A Short History of Germany Part 1

A Short History of Germany.

by Mary Platt Parmele.

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 mult.i.tudinous 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.

M. P. P.

NEW YORK, _June_ 21, 1897.

A SHORT HISTORY OF GERMANY.

CHAPTER I.

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-gla.s.s 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 Rhone, 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 appet.i.tes 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, a.s.similation, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 G.o.ds.

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.

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 Caesar, 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 mora.s.ses 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 mora.s.ses. 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ddesses, _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.

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_ cla.s.ses.

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 cla.s.s tilled the soil, and were thus the serfs of a ruling cla.s.s, 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.