In fact, Germany keeps bringing me – as in my childhood, in my youth, and my maturity - misery and joy, wounds and praises, irreparable losses and great treasures.

In his book, Michel Tournier tells us about his close bonds with Germany. His family, his link with Goethe’s language and his university studies in a post-war devastated country unite him to the country. However, the author is French and he wants to share with us the analysis of the relationship between those two countries. Thus, he rewrites the story of the France-Germany couple. Beginning with the 1770-1830 years, he writes about Bismarck, the advent of the empire, the First World War, Weimar and the Nazi disaster, up to the birth of the German Democratic Republic with which he has always had an intimate relationship, he offers us a clear and unbiased analysis of two nations that History has always brought closer, either in aggressive or in friendly contexts. But it is also an analysis dealing with Europe and the peoples who constitute it.
However, the author does not content himself with a rapid historical depiction; he relates and sets out what, in literature, philosophy, music and painting, is linked to our common heritage. According to him, it is the romantic preference and the extraordinary fecundity of the German thought.

Happiness in Germany ? is a subtle and delicate text, a pleasant stroll, in which the beautiful language and the appropriateness of the words underline what makes the richness, the strength, but also the weakness and the paradox of this age-old patchwork which is Europe.