The title of Simon Winder's “Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country” won't mean much to most American readers, but the odds are that you've drunk wine from Lotharingia, eaten its chocolate and worn its watches. You know its painters, from Van Eyck to Rubens, and its battles too—Waterloo and the whole line of the Great War's trenches. Or the Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944, some of which was fought in the very spot where Mr. Winder begins, a small Belgian town named Stavelot. That's where the German army's surprise assault began to fail. But the Germans massacred many of its inhabitants before turning in retreat, and Mr. Winder's own visit grows from a mix of “contrition and annoyance that I had not heard of the place before.” The town is now nothing much, a “dozy” village with a few medieval ruins, and yet it was once “central to the fate of humanity.”
That makes it utterly typical of Lotharingia itself, a place whose name no longer appears on the map. Once there was a man known as Charlemagne, who conquered most of western Europe and then died, leaving his heirs to fight over who got what, until in 843 his grandsons met at a spot called Verdun and divvied it all up. One received what would become France, and another went east into what is now Germany. A third grandson, Lothair, took the land between, a narrow band that ran from the North Sea down to central Italy. He had children, too, and a further partition gave a second Lothair everything north of Provence. That's Mr. Winder's “lost country”: eastern France, Germany west of the Rhine, the Low Countries and pieces of Switzerland as well. It has always been rich, and always in splinters, and for 10 centuries and more “outsiders have tried and failed to get their hands” on it. It's not a buffer zone but a battlefield.
Mr. Winder holds a day job as a London publisher and claims to have learned everything he knows by editing other people's books. He likes to present himself as a world-class bore, wearing down his children with one fact or cathedral after another, but he is deeply read and endlessly curious, a man with the enviable ability to make one share his obsessions. He even got me to care about the politics that lie behind the different spellings of Ghent and Strasbourg. This is his third crack at Charlemagne's legacy, following “Germania” (2010) and “Danubia” (2013). The one concerns the land contained within the present Federal Republic, the other the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. So “Lotharingia” completes what Mr. Winder describes as a trilogy, though he seems to snort in self-derision as he does so.
All three books move through both time and space in a “roughly chronological” if crablike motion, with the writer's steps forever digressing from the straight path. Mr. Winder likes to keep an eye on the present as he turns over the past; his account of Stavelot includes a busload of shrieking schoolchildren and a fog that resembles some “solid form of Milk of Magnesia.” In the Burgundian wine capital of Beaune he rushes a child to the hospital and feels “guiltily . . . furious” that hygienic modernity has replaced the old hospital, “the magical Hospices de Beaune,” which he had visited earlier that day. Being sick there, in a ward hung with Rogier van der Weyden's great 15th-century “Last Judgment”—well, that would have a certain cachet. A church in Delft seems an “advertisement for Protestant whitewash—pristine, severe, and elegant.” But what really gets him going there is the 17th-century tomb of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the microscope.
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