The Shortest History of Germany: From Julius Caesar to Angela Merkel—A Retelling for Our Times (2019 Edition)

224 Pages·2016·8.82 MB·English

by  James Hawes

THE
SHORTEST HISTORY
of
GERMANY
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
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
In the Proto-Beginning…
PART ONE
The First Half-Millennium (8 BC–526 AD)
The Romans create the Germans, then the Germans take over Rome
PART TWO
The Second Half-Millennium (526 AD–983 AD)
The Germans restore Rome
PART THREE
The Third Half-Millennium (983 AD–1525 AD)
There is a battle for Germany
PART FOUR
The Fourth Half-Millennium (1525 AD–the present)
Germany goes two ways
Acknowledgements
Copyright
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 First Germanic Sound-Shift is also known as Grimm’s Law because
it was set down by Jacob, elder of the folktale-collecting Brothers
Grimm. Its effect can most clearly be seen in modern English, which uses
both Germanic and non-Germanic, Latin-derived versions.
p became f: paternal – fatherly
f became b: fraternal – brotherly
b became p: labia – lip
c/k/qu became hv/wh/h: century – hundred
h became g: horticulture – gardening
g became k: gnostic – know
t became th: triple – three
d became t: dental – teeth
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.