VI.

History

This article surveys the history of Germany before 1949 and after 1990. For details on its history between 1949 and 1990, see Germany, East and Germany, West.

A.

Origins of the Germans

Germany was inhabited from earliest times, but it took many millennia of migration, conquest, and intermingling to produce the people known as Germans.

A.1.

Stone Age Peoples

During the Palaeolithic Age (see Stone Age), the German forests were thinly populated by wandering bands of hunters and gatherers. They belonged to the earliest forms of Homo sapiens, such as Heidelberg man, who lived about 400,000 years ago. Somewhat later more advanced forms of Homo sapiens appeared, as exemplified by skeletal finds near Steinheim, some 300,000 years old, and near Ehringsdorf, from about 100,000 years ago. Another human type was the Neanderthal, found near Düsseldorf, who lived about 100,000 years ago. The most recent type, which appeared by 40,000 bc, was the Cro-Magnon, a member of Homo sapiens sapiens, essentially of the same group as modern Europeans.

During the New Stone Age, the indigenous hunters encountered farming peoples from the more advanced south-west Asia, who were migrating up the Danube Valley into central Germany around 4500 bc. These populations mixed and settled in villages to raise crops and breed stock. Villagers of this Danubian culture lived with their animals in large, gabled wooden houses, made pottery, and traded with Mediterranean peoples for fine stone and flint axes and shells. As their hand-hoed fields wore out, they moved on, often returning years later.

A.2.

Bronze Age Peoples

The Bronze Age began in central Germany, Bohemia, and Austria in about 2500 bc with the working of copper and tin deposits by prospectors from the eastern Mediterranean. Around 2300 bc new waves of migrating peoples arrived, probably from southern Russia. These battleaxe-wielding Indo-Europeans were the ancestors of the Germanic peoples that settled in northern and central Germany, the Baltic and Slavic peoples in the east, and the Celts in the south and west. The central and southern groups mixed with the so-called Bell-Beaker people, who moved east from Spain and Portugal about the year 2000 bc. The Bell-Beaker folk, probably Indo-Europeans, were skilled metalworkers. They developed a thriving Bronze Age culture in Germany and traded amber from the Baltic coast for bronze, pottery, and beads from the Mediterranean.

From 1800 to 400 bc, Celtic peoples in southern Germany and Austria developed a sequence of advanced metalworking cultures—Urnfield, Hallstatt, and La Tène—each of which spread throughout Europe. They introduced the use of iron for tools and weapons. The La Tène Celts did fine metalwork and used ox-drawn ploughs and wheeled vehicles. The Germanic people absorbed much Celtic culture and eventually displaced the Celts themselves.

A.3.

Germans and Romans

From the 2nd century bc to the 5th century ad the Germanic and Celtic peoples, constantly pressed by migrations from the north and east, were in contact with the Romans, who controlled southern and western Europe. Roman accounts by Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus describe these encounters.

The Cimbri and Teutons, about to invade Italy, were defeated by the Roman general Gaius Marius in 101 and 102 bc. The Suevi and other peoples in Gaul (modern France), west of the Rhine, were subdued by Julius Caesar around 50 bc. The Romans tried unsuccessfully to extend their rule to the Elbe, and the emperors held the border at the Rhine and the Danube. Between the two rivers they erected a limes, a line of fortifications to keep out raiding peoples.

In the 2nd century ad the Romans prevented confederations of Franks, Alamanni, and Burgundians outside the empire from crossing the Rhine. But in the 4th and 5th centuries, the pressure proved too much for the weakened Romans. The Huns, sweeping in from Asia, set off waves of migration, during which the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards, and other Germanic peoples overran the empire.

B.

Beginnings of a German State

In the late 5th century the Frankish chieftain Clovis defeated the Romans, and he established a kingdom that included most of Gaul and south-west Germany. He converted his subjects, believers in the Arian heresy, to orthodox Christianity.

B.1.

Carolingian Germany

Clovis’s work was carried on in the 8th century by Charlemagne, who fought the Slavs south of the Danube, annexed southern Germany, and ferociously subdued and converted the pagan Saxons in the north-west. As champion of Christianity and supporter of the papacy against the restive people of Rome, Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in Rome in 800. This milestone event revived the Roman imperial tradition in the west, but it also set a precedent for the dependence of the emperors on papal approval.

The Carolingian Empire was based on the social structure of the late Roman Empire. The official language of the court and the Church was Latin, but Franks in Gaul adopted the Latinate vernacular that became French, and Franks and other Germanic peoples in the east spoke various languages that became German. The only relic of Old High German is the Hildebrandslied (“Lay of Hildebrand”), a fragmentary 8th-century poem, based on early pagan heroic tales, about the tragic duel between a father and son.

Carolingian rulers encouraged missionary work among the Germans. St Willibrord founded the monastery of Echternach, and St Boniface founded Reichenau and Fulda and reformed the Frankish Church. Non-Frankish Germans, however, retained much pagan belief beneath their newly acquired faith. The Heliand, a 9th-century epic, depicts Christ as a Saxon warrior king.

B.2.

East Francia

The Carolingian Empire, unwieldy and prey to tribal dissension, did not long survive Charlemagne’s death in 814. By the Treaty of Verdun (843), the empire was divided among his three grandsons. One received West Francia (modern France). Another acquired the imperial title and an area running from the North Sea through Lotharingia (Lorraine) and Burgundy to Italy. The third, Louis the German, received East Francia (modern Germany). The Treaty of Mersen (870) divided the middle kingdom, with Lotharingia going to East Francia and the rest to West Francia. In 881 Charles the Fat of East Francia, heir of Louis the German, received the imperial title. Six years later he was deposed by Arnulf, the last Carolingian emperor.

B.3.

The Tribal Duchies

By the 10th century East Francia was being buffeted by new waves of pagan Danes, Magyars, and Moravians from the north and east and was virtually torn apart by rival peoples fighting. The Carolingians had granted tribal military leaders (dukes) and appointed officials (counts and margraves) lands as temporary fiefs for their services to the state, and many of the high clergy had also received fiefs. As royal authority declined, these feudal lords, or princes, provided local government and defence. The secular lords gradually made their fiefs hereditary. The greatest of them were the rulers of five stem (tribal) duchies—Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Lorraine. Lesser warriors joined princely retinues out of tribal loyalty and in exchange for smaller grants of land and other gifts. Common people lost the right to bear arms. They worked the fields of warriors and Churchmen in return for protection and a share of the crops. Thus, the Carolingian governmental system blended with the German tradition of free tribesmen to form a society in which a military nobility was supported by an agricultural peasantry of freemen and serfs.

By ancient German tradition, the kings were elected. Because no noble family wanted to be subject to another family or to a strong king, weak kings were often chosen, and none could safely assume the loyalty of his nobles. These conditions delayed for centuries the consolidation of a strong German state.

C.

Early Middle Ages

Medieval German kings had three major concerns. One was checking the rebellious princes—usually with the help of Churchmen. The second was controlling Italy and being crowned emperor of the West by the pope, a policy considered an essential part of the Carolingian heritage. The third was expansion to the north and east.

C.1.

The Saxon Kings

When the last Carolingian died without an heir, the Franks and Saxons elected Conrad, Duke of Franconia, as their King; he proved incompetent. After his death in 918 they chose the Saxon Duke Henry I, the Fowler, a sober, practical soldier, who made peace with a rival king chosen by the Bavarians, defeated Magyars and Slavs, and regained Lorraine.

At Henry’s death in 936, the princes elected his son Otto I, who combined extraordinary forcefulness, dignity, and military prowess with great diplomatic skill and strong religious faith. Determined to create an effective centralized monarchy, Otto gave the duchies to his relatives and then broke them up into non-hereditary fiefs granted to bishops and abbots. By appointing these Churchmen and subjecting them to the royal court, he ensured their loyalty. This Ottonian system of government through alliance with the German state Church was carried much further by his successors.

Otto also had to defend his realm from outside pressures. In the west he strengthened his hold on Lorraine and gained influence over Burgundy (Arles). In the north and east he defeated the Danes and Slavs, and he permanently broke the power of the Magyars (Hungarians) at the Battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Otto established the archbishopric of Magdeburg (968) and other sees as centres of civilization in the conquered lands. Germans settled these regions.

Wanting to emulate Charlemagne as the divinely sanctioned emperor of Christendom, Otto began the disastrous policy of German entanglement in Italy. The temptation was the greater because Italy was a rich land, and a scene of feudal disorder and Saracen invasions. When Adelaide, widowed queen of the Lombards, asked Otto for help against her captor, Berengar, King of Italy, Otto invaded Italy in 951, married her, and took her dead husband’s title.

The papacy at this time was struggling to hold its land against encroaching nobles from the north and Byzantine Greeks and Saracens from the south. When Pope John XII appealed to Otto for aid against Berengar, Otto invaded Italy a second time, defeated Berengar, and was crowned Emperor by the pope in 962. By a treaty called the Ottonian Privilege, Otto guaranteed the pope’s claim to papal lands, and all future papal candidates had to swear fealty to the Emperor.

Otto’s successors in the 10th and 11th centuries continued his German and Italian policies as best they could. Otto II established the Eastern March (Austria) under the Babenbergs as a military outpost but was defeated by the Saracens in his efforts to secure southern Italy. The pious Otto III supported the Benedictine reform movement originating in Cluny, Burgundy, which encouraged a more austere, disciplined life. The childless Henry II, gentle and devout, also encouraged the Cluniac movement and sent out missionaries from his court in the new bishopric of Bamberg.

C.2.

Salian Kings

For 100 years (1024-1125) German kings were chosen from the Salian line, which was related to the Saxons. The Salians brought the empire to its height.

Conrad II, a clever and ruthless ruler, reasserted royal authority over princely opposition by making the fiefs of lesser nobles hereditary and by appointing ministerials, lower-class men responsible directly to him, as officials and soldiers. He seized Burgundy, strengthened his hold on northern Italy, and became overlord of Poland.

Conrad’s son Henry III, the Black, was the first undisputed King of Germany. A pious visionary, he introduced to a Germany torn by civil strife the Cluny-inspired Truce of God, a respite from war lasting from Wednesday night to Monday morning, and tried in vain to extend it to a permanent peace. He ended the payment by new bishops of tribute to the Crown—a practice called simony—although he still invested Churchmen, who remained his vassals. During his reign he deposed three rival popes and created four new ones, notably the reform-minded Leo IX.

