Hawes The Shortest History of Germany

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-910400-42-5
Verlag: Old Street Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hawes, James

Leseproben

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...