German nationality

“ A large number of German fellow-countrymen have been incorporated into other States, or live in political independence, like the Dutch, who have developed into a separate nationality, but in language and national customs cannot deny their German ancestry. ”

“ Since then, more than seven million German immigrants have entered the United States and made extraordinary human, economic, political, social, and cultural contributions to the growth and success of our great country.
Today there are more than sixty million Americans of German descent, a number about equal to the total population of the Federal Republic of Germany. More Americans claim German ancestry than any other nationality. ”

“ The idea of nationality had received scant attention in Germany before the nineteenth century. Kant, Fichte and Hegel contributed powerfully to its awakening. Hardly had the concept become familiar to German thought before its relation with language became established. The trend of feeling on the subject is best expressed by Arndt about half a century before the fruition of Bismarck’s life project at Versailles:
Was ist das deutsche Vaterland? ”

“ Official Germany is not to be taken here in the narrow sense of German officialdom; it means all that part of the people—German or any other—which in normal circumstances appears to be the whole people, and as such sets the stamp of nationality on all that is produced by that people, the same stamp which it has set on all that has emanated from it in the past. ”

“ Within the limits of Germany itself, there was, as we have seen, no united nationality. Even the consolidation of the smaller tribes under the names of Goths, Franks, Saxons and Alemanni, during the third century, was only the beginning of a new political development which was not continued upon German soil. With the exception of Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Ireland, Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and the Byzantine territory in Turkey, Greece and Italy, all Europe was under Germanic rule at the end of the Migration of the Races, in the year 570. ”

“ Neither would it be intelligible why modern Germany should never have pursued the policy of unifying all German-speaking peoples in Europe, why she should not covet the large German provinces of Austria, and should patiently witness the forcible Russianization of the German towns in the Baltic provinces and the Magyarization of the Germans in Hungary.
Neither the bonds of blood nor those of language alone make a nation. ”

“ M. FAURE: The term “souche allemande” applies, as indicated in connection with the preceding text, to the following categories of persons: In the first place, persons who were in Alsace and Lorraine before the Treaty of Versailles and who became French by the treaty; persons whose nationality before 1919 was German are considered as of German origin, as well as their children, their grandchildren, and their spouses. This affects the great majority of the population of the three departments.
I continue reading Paragraph 2 of the first article of Document Number RF-744. ”

“ If nationality is to be recognised as the ruling principle—and the scheme of German confederation and empire contemplated nothing else—these countries would fall to be excluded, since, by language and race, they form part of a totally different branch of the European family. ”

“ By this arrangement provision was made for the strengthening of a number of weak states without the creation of a new powerful unit in the group of European nations. Thirty million Germans, comprising by far the majority of the German-speaking inhabitants of the period, were thus politically welded for the first time in modern history. ”

“ A German succeeds in this country because all his fellow-countrymen patronize him in whatever business he engages. A German will put himself to inconvenience, and go miles out of his way to spend money with one of his own race and nationality. ”

“ Signs of political weakness are visible here, while for centuries the overflow of the strength of the German nation has poured into foreign countries, and been lost to our fatherland and to our nationality; it is absorbed by foreign nations and steeped with foreign sentiments. Even to-day the German Empire possesses no colonial territories where its increasing population may find remunerative work and a German way of living. ”

“ Nevertheless the country seemed predestined by nature itself to form a part of Germany. The broken surface of the Ardenne hilly region and the extension of the plateau of Lorraine are drained by the Sauer and Moselle into German territory. The life of the inhabitants of the entire state is influenced by this easterly drift and tends yearly to greater dispersal in the same direction. This is the danger which prompts them to cling to their independence with patriotic tenacity. ”

“ German diplomacy has exerted its best efforts during the past generation in the attempt to defeat this design. In overcrowded Germany the need of land for colonization is felt as keenly as the necessity of providing new markets for the country’s busy industries. ”

“ French Switzerland receives a large number of German immigrants. In 1900 the number of Germans, both from German cantons and from the German Empire, was estimated at 164,379. In 1910 this foreign element had grown to a community of 186,135. The tendency of these newcomers is to become assimilated. Intermarriage and social intercourse favor French influence. ”

