The Evolution of Germany

John A. Hawgood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367243760
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000007817
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: History

Originally published in 1955, this book concisely charts the development of the states of Germany backwards, from the post-war partition into two republics, through the ruthless unification imposed by Hitler and the efficient federation created by Bismarck to the acute disunity of the 400 separate sovereignties existing in Germany after the Peace of Westphalia. The book also covers regional and geographical differences, natural resources, the class system and population problems.

MAP 1

The Peoples of Germany

Part I

CHAPTER I

PREHISTORIC GERMANY

GERMANY’S first man (if this chinless creature can be called a man) of whom we have any knowledge, lived—or at any rate died—in the valley of the Neckar river near Heidelberg several hundred thousand years ago. We know nothing of his habits or of his way of life, whether he used tools or had fire, for homo heidelbergensis has left us only a portion of his skull: to wit, one lower jawbone. Some prefer to regard him as no more than a very highly developed ape, and he was certainly not a direct ancestor of modern man. Many ages later a creature with rather more of a chin and a larger brain capacity than homo heidelbergensis flourished in the valley of the Neander river near to Düsseldorf, and this homo neanderthalensis lived in caves, hunted animals with simple tools and made fires. Unlike Heidelberg Man (who is unique) Neanderthal Man seems to have been similar to beings living at approximately the same time in a number of other parts of Europe, where their skulls, and in several cases complete skeletons, have been found. Neanderthal Man of the old Stone Age was not yet homo sapiens, that first ‘true man’ who was the ancestor of us all, but this ‘true man’ was to appear soon afterwards (geologically speaking)—during the culmination of the fourth and last glacial period in Europe—on the inhospitable tundra or steppe which covered those parts of Europe not enveloped by the ice-sheets. His life must have been nasty, brutish and very cold, but the contraction of the ice-sheets was to change the climate of Europe from arctic to sub-arctic and then to bring forests and animals of a more temperate zone. Mesolithic (or middle Stone Age) man was the recipient of these blessings and many traces of this individual have been found in Germany. He occasionally forsook his nomadic habits and practised a primitive agriculture, he had learned to domesticate animals, he could build himself a crude shelter in which to live, his stone tools were more varied and better finished than those of Palaeolithic man and he could speak intelligibly to his fellows, though the art of writing was as yet unknown to him. Above all he could draw. While this Mesolithic man still flourished in the Danube and the Rhine valleys, and indeed over most of Europe, the great river valleys of the adjoining regions of north Africa and south-western Asia had passed out of pre-history into history. The civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates valleys which came into existence at this time were literate and urban and their weapons and tools were no longer of stone only, but of bronze also. They were indeed two stages ahead of Europe (and particularly of north Germany, Denmark and south Sweden) where the Neolithic (or new Stone Age) culture was only slowly creeping up from the south.

Geographically considered Europe had by this time pretty well taken the shape it has retained through historical times. The land-bridges were down between the continent of Europe and North Africa, between Britain and Ireland and between Britain and the Continent; the Mediterranean had filled up to approximately its present shore-line; the Thames no longer flowed into the Rhine; the Baltic had become a sea and Denmark a peninsula. The dense forests that now covered most of this area had to be laboriously cleared by fire and by the polished stone axe (the most characteristic Neolithic tool and the most important) in order that man could settle down, as now at last he wanted to do, and till the soil in farmsteads and villages. A vigorous ‘Danubian’ culture spread at this time far beyond the Danube valley proper, through Moravia, Galicia and Poland as far as the Vistula in the east, and across Silesia, Saxony and Bavaria to the Rhineland in the west. The people of the second stage of this Danubian culture (from about 2500 to 2100 B.C.) built sturdy timber houses—remnants of which have been found in Swabia, for instance—and established contacts with Italy, Crete and Asia. These contacts helped to bring the Neolithic Age to an end, for by the third Danubian phase (2100 to 1700 B.C.) bronze implements and jewellery were being imported and a local copper industry had made its appearance. Farther north—in Thuringia, in Saxony and beyond—the stone battle-axe still reigned supreme (just as the European arctic still remained in the Stone Age when the rest of Europe was already using iron), for the metal cultures came to northern Europe by sea from the Mediterranean area or up the Danube valley from the south-east.