While still a child, Henry IV succeeded his father, Henry III, in 1056. During his mother’s regency, long-restive princes annexed much royal land; cities, popes, and Normans controlled Italy; and the Lateran synod of 1059 declared that only cardinals could canonically elect the pope. Henry IV was wily, opportunistic, and headstrong in an era of violence and treachery, and as ruler he sought to recover lost imperial power. His efforts to retrieve Crown lands aroused the Saxons, who resented the Salian kings. He crushed a Saxon rebellion in 1075 and proceeded to confiscate land, thus intensifying their enmity towards him.

Henry’s control of the clergy embroiled him with the militant reform pope Gregory VII, who wanted to free the Church from secular bondage. When Gregory forbade lay investiture of Churchmen, Henry had him deposed by the Synod of Worms in 1076. The pope promptly excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oath of loyalty to him. To keep his crown, Henry cleverly sought the pope at Canossa in the Apennines in January 1077, where, after three days of humble penitence, he was forgiven. The princes, however, elected a rival king, Rudolf of Swabia.

The result was nearly 20 years of civil war. In 1080 Gregory excommunicated Henry again and recognized Rudolf. Deposing Gregory, Henry marched on Rome, installed the Antipope Clement III, and was crowned Emperor in 1084. Henry returned to Germany to continue the civil war against a new rival King (Rudolf had died in 1080). Finally, betrayed and imprisoned by his son Henry, the Emperor was forced to abdicate.

The treacherous, brutal, and greedy Henry V vainly continued his father’s struggle for supremacy. Suffering military defeats, he lost control of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia. Despite the support of Churchmen, ministers, and the towns, he could not suppress the princes, who forced the weary Emperor and Pope Callistus II to compromise on investiture. They accepted the Concordat of Worms (1122), which stipulated that clerical elections in Germany were to take place in the imperial presence without simony and that the emperor was to invest the candidate with the symbols of his temporal office before a bishop invested him with the spiritual ones. The pope, however, had the better of the bargain, and the rivalry between empire and papacy took on new dimensions.

C.3.

Early Medieval Society

German kings had no fixed capital, but travelled unceasingly about their realm. They had no income beyond that from their family lands and gifts from Churchmen. Feudalism was the rule. The great lords, theoretically vassals of the king, in fact usurped royal rights to build castles and administer justice. The vast majority of common people lived on country manors belonging to nobles or Churchmen. The few cities, such as Trier and Cologne, were chiefly Roman foundations or imperial fortifications. There, merchants, artisans, and uprooted peasants settled as free citizens under the authority of a prince. The cities also sheltered Jews, who were not allowed to hold land.

The clergy, which included many nobles, spread the faith, provided education, and carried on the functions of government. Monasteries such as Reichenau, Regensburg, Fulda, Echternach, and St Gall became centres of scholarship. Monks wrote Latin works (such as the Walthariuslied, based on a German legend) and translated biblical and other Christian texts into Old High German. Their illuminated manuscripts with flat, dignified images imitated the art of Classical antiquity and Byzantium. Churches, notably St Michael at Hildesheim and the cathedrals of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms, were massive, stone-vaulted basilicas with towers and small, round-arched windows. Their walls were adorned with painted murals and expressive sculpture in wood and bronze.

D.

High Middle Ages

In the 12th and 13th centuries Germany and Italy were rent by rivalry between two princely families. The Hohenstaufen, or Waiblingen, of Swabia, known as Ghibellines in Italy, held the German and imperial crowns. The Welfs of Bavaria and Saxony, known as Guelphs in Italy, were allied with the papacy.

Henry V died childless in 1125. The princes, avoiding the principle of heredity, passed over his nephews, Frederick and Conrad Hohenstaufen, to choose Lothair, Duke of Saxony. As Emperor, Lothair II revived German efforts to convert and dominate the east. To assert his authority in Italy, he made two expeditions supporting the pope, who crowned him in 1133. In Germany he fought a civil war with the Hohenstaufen princes, who refused to accept him as Emperor.

D.1.

The Hohenstaufen Kings

At Lothair’s death the princes avoided his powerful Welf son-in-law and heir, Henry the Proud, Lord of Bavaria and Saxony. Instead, they chose Conrad Hohenstaufen. Civil war erupted again, this time between the weak but charming Conrad III and the Welf dukes, Henry the Proud and his son Henry the Lion. It continued while Conrad led the ill-fated Second Crusade and was paralleled by the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict in Italy. The struggle in Germany was temporarily resolved at Conrad’s death by the election of his nephew Frederick, a Hohenstaufen born of a Welf mother.

Handsome and intelligent, warlike, just, and charming, Frederick I, Barbarossa was the ideal of the medieval Christian king. Regarding himself as the successor of Augustus, Charlemagne, and Otto the Great, he took the title Holy Roman Emperor and spent most of his reign shuttling between Germany and Italy trying to restore imperial glory in both.

In the north he joined Germany and Burgundy by marrying Beatrice, heiress to Burgundy. He declared an imperial peace; to ensure it, he placated the Welfs by recognizing Henry the Lion as Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, and for balance he made Austria a duchy. But when Henry refused to contribute troops to a critical Italian campaign, Frederick and jealous princes exiled him as a traitor. Henry’s duchies were split up, Bavaria going to the Wittelsbach family.

In the south, Frederick made six expeditions to Italy to assert full imperial authority over the Lombard city-states and the popes. In 1155, on his first trip, he was crowned Emperor. On his second, he had the Diet of Roncaglia (1158) declare his rights, and he installed podestas (imperial representatives) in the cities. Some cities had Ghibelline sympathies, but most objected to being ruled and taxed by uncouth, greedy foreigners. The popes needed imperial support against a Roman rising, but they believed that their spiritual office gave them sovereignty over the emperors. Also, they wanted to maintain independent control of the Papal States. Consequently, some cities revolted against imperial authority and formed the Lombard League in alliance with Pope Alexander III. Frederick reacted by creating an antipope. On his next two trips, Ghibelline cities joined with Guelph in a revived league and threw out the podestas. Alexander, who had excommunicated Frederick, fled to his Norman allies in Sicily, and Frederick captured Rome in 1166.

During his fifth invasion of Italy, lacking the support of Henry the Lion, Frederick was defeated by the league at the Battle of Legnano (1176). As a result, the Peace of Constance (1183) recognized the autonomy of the cities, which remained only nominally subject to the Emperor. Stubbornly, Frederick made a last trip in which he gained new support among the quarrelsome cities. He died leading the Third Crusade.

More ambitious even than his father, Henry VI wanted to dominate the known world. To secure peace in Germany, he put down a rebellion by the returned exile Henry the Lion and then restored him to power. He forced the northern Italian cities to submit to him and seized Sicily from a usurping Norman king. Intending to create an empire in the Mediterranean, he exacted tribute from North Africa and the weak Byzantine emperor. Henry died suddenly in 1197 while planning a crusade to the Holy Land.

The empire immediately fell apart. Henry’s infant son, Frederick II, inherited Sicily, but northern Italy reasserted its independence. The Germans refused to accept a child or make the Crown hereditary in the Hohenstaufen line. Once more civil war raged as two elected kings—the Hohenstaufen Philip of Swabia and the Welf Otto of Brunswick, son of Henry the Lion—struggled for the Crown. When Otto invaded Italy, Pope Innocent III secured the election of Frederick II on the promise that Frederick would give up Sicily so as not to surround the pope.

Outstandingly accomplished in many fields, the new king was called Stupor Mundi (“wonder of the world”). He was gracious and amiable but also crafty and ruthless. Determined to keep Sicily as his base of operations, he revised his coronation promise, giving Germany rather than Sicily to his young son Henry. In Sicily he suppressed the barons, reformed the laws, founded the University of Naples, and kept a brilliant court, where he shone as scientist, artist, and poet. He was also an excellent soldier, diplomat, and administrator.

To gain German support for his campaigns in northern Italy, Frederick allowed the princes to usurp royal powers. The confirmation of their rights by the Privilege of Worms (1231) made them virtually kings in their own territories. Henry, when he came of age, objected to this policy and revolted but was quickly deposed and imprisoned by his father.

An aggressive Emperor such as Frederick was regarded as dangerous by the popes. Angered by his claims to Lombardy, Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him for his delay in leading a promised crusade. Frederick finally went to Jerusalem in 1228, was crowned King, and gained the chief Christian sites in the Holy Land. His success did not mollify Gregory, however, who in his absence invaded Sicily. Frederick rushed home and made peace. But by 1237 he was battling in northern Italy against the second Lombard League of cities. The league was allied with the pope, who excommunicated him again. Frederick then seized the Papal States. The new pope, Innocent IV, fled to Lyon and declared him deposed. Undaunted, Frederick was making headway against the league when he suddenly died.

Frederick’s young son Conrad IV inherited Sicily and the imperial title, but Italy and Germany were never united again. The popes, allied with the French, ousted the Hohenstaufens from Sicily. Germany suffered the turmoil of the Great Interregnum (1254-1273), during which foreigners claimed the Crown and the princes won a six-century ascendancy.

D.2.

Society and Culture in the High Middle Ages

By the late 13th century the empire had lost Poland and Hungary and effective control of Burgundy and Italy. Within its borders the principalities were virtually autonomous. The ancient right of royal election was limited to seven princes, who purposely chose weak men unlikely to thwart their own dynastic ambitions.

The Church continued to be a dominant force in society. Cistercian monks and Premonstratensian canons settled new lands in the east, and friars of the Dominicans and Franciscans preached and taught in the towns. The Teutonic Knights moved their headquarters to Marienburg in eastern Germany, where they led a crusade against the pagan Prussians. The knights opened the Baltic coast to the German Church and to German merchants.

The struggle between emperors and princes benefited the towns, who paid taxes to the emperors in exchange for freedom from feudal obligations. Trade greatly increased. Cologne and Frankfurt gave access to the fairs of Champagne. Mainz lay on the route across the Alps to Italy. Lübeck and Hamburg dominated North Sea and Baltic trade, and Leipzig was in contact with Russia. Rhine towns and, later, north German towns began to form trade associations, the most powerful of which was the Hanseatic League. This trade association arranged advantageous commercial treaties, created new centres of trade and civilization, contributed to the development of agriculture and industrial arts, built canals and roads, and even declared war. Disintegration of the league began towards the end of the 15th century, and was complete in 1669.

