The first Reich.

• Author: Bakshian, Aram, Jr.
• Position: Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire - Book review

Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 941 pp., $39.95.

It says something about the power of historical memory that, 132 years after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, it still exerted a strong emotional pull on the German imagination. So much so that, in the days immediately preceding the Anschluss, Adolf Hitler's military annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938, a Nazi agent was tasked with preventing Austrian patriots from making off with the coronation regalia of the Holy Roman emperors before the incoming Germans could confiscate it.

Waffen ss Maj. Walter Buch--an early Hitler acolyte, rampant anti-Semite and something of a goofy mystic when it came to Germanic holy relics--checked into a small Viennese hotel incognito. Once the Anschluss was launched, he donned his uniform and, toting a loaded Luger, proceeded to the Kunsthistorisches Museum where the imperial regalia were housed. Like the incoming columns of German troops, Buch encountered no serious Austrian resistance and was able to present his plunder to a gratified Hitler when the fuhrer made his triumphant entry into Vienna.

The trophies were packed off to Nuremberg, which, in its days as a proud imperial city, had housed the crown regalia between coronations of Holy Roman emperors. The same city had become a hotbed of Nazi support and the scene of the mammoth Nuremberg Rallies recorded on film by Leni Riefenstahl. In a final irony, after World War II it would also be the site of the Nuremberg Trials prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Walter Buch, who besides his other Nazi credentials was also Martin Bormann's father-in-law, would serve time as one of them. In 1949, faced with further charges, he committed suicide. Taking no chances--and with a distinctly Teutonic thoroughness--he slashed his wrists before drowning himself in the Ammersee. Three years earlier, after rescue from a Nazi bunker, the crown regalia had been returned to a once-more independent Austria. With any luck, they have found their permanent resting place there, displayed in the Hofburg Palace, home of the dynasty that ruled the empire for almost all of its last three centuries.

The Holy Roman Empire was the first of three Reichs in German history. The second was the Hohenzollerns' formidable, Prussian-dominated empire forged by Bismarck out of victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Despite making a newly unified Germany the dominant economic and military power on the European continent, it only lasted from 1871 to 1918. The third German Empire, Hitler's vaunted "Thousand-Year Reich," enjoyed an even shorter run, from 1933 to 1945. There had, however, been a real Thousand-Year Reich. The Holy Roman Empire, constantly ebbing, flowing and morphing in size, shape and composition, occupied the heart of Europe from 800 to 1806, a millennium spanning from the Age of Charlemagne to the Age of Napoleon. Old enough to predate any of Europe's modern nation-states, in some of its most important aspects it foreshadowed the ideals, if not the realities, of today's European Union.

After a long period of historical neglect, of treatment as an extinct specimen from a distant and irrelevant past, the empire has finally found a modern chronicler to do it justice and bring it back to life for contemporary readers. Peter H. Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, has produced a magisterial work that tackles a complex subject with both erudition and lucidity, a combination of qualities that few academic historians manage to balance. The result is a big book but not a heavy one. Heart of Europe has almost as many pages as its subject's lifespan, including 686 pages of central text, extensively detailed notes, a glossary, a chronology, appendices, imperial genealogies, thirty-five illustrations and twenty-two maps. Each of the maps, if not the pictures, is worth a thousand words, graphically depicting in black and white--and many appropriate gray areas--the amoeba-like changes in boundaries, the rise and fall of dynastic influences, and the shifting hubs of power in the European heartland.

It's a massive book for a massive subject. As Professor Wilson explains in his introduction, understanding the history of the Holy Roman Empire "explains how much of the [European] continent developed between the early Middle Ages and the nineteenth century," and reveals "important aspects which have become obscured by the more familiar story of European history as that of separate nation states." Moreover, he writes,

The Empire lasted ... well over twice as long as imperial Rome itself, and encompassed much of the continent. In addition to present-day Germany, it included all or part of ten other modern countries: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark...