The German Question
This posting comes live from Munich where I’m getting myself updated on Germany, its history, and its current mood. The last time I was here was in 1971, where, along with several dozen other American teenagers, I was getting my first taste of Europe (including fresh Lowenbrau beer (but that’s another story)). In the next posting, I will talk about the construction of memory regarding relatively recent German historical developments, here I want to take a broader view.
Germany has been the heart of Europe for centuries; certainly since medieval times. While we in the US tend to get a heavier flavoring of British and French history, we can’t begin to understand Europe without addressing the “German question.”
Part of the problem in adjusting our perspective is that until 1871 there was no “Germany” in the national, political sense. The formation of a single integrated state, building on increasing industrial and economic power in the mid-19C shifted the gravitational patterns across Europe. For several reasons, that project went off the rails, as Germany fostered the descent into WWI and was the primary instigator of WWII. The solution to that problem was the peace settlement imposed by the Allies splitting the country into two pieces, each tied into their respective Cold War blocs and effectively neutralizing Germany as a geopolitical force. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, marked by the (effective, then physical) dismantling of the Berlin Wall led to reunification and the eventual shift of the national capital back to Berlin.
The presence of important centers of German culture in Austria, Switzerland, and other border areas highlights the difficulty of automatically tying politically-framed history to a particular piece of territory. For example, if the Habsburg’s Austrian Empire had defeated the Prussians in 1867, the contours of German political entities would have followed a far different path than what we are familiar with. Instead, Prussia won, knocked Austria out of the picture and became the heart of the German unification project which had been going on for much of the 19C until then. Forced territorial adjustment following WWI (vis-à-vis France, Belgium, and Poland in particular) left Germany with a different shape for twenty years until Hitler (through diplomacy chutzpah, and invasion) launched his (temporarily successful) effort to build a “Greater Germany.” The Cold War split put yet another spin on the definition of “What is Germany?
These events make it pretty plain to see the centrality of the German question for European geopolitics over the last 160 years. But even before then, one might say the European political history wrestled with the absence of Germany; it was a political vacuum and battlefield for the great powers, with famous wars involving dynastic politics, religious politics (particularly following the Reformation), not least of which was the “Thirty Years War (1618-1648), and various tussles over who would dominate the Continent. At various points the German lands “hosted” Russian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, British, French, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, and Lithuanian incursions.
Of course it’s not as if there was no one there, either in terms of people or of political entities. For hundreds of years (962 -1806), there was a bizarre entity called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. It started with Charlemagne, but it wasn’t a state, controlled from the center; but rather a kind of loose federation of over 300 principalities, kingdoms, duchies, free cities, and bishoprics; with an important linkage to Papal politics in Rome. They all spoke German, although in a bewildering range of dialects. Following the Reformation of the 16C, there was a hodge-podge of Protestant (multiple flavors) and Catholic states. While the Protestants were stronger in the north (Hamburg, Saxony, and Prussia), the Catholics were stronger in the south (Bavaria, Austria). But the key to the eventual quieting of the religious wars as the principle of “Cuius regio, eius religio,” which meant that the local ruler would determine the local religion; accompanied by widely varying degrees of toleration of other creeds.
None of the politico-military history occurred in a vacuum. While the German-speaking lands had no single center a la London or Paris, culture and industry flourished. Important universities popped up in multiple small states, and intellectuals were connected in both Latin and German. Philosophers such as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel or Marx, authors such as Novalis or Geothe, and a splendor of musical genii (Bach, Mozart, et al.) are but a few of the luminaries of the scene.
All of which is to say, there was a lot of “there” there.
The disruptions, devastation, and drama of the German 20C, provide a sharp illustration of our common tendency in history to look backward into the distant past through the lens of the intermediate past. We tend to color the earlier centuries with our filters of the Cold War and Nazidom, either dismissing them as insignificant or looking at them only in terms of how the earlier events might have led up to the later conflict and cataclysm.
In German history, this is called the problem of the “Sonderweg,” trying to understand the “special path” that Germany took. Historians have tried to explain how Germany, which was so similar to its neighbors for centuries could have turned into the mid-20C monstrosity. I don’t think there’s much to this line of thought. We can always connect lines of trends and historical developments, but those connections are at least as much our projection as any lead-bottomed “truth.”
It’s better to take German history, with its complexities and distinctions, on its own terms—whether earlier, or mid-20C, or today. There is certainly no sense to holding a German born in 2000 responsible for what their great-grandparents might have done (or not done) sixty years earlier. Germany today insists on being treated as…Germany today. They are mindful (as I will discuss next week) of their past, but they don’t wallow in it (with the exception of a fringe populist nostalgia). The benefit of travel today is to respect its history, but not be captured by it.
This posting comes live from Munich where I’m getting myself updated on Germany, its history, and its current mood. The last time I was here was in 1971, where, along with several dozen other American teenagers, I was getting my first taste of Europe (including fresh Lowenbrau beer (but that’s another story)). In the next posting, I will talk about the construction of memory regarding relatively recent German historical developments, here I want to take a broader view.
Germany has been the heart of Europe for centuries; certainly since medieval times. While we in the US tend to get a heavier flavoring of British and French history, we can’t begin to understand Europe without addressing the “German question.”
Part of the problem in adjusting our perspective is that until 1871 there was no “Germany” in the national, political sense. The formation of a single integrated state, building on increasing industrial and economic power in the mid-19C shifted the gravitational patterns across Europe. For several reasons, that project went off the rails, as Germany fostered the descent into WWI and was the primary instigator of WWII. The solution to that problem was the peace settlement imposed by the Allies splitting the country into two pieces, each tied into their respective Cold War blocs and effectively neutralizing Germany as a geopolitical force. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, marked by the (effective, then physical) dismantling of the Berlin Wall led to reunification and the eventual shift of the national capital back to Berlin.
The presence of important centers of German culture in Austria, Switzerland, and other border areas highlights the difficulty of automatically tying politically-framed history to a particular piece of territory. For example, if the Habsburg’s Austrian Empire had defeated the Prussians in 1867, the contours of German political entities would have followed a far different path than what we are familiar with. Instead, Prussia won, knocked Austria out of the picture and became the heart of the German unification project which had been going on for much of the 19C until then. Forced territorial adjustment following WWI (vis-à-vis France, Belgium, and Poland in particular) left Germany with a different shape for twenty years until Hitler (through diplomacy chutzpah, and invasion) launched his (temporarily successful) effort to build a “Greater Germany.” The Cold War split put yet another spin on the definition of “What is Germany?
These events make it pretty plain to see the centrality of the German question for European geopolitics over the last 160 years. But even before then, one might say the European political history wrestled with the absence of Germany; it was a political vacuum and battlefield for the great powers, with famous wars involving dynastic politics, religious politics (particularly following the Reformation), not least of which was the “Thirty Years War (1618-1648), and various tussles over who would dominate the Continent. At various points the German lands “hosted” Russian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, British, French, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, and Lithuanian incursions.
Of course it’s not as if there was no one there, either in terms of people or of political entities. For hundreds of years (962 -1806), there was a bizarre entity called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. It started with Charlemagne, but it wasn’t a state, controlled from the center; but rather a kind of loose federation of over 300 principalities, kingdoms, duchies, free cities, and bishoprics; with an important linkage to Papal politics in Rome. They all spoke German, although in a bewildering range of dialects. Following the Reformation of the 16C, there was a hodge-podge of Protestant (multiple flavors) and Catholic states. While the Protestants were stronger in the north (Hamburg, Saxony, and Prussia), the Catholics were stronger in the south (Bavaria, Austria). But the key to the eventual quieting of the religious wars as the principle of “Cuius regio, eius religio,” which meant that the local ruler would determine the local religion; accompanied by widely varying degrees of toleration of other creeds.
None of the politico-military history occurred in a vacuum. While the German-speaking lands had no single center a la London or Paris, culture and industry flourished. Important universities popped up in multiple small states, and intellectuals were connected in both Latin and German. Philosophers such as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel or Marx, authors such as Novalis or Geothe, and a splendor of musical genii (Bach, Mozart, et al.) are but a few of the luminaries of the scene.
All of which is to say, there was a lot of “there” there.
The disruptions, devastation, and drama of the German 20C, provide a sharp illustration of our common tendency in history to look backward into the distant past through the lens of the intermediate past. We tend to color the earlier centuries with our filters of the Cold War and Nazidom, either dismissing them as insignificant or looking at them only in terms of how the earlier events might have led up to the later conflict and cataclysm.
In German history, this is called the problem of the “Sonderweg,” trying to understand the “special path” that Germany took. Historians have tried to explain how Germany, which was so similar to its neighbors for centuries could have turned into the mid-20C monstrosity. I don’t think there’s much to this line of thought. We can always connect lines of trends and historical developments, but those connections are at least as much our projection as any lead-bottomed “truth.”
It’s better to take German history, with its complexities and distinctions, on its own terms—whether earlier, or mid-20C, or today. There is certainly no sense to holding a German born in 2000 responsible for what their great-grandparents might have done (or not done) sixty years earlier. Germany today insists on being treated as…Germany today. They are mindful (as I will discuss next week) of their past, but they don’t wallow in it (with the exception of a fringe populist nostalgia). The benefit of travel today is to respect its history, but not be captured by it.
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