expect – and largely why the majority of my comic reading is done from trades (collections of several individual issues).

But then this is a comic Event.

Of course, as with Gibson’s novels, there’s far more subtlety involved than such bare phrases suggest. The characters are already clearly beyond mere symbols.

The art – by Butch Guice – is seriously good. Plus there’s a choice of covers for the first issue, just to increase the pleasure (and possible torture) for collectors.

A page of Jaques Tardi's work

And that’s all I can really tell you at this point. But beyond the opening of the actual story, the first issue has much to offer, with sketchbook pages of character development, as well as pages through the processes (both fascinating) and notes from Gibson himself.

That’s not, however, the end of this review. 

In recent weeks, my comic reading has also included the newly-published second volume of the trade of Descender by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen.

This is good stuff, taking us forward in a story about a sentient robot child, Tim, who is struggling to stay alive in a world where all androids have been outlawed and bounty hunters are constantly hunting for them.

It was pre-ordered for the simple reason that the first volume made me care about Tim, while Nguyen’s unusual (for a comic) art is also hugely appealing.

Also entered into the recently-read list is the first part of Jaques Tardi’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec – Pterror Over Paris (which forms the basis of a Luc Besson film, in French with English subtitles, which is also worth watching).

Featuring the eponymous heroine – an archeologist and feisty creation of delightfully dubious morality – there are currently four stories available in English, so these are rare and great fun. 

It’s always worth pointing out to any snobs that the French regard comic books as the ninth art. 

Trees, by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard is another trade first volume (the second is out this summer), and is a complex interweaving of different stories from across the world, a decade after vast, alien ‘trees’ suddenly arrived and ‘planted’ themselves across the Earth – and then did nothing.

Another fascinating story that gives few clues as to where it is going to go, Ellis’s character and plot development are strong and the art from Howard is equally memorable.

A page from Fables 2

Rather older is Fables, a long series by Bill Willingham, working with various artists.

The overarching story deals with characters from myth, folktale, fairytale and fantasy literature, who are driven from their home lands by the violent Adversary and become refugees in New York, staying hidden from humans and running their own society.

The second issue, Animal Farm, with art by Mark Buckingham, Steve Leiloha and Daniel Vozzo, largely takes place in the community’s out-of-town hideaway for those who cannot maintain a human form or otherwise pass unnoticed among humankind.

And yes, those familiar with George Orwell’s novel of the same name will find links between the plots and ideas.

With an approach that owes more to the darker origins of folk and fairytales than Disney, Willingham’s series is a good illustration of just how grown-up comics can be and would be a candidate for any list of best graphic novel reads.

Volume one of The Autumnlands, by Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Dewey, is another rollicking read: a brilliantly envisaged anthropomorphic world where magic is dying and the elite are trying to save their society.

Unfortunately for them, the secret efforts of a group of wizards to save the situation plunges them all – literally – into serious danger.

Another that’s rated ‘M’ for ‘mature’, Busiek’s story unfolds darkly and brutally. Dewey’s artwork is simply brilliant.

I have no personal axe to grind about comicbook superheroes – I’m rather fond of Wonder Woman – but if you believe that the worlds of Marvel and DC are the only ones in the comic universe, then think again. 

• Archangel issue 1 is out now from idwpublishing.com. 

Descender, Trees and The Autumnlands are all from imagecomics.com. 

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec is published by Fantagraphics Books. 

Fables is available from vertigocomics.com.

There can never be too many books

And so it is that World Book Day is upon us again – and almost gone, at the time of writing.

In an era where, increasingly, digital seems to dominate, it’s wonderful to think about books.

Yes, yes: I know that books can be digital too, but, to me – and many millions more – there is nothing to beat the tactile joy of a real book. Indeed, for billions of people on this planet, the old-fashioned variety of bound paper is all that they can hope to have access to.

Do you remember the joy when, as a child, you managed to read a book on your own for the first time?

I cannot remember the title of the first book I managed like that, but I remember sitting in a small red and white straw child’s basket chair with it, and being so proud when I got to the last page.

Not that long after, I took enormous pleasure in Enid Blyton’s Well Really, Mr Twiddle, which had me hooting with hysterical laughter.

Many years later, I got pretty much the same sense of pride from reading an entire Asterix book in German. Books always offer potential for new moments of personal achievement.

At the beginning of my twenties, I suffered some sort of breakdown after being injured and then chucked out of polytechnic. For ages, I couldn’t read – even much-loved books could not hold my concentration beyond the first few pages.

What revived reading for me was Stephen King. I picked up Carrie in a local bookshop and couldn’t it down. Then The Stand and It, with many more to follow.

