Suzi Feay's Book Bag

Lockdown has impelled me towards books I might not have read under other circumstances. Long books, about complicated topics. Books that require a bit of thought. I had a copy of Simon Winder’s ‘Lotharingia’ (Picador) knocking about, having heard him speak amusingly at an event. The third part in a trilogy (after ‘Germania’ and ‘Danubia’), it tells the story of ‘Europe’s Lost Country’. Lotharingia forms a long strip from the Netherlands to Switzerland, taking in parts of France, Germany and Belgium, together with Luxemburg. Its history is a staggeringly diverse and complex topic to cover in one book, even one of 450+ pages.

Even Winder’s definition of the territory is complicated: ‘the area from where the Rhine leaves Lake Constance, taking in the banks of the Rhine including the northern Swiss Cantons… Lotharingia is formed to the east by the banks of the Rhine, and to the west by the areas of France which were for many centuries part of the Holy Roman Empire… stopping just short of North Holland.’

It is ‘an enormous region… strikingly empty of major capital cities’, states Winder. What it does have is an enormous range of fascinating museums, fortifications and major cathedrals, and Winder is not a man to leave a single one out. If he sees a Gothic silhouette on the horizon, he checks it out, skipping with glee. From his starting point of 843AD, when the territory came into existence, he explains that ‘outsiders have tried and failed to get their hands on the wealthy and sophisticated lands of Lotharingia’. The Lotharingians themselves had an amazing ability to adversely affect the military and political plans of more major European players throughout history, and Winder tells the story with great verve.

I didn’t have to wait long to get hooked. Page 38 to be exact, when Winder describes Wagner’s Rhinemaidens as ‘Europe’s most nubile security squad’. (I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Rhinegold.) He loves a great character, whether male or female, lover, genius or fool, and stuffs his account with enough material to fill a score of thrilling biographies. Along the way there are charming personal interjections. ‘Spiritually I have always been a bit confused. Both my parents were Catholic and I was raised as Catholic. But I was sent away to very Protestant schools. I cannot swear that I noticed the difference for a long time…’ A three-week visit to France aged 14 was hardly calculated to fuel Europhilia; it left him feeling like one of the ‘disregarded small animals in a zoo that huddle in the back of their cage in soiled straw, ears flat to their heads and eyes blank with permanent terror’. How strange this French farming family was to a middle-class child, ‘with guns and dogs and open-face flans, spiral staircases and Monsieur wearing a long cloak’.

Jolly subtitles sprinkle the book: ‘Kilometre pigs’; ‘Boulogne boy makes good’; ‘The call of the oliphant’; ‘Sperm by candlelight’. The enthusiasm rarely falters. A grand house outside Utrecht has ‘a fair claim to be one of the most resonant sites in Europe’. ‘For anyone who gets a funny feeling when they hear the words “epaulette”, “shako” or “regimental silverware”, the Badenese military museum in Rastatt is the equivalent of the Folies Bergere.’ Mixed metaphors merely add to the delight: in the decades before 1914, he claims, ‘Architecture lurched about crazily, devouring then regurgitating a buffet trolley: Byzantime, Aztec, Greek, Javanese, Carolingian – an incontinent thrashing about that caused such indigestion that it forced Modernism to come to the rescue, kicking in the stained-glass and copper-tendril front door and arresting the lot.’

So enthusiastic is he that it comes as a surprise when he plods glumly through ‘One of the most relentlessly uninteresting displays of sculpture in Western Europe’ on the ground floor of the Musee des Beaux Arts in Lille. Even amid such dullness he can observe ‘an odd feature of the era’, the way that ‘allegorical and mythical women seem obliged at moments of crisis to step out of their clothes.’ The glum mood doesn’t last for long, for downstairs in the basement is ‘something magical’: a series of ‘map tables’, tabletop tableaux of fortified towns, intended for military purposes but now ‘among the greatest of all French works of art’.

Throughout, the key word is ‘fun’. Military museums, cathedrals and monstrous monuments are fun. Tramping through obscure Flanders towns way off the tourist trail is fun. Everything is such fun, in fact, it comes as a shock when something’s defined as not fun, such as standing ‘in the same lightly remodelled entrance to the Hotel Dreesen that Hitler and Churchill stood in for their famous picture together’.

If I have a preference, it’s for the first half of the book, when characters have such names as Juana the Mad, Charles the Fat, Philip the Handsome and (best of all) Mary the Rich of Burgundy. (Charles X is Winder’s ‘favourite catastrophic French royal’). But throughout Winder has a way of cutting through large historical events such as the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon with a witty aphorism or brisk piece of exposition. His breakdown of the way the distinctive nature of Lotharingia played out in the First World War, when trenches bisected it, is masterly.

Oh, and Lothar? Lothair II was a descendant of Charlemagne who inherited a stretch of land north of Provence, hence Lotharingia: ‘The lands of Lothar’. Writing about them was a mad endeavour, but lots of fun.