At the height of the league, the rich burghers built city walls, cathedrals, and elaborate town halls and guildhalls as expressions of civic pride. By the mid-13th century, French Gothic influences were affecting German architecture. The lofty cathedrals of Bamberg, Strasbourg, Naumburg, and Cologne were richly decorated with sculpture, and they were filled with light from the stained glass in their large, pointed-arched windows.

French culture also affected German literature. Wandering nobles and knights, called minnesinger, wrote and recited courtly love poems in the tradition of Provençal troubadours and French trouvères. Foremost among them were Reinmar von Hagenau and Walther von der Vogelweide. Other poets, called Spielleute, composed epics. Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach dealt with Christian themes from the French Arthurian cycle. Nonetheless, the two most important epics—the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrunlied—were based on pagan Germanic traditions.

E.

Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance

By the late Middle Ages, the great stem duchies had been broken up and new principalities created. Three princely families—Habsburg, Wittelsbach, and Luxembourg—struggled for dynastic rights to the imperial crown.

E.1.

Princely Rivalry

In 1273 the electors ended the Great Interregnum by choosing Rudolf of Habsburg, a minor Swabian prince unable to repossess the lands they had usurped. Rudolf I concentrated on aggrandizing his family. Aided by the Wittelsbachs and others, he defeated the rebellious Ottokar II of Bohemia and took the lands Ottokar had usurped—Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola—for his two sons, thus making the Habsburgs one of the great powers in the empire.

On Rudolf’s death the electors chose Adolf of Nassau but deposed him when he asserted his authority. They next chose Rudolf’s son, Albert of Austria, but when he displayed an appetite for additional territory, he was murdered. Still seeking a weak emperor, the electors voted for Henry, Count of Luxembourg. Anxious to restore imperial claims to Italy, Henry VII crossed the Alps in 1310 and temporarily subdued Lombardy; he was crowned by the Roman people, because the popes had left Rome and were then living in Avignon, France—the so-called Babylonian Captivity. He died trying to conquer Naples from the French.

Civil war then raged until the Wittelsbach candidate for the throne, Louis the Bavarian, defeated his Habsburg rival at the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322. Louis IV obtained a secular coronation in Italy, but Pope John XXII, objecting to his interference in Italian politics, declared his title invalid and excommunicated him. Louis then called for a Church council and installed an antipope in Rome. At Rhense in 1338 the electors made the momentous declaration that henceforth the King of the Germans would be the majority electoral choice, thus avoiding civil war, and that he would automatically be Emperor without being crowned by the pope. This was reflected in the title, official in the 15th century, Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation.

E.2.

The Luxembourg Line

The popes, of course, objected. Clement VI opened negotiations with Charles, King of Bohemia, grandson of Henry VII. In 1347 he was chosen by five of the seven electors, who had previously deposed Louis. Charles IV diplomatically ignored the question of papal assent. In the Golden Bull (1356) he specified the seven electors as the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony (an old title for a new state in the east), the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia. Because the bull made their lands indivisible, granted them monopolies on mining and tolls, and secured them “gifts” from candidates, they were the strongest of all the princes.

Having ensured the power of the princes, the astute Charles entrenched his own dynasty in Bohemia. He bought Brandenburg and took Silesia from Poland to build a great state to the east. To obtain cash, he encouraged the silver, glass, and paper industries of Bohemia. He adorned Prague, his capital, with new buildings in the late Gothic style, founded a noted university, and kept a brilliant court.

Charles’s son, Sigismund, forced Pope John XXIII to call the Council of Constance (1414-1418), which ended the Great Schism in the papacy. But as the King of Bohemia he was chiefly concerned with his own dynastic lands. Bohemia was convulsed by the Hussite movement, which combined traditional Czech national feeling with desire for much-needed Church reform. Sigismund invited the reformer John Huss (also spelled Jan Hus) to state his views, under imperial protection, at the Council of Constance, but failed to prevent the council from subsequently burning him as a heretic. This led to the Hussite Wars by which the moderate Calixtine Hussites won some concessions from the Church and Sigismund in exchange for their reconciliation.

E.3.

The Habsburg Line

When Sigismund died without an heir, the electors unanimously chose his Habsburg son-in-law Albert of Austria, who became Emperor as Albert II. From that time on, the imperial crown became in practice, although not in theory, hereditary in the Habsburg line. Albert II died in the midst of civil war in Bohemia and an Ottoman invasion of Hungary. His cousin and successor, Frederick III, lost Hungary and Bohemia and sold Luxembourg to France, while he struggled with the German princes and the Turks on his borders. In 1486 the princes forced him to cede his authority to his son but he retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor until 1493.

Maximilian I, knight and art patron, enthusiastically laid many plans, which never materialized. His chief success was in arranging marriages to benefit his family. By his own marriage to Mary of Burgundy he acquired a rich territory that included the thriving Flemish towns. French-speaking Burgundy was the initial cause of the Habsburg-Valois feud that lasted for the next three centuries. By marrying his son, Philip the Handsome, to the heiress of Spain, Maximilian acquired Spain and its possessions in Italy and the New World. By betrothing his grandson Ferdinand to the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia, he added those states to the inheritance.

E.4.

15th-Century Society

In Germany as in the rest of Europe, the 15th century was a time of transition from the land economy of the Middle Ages to the money economy of modern times. The process created painful tensions among all classes of society.

The German nobility ranged from the great electors and other princes of the 240 states of the empire to the minor knights who held fiefs directly from the emperor. They had supreme jurisdiction in their own lands, checked only by diets representing nobles, clergy, and burghers, which alone could levy the taxes needed to pay for new arms and mercenary soldiers. As prices rose and income from land did not, all the nobility felt pressed for funds. Some squeezed more goods and services out of their peasants. Others resorted to raiding their peers or the cities, and still others sold their military services as mercenaries.

As centres of commerce, the cities became increasingly important in a money economy. In the south, Nuremberg and Augsburg, home of the Fugger bank, thrived on mines and trade with Italy. In the north, Lübeck, Hamburg, and other cities of the Hanseatic League carried on brisk trade with Britain and Scandinavia. Within the cities the old merchant guilds and new craft guilds, both virtually hereditary, struggled for power. Common labourers had no say. As their trade grew, the cities’ demand for freedom from attack and from local tolls levied on roads and rivers often led to war with the nobles.

Perhaps as many as one-third of the peasants, the same estimate as for the rest of the population, died during the plague that swept Europe in the mid-14th century. Of the survivors, some peasants had lost their land through frequent subdivision among heirs. Many of these emigrated to the cities, while others charged landlords more for their labour. Most small peasants, however, lost whatever rights and freedoms they had traditionally possessed, as lords strove to keep them on the land and make them as profitable as possible. The peasants, especially in southern Germany, finally resorted to violent protest.

Cries for Church reform had been raised at least as early as the 11th-century Cluniac movement. During the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance they became more insistent. On the political level, the Church lost prestige as a result of the unedifying Babylonian Captivity and the ensuing Great Schism in the papacy.

On the economic level, the increasingly widespread need for cash led to criticism of the Church’s wealth. People objected that the Church owned much land and bore heavily on its tenants, but paid no taxes. Economic and political concerns came together in growing German resentment at sending money to maintain the pope in Rome.

The Church was also attacked on the intellectual level by the humanist study of classical antiquity, which spread north from Italy. Nicholas of Cusa proposed a heliocentric (Sun-centred) theory of astronomy that undermined the accepted biblical view of creation. Literary humanists such as Conradus Celtes, Willibald Pirkheimer, Johann Reuchlin, and Erasmus of Rotterdam urged linguistic purity in the study of biblical and other texts and satirized abuses in the Church. The invention of printing from movable type by Johann Gutenberg made it possible to produce Bibles, other books, and pamphlets in great quantity at low cost. As a result, the new learning could circulate widely, preparing the intellectual ground for the Reformation.

F.

Age of Religious Strife

The spiritual concerns of Martin Luther combined with secular ambitions of the German princes to produce the Protestant Reformation. The movement for Church reform created religious liberty at the cost of Western Christian unity. Religious strife intensified European political wars for 100 years.

F.1.

The Protestant Reformation

Charles V succeeded his grandfather Maximilian as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. He devoted his life to preserving a medieval empire united in faith, a fruitless effort in the pluralistic society created by religious reformers and secular forces.

A key figure of the new age was Martin Luther, a friar of the Augustinians who was disturbed by abuses within the Church. He was particularly aroused by the unscrupulous campaign to sell indulgences, or remissions of punishment for sin. In 1517 Luther published a list of 95 theses attacking indulgences, which stirred up much controversy.

In 1520 Luther published three pamphlets stating his beliefs in the liberty of the Christian conscience informed only by the Bible, the priesthood of all believers, and a State-supported Church. Because these doctrines struck at the root of Church authority, Pope Leo X issued a bull condemning Luther’s works. Luther burned the bull and was excommunicated. Charles V summoned him to defend himself at the Diet of Worms (1521) and, when Luther refused to recant, outlawed him. On his way home, however, Luther was rescued by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony; installed in the Wartburg castle, he began to translate the Bible into German.

Lutheran ideas, partly a continuation of Hussite traditions, were sympathetically received by many. Matters of conscience, however, were often carried to extremes or mixed with socio-economic grievances. The fanatical Karlstadt urged iconoclastic attacks on church painting, statuary, and stained glass. The mercenary knight Franz von Sickingen led impecunious south German knights against ecclesiastical lords in the hope of gaining Church lands. Peasant groups, wanting a return to old ways, looted and burned castles and monasteries in the Peasants’ War (1524-1526).

These revolutionaries looked to Luther for guidance in reordering the Church and German society, but Luther did not want to mix religious with secular concerns. Emerging from the Wartburg to restore order, he checked Karlstadt and urged the princes to crush every rising, which they did. The peasants then lost all traditional rights, sense of initiative, and status, while the princes set up state Churches supported by confiscated Catholic lands. In these new Churches the service was in German, and the clergy were permitted to marry.

At this early stage, a break with Rome did not seem inevitable. Many Lutherans would have remained in the Church if non-biblical practices had been eliminated. Charles V, busy with foreign wars, wanted to make peace at home, but Luther was not conciliatory. Furthermore, Protestants, as the reformers came to be called, were themselves divided. In addition to Lutherans there were Reformed Christians, inspired by the Swiss theologian Huldreich Zwingli, who wanted to set up theocratic states based on the Bible, and radical Anabaptists, mostly poor people who wanted to form Churches independent of the state.