I ‘discovered’ Terry Pratchett before he was anywhere near national treasure status, standing in a small sci-fi and fantasy bookshop to meet him once when nobody else was even around.

The result is three very precious signed volumes of the earliest Discworld novels.

Books – among the very first things I’d unpack in my nomadic early adulthood: get those out and it would start to feel like home.

Books, which provide a wonderful pre-holiday ritual when considering what from my buckling shelves I wish to take.

Books, which bring with them knowledge and entertainment.

While the majority of the books that I have bought in recent years have been non-fiction, I still seek out good storytelling too.

Penguin are now releasing the entire Maigret collection, and with new translations that finally do Simenon’s noir novels justice. Those are on pre-order with me.

There are old friends that I have read many times already and will probably read many times more: Jan Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre (which I hated at school), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Stephen King’s The Shining (the movie was crap) and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, all of which I find new things in every time I pick them up.

I have a few antiquarian (relish that word) books – some up to 200 years old. They are to be treasured and looked after: I feel only a temporary guardian.

And I also rather pride myself on having a collection of books about German history – no! Not that period! – that would, I suspect, count as pretty decent.

I still judge a bookshop on its history section: on whether it is just full of WWII and the Nazis or goes beyond that.

Of course, talking of the Nazis, it’s always worth remembering how they burnt books on Bebelplatz in Berlin in 1933 – right next to the Humboldt University. That symbolism should tell you something about the power of the written word. And today, of course, we have groups of religious fundamentalists who want to deny people – and women and girls in particular – the right to learn.

Whether in the deepest, darkest days or winter, curled up on the sofa with a good read and a hot chocolate or under a parasol on the beach in the height of summer, is there really anything that can compare to the pleasure that can be found in the pages of a good book?

So let’s celebrate books today – and those who create them and those who read them – but let’s never stop loving books for all the other days of the year.

And PS: make sure you love your local library too.

Germany and the complexity of memory

VW Beetle at the British Museum. Ink on A5 paper, A Kendal

It is perhaps one of life’s little tricks that, having grown up in a rabidly anti-German home, I should become a Germanophile.

One of the contributory factors was history. Studying for my O’ level and bored to tears with the Corn Laws (well, who wouldn’t be?) the course that probably gained me a pass was Bismarck and German unification. Because it was the one course that absolutely fascinated me.

Some 20 years later, during a stint at the online version of the Guardian, I was subbing an article by its then Berlin correspondent, John Hooper, about the Lange Kerls, Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia’s extraordinary regiment of particularly tall men.

It was far from being the same period as that which I’d so enjoyed studying in the 1970s, but it reminded me of that. In the next few days, I started hunting in bookshops for books on Prussia; the start if an affair that would grow to encompass an ever-wider area of history.

And even now, I will judge a bookshop on the basis of whether or not its history section contains anything beyond the Nazi era.

So when it was announced that the British Museum was hosting an exhibition on Germany: Memories of a Nation, it was always going to be a must-see.

Neil MacGregor is director of the museum, and his own previous works include A History of the World in 100 Objects. Here, the exhibition itself was built around a substantial new tome by MacGregor, plus an acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series (which I missed), and takes a similar approach.

I’m not sure that I went expecting to be educated as such, but more that I went in anticipation of seeing things, in the flesh, that would provide a visual companion to some of what I’ve read in the past 14 years or so.

Having walked up the steps of the Reading Room, past a VW Beetle and a fragment of the Berlin Wall, the exhibition proper begins with a brief explanation of how Germany has not long been that; that it shares more borders with other countries than any other European nation, that its borders have been more fluid than those of other nations and, indeed, that there was, for most of its history, no such thing as a common and single ‘Germany’.

All this I – and The Other Half – was familiar with. Which made me realise that I’d probably never attended an exhibition with as much base knowledge as I already had in this case.

But to be honest, I don’t think that we were the core target audience.

The exhibition sets out, it seems to me, to convey a wider picture of Germany than that which has been dominant in the UK since 1939.

The Blacksmith of German Unity, print

You cannot, of course, omit the Nazi era, and the exhibition does not, including a range of exhibits from a pre-war anti-semitic poster to a 1935 sheet of a cut-out Hitler and marching brown shirts for children.

Here too is a replica of the gate to the Buchenwald concentration camp: wrought iron; small, like a garden gate, with its motto, ‘Jedem das Seine’ (‘to each what is due to them’) facing inward for the prisoners on the parade ground to see every day; a motto, one could feel, that is even more sinister even than the famous ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘work makes you free’) of Auschwitz, Dachau or Sachsenhausen, where it was facing outwards to be seen by those arriving at the camps.

