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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
READ IN AN AFTERNOON. REMEMBER FOR A LIFETIME. The West is in full retreat. The Anglo-Saxon powers, great and small, withdraw into fantasies of lost greatness. Populists all over Europe cry out that immigration and globalisation are the work of a nefarious System, run by unseen masters with no national loyalties. From the Kremlin, Tsar Vladimir watches his Great Game line up, while the Baltic and Vizegrad states shiver -- and everyone looks to Berlin. But are the Germans really us, or them? This question has haunted Europe ever since Julius Caesar invented the Germani in 58 BC. How Roman did Germania ever become? Did the Germans destroy the culture of Rome, or inherit it? When did they first drive east, and did they ever truly rule there? How did Germany become, for centuries, a power-vacuum at the heart of Europe? How was Prussia born? Did Bismarck unify Germany or conquer it? Where are the roots of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich? Why did it lose? By what miracle did a better Germany arise from the rubble? Is Germany now the last Western bastion of industrial prosperity and rational politics? Or are the EU and the Euro merely window-dressing for a new German hegemony? This fresh, illuminating and concise new history makes sense of Europe's most admired and feared country. It's time for the real story of Germany.
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THE SHORTEST HISTORYofGERMANY
James Hawes
To the memory of my father, Maurice Hawes, and the future of my third son, Karl Maurice Hawes v. Oppen, whose lives crossed for a few hours on 25 February 2015
CONTENTS
Foreword
If not now, when?
The West is in full retreat. The Anglo-Saxon powers, great and small, withdraw into fantasies of lost greatness. Populists all over Europe cry out that immigration and globalisation are the work of a nefarious System, run by unseen masters with no national loyalties. Hardly believing his luck, Tsar Vladimir watches his Great Game line up; the Baltic and Vizegrad states shiver. Germany’s Foreign Minister from 1998-2005 sees very little hope left:
Europe is far too weak and divided to stand in for the US strategically; and, without US leadership the West cannot survive. Thus, the Western world as virtually everyone alive today has known it will almost certainly perish before our eyes.
Joschka Fischer, The End of the West, 5 Dec 2016
Meanwhile, a New York Times headline wonders whether the Liberal West’s Last Defender might be Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany.
Germany? The land where, within living memory, Adolf Hitler was democratically confirmed in power (though only just, and only thanks to a very specific group of voters, as we’ll see) and proceeded to unleash all-out war in pursuit of a murderously racist dominion? Can Germany really have changed so drastically in a single lifetime?
Yes, it can. But to understand this – and why Germany may now be our last hope – we have to throw away a great deal of what we think we know about German history, and start afresh.
So let’s begin at the very beginning. Or rather, a little further back, at the proto-beginning…
In the Proto-Beginning
Around 500 BC, at our best guess, in a collection of Iron Age huts in southern Scandinavia or northernmost Germany, one branch of the Indo-European population of Europe began to pronounce certain consonants differently from everyone else.
Where it probably started, c. 500 BC
Exactly who and where and when and why, nobody knows for sure, or ever can. We can, though, reconstruct what happened. Take those question-words. Other languages went on using a c/k/qu sound (as in the Latin quis, quid, quo, cur, quam) and still do today (quoi, que, che, kakiya and so on); but the ancestor of Danish, English, German and suchlike now peeled off and started using a hv/wh/h sound, leading to the modern hvad/what/was and so on.
The tribes who (we deduce) started using these new sounds in about 500 BC are known as the proto-Germans. We have no idea what they called themselves, because at this stage they had no contact whatever with the peoples of the Mediterranean, who had things like aqueducts, libraries, theatres, elections and written history.
We do know that by about 150 BC, the proto-Germans had started interacting with the Mediterranean world. From this period, Roman-made wine-drinking sets start turning up all over Germany. We also know that shopping was a new experience for them, because in all Germanic languages, the word for buying things (kaupa/kopen/shopping/kaufen etc) is taken straight from the Latin word caupo, which means small trader or innkeeper. We can imagine First Contact taking place in some trading-post on the Rhine or the Danube, where the proto-German elite exchanged furs, amber, their blond hair (prized by Roman wig-makers) and above all slaves, for drink.
This trade seems to have continued peacefully until some tribes from the north called the Cimbri and Teutones gave the Roman Republic a mortal scare from 112 BC until 101 BC, when they were finally wiped out by the great general Marius. Later patriots would claim them as early Germans, but to the Romans they were just generic barbarians. Certainly, no one ever called them Germans at the time. In fact, as far as we know, no one ever called anyone a German until 58 BC. Fittingly, the whole grand story starts with one of the most famous men in history.
