Author : James Hawes
The first Half Millennium 8BC – 526 AD
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 WWI. The peoples beyond the Rhine are declared irredeemably barbaric and their land a nightmarish wilderness. Rome’s mission is clear : keep a watch on the Rhine and give them hell everytime they try to cross it.
In 9 AD Publius Quinctilius Varus, governor of Germania had spent the summer deep up-country collecting taxes. On the way back to winter quarters on the Rhine he made the mistake of trusting his Romanised rable-companion, Arminius (called Hermann in germany), the son of the chief of the north-western Cherusci tribe, who had been educated in rome. His legions were not organized for a march as he was thinking he was safe and his 3 legions got butchered in the narrow paths and dense forests in the ambush called ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest‘.
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 Goth. The first emperor to be installed solely by the army and the first without literary education and half german. Maximinus was the begining of the end for Rome. His reign opened the great Crisis of the Third century, with some 20 different emperors in 49 years.
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 migration of peoples.
In 375 AD, the huns appeared from the Eurasian steppes, sending the Goths recoiling from modern-day Ukraine towards the Danube. The romans forced to accept this flow of new people ferried them over the Danube and welcomed them, but under conditions so harsh that the Goths, starving and desperate, now began to wage war on the empire from within.
In 486 AD Clovis defeated the last rival forces claiming to represent the western empire and converted to Christianity in 496. After the Gothic wars, which exhausted the empire and defeated the goths, the merovingians were the great beneficiaries and they spent the seventh century securing what’s now France.
The Second Half-Millennium 526 AD – 983 AD
The word that became deutsch wasn’t originally anything to do with Germany. Charlemagne’s chaplain wrote in 786 AD that in England, church business was conducted in both latin and theodisce (language of the people, in this case anglo saxon). Later theodisce was used to mean the non-latinate frankish tongues and eventually became Deutsch/Dutch.
842 AD the Strasbourg Oaths, Charlemagne children, Charles the bald and Louis the german come to terms in Strasbourg concerning the partition of the empire of their father, and pronounce the memorandum in the language of his brother’s army in front of everybody. This is one of the greatest tableaux in European history and is gold dust for historians of language : on this single day, French first appears as a recorded tongue and German attains the rank of a diplomatic language.
In 870 AD, Louis and Charles partitioned Lothair’s realm between them, creating the west frankish and east frankish kingdoms which would become France and Germany respectively. Lothair’s realm was left only as a name Lotharingia and as the memory of a thoroughly mixed Franco/German Roman realm.
Otto had to deal with his eastern question. IOt’s in his reign that the world teutonicis is first recorded. Which distinguish between Otto’s German subjects and the sclavanis. The slavs responded in kind by coining the word nemoy (non-speakers) as their own word for all Germans. It stuck in every slavic language. The Elbe was still the great dividing line between a Rome-facing us and a distinct them.
The Great Slav Revolt of 983 AD is central to Slavic history, it was the event which guaranteed cultural survival. Just as the romans lost everything beyond the Rhine in 9 AD, the Germans were thrown clean back across the Elbe in 983 AD. Within a few decades, the Poles and the Magyars had founded indepent Christian realms.
The third Half Millennium 983 AD – 1525 AD
In 1226, Emperor Frederick II signed one of the central documents in the history of nort-eastern Europe : the Golden Bull of Rimini. The Bull was for the Teutonic order, originally merchants from Lübeck and Bremen who’d set off to tend wounded crusaders in the Holy Land. It invited them to militarize themselves and conquer the Pruscie. If they succeeded where many others had failed, they would be allowed to rule there, subject only to the emperor himself. The Teutonic knights soon went far beyond the lads specified in the Golden Bull of Rimini.
The Hansa, league of merchants, which controlled the market with north east through Lübeck, became so walthy that it could loan, bribe and lobby even large states. Englishman called the Hansa merchants Easterlings, and their name came to stand for a reliable pound’s worth of money : the pound Sterling.
In 1410, the new joint Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania shattered the power of the Teutonic Knights forever at Tannenberg.
On all Hallow’s day 1517, in the university town of Wittenberg on the Elbe, a prominent local priest who had recently had mighty revelation while taking a dump, nailed a multi-bullet-point challenge to Rome onto the doors of the castle church. His name was Martin Luther and his 95 Theses are regarded as the birth of the Protestant Reformation.