At the Diet of Augsburg (1530) Lutherans and Reformed Christians presented separate confessions of faith, indicating that they could not compromise with the Catholics or each other. The Anabaptists were not represented at all. Both the princes and the pope blocked Charles’s desire for a council to mediate in the dispute. Despairing of peaceful means, Charles led his troops against the Protestant princes and cities of the Schmalkaldic League (1531), routing them at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547. By this time, however, many nobles, who had acquired secularized Catholic lands, were staunch Protestants, and they forced on Charles the compromise Peace of Augsburg (1555). It recognized Lutheranism, but not the Reformed (Calvinist) faith, whose theocratic doctrines seemed revolutionary to the princes. Most significant, it gave the princes the right to choose the religion for their territory.

Luther died in 1546, his work done. Charles, who had failed at a hopeless task, abdicated in 1556. His vast empire was divided, with the Spanish and Burgundian lands going to his son Philip II and the imperial title and the German lands going to his brother Ferdinand.

F.2.

The Catholic Reformation

While the emperors Ferdinand I and his son Maximilian II were occupied with the threat of Turkish invasion, Protestantism in Germany expanded rapidly. Its progress was checked, however, by the Counter-Reformation. The long-delayed Council of Trent (1545-1563), dominated by the Jesuits, abolished the sale of indulgences but also reformulated doctrine and worship so as to preclude reconciliation with Protestantism. The Jesuits established centres in German cities, where they won many Germans back to Catholicism. The rulers of Bavaria, Austria, Salzburg, Bamberg, and Würzburg restored Catholicism by force, creating a Catholic bloc in southern Germany.

Tension mounted between Protestants and Catholics. Protestant princes under Frederick IV formed the Protestant Union in 1608. In 1609 Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria, led the Catholic princes into the Catholic League. Emperor Rudolf II, a scholarly recluse in Prague, unable to govern, was forced to relinquish his authority to his brother Matthias, who proved no more effective.

Matthias was succeeded by his nephew, who ruled as Ferdinand II. The real power in Europe, however, was Philip II of Spain, with his well-armed troops highly paid in New World gold. Catholic France was determined not to be overwhelmed by Habsburgs on either side. Protestant England and the Netherlands were also opposed to a strong Habsburg dynasty. Denmark and Sweden were lured by the desire to dominate the Baltic. Taking advantage of the quarrelling German states, all these countries intervened to make Germany the scene of a devastating, four-phase European War.

F.3.

The Thirty Years’ War

The trouble began in Protestant Bohemia, which refused to accept the Catholic Ferdinand either as king or future emperor. In 1618 the Czechs set up their own government, supported by the Evangelical Union. After the death of Matthias in 1619, they chose the Protestant Elector Frederick V as their King. Ferdinand, however, crushed the Bohemian forces at the Battle of Weisserberg (1620); Frederick, called the Winter King, was exiled; and Catholicism was restored by force. The Bohemian nobles were killed, deprived of their lands, or fined. As a result of the war the population declined by more than one-half.

Protestant princes objected to Spanish troops in Germany. They supported Christian IV of Denmark, who, financed by the Dutch and English, invaded Germany in 1625. So began the second phase of the Thirty Years’ War, which ended with Christian’s defeat. The victorious Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution (1629), which ordered the return of all Catholic Church property seized by Protestants since 1552.

The third phase of the war began when Gustav II Adolph of Sweden, who had long wanted to extend Swedish control of the Baltic, invaded Pomerania as the champion of the Protestant princes. The Swedish army won a brilliant victory at Breitenfeld (1631) and took Mainz and Prague, but the war dragged on for years, the two opposing armies devastating the countryside and accomplishing little. In 1635 a truce was declared, and the Edict of Restitution was revoked.

The Swedish, however, were still land-hungry, and the French, led by Cardinal Richelieu, were determined to subdue the Habsburgs. Accordingly, in the fourth phase of the war, the French paid subsidies to the Swedish army to keep it fighting, and French troops crossed the Rhine. After another 13 years of struggle, Emperor Ferdinand III and the princes were ready for peace.

F.4.

The Peace of Westphalia

The long war ended in a draw, finalized by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. By the terms of the treaty, the sovereignty and independence of each state of the Holy Roman Empire was fully recognized, making the Holy Roman Emperor virtually powerless. In addition, the religion of each German state was to be determined by its prince. The religious status quo of 1624 was accepted, meaning that the Habsburg lands as well as the south and west were Catholic, the Reformed faith was recognized, and Protestants could retain acquired lands.

Politically, the Holy Roman Empire, or First Reich, continued in name, but it had lost all claim to universality or effective centralized government. Economically and socially, Germany had lost about one-third of its people to war, famine, and plague and much of its livestock, capital, and trade. Bands of refugees and mercenaries roamed the countryside, seizing what they could.

F.5.

Cultural Life in the Renaissance and Reformation

Renaissance Classicism and the Protestant Reformation deeply affected the arts of the 16th century and transformed education.

In painting and sculpture the late Gothic style, characterized by religious devotion and love of fine detail, lingered on. Great effort was expended on stained-glass windows and altarpieces by such masters as the painters Matthias Grünewald and Stefan Lochner and the sculptors Veit Stoss, Peter Vischer the Elder, Adam Kraft, and Tilman Riemenschneider. The Renaissance style, marked by Classical motifs and interest in the natural world, was introduced from Italy by Albrecht Dürer. Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein the Younger expressed the humanist emphasis on the individual in portraits. Dürer and Martin Schongauer combined Gothic and Renaissance elements in the new arts of woodcut and copper engraving, used for printed book illustration.

Architecture was late Gothic until the Reformation, when church building virtually stopped. Protestants frowned on church art, but they spent lavishly on the steep-roofed, half-timbered, decoratively painted houses of the burghers and on opulent palaces and guildhalls in the Renaissance style.

Medieval tradition continued in popular German literature in the form of folk songs, anecdotes about folk heroes, and religious and secular folk plays. Folk and Classical themes provided source material for the Meistersinger, lyric poets who wrote according to the strict forms of the earlier minnesingers. Foremost among them was Hans Sachs, a cobbler of Nuremberg.

The most important development in literature was Luther’s translation of the Bible into a vigorous vernacular that helped give the German people a unified literary language. It became the basis for standardized “High” German. Luther and others wrote German hymns for Protestant congregations, a liturgical innovation that laid the foundation for German church music and influenced worship throughout the Protestant world. Melanchthon, a professor at the University of Wittenberg, lucidly presented Protestant doctrines in Latin to the non-German world. He and other humanists introduced classical scholarship to universities in Cologne, Leipzig, Vienna, and other cities, and he helped found new universities in Königsberg, Jena, and Marburg.

Medieval German education had been limited chiefly to schools and universities run by religious orders to train Churchmen and a few government officials. Even the new humanist learning was at first intended for a small, scholarly elite. But Luther, consistent with his belief in the priesthood of all believers and individual study of the Bible, thought that state schools should be open to children of every class. In the Protestant states, primary schools were set up to teach German and religion. Latin was the principal subject in the secondary schools (Gymnasien) founded by Melanchthon, which presented a graded course of study for the first time. Saxony and other Protestant states gradually opened Gymnasien, which influenced German education into the 20th century. In the Catholic states similar but highly centralized schools were established. All these schools, however, were attended chiefly by boys whose families could afford the fees.

G.

Rise of Austria and Prussia

In the late 17th and 18th centuries, the empire was overshadowed by France and England. Its creaking framework was supported by lesser German princes, who wanted its protection, and undermined by greater princes, who wanted freedom to develop on their own. The Wettins of Saxony, expanding eastwards, became kings of Poland. The Welfs of Brunswick-Lüneburg became electors of Hanover and gained great influence when Elector George inherited the throne of England as George I in 1714. The Wittelsbachs of Bavaria intrigued for a crown in the Spanish Netherlands. Dominating the other princes were the Habsburgs of Austria, who also held Bohemia and Hungary, and the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, who became kings of Prussia.

Scarcely had they recovered from the Thirty Years’ War when the princes and the emperor plunged into a variety of new dynastic struggles.

G.1.

French Wars

In the west the princes were involved in four wars by which Louis XIV strove to extend French territory to the Rhine. In the War of the Devolution (1667-1668), Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg accepted a pension from Louis in return for political support. In the Dutch War (1672-1678), however, Frederick William turned against Louis and lost his conquests in Pomerania. But he later benefited Brandenburg by offering refuge to Huguenots (French Calvinists), whom Louis had exiled by revoking the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Some 20,000 Huguenots migrated east, bringing with them weaving skills and French culture.

Louis’s invasion of the Palatinate led to the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697), which won him Strasbourg and Alsace.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) was fought over the right of Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip V, to inherit the Spanish throne. Bavaria sided with France, because Louis promised the elector the crown of the Spanish Netherlands. Brandenburg supported the successive emperors Leopold I and Joseph I in return for imperial recognition of Prussia as a kingdom. The other European states also allied with the empire to block the threatened unification of France and Spain. Large, well-trained, well-equipped armies fought in Bavaria and western Germany, wreaking havoc and ruin. When both sides were exhausted, they accepted the Peace of Utrecht.

G.2.

Northern Wars

Encroached on from the west, the German princes turned to the north and east, where they came into conflict with Sweden in the Baltic. In the First Northern War (1655-1660) the Emperor and the Elector of Brandenburg supported Poland and Denmark against Charles X Gustav of Sweden. The outcome did not effect much change.

In the Great Northern War (1700-1721), which paralleled the War of the Spanish Succession, Saxony, Poland, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hanover, Denmark, and Russia joined forces against Sweden. At the end of it, the treaties of Stockholm and Nystadt restored Poland to Augustus, transferred Stettin and West Pomerania from Sweden to Brandenburg-Prussia, and gave Sweden’s eastern Baltic lands to Russia.

G.3.