PART ONE
The first half-millennium: 58 BC–526 AD
The Romans create the Germans, then the Germans take over Rome
Caesar invents the Germans
Rome and Gaul before Caesar
In March 60 BC, the main topic of conversation in Rome (wrote the philosopher-lawyer-politician Cicero) was the threat of barbarian asylum-seekers. They were flooding into the already Romanised area of Cisalpine Gaul – in essence, today’s northern Italy – because of unrest and wars further north. There seemed to be a new and troublesome power in unconquered Transalpine Gaul. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar, the new governor of Cisalpine Gaul, itching for a war of conquest to make his reputation and clear his debts, gave them a name: Germani.
From the first mention on page one of his bestselling history, the Gallic War, Caesar firmly pairs these Germani with the idea that they dwell beyond the Rhine. He is filling in a map as blank for his own readership as Central Africa was for Stanley’s, and he gets his big idea in straight away. Rome and Gaul overlap, both physically and culturally, but beyond the Rhine lies a completely different nation. This is hammered home throughout the pages of the Gallic War.
Caesar soon discovers that things are indeed looking bad. Some Gaulish tribes had bribed 15,000 fighting Germans across the Rhine to help them against the domineering Aedui. But having won the day, the German leader, Ariovistus, called more of his people across the Rhine and is now de facto ruler of all non-Roman Gaul. There are already 120,000 Germans in Gaul; soon, more will come and drive out the locals, who will be forced to seek new homes.
Patriot that he is, Caesar immediately sees the danger. The Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul – maybe even Rome itself – will be swamped by barbarian migrants. He inspires his quailing legionaries with a splendid oration and advances, carefully avoiding the dreaded narrow roads and forests. The tribes he collectively terms the Germani are engaged at the Battle of Vosges in 58 BC.
The Germans are utterly beaten and, as usual in pre-modern warfare, rout turns into general slaughter. When the survivors flee across the river, Caesar wants to go after them. The Ubii (Germans, but allies of Rome) offer to ferry his army over the Rhine. Caesar decides it would be more Roman, and safer, to build a bridge across the river. His legions do so in ten days, a quite astonishing feat.
However awe-inspiring Rome’s military tech, though, it comes down to boots on the ground. And the Germans know this ground. They escape into the forests, where, Caesar learns, they plan to gather all their forces and await the Roman attack. At this, having advanced far enough to serve (as he neatly spins it) both honour and polity, Caesar returns into Gaul, cutting down the bridge behind him.
For the rest of the Gallic War, the Germans lurk as potential allies of anyone in Gaul who wants to rebel. There’s only one solution: let them feel the full might of Rome. So when, in 55 BC, they attempt a mass-migration across the Rhine, Caesar resolves to make war against the Germans.
Caesar boasts that his troops came back safe to a man after driving 430,000 of the enemy into the deadly confluence of the Rhine and the Meuse, where they perished. Even by Roman standards, this was clearly a massacre, not a war. The great orator, Cato, publicly demanded that Caesar be handed over to the Germans as punishment. But Caesar uses the Gallic War to justify the brutality of his methods as an effective deterrent: when the rebellious Gauls next try to bribe the Germans over, the Germans reply that they are not going to risk it after what happened last time.
What, then, are these newly-discovered barbarians really like? Caesar pauses his action-packed tale at suitably dramatic moment – he’s standing at his second bridgehead across the Rhine, in 53 BC – to give his readers his famous description, the first in history, of the Germans.
Caesar’s Germans
The Germans differ much [from the Gauls] for they have neither Druids to preside over sacred offices, nor do they pay great regard to sacrifices. They rank in the number of the gods those alone whom they behold, and by whose instrumentality they are obviously benefitted, namely, the sun, fire, and the moon; they have not heard of the other deities even by report. Their whole life is occupied in hunting and in the pursuits of the military art… they bathe promiscuously in the rivers and [only] use skins or small cloaks of deer’s hides, a large portion of the body being in consequence naked. They do not pay much attention to agriculture, and a large portion of their food consists in milk, cheese, and flesh; nor has anyone a fixed quantity of land or his own individual limits… They consider this the real evidence of their prowess, that their neighbours shall be driven out of their lands and abandon them, and that no one dare settle near them… Robberies which are committed beyond the boundaries of each state bear no infamy… To injure guests they regard as impious; they defend from wrong those who have come to them for any purpose whatever, and esteem them inviolable; to them the houses of all are open and maintenance is freely supplied… The breadth of this Hercynian forest, which has been referred to above, is to a quick traveller, a journey of nine days. For it cannot be otherwise computed, nor are they acquainted with the measures of roads… It is certain that many kinds of wild beast are produced in it which have never been seen in other places.
