A Short History of Germany E-Book

Mary Platt Parmele

• Herausgeber: Enhanced Media Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The concept of Germany as a distinct region in central Europe can be traced to Julius Caesar, who referred to the unconquered area east of the Rhine as Germania, thus distinguishing it from Gaul (France), which he had conquered. The victory of the Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (AD 9) prevented annexation by the Roman Empire.

In  A Short History of Germany Mary Platt Parmele takes the reader on a riveting journey, from the rise of Charlemagne to the age of Martin Luther, from the Thirty Years' War to the iron rule of Otto von Bismarck and beyond. 

Leseprobe

A Short History of Germany

By Mary Platt Parmele

Table of Contents

Title Page

A Short History of Germany

Preface

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

Further Reading: Saga Six Pack 8

A Short History of Germany by Mary Platt Parmele. First published in 1898. This edition published 2017 by Enhanced Media Publishing. All rights reserved.

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ISBN:  978-1-387-00840-7.

Preface

It is more important to comprehend the forces which have created a great nation, and the progressive steps by which it has unfolded, than to know the multitudinous events and incidents which have attended such unfolding.

In order to forestall criticism for the absence of some events in this History of Germany the author desires to say, that there has been an effort to keep strictly to the main line of development and to resist the temptation of introducing details which do not bear directly upon such line.

The bypaths of history are fascinating, but they are of secondary importance, and may better be explored after the main road has been traveled and is thoroughly known.

Such is the ideal which has been very imperfectly followed in this book.

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M. P. P. 

CHAPTER I

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Foundation building is neither picturesque nor especially interesting, but it is indispensable. However fair the structure is to be, one must first lay the rough-hewn stones upon which it is to rest. It would be much pleasanter in this sketch to display at once the minarets and towers and stained-glass windows; but that can only be done when one's castle is in Spain.

Would we comprehend the Germany of to-day, we must hold firmly in our minds an epitome of what it has been, and see vividly the devious path of its development through the ages.

The German nation is of ancient lineage, and indeed belongs to the royal line of human descent, the Aryan; its ancestral roots running back until lost in the heart of Asia, in the mists of antiquity.

The home of the Aryan race is shrouded in mystery, as are the impelling causes which sent those successive tides of humanity into Europe. But we know with certainty that when the last great wave spread over Eastern Europe, or Russia, about one thousand years before Christ, the submergence of that continent was complete.

Before the coming of the Aryan, the Rhine flowed as now; the Alps pierced the sky with their glistening peaks as they do to-day; the Danube, the Rhône, hurried on, as now, toward the sea. Was it all a beautiful, unpeopled solitude, waiting in silence for the richly endowed Asiatic to come and possess it? Far from it! It was teeming with humanity—if, indeed, we may call such the race which modern research and discovery have revealed to us. It is only within the last thirty years that anything whatever has been known of prehistoric man; but now we are able to reconstruct him with probable accuracy. A creature bestial in appearance and in life; dwelling in caves, which, however, a dawning sense of a higher humanity led him to decorate with carvings of birds and fishes; but certain it is, the brain which inhabited that skull was incapable of performing the mental processes necessary to the simplest form of civilization; and life must have been to him simply a thing of fierce appetites and brutal instincts. Such was the being encountered by the Aryan, when he penetrated the mysterious land beyond the confines of Greece and Italy.

The extermination, and perhaps, to some extent, assimilation, of this terrible race must have required centuries of brutalizing conflict, and, it is easy to imagine, would have produced just such men as were the northern barbarians who, for five hundred years, terrorized Europe; men insensible to fear, terrible, fierce, but with fine instincts for civilization—dormant Aryan germs, which quickly developed when brought into contact with a superior race.

The earliest Indo-European migration is supposed to have been into Greece and Italy, where was laid the basis for the civilization of the world. The second was probably into Western Europe and the British Isles; then, after many centuries, the central and last, and at a time comparatively recent, into the Eastern portion of the continent.

So, by the fourth century B.C., three great divisions of the Aryan race occupied Europe north of Greece and Italy: the Keltic, the western; the Teutonic, the central; the Slavonic the eastern; and these, in turn, had ramified into new subdivisions or tribes.

To state it as in the pedigree of the individual, the Aryan was the founder, the father of the family; Slav, Teuton, and Kelt the three sons. Gaul and Briton were sons of the Kelt; Saxon, Angle, Helvetian, etc., sons of the Teuton; and all alike grandchildren of the Aryan; whom—to carry the illustration farther—we may imagine to have had older children, who long ago had left the paternal home and settled about the Caspian and Mediterranean seas: Mede, Persian, Greek, Roman; apparently bearing few marks of kinship to these uncouth younger brothers whom we have found in Europe in the fourth century B.C., but with nevertheless the same cradle and the same ancestral roots.

It is the Teutonic branch of the Aryan family with which we have to do now, between whom and their Keltic brothers there flowed the River Rhine.