Turkish Wars

The Germans also had to reckon with the Ottoman Turks, who, after a period of quiescence, were vigorously expanding in south-east Europe. When the Turks invaded Hungary in 1663, imperial troops managed to defeat them and win a 20-year truce. More eager to check the Catholic Habsburgs than the Muslim Turks, Louis XIV and the Hungarians encouraged Turkish aggression. When the truce was up, the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1683. In this emergency, imperial troops, combined with those of John III Sobieski of Poland, rescued the city. The Turks were driven beyond the Danube, and Hungary was compelled to recognize the Habsburg right to inherit the Hungarian crown. The Turkish wars continued, however, until the brilliant general Prince Eugene of Savoy led imperial troops to victory at Senta (1697). By the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) the Habsburgs regained most of Hungary. The depopulated country was resettled with German veterans, and imperial authority centralized in Vienna was imposed.

G.4.

Rivalry

By 1740 the other German states had fallen behind, leaving Austria and Prussia as rivals for dominance in central Europe.

The family of Hohenzollern, which had been granted Brandenburg in the 15th century, had acquired a number of additional, geographically unconnected territories in the west. Outside the empire to the east was the most important area, Prussia, which they had inherited as a Polish duchy in 1618 and converted into an independent kingdom in 1701. Gradually, all the Hohenzollern lands came to be known as the Kingdom of Prussia.

Frederick William I of Prussia was a sturdy, hardheaded soldier determined to unite his disparate possessions into a modern military state. Crushing local customs and interests, he created an honest, efficient bureaucracy, which filled the treasury and ran the country for the benefit of a large standing army. He tried to convert his intellectual and artistic son Frederick into an image of himself.

Frederick II, the Great, was equally at home on the battlefield and enjoying French literature and music in his palace of Sans Souci (French, “carefree”) near Berlin. He spent most of his life, however, aggrandizing Prussia at the expense of Austria and Poland, and refining and reorganizing the Prussian government and economy to better serve the army.

Emperor Charles VI, anxious to keep Habsburg lands unified, issued the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713, declaring that his only child, Maria Theresa, should succeed him. When he died in 1740, the electors of Bavaria and Saxony rejected the Pragmatic Sanction on the grounds that they had prior claims through their wives. Frederick II offered his support to Maria Theresa in exchange for the rich province of Silesia. Convinced of the justice of her cause, she indignantly refused. Frederick promptly invaded Silesia, precipitating the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). The Bavarians, Saxons, and French invaded Austria and Bohemia, while Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia came to the aid of Austria.

Alarmed by Frederick’s military victories, Maria Theresa made peace with him in 1742, ceding him Silesia. Austria and its allies succeeded, however, in driving the French from Bohemia and conquering Bavaria to replace the lost Silesia. By the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis, Duke of Lorraine, was recognized as emperor, although it was she who actually ruled. In return, Maria Theresa gave up Bavaria and allowed Prussia to keep Silesia.

The emergence of Prussia as a major power led to a radical shift of alliances and to new hostilities. Maria Theresa, determined to reconquer Silesia, made an alliance with Elizabeth of Russia. The Hanoverian George II of Britain, fearing a possible French attack on Hanover, made a treaty of neutrality with Frederick. The old Habsburg-Valois rivalry was forgotten as the Austrian Minister, Prince Kaunitz, manoeuvred Louis XV, fearful of Prussia, into an alliance with Maria Theresa. Frederick, anticipating encirclement, struck first by invading Saxony and Bohemia, beginning the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

Violence spread as the Austrians invaded Silesia, the Russians marched into Prussia, and the French attacked Hanover. Despite good leadership, Frederick soon found himself hard pressed by many enemies. He was conveniently rescued by the death of Elizabeth of Russia and the succession of Peter III, who admired Frederick and at once made peace. The exhausted French also wanted peace. The Treaty of Hubertusburg restored the status quo, with Frederick keeping Silesia.

Bitterly disappointed, Maria Theresa devoted herself to internal affairs. She gradually reorganized the government and established uniform taxes, a customs union, and state-supported elementary schools. She encouraged nobles and commoners to take government and army posts. Wise, warmhearted, and tactful, she was loved by all her subjects. She did not always agree, however, with her idealistic son, Joseph. Joseph II was an enlightened monarch who impatiently tried to create an efficient, modern Germanic bureaucracy without regard for the strong local prejudices.

Prussia was anxious to annex Polish territory separating Brandenburg and Prussia. Austria, still regretting Silesia, looked to the east for compensation. Both countries feared the new Russian presence. A weak Poland seemed ample excuse for intervention, and in 1772 Austria, Prussia, and Russia agreed to the first partition of Poland.

When the Bavarian throne became vacant, Joseph tried to annex Bavaria. Frederick objected and formed the League of Princes against the Emperor. Blocked by Frederick in the short War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-1779), Joseph turned east again. A Turkish war (1788-1791) proved fruitless, and he was left out of the second partition of Poland (1793). Not to be overlooked, he insisted that Austria share in the third partition (1795), in which Poland entirely disappeared.

G.5.

The Baroque Age and the Enlightenment

The end of religious strife and of the Turkish threat gave Germans new confidence. In the 18th century, German culture, nourished by French, English, and Italian developments, achieved a brilliant flowering.

The princes, resisting imperial control and overriding local diets, made themselves absolute monarchs on the model of Louis XIV. They centralized their governments and established mercantile economies. Engaging the foremost artists, they made their capitals artistic and intellectual centres, resplendent with palaces, churches, museums, theatres, gardens, and universities.

Social and cultural life centred on the courts, which were also the chief source of preferment. Courtiers scorned burghers and peasants as uncouth citizens, useful only for paying taxes to support the luxuries of court life. Princes also maintained their courts by accepting foreign subsidies and selling peasant youths as mercenary soldiers. To escape war and taxes, many Germans migrated to North America.

In the Catholic south, great numbers of churches and monasteries were built and restored. They borrowed the dramatic Baroque style that had developed out of the Italian and French Renaissance, transforming it into a graceful, playfully exuberant, Rococo style that was uniquely German. Outstanding are the church at Vierzehnheiligen by Balthasar Neumann; the Karlskirche, Vienna, by J. B. Fischer von Erlach; and the churches of the brothers C. D. Asam and E. Q. Asam. The Baroque-Rococo style was also used for palaces, such as Schönbrunn, outside Vienna, and the Zwinger in Dresden.

In the Baroque period, instrumental music, mostly for chamber groups or keyboard, took the form of complex, highly structured polyphonic suites, preludes, and fugues by such masters as Samuel Scheidt and J. S. Bach. In the pre-Classical and Classical periods, after 1720, orchestral music became more dominant and the compositions themselves longer and more abstract, with the development of sonata form and symphonic structure. Experimentation with orchestral forces and textures by C. P. E. Bach and others culminated in the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. Instrumental and vocal music were combined in the religious cantatas and oratorios of Heinrich Schütz and J. S. Bach, and in the Italianate operas of Handel.

In reaction against the religious concerns of the tumultuous 16th and early 17th centuries was the growth of rationalism and the scientific spirit, which produced the European Enlightenment. Absorbing the works of British and French thinkers, German professors discarded the theology of a world in which sinful men and women needed divine grace. They adopted the optimistic, secular philosophy of a world ordered by natural law in which all humans, intrinsically rational and good, could, through education, aspire to perfection.

The first major German philosopher, G. W. von Leibniz, posited a universe ruled by conscious sources of spiritual energy. His pioneering contributions to mathematics included principles of infinitesimal calculus. The idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant analysed the power of reason and asserted a rational basis for ethics. The playwright G. E. Lessing returned to the structure of Classical drama and introduced to German theatre the English principle of toleration and the concerns of everyday life.

Rationalism was soon opposed by a tendency which stressed intuition and feeling. In religion it took the form of an evangelical revival, known as Pietism. Many middle- and lower-class Germans became followers of the Lutheran pastors P. J. Spener and A. H. Francke, who encouraged Bible study and personal experience of spiritual regeneration expressed in ethical conduct. The University of Halle (1694) became a centre of Pietist education, charity, and training of missionaries. Pietism had a lasting influence on Lutheranism and on many German thinkers.

In literature the antirationalist tendency led to the late 18th-century Sturm und Drang (German, “storm and stress”) movement. Writers in this revolutionary spirit viewed nature as a constantly changing force and valued humans for their individual passions rather than in a spirit of universal reason. Contributing to this movement was the insistence of J. G. von Herder on the influence of history on literature, especially the importance of medieval folk songs and tales. Inspired by the French Revolution, antirationalism broadened into early Romanticism, primarily concerned with the will and feelings of the individual. The philosopher J. G. Fichte saw the universe as based on the moral will of God. August von Schlegel translated Shakespeare’s plays, which emphasize history and individual personality. Novalis wrote mystical Christian lyric poetry.

These contrasting and yet complementary streams came together in the work of three German literary masters: Friedrich von Schiller, who wrote Classical dramas in historical settings, infused with moral conviction and the struggle for freedom; Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote lyrical poems of profound spiritual anguish modelled on Classical Greek forms; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the sage of Weimar, a giant of European literature. Goethe’s early autobiographical novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; trans. 1779), epitomized the Romantic agony. The more disciplined dramas Egmont (1788) and Torquato Tasso (1790), inspired by his Italian travels, were in the Classical vein. He combined both Romantic and Classical outlooks in his dramatic masterpiece Faust (pt I, 1808; pt II, 1832).

H.

Age of Nationalism

Enlightenment theories of representative government, combined with Romantic stress on freedom and national identity, inspired Germans and others with a desire for national unification and liberal reform. The conquests of Napoleon subsequently aroused their sense of national identity.

H.1.

Napoleonic Wars

For 18 years the German states variously engaged in five wars of defence against the well-trained armies of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. In the first two wars the French took the left bank of the Rhine. In the third, Napoleon conquered Vienna and Berlin. In 1806 he reorganized the western German states, to compensate for their left-bank losses, into the Confederation of the Rhine. Austria and Prussia were excluded, and lost much territory. In 1809 Austria led a fourth war against France, while Napoleon was occupied in Spain, but in the process lost more land.

In 1812, Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow, pursued by the Russians, encouraged the allies to make another effort. Frederick William III of Prussia, joined by Austria and Russia, led a War of Liberation, in which Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig (1813). After much bloodshed the allies took Paris in 1814.

At the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) the allies redrew the map of Europe. Austria, which gave up the Austrian Netherlands and its Swabian lands in the west, was compensated in the south and east by the acquisition of Salzburg, the Tirol, Lombardy and Venetia in Italy, and Illyria and Dalmatia on the Adriatic Sea. Prussia lost most of its Polish territory but gained much of Saxony and Swedish Pomerania as well as land in the Rhineland and Westphalia, including the undeveloped iron and coal resources of the Ruhr and Saar.

