Part 1 (1/2)
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 kins.h.i.+p 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!