Greece and Rome were unaware of the existence of the Teuton until about the year 330 B.C., when Pythias, a Greek navigator, came home from a voyage to the Baltic with terrible tales of the Goths whom he had met. Nearly one century before Christ the inhabitants of Italy were enabled to judge for themselves of the accuracy of the description. Driven from their homes by the inroads of the sea, the Goths poured in a hungry torrent down into the tempting vineyards of Northern Italy. Gigantic in stature, with long yellow hair, eyes blue but fierce—what wonder that the people thought they were scarcely human, and fled affrighted, leaving them to enjoy the vineyards at their leisure!

Accounts of this uncanny host reached Rome, which soon knew of their breastplates of iron, their helmets crowned with heads of wild beasts, their white shields glistening in the sun, and, more terrible than all, of their priestesses, clad in white linen, who prophesied and offered human sacrifices to their gods.

But the sacrifices did not avail against the legions which the great Consul Marius led against them. The ponderous Goth was not yet a match for the finer skill of the Roman, and the invaders were exterminated on the plain near Aix, 102 B.C. The women, in despair, slew first their children, then themselves, a few only surviving to be paraded in chains at the triumph accorded to Marius on his return to Rome. Such was the first appearance of the Teuton in the Eternal City, and the last until five hundred years later, when the conditions were changed.

CHAPTER II

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At the time of this first invasion the German race was divided into tribes with no affinity for each other, who were indeed much of the time in fierce conflict among themselves. One of these tribes, called the Cherusci, occupied the southern part of what is now Hanover. Their chief, Hermann, had in his youth been taken to Rome as a hostage, and there had been educated.

Hermann was the first to dream of German unity. While the infant Christ was growing into boyhood in Palestine, this Hermann was studying Latin and history at Rome; and as he read he pondered. He found that the Romans had achieved such tremendous power by combination. If his people would unite and stand as one nation before the world, why might not they too become great? These Romans were pleasure-loving and vicious. His Germans in their rude homes were just and true. They did not laugh at vice; they were rough, but simple and sincere; love bound the father and mother and children closely together. The idea of German unity took possession of Hermann. He resolved to devote his life to its accomplishment, and to return to his country and try to inspire his race with a sense of common brotherhood, and a comprehensive patriotism.

Julius Cæsar, the great Roman general, was governor of Gaul, and with one eye fixed on Britain and another on Germany was steadily bringing Europe into subjection to Rome.

The task of subduing the stubborn Teutons was given by Augustus to Varus, a trusted general. In the year 9 A.D., Varus had arrived with his great army in the heart of Germany. Little suspecting the plans and purposes surging in the young man's brain, he leaned upon Hermann, whom he had known in Rome, as his guide and counselor in a new and strange land.

Unsuspectingly he marched with his heavily armed legions, as if for a holiday excursion, into the fastnesses of the Teutoberger Forest, into which Hermann led him.

When fairly entangled in the dense wood, surrounded by morasses and wet marshes instead of roads, suddenly there was a thundering war-cry, and barbarians swarmed down upon him from all sides. Hundreds who escaped the rain of arrows were lost in the morasses. It was not a question of victory, but of escape, for the entrapped and heavily armed legions. Only a handful returned to tell the story, and Varus, unable to bear his disgrace, threw himself upon his sword.

The great Emperor Augustus clothed himself in mourning, let his beard and hair grow, and cried in the bitterness of his soul, "Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!"

But Hermann, like many another hero, was not comprehended by the people he wished to inspire. He had arrested the tide of Roman conquest in Germany. How was he rewarded? His people could not understand his dream of unity. Should they be friends with the Cimbri and Suevi, who were their enemies? They suspected his motives. There were intrigues for his downfall. His adored wife, Thusnelda, and his child were delivered to the Romans and graced a triumph at Rome, and when only thirty-seven years old, the first heroic character in the history of Germany was assassinated by his own people.

Our Saxon ancestors, four centuries later, made the British Isles echo with the songs in which they chanted the praises of this "War Man," this "Man of Hosts," who was the "Deliverer of Germany." Hermann had not consolidated his people, but he had arrested their conquest and subjugation by the Romans. Many, many centuries were to roll away before his dream of unity was to be realized.

What sort of people were these ancient Germans, for whom Hermann hoped so much almost nineteen hundred years ago?

They were pagan barbarians, without one gleam of civilization to illumine the twilight of their existence. They had no art, no literature, nor even an alphabet. They were fierce and cruel; but they had simple, uncorrupted hearts. They were brave, truthful, hospitable, romantic, with instincts singularly just, and a passion for the mysterious realities of an unseen world. War and hunting were their pursuits, the family and domestic ties were strong and abiding, and over all else, religion was supreme.