H.2.

The German Confederation

The Congress of Vienna replaced the Holy Roman Empire of more than 240 states with the German Confederation of 39 states represented by a powerless legislature, known as a diet. Opinions differed on what the character of the new confederation should be. Many Germans wanted to fashion a liberal government on British and French models according to a constitution guaranteeing popular representation, trial by jury, and free speech. They also hoped for national unification. Such ideas were especially popular among journalists, lawyers, and professors and with impatient university students, who formed secret societies for rapid action. These aims also appealed to the various restive groups within the Austrian Empire.

Liberalism and nationalism were bitterly opposed by the rulers of Prussia and Austria and by the recently crowned kings of Bavaria, Hanover, Württemberg, and Saxony, who dreaded any encroachment on their individual sovereignty. Accordingly, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Britain formed the Quadruple Alliance to suppress—by force if necessary—any threat to the Vienna settlement. The German rulers supported the repressive system instituted by the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Klemens von Metternich. Frederick William III blocked reforms planned by his ministers. Prussia outmanoeuvred Austria by instituting a customs union of most German states except Austria.

The July Revolution in Paris in 1830 set off liberal uprisings in many German states. Metternich had the Confederation forbid public meetings and ban petitions. Nevertheless, in 1848 another wave of revolutions, beginning in Paris, washed over Europe. Nationalist groups revolted in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Lombardy. Metternich resigned and Emperor Ferdinand I abdicated in favour of his young nephew Francis Joseph I. Uprisings also took place in Bavaria, Prussia, and south-west Germany. The frightened rulers agreed to send delegates to an assembly in Frankfurt.

The rebellions were soon crushed, however. In Austria a liberal assembly was dissolved, and a constitution providing highly centralized, although representative, government was imposed. Hungary, which had declared itself a republic, was forcibly subdued. In Prussia Frederick William IV imposed an authoritarian constitution.

Meanwhile, the Frankfurt Assembly wrote a liberal constitution for a united Germany under a hereditary emperor. Austria refused to allow its German lands to be included, so the assembly regretfully decided that Germany should consist of the German states without Austria. For lack of an alternative, they offered the crown to Frederick William, who loftily refused it. The assembly dispersed in failure: unity was to be achieved with Prussian military might.

H.3.

The German Empire

After the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly, both Prussia and Austria put forward conflicting plans for union. On the brink, Prussia backed down, but only temporarily. William I was determined that neither Austria nor a newly aggressive France should thwart Prussian ambitions. He and his Chief Minister, Otto von Bismarck, decided that Prussia must become unassailable. Bismarck, a Prussian Junker (aristocrat) of forceful intellect, overbearing manner, and unswerving loyalty to the Crown, used unification as a means to that end.

Bismarck planned a realpolitik (politics of reality) that astutely combined diplomacy with “blood-and-iron” militarism in order to eliminate Austrian influence and bring about unification on Prussian terms. As a preliminary he bought the neutrality of Russia, Italy, and France with friendly treaties. His first step was to invite Austria in 1864 to join an invasion of Schleswig-Holstein. These two duchies were ruled by Denmark. The Austrians and Prussians quickly defeated the Danes but soon fell out over control of the conquered duchies.

On that excuse Bismarck took a second step by launching the Seven Weeks’ War against Austria. Skilfully coordinating three armies, General Helmuth von Moltke made short work of the Austrians at Königgrätz (Sadowa) in 1866. Bismarck, however, did not want to alienate Austria irrevocably: he made an easy peace. Austria gave up Venetia to Italian nationalists. Prussia annexed Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, and other states, and organized the North German Confederation (1867) without Austria.

To overcome south German fears of an enlarged Prussia, Bismarck took a third step, the Franco-Prussian War. In 1870 the glory-seeking French Emperor Napoleon III unwisely pressed William I to promise that a Hohenzollern would never take the vacant Spanish throne. Bismarck distorted William’s account of the incident to make it seem as if the French had been insulted, and then published the account. The outraged French fell straight into the trap, and foolishly declared war. Stirred by national loyalty, the south German states joined forces behind Prussia, whose seasoned armies conquered the disorganized French at Sedan and, after a long siege, took Paris in 1871. With these events Bismarck convinced the south German states that Prussian hegemony was inevitable. At Versailles in 1871 he persuaded a reluctant William to take a new title as Head of the German Empire, the Second Reich.

Having sufficiently aggrandized Prussia, the Iron Chancellor, as Bismarck was called, worked for peace. He constructed a series of alliances designed to protect Germany from aggression. At the Congress of Berlin (1878) Bismarck mediated a settlement in the Balkans, where various Slavic groups kept rising against the decaying Ottoman Empire. Largely to please the merchant class, he consented to Germany’s acquiring colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Germany found its colonies valuable chiefly for prestige, however.

At home, Bismarck encouraged the Industrial Revolution, which developed rapidly after 1850 as Germans applied advanced industrial technology to the iron and coal resources of the Ruhr and Saar. The population rose by a third, and factories burgeoned, transforming rural farmers into urban producers of steel for machinery, railways, and ships. This enlarged city population demanded a share in the government.

The empire, however, did not function democratically. The 25 nominally sovereign states (plus Alsace-Lorraine) of the North German Confederation were ruled by a Bundesrat of princes dominated by Prussia and a powerless Reichstag of elected deputies, while the Chancellor was responsible only to the Emperor. Bismarck’s scorn for the ordinary citizen and his distrust of the Roman Catholic Centre Party and the workers’ Social Democratic Party further discouraged parliamentary government.

Mindful of old papal-imperial rivalry, Bismarck believed that the Catholic Church, which had declared the infallibility of the pope in 1870, threatened the supremacy of the German state. He therefore initiated the Kulturkampf (“culture struggle”) during which he suppressed many religious orders and dismissed, imprisoned, or exiled disobedient priests. Church-State strife cooled in 1879, chiefly because Bismarck needed the Centre Party’s support against the Liberals to obtain high tariffs that would protect German agriculture and industry from cheap imports.

Bismarck next turned his wrath on the Socialist Party, forerunner of the Social Democratic Party. Blaming on it two attempts by non-Socialists to assassinate William, he had a new Reichstag elected, which supported tariffs and outlawed the Socialists. To forestall workers’ demands and to ensure healthy army recruits, he provided state insurance for sickness, accidents, and old age. When the outlawed Socialist Party won a large number of seats in the election of 1890, Bismarck prepared to abolish the constitution. Suddenly, however, he was dismissed by the new Emperor, William II, who wanted to rule the empire in his own right.

H.4.

19th-Century Art and Thought

With little scope for political action, many middle-class Germans turned to cultural pursuits, through which they influenced the Western world.

German painting, reacting against the Neo-Classicism of Anton Raphael Mengs, became Romantic, as exemplified by the vast, allegorical landscapes of C. D. Friedrich and P. O. Runge. Later painting was realistic. Architecture was Romantic Gothic or imposing Neo-Classical.

Music also became Romantic. Much of it was inspired by literature, for example, the art songs, or lieder, of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, and the operas of Richard Wagner. Instrumental music with literary or pictorial allusions, called programme music, took the form of symphonic poems by Richard Strauss. Pure music, in contrast to programme music, by such masters as Brahms, Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn, continued Classical forms.

Romantic literature, inspired by the lyrics of Goethe, Schiller, and Heinrich Heine, included the work of such poets and storytellers as Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Eichendorff, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and J. L. Uhland. These Romantics often used German folk materials such as the songs and tales collected by the Grimm Brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. The conflict between the individual and society, first treated by Goethe, was expressed in the novels of Theodor Fontane, Adalbert Stifter, and Gottfried Keller, a Swiss, and in the dramas of Franz Grillparzer and Friedrich Hebbel. Their interest in psychology was part of a more realistic approach to the world that gradually superseded Romanticism. Realistic criticism of society was evident in the ironic lyrics of Heine and took the extreme form of social determinism in the naturalist poems of Arno Holz and the plays of Hermann Sudermann and Gerhart Hauptmann.

The French capture of Berlin in 1806 shocked the Prussians into an effort to recover in cultural dignity what they had lost in political fact. Under Wilhelm von Humboldt, the educational system was reorganized to stress the individuality of the student and the moral duty of the state to educate its citizens. Elementary schools emphasized experience instead of mere learning by rote. Gymnasien combined Classical, Christian, and patriotic values to prepare middle-class as well as aristocratic students for the university. The University of Berlin became an outstanding centre of humanistic, historical, and, especially, scientific studies.

German nationalism found justification in the work of the foremost thinkers of the day, J. G. Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The Romantic Friedrich von Schelling presented all history as developing towards an absolute harmony of mind and matter. He influenced the absolute idealist G. W. F. Hegel, who synthesized nature and mind in the progress of the Absolute World Spirit to its embodiment in the Prussian state.

Opposing nationalism, the revolutionary philosophy of Karl Marx cast the Hegelian dialectic in materialistic terms, declaring that all ideas arise from economic systems. Marx urged workers throughout the world to unite in violently overthrowing existing governments and creating a new classless society.

Much more pessimistic was the view of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw the world as a scene of painful, unavoidable conflict among individual wills. Drawing on Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche valued the creative “will to power” of the heroic individual, which sets him apart from the inferior masses. Extreme nationalists, mixing the Nietzschean superman with a Romantic glorification of the German people, developed a hazy but heady concept of German racial superiority that contributed to two world wars.

H.5.

Early 20th-Century Art and Thought

The era of relative peace and prosperity that preceded World War I gave rise to artistic and intellectual reaction against traditional forms and concepts. The avant-garde increasingly separated itself from the general public as it experimented with new ideas and techniques. Continuing to flourish in the Weimar period, it was suppressed by the Nazis. Many artists and thinkers emigrated to avoid a state-imposed return to stereotyped tradition. After World War II, German culture slowly recovered.

Around 1900, German and Austrian architects and designers employed the graceful floral curves of Jugendstil, a version of Art Nouveau, especially in the Vienna Secession movement. Closely allied was a new interest in materials and structure, seen in the work of Peter Behrens, J. M. Olbrich, and Walter Gropius. Adaptation of aesthetics to the machine age inspired buildings in the starkly functional International Style developed at the Bauhaus school of design founded by Gropius in Weimar in 1919. Its principles spread through Europe and the Americas.