Gallic War, VI, 22-28.
No real gods or priests, no property, no social order, no fields of corn for bread, no way of measuring distances, vast forests teeming with ferocious beasts, incessant inter-tribal warfare – barbarism indeed, and no prospect of Rome running the place at a profit.
But this isn’t anthropology. It’s politics. The whole point is to set up a contrast between the left bank of the Rhine (where Caesar has triumphed) and the right bank (which he has twice invaded with no success whatever). On this side are the Gauls: they farm in fertile fields; they worship proper gods who can be easily mapped onto the Graeco-Roman pantheon; they have basic laws, primitive elections, a social order of sorts, and their druids even write in Greek characters, sure proof of civilisable potential. Caesar has won for his people an entire country perfect for Romanisation, and ripe for taxation. On that side of the Rhine, though, are the Germans.
At the same time, it’s clear that the river isn’t really the border between two entirely different cultures. Caesar tells us there’s at least one tribe dwelling on the far side of the Rhine who were until recently Gauls in Gaul; vice-versa, the Belgae, now living on the near side of the Rhine, have sprung from the Germans only recently. The Ubii, who live on the German bank of the Rhine, are steadfast allies of Rome, while on the Gaulish bank dwell hostile tribes, also apparently Germans. All through the Gallic War, people cross the Rhine to attack, to unite, to flee or to migrate. Caesar himself used a German cavalry unit as an elite personal guard.
The reality along the banks of the Rhine in 58–53 BC seems to have been a fluid, baffling and bloody mess, rather like today’s Syria. But what kind of triumphal news would that be? So Caesar announces that he has discovered a natural boundary for Roman rule. The Rhine becomes a Roman version of the Sykes-Picot line in the sand, the border drawn arbitrarily through the Middle East by the British and the French after WW1. The peoples beyond the Rhine are declared irredeemably barbaric and their land a nightmarish wilderness. Worse, they are specifically hostile to Rome herself, never refusing help to anyone who opposes the Romans. Henceforth, Rome’s mission is clear: keep a watch on the Rhine and give them hell every time they try to cross it.
Julius Caesar had invented the Germans.
Gaul and Germany according to Caesar
Germania almost becomes Roman
The Roman Republic, busy fighting itself and becoming an Empire after Caesar’s murder, stuck to his line on the Rhine: civilisable Gauls here, Germans there. Of course, there were uses for uncivilised folk. The first Roman Emperor, Augustus, copied Julius Caesar in using a personal bodyguard of North-Rhineland Germans – as did Herod the Great, Rome’s client King of Judea. In 17 BC, however, a large war-pack of Germans crossed the Rhine, captured V Legion’s holy symbol, its eagle, and took it back across the river in triumph. The brand-new Roman Empire could not permit its writ to be mocked like this, so it mobilized for its first great strategic offensive: the outright conquest of Germania.
The Emperor Augustus’s younger stepson, Drusus, was given command. Jump-off points were built along the Rhine, giving birth to what are now Bonn, Mainz, Nijmegen and Xanten. From these bases, Drusus led his legions and his navy from 12 BC–9 BC in an unbroken succession of victories the length and breadth of north-western Germany.
In 9 BC, Drusus reached the Elbe. There, according to the historians Cassius Dio and Suetonius, a vision of a gigantic female form advised him to turn back and cease his insatiable drive for conquests, for his days were numbered.
Drusus reaches the Elbe; wood engraving after Eduard Bendemann
It’s a seminal moment in the history of Germany and Europe. Stopping at the Elbe is not a normal military-political decision; it’s one dictated by higher powers. Crossing the Rhine is fine; but the Elbe marks the end of reasonable ambition.
The final conquest of Germania between the Danube, the Rhine and the Elbe was slated for 6 AD. In perhaps the greatest single campaign ever planned by Rome, twelve legions – about 40% of the Empire’s entire strength – were to envelop the last recalcitrant tribes in a vast pincer-movement from the Rhine in the west and the Danube in the south.