Like their Scandinavian kinsmen, they worshiped the gods of their ancient Aryan ancestors in sacred groves; and offered sacrifices, sometimes human, to Wotan, and Donar, or Thor, the Thunderer, for whom they named Thursday, Thorsday, or Donners-tag, and in honor of one of their goddesses, Freyja, another was called Frei-tag, or Friday. The decrees of fate were read in the flights of birds, or heard in the neighing of wild horses, and then interpreted to the people by priestesses, who, clad in snow-white robes, presided also at the terrible sacrifices.

CHAPTER III

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During the three centuries after Hermann had arrested the flood of Roman conquest, a civilization of the simplest sort was slowly developing in Germany, where society was divided into the free and the unfree classes.

The tribes in the south differed greatly from those in the north. They had no settled homes, nor ownership in land. This was divided among them every year by lot; one-half of the people remaining yearly at home to till the soil, and the other half giving their entire time to the wars which were as perennial as the growing crops of grain.

In the north, however, where lived the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon race, conditions very different prevailed. There the lands were bestowed in perpetuity upon the most powerful members of the tribes, and by them handed down to their sons. The unfree class tilled the soil, and were thus the serfs of a ruling class, and only freemen could bear arms.

There were no cities in ancient Germany, only villages which were composed of rude huts. A collection of these villages formed a group which was called a Hundred. Every Hundred had its chief, who was elected by the people; and the one chosen by the combined will of all these Hundreds was the chief or King of the tribe.

The chiefs of the Hundreds formed a sort of advisory council to the King or tribal chief. But supreme over the will of these chiefs and their King was the will of the people. Every village had its meetings of the people, which all freemen were entitled to attend. The real governing power lay in these meetings, to which both chiefs of the Hundreds and the King were compelled to defer.

Was a new King to be elected, or were there grave questions concerning wars to be considered—they were discussed in advance by the chiefs and the King. But the ultimate decision lay with the people themselves; a general meeting of the whole tribe being required to elect a new King; the people clashing their arms in token of approval, or shouting their dissent.

As all freemen bore arms, there was no distinct military organization. Every man held himself ready at any moment to respond to a call, and the army was the people!

About the middle of the third century, numerous small German tribes became united into large confederacies. Conspicuous among these were the Allemani, the Franks, the Saxons, and the Goths.

The Allemani, in the south of Germany, it is said were so called because of the fact that all men held the land in common. If this be so, then the French name for Germany is essentially communistic, and it is not strange that communism has always found a congenial soil in that land.

The Franks occupied the banks of the Rhine and of the river Saal. The Saxons were spread over North Germany, and the Goths, on both sides of the river Dnieper, were divided into the Ostro-Goths and the Visi-Goths (or the East and West Goths).

It was these Visigoths under Alaric who inflicted the deadliest blows upon the Roman Empire. The sacking of Rome in 410, and the establishing of a Gothic kingdom in Spain, shook the very foundations of that power. Then the legions could no longer be spared in distant Britain, which was left to its fate. And that fate was of deepest import to us! The Saxons and the Angles overflowed and absorbed the land, and Keltic Britain was Teutonized.

So this untamed and untamable Teuton was being spread, like some coarse but renovating element, over the surface of old Europe. And with the occupation of Gaul by the Franks in 481, and the annexing of France to the Frankish kingdom under Clovis, the process was complete.

I cannot resist the temptation of saying a few words about the Anglo-Saxon occupation of Britain, which, as it virtually converted us from Kelts into Teutons, is not a digression.

From the time of Julius Cæsar the island of Britain had been occupied by the Romans, and in consequence had become partly civilized and Christianized. Upon the fall of the empire, the Roman legions were withdrawn, and the people, left defenseless, became the prey of their own northern barbarians, the Picts and Scots; the drama of Southern Europe and the Goths being re-enacted on a diminished scale. In the fourth century the Britons implored the Angles and Saxons to come and protect them from these savages. Invited as allies, they came as invaders, and remained as conquerors, implanting their habits, speech, and paganism upon the prostrate island. It was the extermination of this exotic paganism which impelled to those deeds of valor recited in the Round Table romances, and which made King Arthur and his knights the theme of poet and minstrel for centuries.

But the Saxon had come to stay, and Teuton and Kelt became merged, much as do the lion and lamb, after the former has dined! The Teutonic Saxon may be said to have dined on the Keltic Briton, and remained master of the island until the Normans came, six centuries later, and in turn dominated, and made him bear the yoke of servitude.

Nor was this French-speaking Norman French at all, except by adoption; being, in fact, the terrible Northman of two centuries before, on account of whose ravages the noble had intrenched himself in his strong castle, and the wretched serf had in mortal terror sold himself and all that he possessed, for the protection of its solid walls and moat; and thus had been laid the foundations of feudalism. He it was who, with longhair reeking with rancid oil, battle-ax, spear, and iron hook—with which to capture human and other prey—had held France in a state of unspeakable terror for centuries, but who had finally settled down as a respectable French citizen in the sea-board province of Normandy, and in [...]