Revisionism at its best. The Telegraph has high praise for Joachim Whaley's Germany and the Holy Roman Empire:
The Cambridge historian Joachim Whaley has reinterpreted the final 500 years of the Holy Roman Empire as a story of success not failure, and stability rather than disintegration. ...
Whaley’s portrayal of the Holy Roman Empire, with checks and balances and loose connections between a central state and its strong local tributaries, governed by a culture of compromise and negotiation, feels like a model of good government in an age when we have learnt to fear the power of the individual nation state. ...
The Holy Roman Empire, writes Whaley, sustained “an imperial framework that ultimately facilitated the peaceful coexistence of the major Christian denominations; an imperial system which preserved the independent existence of even the smallest subsidiary unit against the predatory inclinations and ambitions of the largest ones, and which provided mechanisms whereby the subjects of all of them could appeal against their overlords through the imperial courts.”
Above all Whaley has rewritten the course of German history by suggesting that there was nothing about German society, culture or political structure that created the conditions for 20th-century authoritarianism.
If he is right there is less need to dive back into Germany’s alleged dark past to explain the horror of the mid-20th century, while the immediate circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler – the legacy of the First World War – become much more relevant. There is therefore also no need to be frightened of a powerful Germany at the heart of Europe. It may be indeed that the once despised Holy Roman Empire would serve as a decent model for a peaceful European future.
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| The Holy Roman Empire ("Germany") in 1789 |