But the designer of the Buchenwald gate, Franz Ehrlich, had learned his art in Bauhaus: the lettering was, unlike that elsewhere, an obvious nod to the modernism that Hitler considered ‘degenerate’.

And that motto could be seen in another way, as meaning that the guards, the torturers and the killers would, one day, get what they were due.

It is a perfect illustration of the complexity of German history.

MacGregor explains in the accompanying book that one of his aims was to examine how Germans see themselves and their own national story, a quarter of a century after it’s latest incarnation came into being with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There are many things that could be viewed as strange omissions – and all of us with some knowledge would doubtless be able to cite a few.

Personally, I was surprised to see no mention in the exhibition itself of Thomas Mann, although he’s in the pages of Neil MacGregor’s book of the same name. There’s no Günter Grass in either.

Less personally but more surprisingly, there’s no mention that I can recall of music – and Germany provided two of the trio of composers who all singlehandledly changed the course of classical music. Setting aside Mozart as Austrian, that still leaves Beethoven and Wagner, whose absences seem particularly strange if one is attempting to convey that wider picture.

One can only guess that it was assumed that this was a known part of German history and culture, although the different ways in which, post WWII, these two composers have been treated can itself offer an interesting way of exploring MacGregor’s themes.

It is, I think, rather a butterfly of an exhibition: a gentle flit across a period of history that is largely unknown to most Britons.

Yet that lightness is deceptive, and in the selected objects there are plenty of things to fascinate, intrigue and even stun.

Napoleon's hat from Waterloo

You will not often, for instance, see an edition of Martin Luther’s own translation of the Bible into German, with his own handwritten version of Psalm 23 and his signature on the facing page, dated 1542.

That’s the sort of thing I find stunning.

And then there was one of the remaining 48 copies of the Gutenberg Bible from 1455, with its still-immaculate Gothic type.

Both these Bibles serve as a reminder of the linguistic and democratic impact of the Reformation – no matter how much the latter was to shock and appall Luther himself.

Among the other objects that hit one like a hammer is one of Napoleon’s hats, taken as war booty from his abandoned carriage after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

There’s an intriguing iron and terracotta statue of Bismarck, showing the Iron Chancellor as a blacksmith, standing at his anvil, crafting a united Germany.

Next to it is a copy of Marx’s Capital, volume one, presented to the museum by the author himself, who had spent many an hour working in the old reading room.

A Bauhaus cradle by Peter Keler (1922) – a design still being produced – shows how good design is good not simply because it looks good, but because it works well too.

There’s a stage design for the original production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, plus Dürer’s Rhinoceros (1515) and then a vast Meissen porcelain version (1730).

If Isaac Habreacht’s 1589 ‘portable’ Strasbourg clock is incredible, then the astronomical compendium by Johan Anton Linden (1596) is simply astonishing.

But one of my particular personal highlights was the chance to see Tilman Riemenschneider’s Four Evangelists, stunning wood carvings from 1490-92 from an artist/craftsman I’d encountered before only thanks to Andrew Graham Dixon’s The Art of Germany.

Carved from the traditional lime wood, they are quite beautiful – not idealised, as you’d expect with the Renaissance, but with real, human faces. Unbelievably, they were, at one point in their history, painted. Fortunately, that has been very carefully removed.

Riemenschneider's Four Evangelists

But Riemenschneider’s own story – whether historically accurate or not – is entirely in keeping with part of MacGregor’s aim. Legend has it that, in the German Peasants’ War of 1525, as a city councilor of Würzburg, Riemenschneider took the side of the peasants. After their defeat, he was arrested and his hands broken. What is certain is that no work of significance by him exists after that year.

How you see it – what you choose to believe – is all very much about how we construct the wider stories of which we are parts.

That Thomas Mann, for instance, chose to believe the story of an heroic Riemenschneider siding with the peasants tells you something about Mann himself – not about whether it really did happen or not.

On the way out, passing the VW Beetle once again, it occurred that one can see the same duality there too: once hailed by Hitler as ‘the people’s car’, its later links with flower power and hippies effectively made it ‘entartete auto’. Which is really rather pleasing.

If this feels in some ways a very small exhibition, it leaves you with a sense of something far, far larger. On a practical level, you will need at least 90 minutes to really get the most out of this – and on the basis of what I’ve read so far, the book is vital to really extending knowledge and understanding of the exhibits and their context.

In asking about Germans and the construction of national memory, MacGregor opens the door to asking everyone else to do the same.

In England at this time, that would be every bit as pertinent an exercise.  

• Germany: Memories of a Nation is at the British Museum until 25 January 2015