The teutonic knights, under grand master Albrecht von Brandenburg-Ansbach having met Luther, declared himself no longer the mere head of a catholic order, obediant to the pope and emperor, but the protestant Duke of Prussia in his own right, notionally subservient only to the king of Poland. This was in april 1525 and it’s the most important date in German history between 800 and 1866. In that strange colony way beyond the Elbe, where genuine pagans had dwelled, there was now for the first time since Charlemagne’s conquest a german realm which refused all allegiance to the Church, or the emperor or Rome. Prussia and the political reformatrion were born in the same moment, as a direct challenge to the great continuum of the west.
The fourth half millennium 1525 AD – present
The thirty years war was originally yet another round in the ancient struggle over whether any rome centered power would ever truly rule over all germany. This time the fight was expressed in the new terms of Catholic versus Protestant-at first. It was then a fight joined by France and the Swedes. And then a fights between french Bourbons and spanish Habsburgs. The state of Germany at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was catastrophic. 1/3 of the entire population seems to have perished, cities were completely wiped out.
The 18th century in Europe belonged to France. All over germany, ruinously expensive imitations of Versailles shot up, within whose gilded chambers courtiers and nobleman took to speaking in French. By mid eighteenth century french words heavily penetrated the german language. Frederick the great now full king of prussia wrote that German was a half-barbarian tongue in which not even a literary could do descent work.
The junker state : Prussia in 1750 had not only a frenchified court but also a nasty reputation as a militaristic robber-state. From his father Frederick the great had inherited an efficient bureaucracy and an army so disproportionately large that Voltaire, who was briefly the favourite at Frderick’s court famously said : other states have armies; in Prussia, the army has a state.
Junkers = pround prussian young men, bred to arms and semi colonial rule, with absolutely no money, with precious title ‘von’ to their names. Despite vast differences in wealth and status between them, the Prussian vons strill recognised each other as a single caste, and my would literally die rathe rthan lose membership of it. They made wonderful officers.
When the seven year’s war (1756-63) began, most Germans thought of Prussia as the ancient greeks thought of Sparta : a grim land filled with ferocious soldiery. But Prussia gained huge prestige and even adoration within Germany by whipping a larger French army at Rossbach in 1757.
Queen Louise of Prussia to her children after the Prussian defeatr of Iena : In one day, fate (napoleon) has destroyed the edifice which great men worked to erect over the course of two centuries. There is no Prussian state left, no Prussian army, no national honour left.
G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831) : Hegel thought that ideas are always in open conflict, the conflicts create change in sudden great upheavals whose results are impossible to predict. He believed that the world spirit (der Weltgeist) was always leading things in the general direction of the pefect Rational state. He often suggested Prussia. Radical belief in change through conflict + worship of state power = the perfect philosophy for extremists of both left and right.
Karl Marx : in the communist manifesto, he and Engels took Hegel’s doctrine of progress through conflict and proclaimed that the real battle which powered all history was between the social classes. This class struggle would continue until Marx’s version of Hegel’s rational state cam about with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Later Das Kapital claimed to provie it scientifically invevitable that capitalism would collapse violently.
Otto von Bismarck, the iron chancellor, 1815 – 1898, tells it straight in 1862 : I shall soon be compelled to undertake the conduct of the Prussian government. As soon as the army shall have been brought to such a condition as to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German confederation, subdue the minor states and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership.
On the morning of 18 January 1871, in the hall of mirrors at versailles, Bismarck and Wilhelm I appeared and declared the creation of the second German Empire.
Bismarck declared war on the social and political influence of the Catholic church in what was known as the Cultural struggle (Kulturkampf). Schools were to be taken out of Church control, civil marriages allowed and priests forbidden from engaging in anything that could be termed political opposition.
Bismarck then did a U-turn, called off Kulturkampf, broke with the liberals and in 1879 signed an anti Russian defensive alliance with his oldest enemy, arch-Catholic Austria. The Dual Alliance of 1879 was a terrible deal for Germany.
In 1892 the Tivoli programme mad it official conservative policy to oppose the often obstrusive and corrosive Jewish influence on our national life. Open anti semitism was now socially respectable at the highest level.
Fear/hatred of Judaengland as driver of modernity + fear/hatred of inexaustible womb of Poland + Obsession with German Unity under a great non-royal leader + socially radical vision of hierarchy based on race, not class = Pre-1914 precursors of Nazi Ideology.
Bismarck hoped to ally with England and counter Russia, he on land and England on sea, but his plan lay in shambles when Disraeli (the foreign minister of UK) was thrown out. Bismarck then became openly anti English, Anglophobia.
