A brief history of Bavaria

As of 2021, being an English speaker and wanting to learn about general Bavarian history, your options are heavily limited. You can either read about it on Wikipedia or read this book...that was written in 1906. There are books on specific cases of Bavarian history such as a history book on Ludwig II or Merovingian Bavaria but other than that you're out of luck if you do not speak German.

As of now, I don't speak German so I decided to read this book. Ultimately, it was alright. Gertrude Norman doesn't really cite her sources so who knows where she's getting this from. Perhaps she spoke German and read a Bavarian history book in German. But nonetheless, from following along with Wikipedia, she appeared to be accurate. It was nice learning about these dukes and monarchs in chronology.

However, after around 140 pages which is how long it takes her to catch up to 1906, she shifts gear and starts to discuss art, architecture and cities. While there was some history involved such as the history of Munich, Regensburg, Wurzburg, Augsburg, etc it was mainly talking about the architecture of these cities. As a result, I spent a good amount of the book ultra-skimming which I why I was able to finish around 60 pages of this book in just one day (I usually read 10 pages a day).

Until more Bavarian history books are translated from German into English, I'm afraid this is all we have for now. I'd recommend it if you're really interested in Bavarian history and sure it's only 214 pages, most people could get it done it a week or two (whereas it took me 3 weeks!).

Also, she's not a historian from what I know about Gertrude Norman. From my guess she could be some countess in England who lived in Bavaria for a number of years and is just repeating what she learned in this book. As a result, she doesn't write like a history would but rather a fiction writer. This means when she isn't talking hard dates, it's gonna be pretty flowery language.