The Empire’s grand plan, 6 AD
Just a few days before the mighty offensive was due to begin, an auxiliary legion in modern-day Bosnia mutinied, sparking the Great Illyrian Revolt in the Balkans. The massed Rhine-Danube armies were hastily transferred south.
Back in Germania, despite the abandoned campaign, Romanisation continued apace. Cassius Dio wrote that cities were being founded. The barbarians were becoming used to holding markets, and were meeting in peaceful assemblies. This sounds rather like Dick Cheney’s idyllic dream of a post-Desert Storm Iraq, and traditionally it’s been dismissed as gross exaggeration. Recently, though, archaeologists have found clear evidence that the Romans truly were constructing Germania. At Waldgirmes, 60 miles east of the Rhine, an entire military and civilian town complete with streets, a market and a forum, has been uncovered. The coins found there date Roman occupation from 5 AD to 9 AD.
That second date was for many decades drilled into every German schoolchild’s brain as the most memorable in German history.
Arminius and After
Rather like the British in India, the Romans in Germany found a patchwork of warring statelets and imposed upon it, for their own convenience, the notion of a single vast Nation. Like the British, they then created for this invented land a class of semi-acculturated leaders from whom they expected loyalty.
In 9 AD Publius Quinctilius Varus, governor of Germania, had spent the summer deep up-country, not at war but collecting taxes (with too heavy a hand, it was later said). On the way back to winter quarters on the Rhine, he made the mistake of trusting his Romanised table-companion, Arminius (the Latinised version of Hermann), the son of the chief of the north-western Cherusci tribe, who’d been educated in Rome itself. Arminius told him that there was a small rebellion going on nearby, and that the Romans ought to show the flag there just one more time this year. Despite being warned by Arminius’s own father-in-law not to trust him, Varus agreed and, convinced he was in fully pacified territory, set off without even bothering to organise his three legions into proper war-march formation. Camp-followers and all, the Romans struck out into the narrow paths and dense forests which Caesar, fifty years before, had carefully avoided. There, they were wiped out in the ambush known as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, amid well-attested scenes of horror that would strain even today’s movie-makers. Following a breakthrough by British amateur Major Tony Clunn in 1985, archaeologists are now certain that the battlefield was at Kalkriese, in Lower Saxony.
Roman cavalry mask discovered at the Kalkriese site
In the aftermath, almost every Roman foothold east of the Rhine was destroyed. It was a massive defeat, but it was not (as is widely thought) the end of Roman ambition in Germany. From 14 to 16 AD Drusus’s son, Germanicus, ravaged the land in vengeance and finally managed to bring Arminius and his allies to bay on the banks of the River Weser. The eve of battle was the stuff of legend. Arminius and a brother who’d stayed loyal to Rome traded insults across the river, in Latin. Germanicus provided the model for Shakespeare’s Henry V by touring his troops incognito in the darkness. Come the morning, the Germans were routed and slaughtered so that ten miles were strewn with bodies and abandoned weapons (Tacitus). Soon afterwards, Arminius/Hermann, the first hero of German nationalism, was murdered in obscure circumstances by his fellow-countrymen.
The Rhineland was secure again. The Roman army, like all armies, preferred tough boys from the backwoods to city youths, and the Germans now became their most-favoured recruits. During the Roman conquest of Britannia, German troops swam the Thames in full armour to win the vital Battle of the Medway. The Imperial bodyguard itself was so thoroughly German-manned that it was known by the cowed citizens of Rome simply as the cohors Germanorum. In parts of the Rhineland, providing soldiers for Rome became the mainstay of the whole local economy.
Rome was now enjoying its greatest days – a near-century of exceptional peace, stability and prosperity under the socalled Five Good Emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius – and moving inexorably forward on all fronts, including Germany. We’ve only recently discovered just how far. Around 20 AD, the Greek geographer Strabo had seen Germany thus:
Map of Europe according to Strabo
The Romans, he wrote, have not yet advanced into the parts that are beyond the Albis [Elbe]. But by 150 AD, the great scholar of Alexandria, Ptolemy, had drawn Magna Germania extending far beyond it:
Until very recently, it was believed that much of Ptolemy’s map was pure imagination. Then, in 2010, a team from Berlin Technical University, benefitting from a newly-discovered version of the map and modern computing power, decided that it was far more accurate than had hitherto been believed – so accurate, in fact, that it could not possibly have been drawn by a man sitting in a library on the North African coast unless he had access to military-grade surveying information. The team concluded that by the early 2nd century AD, the Roman army must have thoroughly known the ground as far east as the Vistula, in today’s Poland.