Enfd of 19 century people already knew that there will be a world war : the constellation that would result in WWI was already visible. Waldersee, Moltke’s heir apparent as head of the Prussian army wrote in his diary that war with France was now inevitable and that it might become a World War (Weltkrieg). He bagan plotting a two front war against both France and Russia. Bismarck plotted desperately to avoid it.Bismarck got evicted by young emperor Wilhelm II in 1890.
The last recorded time Moltke repeated his mantra, the sooner the better, was 1st of June 1914. On the 28 news came from Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Habsburg Empire, has been assassinated.. Wilhelm I gave Austria Hungary general staff the blank cheque they had been waiting for since 1879 : full Prussian military support for whatever they choise to do in sorting out their Slav problem. The Austrians thought the Russians would back down. They didn’t. The rest followed.
In the east though things wer looking good for Germany. Ludendorff deliverately allowed Lenin to pass through Germany into Russia in a sealed train, hoping to infect Russia with revolution. It worked perfectly.
As early as 1920 one of Lenin’s diplomats in Berlin was already suggesting the possibility of combining the German Army and the Red army for a joint war on poland. Von Seeckt was enthusiastic (general who was left in charge after WWI, arch-junker, Prussian from Posen), here is what he said in 1922 :
The existence of Poland is intolerable and incompatible with Germany’s vital interests. She must disappear and will do so through her own inner weakness and through Russia- with our help. Poland is even more intolerable for Russia than for ourselves; Russia can never tolerate Poland. The attainment of this objective must be one of the firmest guiding principles of German policy, as it is capable of achievment – but only through Russia or with her help.
Hitler and Lenin : dark mordernism
Just as von Seeckt’s Prussian Junker army, radicalised by defeat, found much to agree on with the red army, so Hitler’s ideas were closer to Lenin’s than to any traditional European conservatism. Both Lenin and Hitler appealed to perverted versions of that great 19th century liberal ideology (as seen in Hegel, Marx and Darwin) : the idea of progress through struggle to utopia. Hitler and Lenin did not care for the fate of the individual. They defined progress solely in terms of the masses, be they the workers or the German race, and where happy to eliminate anyone regardes as a block to that progress. They were both fan of Henry ford, a rabid antisemite himself who helped to fund the nazi party.
Being close to Ludendorff gave Hitler priceless respectability and wealthy sponsors. It was only now that the arch-Prussian idea of colonial Living Space (Lebensraum) in the east became a central part of Hitler’s ideology.
The key compositional predictor of the Nazi vote in Weimar Germany is the Protestant ratio of the local population. Hitler’s strongholds were clearly in the Lutheran countryside.
Night of the long knives : 30.06.1934 : Hitler kills Röhm and between 150 and 200 hardcore SA leaders (nazis). Hitler strikes a deal with Blomberg : he would tame the SA and vastly expand the army if the generals promised to back him as total leader of Germany after Hindenburg’s death.
kristallnacht : 10.111938, unleashed Nazi thugs smash and burn Jewish premises and synagogues all over germany. The Nazi’s Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, crowed that the radical view has triumphed.
To be noted : Prussia had been born and raised under the throne of Poland and Russia saved it from extrinction at the hands of Napoleon in 1807
in 1948 a new currency is introduced by Erhard to prevent inflation, Reich mark is converted to Deutsche Mark. Businesses gets a exchange rate 1:1 , private individuals 15:1. Personal savings of germans are wiped out, but the economy is saved.
Shortest history of east elbia : Otto the great invaded across the Elbe in 935 AD, the slaves thew the germans out in 983 AD; the Germans tried again in 1147 and over the next two centuries they largely (but never completely) succeeded in supplanting the slavs up to the river Oder. The teutonic knights went further until the Poles smashed them in 1410. Prussia was born under Polish suzerainty as an act of revol against Rome in 1525, rose to fame in battle against Sweden, was made a great power by victories between the Elbe and the Oder, then saved from abolition by the Tsar in 1807. The fata inability of the western Germans to unite allowed Prussia to conquer them after a single great battle on the elbe in 1866. Prussia smashed France in 1870; it thereafter dragooned the Germans into providing manpower and money for its bid(s) to settle the 1000 year struggle with the Slavs. That struggle ended in 1945 with part of east elbia lost forever and what was left, between Elbe and Oder, a helpless colony of Russia.
By permitting Germany to expand eastwards, Miterrand heloped Kohl become the “chancellor of unity”. This in turn put Kohl in a position to relieve Germany of its dearly held currency, one of the greatest triumphs of the Mitterand presidency.
Germany must now recall its real history. Europe must reciprocate by seeing that 1871-1945 was a Prussian anomaly in the story of the country where state worship, puritanical zeal and scar faced militarism have always been entirely alien.