The new Bronze Age which now dawned witnessed the rise of the culture of the remarkable ‘Beaker Folk’, stretching from Spain to Poland. In this age the Danube valley traded extensively with western, eastern and northern Europe as well as developing further its contacts with the south. Europe was now one vast trading area, and copper and bronze articles from one end of the Continent found their way easily to the other. In central Germany a very prosperous era dawned, and its warrior chieftains were buried with great pomp, loaded with jewels and finely wrought weapons. The Bronze Age in Europe indeed culminated in the making of these tumuli, or burial mounds (about 1300 to 1000 B.C.).

Central Europe now passed to yet another level of material and cultural development with the coming of iron from north Italy—where the Iron Age had already commenced. The famous ‘Hallstadt’ culture (named from the finds at Hallstadt near Salzburg) saw bronze gradually supplanted by iron weapons and tools. By 650 B.C. the Age of Bronze was virtually over in the Danube valley. The Iron Age was essentially the period of Celtic domination over the greater part of Europe north of the Alps and south of the Baltic. The long iron or bronze swords of Hallstadt Age ‘C’ are found in south Germany and on the Swiss plateau, in Alsace, down the Rhine and in Burgundy, and even spread south-west into Spain, wielded by the Celtic warriors. A century or so later, in Hallstadt Age ‘D’ (around 500 B.C.) these warriors, armed with short iron swords, spread to the Lower Rhine and Meuse valleys, into northern and western France, to the Garonne and over the Pyrenees into Spain. Soon they were to penetrate into north Italy. These Celtic Iron Age peoples traded down the Rhine valley, through the port of Marseilles with southern Italy and Greece. By the fourth century B.C. the Celtic culture known as La Tene (from one of its settlements in Switzerland, near Neuchâtel) was spreading to central Germany. Gauls belonging to this highly developed culture sacked Rome itself in 386 B.C., and by 350 B.C. had occupied in north Italy what came to be called ‘Cisalpine Gaul’ by the Romans.

CHAPTER II

THE GERMANIC TRIBES

THE Germanic tribes first thrust themselves into history a century before the Christian era, when the Cimbri and the Teutoni invaded the provinces of Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul of the Roman republic and were defeated and destroyed in two battles by the Roman general Marius. These two tribes passed out of history as quickly as they had entered it. Half a century later they were followed by other migrants. Their successors bore many different names, but by the end of the second century A.D. not one of the Germanic tribes that.had harassed the Roman Empire during the days of Caesar, Augustus and their successors right up to the death of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 180) remained a menace to it. Extermination, assimilation, expulsion or simply disappearance had removed them all. But unfortunately for the Empire a fresh and much more dangerous group of Germanic tribes now appeared—the Alemanni (or Suevi), the Franks, the Saxons, the Goths and others—and within the space of two more centuries they had literally hacked the Empire in the west into pieces.

The earlier Germanic tribes, against whom Julius Caesar and Drusus and Germanicus and Marcus Aurelius fought, and which were described by Tacitus and other writers, have only antiquarian interest to the student of the history of Germany. There is even some doubt as to whether all of them were strictly ‘Germanic’, for some of their leaders bore Celtic names and there was a tendency among the Gauls of what is now France to describe all peoples who came from across the Rhine or who lived beyond its farther bank as ‘Germans’. The whole of the south of the modern area of Germany was probably occupied up to the second century B.C. by Celtic peoples, and a certain admixture was inevitable as the Germanic invaders from the area of the lower Elbe and the Danish peninsula pushed them southward and westward and occupied their lands. Modern German scholars have shown a tendency to characterize any tribe or tribal leader defeated on the field of battle by the Romans as ‘Celtic’ and any that won a victory or victories over the Romans as ‘Germanic’. No French scholar has retaliated to the extent of claiming that the national hero of modern Germans, Hermann (or Arminius), who destroyed the three legions of Varus in A.D. 9, was really a Celt, though one, after pointing out that Gaul was only saved from a Germanic invasion by the invasion of Julius Caesar over Ariovistus near Strassbourg in 58 B.C., and regretting that having thus saved it he was immediately to turn and reduce all Gaul to vassalage, mordantly remarks that, anyway, a Roman conquest of Gaul was preferable to a Germanic one.

