But the fall of the Berlin Wall was a Bad Thing: no sooner had the barbarians burst through in 1989, than the old extremist politics of Left and Right resurfaced in the East, unappeased by the West’s trillions. In a series of maps, Hawes tries to show that there is continuity from the Roman Germania, via the Holy Roman Empire, to Adenauer’s late, lamented West Germany. “This Germany,” Hawes assures us, “is Europe’s best hope.” Whoever wins the election in September “will face a world in which the West is tottering” and should act accordingly: as the leader of “a mighty land at the very heart of the West”.

If my summary reads a little like a caricature of Hawes’s Shortest History as a German version of the classic textbook parody by W.C. Sellars and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That, then I can only plead guilty; the temptation is too great. But Hawes is in earnest. He hopes that either Angela Merkel or her left-wing challenger Martin Schulz will emerge as the saviour of the liberal West from the scourge of populism, driven by the barbarians at the Brandenburg Gate. He doesn’t care that Mrs Merkel is, at least by background, herself one of these barbarians: an “Ossi” from the wrong side of the Wall. Many of the great (if not always good) Germans in history also came from East of the Elbe, from Bach to Wagner, from Kant to Nietzsche, and so on. Some of the worst come from the Romanised West or South, from the Crusaders who massacred the Jews of the Rhineland in the 11th century to Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, who tried to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. It is true, as Hawes claims, that those who voted for the Nazis were mainly Protestant and lived in the North and East, while those who did not were mainly Catholic and lived in the West or South. But the Catholic Centre Party (of which Adenauer, as mayor of Cologne, was a leading member) voted for Hitler’s Enabling Law that created the Nazi dictatorship; and though Hawes makes much of Bishop Galen, who bravely opposed the Nazi euthanasia programme, most prelates of the Catholic Church collaborated as willingly as their Protestant counterparts. Adenauer, who was imprisoned by the Nazis, spoke contemptuously after 1945 of the moral collapse of the German Catholic hierarchy. “Good Germans”, like war criminals, came from very varied backgrounds; the urge to assign guilt or innocence collectively deprives individuals of responsibility. Hannah Arendt fell into the trap of reducing the culpability of Eichmann, an architect of the Shoah, to “the banality of evil”; Hawes risks doing the same by making Prussia the scapegoat instead. The unintended consequence is that he makes Bismarck — who gave the Germans universal male suffrage, Jewish emancipation and the welfare state — a bigger villain than Hitler. 

What Hawes has however achieved, like Sellar and Yeatman, is to write a Memorable History: if the Prime Minister reads nothing else, she will know a good deal more about German history than most British politicians. Hawes exemplifies the remarkable contribution of Anglo-Saxon scholarship to post-war German historiography. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that much of the most important political, economic and cultural history of modern Germany has been written in English. Hawes belongs in a grand Anglo-American tradition that includes, among many others, A.J.P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Gordon Craig, Fritz Stern, Peter Gay, Sebastian Haffner, James J. Sheehan, Michael Burleigh, Richard Evans, Jonathan Steinberg, John Röhl, J.P. Stern, Norman Stone, David Blackbourn, Harold James, Nicholas Boyle and Mary Elise Sarotte. It is not accidental that some of the best minds in the Anglosphere have worried away at the German problem ever since 1945. The preceding generation had been dragged into two world wars, the Iron Curtain ran through Berlin, and getting to grips with German history was the key to preventing the Cold War from becoming a Third World War. Hawes has distilled all this into a primer that might be slipped into a prime ministerial red box.