Unification of Germany

This series has four easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: German Language and Culture.

Introduction
Independent tribes inhabited the area of Germany in ancient days. Same thing during oman times. The tribes migrated during the barbarian invasions but the new inhabitants that moved into German territory behind them were also disunite. There was a time during the early Medieval Age the Holy Roman Empire controlled Germany but then united government fell apart. A variety of duchies, bishoprics, and other unit made up the Empire. In the 1800’s Otto von Bismarck made it his life’s work to expand the kingdom of Prussia. This led to the proclamation of the German Empire with the King of Prussia.

After the surrender of Napoleon III at Sedan (September 2, 1870) and the proclamation of a republic by the French, the German armies marched on Paris and laid siege to the city. Soon a large French army that had been shut up in Metz surrendered; and when on January 28, 1871, Paris itself capitulated, the German triumph was complete. Al ready it had been suggested in Germany that the possession of presidential rights in the new confederation by King William I of Prussia should ” be coupled with the imperial title.” Later the suggestion took the form of Parliamentary and diplomatic request, presented to King William in an official address at Versailles, December 18, 1870; and there, in the palace, January 18, 1871, he was proclaimed German Emperor.

William formally assumed the imperial dignity in the presence of all the German princes or their representatives, and of many military officers. The ceremony was conducted by the Crown Prince Frederick William, and a proclamation to the German people was read by Prince Bismarck, first Chancellor of the new Empire. On March 17th the Emperor returned to Berlin, and in April a constitution for the German Empire was adopted and published.

In this series Emil Reich, who has devoted particular attention to the development of modern Europe, treats the making of the German Empire not after the manner of the ordinary chronicler, but in the profound spirit of the philosophic student. His survey of the historical antecedents of this unification of national life is especially illuminating.

This selection is from Foundations of Modern Europe by Emil Reich published in 1908. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Emil Reich (1854-1910) was a Hungarian-born historian of a Jewish family who lived and worked in the United States and France before spending his final years in England.

Time: 1871
Place: Versailles,

The unity of Germany forms in many ways one of the most instructive chapters of history. For it is in Germany perhaps more than in most countries that the old perennial and terrible fight of man against nature has been fought out, and finally led to results perhaps all-important. Like all the other nations of Europe the Germans, too, have always tried to make the limits of their country conterminous with the limits of their language. Europe has at no time been given to the Roman ideal, and just as a united states of Europe is impossible in the near or in the far future, so it was impracticable in the last two thousand years. Europe consists at present of more than forty highly organized polities, each of which clings to its personality in language, law, custom, and every other feature of national life with uncompromising tenacity. Each of these States has at all times tried to combine and unite its members and to separate itself from its neighbors. The centripetal forces in Europe have always been in the minority, and even the greatest emperors and conquerors have found that their dreams of uniting Europe under one rule were short-lived and sterile.

This work of union, this attempt to bring together in one highly differentiated state the members of one and the same nation, this old historical endeavor of the European peoples, has been realized in some countries earlier than in others.

Of the diverse elements of what was called the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic nation in previous centuries, it is very difficult to form a definite idea. The number of sovereigns, from a small lord to the Emperor, who all had sovereign rights over their respective subjects, is amazing. The Emperor had no fixed nor considerable revenue; he had no standing and efficient army; and being at the same time the ruler of Austria and Hungary he had no vital interest in the welfare of his Provinces outside his Danubian monarchy. In fact, the interest of the Hapsburg emperors was rather the other way. The more Germany was split up into innumerable little sovereignties, the more it was unable to offer very great resistance to the Hapsburgs. The great international Treaty of 1648, the so-called Peace of Westphalia, had really increased the almost anarchic state of Germany, and by its terms Sweden and France stood as guarantors or perpetuators of this condition. It is almost impossible to realize the confusion, the chaos, the incredible disorder, that reigned in Germany in consequence of this political dismemberment. Each sovereign had coins of his own, had customs-lines of his own, had little armies of his own, separate individual codes of law of his own; the religion of the sovereign decided as a rule the religion of his subjects, and a very considerable portion of Germany was “ under the crozier,” belonging as it did to powerful ecclesiastical potentates such as the Archbishops of Cologne, of Mainz, of Treves, and the Bishops of Bamberg and Wurtzburg. Litigation in the courts of these small sovereigns, and appeals to the central court of the Emperor, were, as a rule, exposed to the most exasperating delays and to ruinous expense.

The German poet Schiller, in his tragedy Kabale und Liebe (“Intrigue and Love ”), has given us a terrible picture of the cruelty and oppression practiced by these petty tyrants. Commerce flourished very little, and the German towns had long fallen from that commercial importance which they had reached in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The people were indifferent to their lot, and did not even rise when the Landgrave of Hesse sold them like chattels to the English to fight the Americans in the war of 1775-1783.

The position of the women, especially in the seventeenth century, was most degrading. The German woman, at no time credited with any superior intellectual energy, was in the seventeenth century an altogether obscure and insignificant partner of her husband. It is true that in the first half of the eighteenth century the status of German women was considerably raised, and we hear of many an energetic, highly intellectual, and cultivated woman in that century.

More information here and here and below.

We want to take this site to the next level but we need money to do that. Please contribute directly by signing up at https://www.patreon.com/history