German Expressionist paintings emphasized the artists’ feelings instead of objectively attempting to portray the outside world. Such painters as E. L. Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky (a Russian), and Paul Klee (a Swiss) used strident colours and distorted forms. In the 1920s Otto Dix and Max Beckmann painted bitter social commentaries, and John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfelde) pioneered photomontage, which he applied to radical political expression. Surrealist interests influenced Klee and Max Ernst. Kandinsky created the first non-representational works.

In music, Richard Strauss and Carl Orff wrote innovative programme works. At the same time Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Anton von Webern and Alban Berg devised a revolutionary twelve-tone music that abandoned traditional melodies and harmonies completely. The level of music education and performance remained high.

Writers such as Franz Werfel, the poets Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the psychological novelists Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Franz Kafka turned from realistic description of the world to an Expressionistic exploration of the mind and spirit. Often they used myth, symbol, and exaggerated language to convey inner truths, frustrations, ironies, ambiguities, and subconscious forces. Social criticism was the primary purpose of the playwrights Arthur Schnitzler, Frank Wedekind, and Carl Sternheim. The narrative epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht in Berlin in the 1920s attacked capitalist society. Expressionism influenced German film directors such as Robert Wiene, G. W. Pabst, and Fritz Lang, who produced work of great originality. After World War II such novelists as Uwe Johnson, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass continued to analyse German society.

A great influence on Expressionism in the arts was the new science of psychoanalysis developed around 1900 by Sigmund Freud (born in Freiberg, Austria). Psychoanalysis seemed to undermine confidence in the progress of a rational human race in an orderly universe by focusing on the uncharted, amoral depths of the subconscious. Belief in rational, liberal Christianity was specifically attacked by the Swiss neo-orthodox theologians Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. Existentialism, as developed by the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and the theologian Paul Tillich, sought to integrate religion, art, and science.

I.

World War I

None of the European powers wanted a world war, but they all feared Germany—newly unified, outstripping them in population and industry, and aggressively self-assertive—as a dangerous rival. Specifically, France wanted to recover Alsace-Lorraine; Britain, a seafaring country, felt threatened by German colonial expansion and William II’s insistence on a large navy; Austria and Russia feared pressure within their tottering empires. Germany itself had nightmares of a war on two fronts. All these powers sought protection in huge, peacetime, standing armies and in an intricate system of international alliances.

Bismarck’s delicate balance of power proved too difficult for William II to maintain. Refusing in 1887 to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, he continued the Triple Alliance (1882) of Germany, Austria, and Italy. Rebuffed, Russia made an alliance in 1894 with France. Britain, long neutral, settled its colonial differences with France in the Entente Cordiale (1904) and its Middle East dispute with Russia in 1907, resulting in the Triple Entente. Thus, Europe was divided into two armed camps.

Crises in Morocco and the Balkans intensified antagonisms. William twice intervened in Morocco (1905, 1911), which France claimed, to protect German interests in Africa. Austria’s annexation in 1908 of the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina spoiled Serbia’s hopes of gaining them. The assassination, with Serbian knowledge, of the liberal Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 proved to be the spark that ignited the war. Germany rashly assured Austria of full support, resulting in an Austrian ultimatum that Serbia could not accept. Because military advantage depended on rapid mobilization, the powers then moved with headlong speed. Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia, to defend Serbia, mobilized against Austria and Germany. Germany gave Russia 12 hours to demobilize, called up its own troops, and, receiving no answer, declared war on Russia. Assuming that France would aid Russia, Germany also declared war on France.

I.1.

Course of the War

The Germans hoped that a quick conquest of France would secure the western front and release forces for the east. Avoiding the fortified French frontier, German armies moved through neutral Belgium, hoping to take Paris by surprise, but the Germans encountered greater resistance in Belgium than expected. Their violation of international law brought Britain to the aid of France and destroyed all sympathy for the Central Powers.

German forces nearly reached Paris. The British and French miraculously turned back the overstretched German lines at the Battle of the Marne, however, and the two sides dug trenches for a ferocious war of attrition that would last for four years. Meanwhile, the Russians attacked on the east, plunging Germany into the dreaded two-front war.

The Germans several times defeated the ill-equipped Russians, but they could make no headway in the west. The Allies blockaded Germany to cut off food and raw materials. Desperate to break the blockade, the Germans declared unrestricted submarine warfare. After several United States ships were sunk, the United States entered the war in 1917. The next year Russia, in the throes of two revolutions, sued for peace, which was concluded at Brest-Litovsk in 1918. Thus freed in the east, in 1918 the Germans launched a final, all-out offensive in the west, but the united Allies slowly turned the tide.

Recognizing the situation as hopeless, the German high command urged William to let a new civil government sue for peace. Moreover, Woodrow Wilson, US President from 1913 to 1921, insisted on dealing with civilians. William grudgingly appointed Prince Max of Baden as Chancellor, and while he negotiated with Wilson, fighting continued, sailors mutinied, socialists organized strikes, workers and the military formed Communist councils, and revolution broke out in Bavaria. Prince Max announced the abdication of William II and resigned. A leader of the Social Democrats proclaimed Germany a republic.

I.2.

The Treaty of Versailles

Having surrendered and changed its government, Germany expected a negotiated peace rather than the harsh terms imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. But the Allies were determined to receive reparation for their losses and to see that their enemy was never again in a position to endanger them. Accordingly, Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France and West Prussia to Poland, creating a Polish Corridor between Germany and East Prussia. It also lost its colonies and had to give up most of its coal, trains, and merchant ships, as well as its navy. Germany had to limit its army and submit to Allied occupation of the Rhineland for 15 years. Worst of all, the Germans had to accept full responsibility for causing the war and, consequently, pay its total cost. These last provisions particularly rankled; Germans did not consider themselves more guilty than anyone else and could not possibly pay all that was demanded.

The Versailles treaty, understandable from the Allies’ immediate point of view, did not ensure lasting peace. Germany was neither crushed completely nor encouraged to return to the European community. Instead, by accepting the treaty, the new German government lost all favour among its citizens, crippling its chances of success.

In Weimar in 1919, a national assembly, led by the Social Democratic Party, wrote a democratic constitution for the new German Reich. But the prospects of the Weimar Republic, as it was familiarly known, were dim. For most Germans the government bore the stigma of military defeat and the Versailles treaty, which they regarded as only temporary. In addition, as parliamentary government, it was opposed on principle by both conservative militarists and revolutionary socialists. Both sides, using private armies, frequently tried to overthrow the government, as in the military Kapp Putsch (1920) and the uprising of the Communist Spartacists (1919) under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

The economic situation made matters worse. Because Germany could not meet reparations requirements, France invaded the Ruhr in 1923 to take over the coal mines. The government encouraged the workers to resist passively, printing vast amounts of money to pay them. The resulting inflation wiped out savings, pensions, insurance, and other forms of fixed income, creating a social revolution that destroyed the most stable elements in Germany.

Aided by the Dawes Plan (1924), which set reasonable annual amounts of reparations and provided for foreign loans, the brilliant German Minister Gustav Stresemann reorganized the monetary system and encouraged industry. For five years Germany enjoyed relative peace and prosperity; in 1926 it joined the League of Nations. The worldwide depression of 1929, however, plunged the country once more into disaster. Millions of unemployed, disillusioned by capitalist democracy, turned to communism or to the party of National Socialism (Nazism) led by Adolf Hitler.

J.

Hitler and the Third Reich

A former army corporal, Hitler hated aristocrats, capitalists, Communists, and liberals, but especially Jews and other so-called non-Aryans. He had already tried to topple the government in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923. After nearly a year in prison, he continued to build up the Nazi Party. A gifted public speaker, he rapidly won supporters by denouncing the Weimar government as weak and treacherous. He proposed giving the jobs of Jews, whom he depicted as villainous, to deserving Germans, and he promised to recover Germany’s strength and honour. In return, he demanded the complete loyalty and obedience of people to himself as their Führer (leader). To reinforce his message, brown-shirted storm troopers attacked Communists, Jews, and other party targets.

In the depths of the depression of 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag. In 1933, with the support of right-wing elements, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. To secure supreme power for himself, Hitler called new elections. Blaming a fire in the Reichstag building on the Communists, he banned the Communist Party. In the new Reichstag the Nazis, Nationals, and Catholic Centre passed the revolutionary Enabling Act allowing the government to control all aspects of German life.

J.1.

The Nazis in Power

Armed with this power, Hitler set out to create the Third Reich, as he called the new totalitarian Germany. The groundwork had been laid in World War I, when the military ran the government. From that foundation, Hitler proceeded with frightening efficiency. Arrogating legislative, executive, judicial, and military authority to himself, he remained chancellor, became head of state after the death of Paul von Hindenburg, headed a new court system, and commanded the armed forces.

All political parties except the Nazis were banned. Strikes were forbidden, and the unemployed were enrolled in labour camps or the army as Germany strove to be economically self-sufficient. A professional army, enlarged by conscription, was established to carry out Hitler’s plan for conquest. An organized system of propaganda was implemented through publishing and teaching. Children were also indoctrinated through the Hitler Youth movement. Gigantic rallies were staged to galvanize the German public. Backing up the propaganda were the Gestapo, a secret police force created to suppress opposition and round up Jews, which operated without civil restraints; and the Schutzstaffel (SS), originally an elite personal bodyguard for Hitler, which grew into a vast bureaucracy with military and police powers.

Some Germans did not take Hitler seriously, but others accepted his emphasis on race and violence. Outspoken dissenters left the country or took the consequences. Initially, Jews were targeted for discriminatory laws and directives, deprived of citizenship, and barred from civil service and the professions. Jewish firms were liquidated or purchased for less than full value by companies owned by non-Jews. On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazis killed more than 90 Jews at random, smashed thousands of store windows, and set fire to synagogues during Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”). Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the country.

J.2.

The Concentration Camps

Beginning in 1933, the first German concentration camps were constructed to imprison numerous groups of political opponents and so-called asocials: Jews, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Communists, religious dissenters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals, and prostitutes. The prisoners were exploited as forced labourers: when no longer able to work they were killed by gassing, shooting, or fatal injection. Inmates were also used for “medical experiments”. The camps increased in size and number throughout the war, as Germany conquered one country after another, especially in the east.

J.3.

