Germany

The Merovingians have a reputation for long hair and barbarity. Instead, the dynasty, born out of the chaos of civil war, was one of peace, diplomacy, and bureaucracy.

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud with Gladstone.

In April 1945 ten British politicians flew to Germany tasked with investigating the ‘truth’ about Buchenwald concentration camp.

The doomed film collaboration between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan resulted in two very different features serving the same fascist agenda: The Daughter of the Samurai and The New Earth. 

More than 100,000 people took up arms across the Holy Roman Empire in the spring of 1525. What drove them? And why were they ultimately crushed?

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesing brings folklore’s most famous double act out of the shadowy realm of legend.

In Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco, Tim Blanning looks for a legacy for the ‘incorrigible Saxon’.

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

An attempt to prosecute German war criminals in 1921 failed to such an extent that the entire enterprise is largely forgotten. What went wrong?

Indulgent symbol of papist excess or mouthpiece for God’s second greatest gift? What place was there for the organ in the Reformation church?