The Limes that Lasted
Although the Romans seem to have surveyed everything that would one day be called Germany, they never conquered anything like all of it. In fact, the future of Germany was largely dictated by precisely how far Rome truly ruled. There’s no doubt how far that was, for the limit is still written unmistakeably in the soil.
The dates are vague, but by 100 AD at the latest the Romans were in full control of much of south-west Germany. By c. 160 AD they had formalised their rule by building the great fortified border, known as the limes Germanicus. This traced the Rhine, then cut eastwards inland before following the River Main (to this day proverbial as the north-south divide in Germany) then heading south and east to modern-day Regensburg.
This fault-line in German history is Europe’s very own Great Wall: 350 miles long and with about a thousand forts or watchtowers, many still traceable. For years it was inexplicably ignored by historians, but in the last decade it has at last started to receive the attention it deserves. For the rest of this book we should remember exactly how much of Germany the Romans actually ruled.
If you lay the line of the limes over a map of modern Germany, it encompasses Cologne, Bonn, Mainz, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich and Vienna; just east of the line, places like Duisburg were originally Roman forward bases. In other words, all the greatest cities of the future Austria and West Germany except Hamburg grew up within, or in the immediate and daily shadow of, the Roman Empire.
The Noble Savage Germans
The most famous Roman account of the early Germans is the historian Tacitus’s Germania (c. 103 AD). Like Caesar, Tacitus cast the Germans as the opposite of the Romans. But for him this was no bad thing, since he claimed the Romans had degenerated into a people made soft by vice and luxury, who merely grovelled to their emperors. The Germans were barbarians, yes, but noble ones uncorrupted by the temptations of public entertainments.
Later patriots misread Tacitus’s book as evidence that the Germans were never romanised. Actually, it means exactly the opposite. The Romans, like many later imperialists, liked nothing better than to read about wild and noble tribesmen on their frontiers – once they’d been beaten. If it took a real fight, so much the nobler all round. In 1745, all England trembled with fear as the Highland Scots invaded. No one thought them romantic. But once they’d been smashed at Culloden, the British Army almost immediately began using them as shock-troops, and the English public fell in love with tales of their unspoiled, natural bravado. So it was with the Romans and Germans in 100 AD. The last serious rebellion in Germania had been in 69/70 AD, and that was only because Rome’s crack German troops had felt insulted at the disbanding of the imperial bodyguard, the cohors Germanorum. Roman readers in Tacitus’s day could safely enjoy tales of their very own wild Germani.
Tacitus’s best-known, and most notorious, statement about the Germans is that they are a pure race not mixed at all with other races and all having the same physical appearance: blue eyes, red/blond hair, huge frames. Less often quoted is his insight into a central fact about Germania, right from its very beginnings. It is bounded to the north by the ocean, to the west by the Rhine and to the south by the Danube – but all that defines the boundary between the Germans and the scarcely-known peoples to their east is mutual fear. Tacitus had hit on a great lever of German history: the uncertainty about how far east it actually stretched.
We’ll come back to Tacitus later, when he is rediscovered in the fifteenth century AD. For now the important thing is that by c. 100 AD, despite the bloody setback of the Teutoburg Forest, Rome was in full control of the richest and most fertile parts of Germania.
The Beginning of the End
Roman troops returning from the Near East brought back a terrible souvenir. The Antonine Plague, possibly a smallpox pandemic, ravaged Western Europe between about 165 and 180 AD. Meanwhile, the Germans along the Danube came under pressure from more ferocious Germans, the Goths, who were expanding southwards, and began to push against the undermanned Roman fortresses which hemmed them in.
With only plague-degraded legions at his disposal, the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, found himself obliged to expose his person in eight winter campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution (Gibbon). He was faced not with a single enemy, or a nation, but with a crazy political jigsaw-puzzle, in which Germani was still just a catch-all term for various tribes:
Roman limes and tribes of Magna Germania, around 160 AD
Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXXII
Some of the tribes, under the leadership of Battarius, a boy twelve years old, promised an alliance; these received a gift of money. Others, like the Quadi, asked for peace, which was granted them. The right to attend the markets, however, was not granted to them, for fear that the Iazyges and the Marcomani should mingle with them, and reconnoitre the Roman positions and purchase provisions… Both the Astingi and the Lacringi came to the assistance of Marcus, hoping to secure money and land. The Lacringi attacked the Astingi and won a decisive victory. As a result, the Astingi committed no further acts of hostility against the Romans… etc.