The Holocaust

When Germany occupied Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were killed or forced into walled ghettos, where thousands died monthly from starvation and illness. The conquests of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Yugoslavia, and Greece brought hundreds of thousands more Jews under German rule. Invading the USSR in June 1941, the German army was followed by specially formed death squads, which killed nearly a million Jews on Russian soil. By the end of that year, a “final solution to the Jewish question” was formulated by Hitler’s staff. Extermination centres were built to kill entire populations. Millions of Jews and thousands of Roma and Soviet prisoners were gassed and shot. While collaborators in the occupied territories assisted Germany, resistance was substantial. Before German occupation, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, and Italy refused to deport Jews; widespread partisan resistance existed in the occupied territories; and there were armed Jewish uprisings in Tarnow, Radom, Bedzin, Białystok, and others, and in the camp at Sobibor. For three weeks in 1943, the 65,000 remaining Jews of the Warsaw ghetto battled with German police attempting a final round-up. By the end of the war, Jewish dead numbered about 6 million, and millions of others targeted by the Nazis had died in the Holocaust.

K.

World War II

Many of Europe’s problems were left unresolved by World War I. Germany’s willingness to seek a solution by force, while other countries wanted to avoid violence at all costs, led to World War II.

Hitler planned to threaten and bluff the European powers into allowing him gradually to revise Germany’s boundaries. His goal, to unite all Germans and give them Lebensraum (“living space”), did not seem unreasonable to some statesmen, who realized that the Versailles treaty had been unjust. At the time, no single demand of Hitler’s seemed worth risking war to protest. Germany left the League of Nations in 1933 and, virtually unopposed, began to rearm in 1935; it then reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936. Germany signed an anti-Communist pact with Japan and made an alliance with Fascist Italy, creating the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. In 1938 it declared an Anschluss (union) with Austria. At Munich that year, Britain, France, and Italy timorously acceded to Hitler’s demand for the German-populated area of Sudeten in Czechoslovakia, on his promise that Germany would then be satisfied.

In March 1939, breaking his word, Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In August, dramatically reversing his anti-Communist policy, he made a non-aggression pact with the USSR containing a secret clause on the partition of Poland. His repeated demands for Danzig in the Polish Corridor led to a Polish British pact and Polish mobilization. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France promptly declared war on Germany: World War II had begun.

K.1.

Course of the War

In a few weeks of blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), mechanized German divisions overwhelmed the ill-equipped Poles, taking western Poland. The Soviets, not to be outdone, seized the eastern part. Encouraged by success, in 1940 Germany swallowed Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries and invaded France, which rapidly collapsed. British and French forces were hastily evacuated from Dunkirk to England. Hitler then blockaded Britain with submarines and bombed the country with his new air force. He made a ten-year military pact with the other Axis powers—Italy and Japan. In 1941, to aid faltering Italian forces, he sent troops to North Africa, Greece, and Yugoslavia. To block Soviet ambitions in agricultural eastern Europe, which industrial Germany needed, he suddenly invaded the USSR. As the Soviets retreated eastwards, German armies engulfed the rich Ukraine.

At this point, Hitler was master of continental Europe. In 1942, however, Britain was still resisting, and the United States, which had entered the war after an attack by Japan, was sending supplies to Britain and the USSR. Hitler then ordered total mobilization of men and resources. Throughout Europe, conquered peoples, especially Slavs and Jews, were executed or enslaved in German war factories, while their countries were drained of food and raw materials.

In 1943 the tide began to turn. Supply lines in the USSR were overextended, and the Germans were gradually driven west. Axis forces in North Africa were defeated, and Italy was invaded. Germany itself, from 1942 on, was being systematically bombed. Although defeat was inevitable, Hitler refused to surrender. The war dragged on as British and US forces invaded Normandy in 1944 and swept inexorably east while the Soviets marched west. Hitler committed suicide just before Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in April 1945.

K.2.

Occupation and Partition

Germany’s unconditional surrender ended the Third Reich. The Allies reduced Germany to its pre-war western boundaries and assigned a large portion on the east to Poland. Setting up four occupation zones, they tried war criminals and dismantled factories. But as their policies diverged, Germany was split into two parts.

Britain, the United States, and, eventually, France wanted to rebuild Germany into a major Western European power capable of countering the expansionist tendencies of the USSR. In 1948 they merged their zones into one region, supplied with US aid, and encouraged the Germans to form a democratic government. The USSR, on the other hand, imposed a Communist German government, under Soviet domination, on East Germany. In 1949 this practical polarization of Germany was legalized by the creation of two German states: the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, and the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.

L.

Reunification

With the rise of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR in the late 1980s, the Soviet-backed regimes of Eastern Europe began to lose control over their people. East Germany’s Communist government fell in 1989, an event that profoundly altered relations between the two Germanys. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and other emigration barriers, more than 200,000 East Germans streamed into West Germany. The West German government not only aided the new immigrants but also allocated a massive injection of capital to shore up the ailing East German economy. West Germany and East Germany merged their financial systems in July 1990, and in October East Germany dissolved and all its citizens became citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The coalition led by Helmut Kohl scored a decisive victory in all-German elections in December 1990. The newly elected Bundestag, representing both East and West, made Berlin the capital of Germany on June 20, 1991. The transfer of administration from Bonn was expected to be completed by the year 2003 with some government offices remaining in Bonn.

L.1.

Economic Changes

While reunification (Die Wende, or “the change”) brought together long-separated families and friends, it also brought numerous economic and social problems to Germany, including housing shortages, strikes and demonstrations, unemployment, and increases in crime and right-wing violence against foreigners. Budget deficits caused by unification and worsened by a recession led to increased taxes, reduced government subsidies and increased privatization, and cuts in social services. While increasing the market for consumer products, reunification significantly affected the strength and competitiveness of the German economy. A gulf was evident between the two Germanys in standards of living, industrial performance, and infrastructure. Many East Germans felt patronized and overwhelmed by the west, and complained of second-class treatment. Many West Germans believed they were sacrificing their standard of living to support East Germans.

L.2.

Attacks on Foreigners

Of great significance for Germany is the problem of xenophobia and attacks on foreigners. Since the end of World War II, West Germany addressed its often acute labour shortage by permitting immigrants known as “guest workers” to live and work there. Guest workers, many from Turkey, worked full-time and brought or raised families in West Germany, but were not allowed to become citizens. By the 1990s, Germany had nearly 2 million guest workers. In addition, 440,000 asylum seekers entered the country in 1992, an increase of 71 per cent from 1991. Of these, 122,666 were from the former Yugoslavia.

In 1992, about 2,300 attacks on foreigners were reported; in 1993, the figure was about 1,300. In that year eight died from right-wing extremist violence, down from 17 in 1992. Attacks on Jews declined, but attacks on homeless and disabled people more than doubled, from 145 to 324. Mass demonstrations protested against the violence, and the government increased its activities against neo-Nazi groups. In May 1993, the German parliament approved limitations on asylum for foreigners in Germany, which took effect from July 1, 1993. From June to July of that year, asylum applications to Germany decreased by 34 per cent.

In September 1993, Germany renewed its bid for a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations (UN). As a council member, Germany would be expected to contribute troops to UN peacekeeping operations, a source of contention in the German parliament. Also in 1993, German voters ratified the country’s membership of the European Union (EU; formerly the European Community).

L.3.

Painful Readjustment

The formerly impregnable German economy was rocked by worsening recession and attendant strikes in 1993, with growing criticisms of structural problems that included high labour costs, powerful unions, and overcommitment to quality of work at the expense of competitiveness. The so-called Solidarity Pact, designed to finance reconstruction of the east, was finally agreed in 1993, but further inflated a ballooning budget deficit, causing the Bundesbank to press for heavy government spending cuts.

In May 1994 Roman Herzog, a Christian Democrat, was elected President by parliament in place of Richard von Weizsäcker, who had reached his maximum two terms. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled in July that German armed forces could serve with the UN or other international missions outside the NATO area, subject to parliamentary approval, thus freeing Germany to send its forces outside Western Europe for the first time since 1945. In August 1994 the last Russian troops left Berlin, followed in September by the last British, French, and American troops.

In the October 1994 general elections, Helmut Kohl’s ruling coalition was returned to office for a fourth time, albeit with a majority reduced from 134 to 10 Bundestag seats. In January 1995 former officials in the East German government, including ex-premier Egon Krenz, were indicted for manslaughter over shootings along the Berlin Wall. In August the Federal Constitutional Court made a controversial ruling that hanging crucifixes in state schools was unconstitutional. As part of Germany’s new policy of undertaking external peacekeeping commitments, the Bundestag voted in December to send a 4,000-strong peacekeeping force to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Despite recovery from recession, continuing economic problems were highlighted in January 1996 when unemployment reached a post-war high of 10.8 per cent; the government responded with new industrial initiatives, talks with trade unions, and some trimming of the social security system. After failing to reach agreement with unions and employers, the government introduced its own austerity and competitiveness package in April, including deep cuts in social security spending and deregulation measures.

In May, a regional referendum rejected a proposal to merge the city of Berlin with the surrounding state of Brandenburg, which would have re-created the territorial core of the old Prussian state. Also in May, the Constitutional Court cleared the implementation of a controversial law restricting numbers of asylum seekers, in an attempt to defuse continuing racial tensions.

L.4.

Economic Restructuring

In a three-day protest in April 1997, thousands of German coal miners besieged Bonn over the government’s proposed acceleration of subsidy cuts to the coal industry. Following the protest, a compromise was reached with the acceleration of cuts to be slowed down. In 1997 it was admitted that Germany’s economic commitments would delay its joining a single European currency. Government attempts to adjust public finances ready for European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999 by revaluing gold reserves were sharply criticized by many, including the Bundesbank, when the plan was announced in May 1997; by June the government had been forced to drop the plan. In July Chancellor Kohl’s tax-cutting reform legislation was defeated in the Bundesrat. The former head of state of East Germany Egon Krenz was jailed in August 1997 for his part in the deaths of East Germans shot while trying to cross the Berlin Wall, but was released pending an appeal.

By December 1997 the German unemployment rate was the highest since World War II, at 11.9 per cent. In February 1998 Germany announced that it had reached the economic criteria for participation in EMU. In March 1998 the charismatic reformist Gerhard Schröder was selected as Social Democratic Party leader, ready for the September general elections; in the same month, his party’s proposals to amend Germany’s citizenship law to allow naturalization of those resident in Germany were vote