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The Land in the Middle

A history of Germany from the tribes beyond the Rhine to the 2025 election: Arminius and the Teutoburg Forest, Charlemagne, the emperors and the walk to Canossa, the Hanse, Gutenberg and Luther, the Thirty Years War, Frederick the Great, Goethe and Beethoven, Bismarck, two world wars, the Holocaust, division, the fall of the Wall, and reunification. Every quotation comes from a public-domain source, and every era's sources are named.

40chapters
7.7hours
2,100years of history

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Chapter 1

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Chapters

    Sources by era

    Quotations come from public-domain translations: Caesar (McDevitte and Bohn, 1869), Gregory of Tours (Brehaut, 1916), Einhard (Turner, 1880), the Song of Roland (Scott Moncrieff, 1919), Joinville (Wedgwood, 1906), Froissart (Berners), the trial of Joan of Arc (Murray, 1902), Commynes (Scoble, 1855), Montaigne (Cotton), Saint-Simon (Bayle St. John, 1857), Rousseau (Cole, 1913) and Hugo (Hapgood, 1887). Every page the research opened is listed under its era.

    Chapters 1 to 5: Germanic peoples and Rome
    Chapters 6 to 10: The Franks and East Francia
    Chapters 11 to 15: Saxon and Salian emperors
    Chapters 16 to 20: Staufer emperors, cities and the Hanse
    Chapters 21 to 25: Reformation and the Thirty Years War
    Chapters 26 to 30: Prussia and the Enlightenment
    Chapters 31 to 35: Unification and the German Empire
    Chapters 36 to 40: Weimar, dictatorship, division and reunification

    Narrated by an AI voice. Written and fact-checked with the help of AI tools, from published scholarship, museum records and the ancient texts themselves; where scholars disagree, the book says so. Dates before the colonies are approximate. Events of 2025 and 2026 are told from official records and news reports available when the book was finished, in November 2026.

    Want to see it? The German history timeline has the people and events in this book, with sources.