For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental Europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people now understand themselves? Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, over-arching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly floated. Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest writer, discovered the distinctiveness of his country's art and history, now lies within the borders of France. For most of the five hundred years covered by this book Germany has been composed of many separate political units, each with a distinct history. And any comfortable national story Germans might have told themselves before 1914 was destroyed by the events of the following thirty years. German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of shared memories, awarenesses and experiences; examining some of these is the purpose of this book.

Beginning with the fifteenth-century invention of modern printing by Gutenberg, MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places which still resonate in the new Germany - porcelain from Dresden and rubble from its ruins, Bauhaus design and the German sausage, the crown of Charlemagne and the gates of Buchenwald - to show us something of its collective imagination. There has never been a book about Germany quite like it. Praise for A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor 'A triumph . rightly lauded as one of the most effective and ambitious initiatives in the making of 'public history' for many decades. John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph 'Neil MacGregor has set the seal on his vision of the British Museum as the world's supreme memory palace.' Tom Holland, Observer 'MacGregor offers a sense that, just as every word in a poem has its place, so history is not merely a record of destriction and death, but something to which we can, in some puzzling fashion, give meaning.' David Wootton, Times Literary Supplement.