Marcus used a blend of sheer force and tempting offers to try to control things. After being defeated, selected Germans would be invited to become foederati, allies of Rome, who would fight against the other Germans in return for military aid and cash subsidies. At its core, this system depended on Rome’s continuing ability to hand out a solid military thrashing now and then.
It eventually worked for Marcus Aurelius, though it killed him. But from the early third century AD, Rome began to be challenged by the Persian Sassanid Empire for the huge wealth of the Near East. With resources diverted, it became harder and harder to control the German frontier.
In 235 AD the Roman armies on the Rhine mutinied and proclaimed a new kind of emperor, the gigantic and terrifying Maximinus Thrax, son of a Goth. The first emperor to be installed solely by the army and the first altogether without literary education (Gibbon) was half German. Maximinus was the beginning of the end for Rome. His reign opened the great Crisis of the Third Century, with some 20 different emperors in 49 years. By 284 AD, the lands beyond the Rhine and the Danube had been lost and a new limes had to be constructed along the riverbanks at vast expense. This line held for another century, but the Germans had removed the veil that covered the feeble majesty of Italy (Gibbon). From now on, Rome was purely on the defensive, and a purely defensive war only ever ends one way.
Darkness or Light?
We tend to think of civilised Rome going down at the hands of barbarian Germans, with the Dark Ages the sad result. But the lights were going out in Europe long before the Germans got to the switch.
The Four Tetrarchs
After 235 AD, it was anybody’s guess how long an emperor was going to last before being killed, or when the next civil war would devastate entire provinces. Just how different “Rome” had already become can be seen from the famous statue of the Four Tetrarchs (c. 300 AD); to us, it looks more like a set of Norse chessmen than a classical sculpture.
A sort of order, which relegated Rome itself to the second city of the Empire after Constantinople, was restored by Constantine the Great (reign 306-337 AD), but only thanks to Germanic muscle. Constantine’s first act on taking Rome in 312 AD was to abolish the legendary Praetorian Guard and replace them with the Scholae Palatinae, his own elite Germanic horse-guards. The last great pagan Graeco-Roman thinkers, Libanius and Zosimus, both accused Constantine of conquering Roman civilisation with an army of German barbarians. Constantine was Rome’s first Christian emperor, so a military-political link between Germanic warlords and Roman Christianity was forged right from the start.
But even more massive change was coming, pushed, like most really big things in history, by an epochal shift of populations.
The Wandering Germans
After 300 AD Germanic war-bands seem to have been driven by some irresistible force to shift their habitations, in what’s traditionally known as the Völkerwanderungen – the Migrations of the Peoples.
Since our only witnesses are Roman ones, we only know what they saw on their own borders. What was going on deep inside Germany is anyone’s theory. Climate change is an obvious candidate, as is population growth or a simple desire for some of Rome’s wealth. In some cases – such as that of the Goths, as we’ll see – pressure from further east was certainly the cause. It’s also been argued that the migrations were caused by the slow fall of the Roman Empire, and the resultant power-vacuum along its borders. But no one even really knows when it all started, let alone why. Marcus Aurelius’s troubles back in the 2nd century may have been the very first sign. At any rate, the 19th-century map below shows why we can’t even start to discuss in any detail what actually happened.
One thing we can say, though, is that the 19th-century image of entire tribes shifting (like the Boers or the pioneers of the American West) is misleading. The spectacular odysseys of these various Germans had almost no long-term effect on the linguistic map of continental Europe, a clear indication that the wanderers were overwhelmingly male. They might lord it over wretched farmers or unmilitary townsmen for a few generations; but without their own womenfolk, they would disappear almost without linguistic trace (language being normally transmitted down the maternal line) when they were finally defeated or simply absorbed. The native tongue would then resurface.
This happened all across Europe and North Africa. The only place where a literate, romanised, Christian culture was permanently obliterated by an entire new population of these illiterate, pagan Germans was in the lowland portion of the largest island of the archipelago north-west of the mouth of the Rhine, i.e. England. But that’s another story.
As for the continental Germans, the first proper history we have belongs to the Goths.
The Goths – Saviours of Rome?
From teenage fashion to horror movies to architecture, the word Gothic has become a catch-all title for anything dark, irrational and anti-classical. The Goths would have been horrified.
True, they’d been the first barbarians ever to kill a Roman Emperor, but that had been back in the crisis-ridden days of the third century, in 251 AD
