It being a hundred years since 1914 I recently listened to an audio book of the World War I section of Golo Mann’s Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. I was so enchanted by it that I quickly acquired and listened to the audiobooks of the rest of his history of modern Germany. Mann has a wonderful sense of the ironies and inconsistencies of human history. Although he himself has somewhat liberal tendencies he has great ability to sympathize with those with whom he disagrees. Witness his account of the Zentrumspartei that I have just posted to The Josias. Unlike most liberals he obviously studied Marx closely and learned much from him, but he does not reduce everything to economics, he takes religion, philosophy, music, and literature seriously, and argues that they are not mere ideological superstructure but have an actual effect on history.
