Simon Winder > Quotes

“Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.”
― Simon Winder, Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History

“In Transylvania it was memories of the Romanian revolt that stalked the Hungarian aristocratic imagination.. In Galicia it was memories of Tarnow that performed a similar service for the surviving Polish noble families. Both societies shared something of the brittle, sports-obsessed cheerfulness of the British in India - or indeed of Southerners in the pre-1861 United States. These were societies which could resort to any level of violence in support of racial supremacy. Indeed, an interesting global history could be written about the ferocity of a period which seems, very superficially, to be so 'civilized'. Southern white responses to Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in 1831, with Turner himself flayed, beheaded and quartered, can be linked to the British blowing rebel Indians to pieces from the mouths of cannons in 1857.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“Rather than defeat the reader with a family tree which would look like an illustration of the veins and arteries of the human body drawn by a poorly informed maniac, I thought it better to start with this summary of just the heads of the family, so the sequence is clear. I give the year each ruler became Emperor and the year the ruler died. It all looks very straightforward and natural, but of course the list hides away all kinds of back-stabbing, reckless subdivision, hatred, fake piety and general failure, which can readily be relegated to the main text. To save everyone’s brains I have simplified all titles. Some fuss in this area is inevitable but I will cling under almost all circumstances to a single title for each character. To give you a little glimpse of the chaos, the unattractive Philip ‘the Handsome’ was Philip I of Castile, Philip II of Luxemburg, Philip III of Brabant, Philip IV of Burgundy, Philip V of Namur, Philip VI of Artois as well as assorted Is, IIs, IIIs and so on for other places. So when I just refer to Philip ‘the Handsome’ you should feel grateful and briefly ponder the pedantic horror-show you are spared.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“The bags full of Turkish noses sent by the Uskoks from Senj to Charles V in 1532 may have been one of those gifts more fun to send than to receive,”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“Or at least it would for perhaps two or three days before the general levels of illiteracy and provincialism became too wearying and for perhaps four or five before you were expelled or burnt as a witch.”
― Simon Winder, Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History

“For much of the seventeenth century the border between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans had been relatively quiet – relatively in the sense that large-scale raiding did happen (baking in a level of violence which we would consider scarcely credible) but it was not by the standards of the time serious.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“It is the last place heading south before the landscape gets terminally dusty, glum and thinly settled, so it has an oasis or frontier atmosphere and a sense that the cappuccinos are a bit hard-won.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“In the usual proto-Art-Nouveau style, the sculptor follows through on an ethnographic hunch that surprising numbers of the tribal womenfolk would be in their late teens and free of clothing.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“It is possible to get too hung up about this point. In, for example, the genealogical multiple pile-up of Swabia with almost every hill under its own prince, it is possible to imagine a feudal version of Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library, a world of so many hundreds of rulers that every variation of behaviour is possible, or indeed certain, in any given moment. So somewhere a ruler with a huge grey beard is dying surrounded by his weeping family and retainers; somewhere else a bored figure is irritably shooting bits off the plaster decorations in the ballroom; another is making an improper suggestion to a stable boy; another is telling an anecdote about fighting the Turks, staring into space, girding for battle, converting to Calvinism, wishing he had a just slightly bigger palace, and so on. This dizzying multiplicity makes each of hundreds of castles a frightening challenge – with the possibility of the guide making my head explode with the dizzying details of how the young duchess had been walled up in a tower for being caught in a non-spiritual context with her confessor and how as a result the Strelitz-Nortibitz inheritance had passed, unexpectedly, to a cousin resident in Livonia who, on his way home to claim the dukedom, died of plague in a tavern near Rothenberg thus activating the claim of the very odd dowager’s niece, long resident in a convent outside Bamberg. But it is probably time to move on.”
― Simon Winder, Germania

“otherwise the remainder of this book would be a trackless waste. The mayhem of the 1790s tends naturally to focus on France and its Revolution, but there is an equally strong argument for seeing a Europe-wide failure in this period which more broadly promoted irresponsibility and chaotic aggression. In the short time since the glory days of helping the United States gain independence, France had collapsed as a great power – demoralized, humiliated and financially broken down – and this had provided a peculiar and unaccustomed space for Austria and Prussia to muck about in without fear of French vengeance. Indeed one of the motors of the French Revolution was a new sense of national rather than merely dynastic humiliation: that the Grande Nation’s borders were being mocked by countries who would have previously shown much greater respect – most egregiously the Prussian invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1787 and the Habsburg crushing of revolution in the Austrian Netherlands in 1790. Joseph”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“John of Bavaria, realizing the game was up and his throwing in the priesthood and marrying had just wasted everyone’s time, made Philip the Good his heir. He was shortly thereafter assassinated in The Hague with a poisoned prayer book (yes, really – nothing can beat the fifteenth century).”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“academics more than anyone else are (with help from priests) some of the greatest villains.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“The chances of anybody today being a ‘pure’ example of any specific medieval ‘race’ must be close to zero, quite aside from the category being patently meaningless.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“Museums are obliged to denature and make dreary the impulse which led to an object’s original creation. Serried rows of coins are like Panini football stickers in a more ponderous form. But as objects to be handled they tell an extraordinary story, from the most over-the-top gold monster to a clipped, almost featureless little square of rough metal used as emergency currency in the Siege of Vienna.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“The Golden Apple for Margarita Teresa’s seventeenth birthday (a special present from ‘uncle’), to which Leopold himself contributed several genuinely beautiful arias. This opera must have been something to see, so scenically unwieldy that it took two days to put on, but with spectacles of flames, thunderclaps, flying dragons and shipwrecks of a dangerousness and scale that we are sadly sheltered from today. Cesti’s”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“As, over the following decades, it became clear that humankind's entire mental experience was about to be hit by a flood of slavery, sugar, gold, silver, genocide, jungles, pirate ships, howler monkeys, Brazil nuts and toucans, the old Europe in which English and French knights hit each other over the head for ownership of some drizzle-washed hamlet in the Pas de Calais suddenly seemed a bit old-fashioned.”
― Simon Winder