The Franks, the Burgundians, the Lombards and the Goths constituted the main divisions of those Germanic tribes which between the second and the sixth centuries A.D. swarmed out of Scandinavia and the Danish peninsula and the lower Elbe—lands across the whole of central Europe, and also in some cases into the Balkans, into Italy and into Iberia. (At the same time tribes closely related to these were invading the islands of Britain, but with them we are not concerned here.) Out of the tribes of the great Volkerwanderung (as this movement of peoples has come to be called by German writers and their imitators) and of their intermingling with the peoples and the civilization they found in the new lands they occupied, have emerged the countries and states of western Europe as we have come to know them in modern times.

The Franks eventually moved their centre of power too far to the west (into France), the Lombards too far to the south (into Italy) and the Visigoths too far west (into Spain) for their subsequent history to belong to that of Germany, but the tribes that remained in Central Europe—the Bavarians, the Saxons, the Swabians (or Allemanians), the Franconians and the Lorrainers—as they gradually came to be called when tribal duchies bearing these names came into existence—were the first recognizably direct ancestors of the west and south Germans of today. Those regions known as ‘Bavaria’ and ‘Franconia’, for instance, have had a continuous thread of political and ethnic development, as such, ever since the break-up of the Empire of Charles the Great at the Partition of Verdun (A.D. 843). It was about this time that they really changed (though the change was subtle and almost unremarked until long afterwards) from being just some of the Germanic tribes into being the truly German tribes. Their language was now sufficiently different from the latinized tongue of the west Franks for the Treaty of Verdun to need to be drawn up not only in the west Frankish language (which was eventually to develop into French) but also in the lingua theodisca or popular tongue of the German tribes—and ‘theodisca’ was to become, in the vernacular, ‘deutsch’. From some points of view, therefore, the history of Germany does not really begin until after the Partition of Verdun, and even then it was to be no more for a long time to come than the histories of these separate German tribes as they lived in their independent or nearly independent duchies. The Carolingian Empire, though an extremely interesting experiment in the unification of the continental peoples of western Europe (under an emperor who called himself ‘Roman’ but never either ‘German’ or ‘French’), no more belongs to the history of Germany than does its predecessor the much more limited and unambitious Merovingian Empire, and it is a misreading of history to treat it as such.¹

MAP 2. TRIBAL DUCHIES AND MARCHES OF THE GERMAN LANDS, A.D. 950–1250

(Forest-free land shaded)—after Dickinson

It is thus only by a stretch of the imagination (but one of which many Germans have found themselves capable) that Charles the Great can be treated as a German king or a German hero at all, and only by an even wilder one that leaders of the Volkerwanderung such as Alaric, and Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and the other historical figures presented in a somewhat confused way in the twelfth-century German epic poem, the Niebelungenlied, can be claimed as such. As for Wotan and the other Wagnerian gods and heroes, they belong to a remote Norse mythology to which the Germans have no exclusive claim at all, but must share with the Scandinavians, the Anglo-Saxons and all other peoples possessing or sharing ‘Germanic’ origins. The fact that Vercingetorix lived in Gaul (some of which is now part of modern France), and fought against the Romans, does not make a Frenchman of him, and he is not claimed as such by moderate-minded Frenchmen today—though one French writer, perhaps with pardonable pride, does refer to him as ‘notre Vercingetorix’. It is no more logical to regard Arminius, who lived in what Tacitus and Caesar called ‘Germania’ (and some of which is now modern Germany) and also fought against the Romans, as a German in the sense of being the fellow countryman of Bismarck the Prussian Junker. That the Chanson de Roland, written in French, and the Rolandslied, written in German (in the twelfth century), both commemorate the same hero, Roland, the Carolingian general who died at Roncevalles, points to the fact that he and his exploits belong to the common western European heritage of the French and the German peoples, and the attempt of either to stake an exclusive claim to him is merely illustrative of the mental excesses to which the very modern sentiment of nationalism can lead. It is undoubtedly true that ‘Charlemagne’ will continue to figure in histories of France and ‘Karl der Grosse’ in histories of Germany, and rightly so if he is treated in proper perspective. He belongs to the pre-history (in the German sense of Ur-Geschichte) o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Maps
• Part I. The Peoples of Germany
• Part II. The Resources of Germany
• Part III. The States of Germany
• Part IV. Germany and the World
• Reading List
• Index