“The Uskoks – like reformed alcoholics brought face to face with row upon row of brightly coloured liqueur miniatures – were simply unable to avoid helping themselves to passing Venetian Christian ships.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“all of whom radiated level-headed competence, physical fitness and pride in appearance, and lived on a different planet from the one defined by general weak tittering, the oxygen levels of which I was more used to.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“example”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“It would be interesting to know, for example, at what point it became decisively clear to everyone concerned that unicorn horns were in fact narwhal’s tusks – a knowledge long available only to a handful of Norwegians and Shetlanders, who may well not have been asked. Was there an awkward silence when these prized objects (very rarely washed up on far northern Atlantic coasts) ceased to be magical, or just a polite agreement to pay no attention to such ideas? They would have been part of the general, encroaching battle to continue enjoying traditional medicine, magic and astrology in the face of ever more plausible scientific scorn. A”
― Simon Winder, Germania

“A new austerity and prayerful privacy reigned. Oddly, this shift moved almost in lockstep with the growth of public musical theatre, as through the now idle impresarios o f the Catholic Church found fresh work in opera and oratorio.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“Nationalists prop themselves up by imagining they are living in a circle of virtue outside which shamble those not so blessed, despite their having near-identical beliefs and stews. Perhaps a distinction can be made between patriotism, which is a legitimate, sometimes vexed affection for and pride in the world one grows up in and knows well, and nationalism, where that central space tends to be hollow but given shape by the imagined foibles, vices and plots of those others about which, in practice, one knows little or nothing.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of France, Germany and the Countries In Between

“but I remained bouncy and immune throughout – by the early eighteenth century the Electors’ tombs are entirely out of control and indeed strongly anticipatory of the fine moment in Fellini’s Roma where the Vatican holds an excitingly modern ecclesiastical fashion show featuring neon-clad, roller-skating priests and entire reliquary skeletons of saints hanging like the Andrews Sisters from the sides of a jeep. Just”
― Simon Winder, Germania

“From the German point of view the military misery came from Louis being someone who, like many unattractive people, spends too much time staring at maps.”
― Simon Winder, Germania

“Jade Bay, the future site of Wilhelmshaven, is a huge semi-circle of land on the North Sea which, just to look at for a few moments from a blustery esplanade, would make most people lose the will to live, particularly once they have had to get there by walking through a haggard shopping centre featuring a man in Bavarian dress playing 'The Shiek of Araby' on his saxophone.”
― Simon Winder

“St Barbara’s itself has a set of frescoes, badly damaged (and thereby, of course, much enhanced) of miners at work, not in any immediate way sacred or even self-aggrandizing. The pictures simply show miners as they were, underground, in their special clothing, the heroic point of their own story, but protected by their church and their saint. To come face to face with these frescoes naturally gets you nowhere near the experience of mining, but it does make apparent something quite difficult about the Middle Ages: that there was a level of day-to-day, sophisticated expertise entirely comparable to our own, that technology always operates in perfect synchronization with its users, and that these silver miners were just as capable, just as aware of their world and its dangers and limitations as we are. Medieval miners were a closed-off little planet, as specialized as their close cousins (also protected by St Barbara) who worked siege engines or made explosives, but in a world of little movement they could define entire communities, set a pace and a range of values and self-sufficiency which deeply marked their towns.”
― Simon Winder, Germania

“The decorative arms race finally caved in under the sheer absurdity of Augustus the Strong (1670–1733), the Elector of Saxony who, with money pouring in from his hideous porcelain factory and from defrauding the Poles (whose king through chicanery he had become), decided to go for broke. When many of his contemporaries were sharpening up and reforming their armies, he spent much of his revenue on mistresses, lovely palaces and daft trinkets. He was aided in this last aim by the services of the great Badenese goldsmith Johann Melchior Ding-linger, who blew astounding sums making such monstrosities as a giant cup made from a block of polished chalcedony, dripping with coloured enamels and metals and balanced on stag horns, or creating repulsive little statues of dwarves by decorating mutant pearls, or a mad but magnificent object called The Birthday of the Grand Mogul Aurangzeb in which dozens of tiny figures made from precious stones and metals fill the tiny court of the Mogul, itself made from all kinds of spectacular and rare stuff. This delirious thing (not paid for by Augustus for many years as the money sort of ran out when a Swedish invasion swept through a virtually undefended Saxony) simply ended the tradition. Looking at it today in the head-spinning Green Vault in Dresden, Dinglinger’s fantasy seems a long way from the relative, bluff innocence of a yellowy whale tooth in a little display box – but it was the same tradition endlessly elaborated. Aside”
― Simon Winder, Germania