“ In many cases the peasants have been provided with funds to carry on their agricultural operations. In Western Prussia 39 estates with about 14,000 inhabitants have passed into German hands. [118] Often it has been impossible to induce peasants from other parts of Germany to settle in the Polish provinces, and the state has resorted to the importation of German peasants from the old German settlements in Russia, Galicia and Bosnia.
German colonization in Polish provinces has been accompanied by increase and expansion of urban centers. ”

“ This process has led to the present distribution of languages, which expresses a fossilization of German colonization in the east, and illustrates in a most striking way the penetration of peoples. Poland and part of Russia, Slavonic and Magyar territories, are interspersed with small German settlements, which are the more sparse and scattered the farther east they are located, the more continuous the nearer they lie to Germany. ”

“ What an extraordinary mixture the Germans are, brave, conceited, sentimental, prosaic, patriotic, and yet no people so soon lose their national characteristics, and become citizens of another country as Germans. ”

“ There are approximately 85 million Germans in Germany. I do not even include in this figure our Low German Volksgenossen. England, the British Empire, has barely 46 million Englishmen at home. The French Empire has barely 37 million Frenchmen at home. Even the American Union, minus Negroes and Jews and Latinos and Germans, has barely 60 million true Anglo- Saxons. ”

“ Would we comprehend the Germany of to-day, we must hold firmly in our minds an epitome of what it has been, and see vividly the devious path of its development through the ages.
The German nation is of ancient lineage, and indeed belongs to the royal line of human descent, the Aryan; its ancestral roots running back until lost in the heart of Asia, in the mists of antiquity.
The home of the Aryan race is shrouded in mystery, as are the impelling causes which sent those successive tides of humanity into Europe. ”

“ The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; ”

“ Today, nearly one quarter of all Americans trace their ancestry to Germany, and many familiar American traditions -- from Christmas trees to kindergarten -- have German origins. German descendants have fundamentally and positively shaped the course of American history. From the wheels of labor and the fields of sport, to the halls of power and throughout our society, generations of German Americans have helped make America what it is today. ”

“ Whilst the 60,000,000 Germans in Germany are increasing with astonishing celerity, the 30,000,000 Germans who live in Austria-Hungary and in other countries are so rapidly losing all German characteristics and even the German language, that it seems possible that, forty or fifty years hence, the number of Germans outside Germany proper will be almost nil. ”

“ Germany allows anyone of German blood to become a German citizen, even if he has never seen Germany and has no intention of taking up his residence there; and Germans, who have emigrated to other countries, secure the amazing opportunity to acquire foreign citizenship without losing their German citizenship. ”

“ Well, Sir, at the end of the summer of last year, and at the commencement of the autumn, after the speeches and dispatches of the First Minister and the Secretary of State, and after, at the end of July, that reassuring announcement from the French Government, there was great excitement in Germany. The German people have been for some time painfully conscious that they do not exercise that influence in Europe which they believe is due to the merits, moral, intellectual, and physical, of forty millions of population, homogeneous and speaking the same language. ”

“ The normal German is an admirable citizen, quiet, peaceable, thrifty, industrious, faithful, efficient, and affectionate to the verge of sentimentality. He, and not the Junker, has made Germany the most efficient political State in the world. ”

“ Had not the uprising of the peasants been shamefully betrayed by the leaders of German culture and civilization, the development of the nation would, at that time, have already assumed a normal form, and not only would Germany be the equal of the other civilized nations, but as the first-born modern nation, would have held the roost prominent place among them. ”

“ The German offer for a solution of the problem of world-government is German sentiments, German racial pride, German manners and customs, an immense increase of German territory and German influence, and above all an acknowledged supremacy for the German race among the nations of the world. ”

“ I have an idea that the waters will benefit me, at least it is something new: we penetrate at once into Germany. It is true, we do not understand German; but where better learn a language than in its native country?
“What’s in a name!”—You know the quotation: it applies to things known; to things unknown, a name is often everything: on me it has a powerful effect; and many hours of extreme pleasure have derived their zest simply from a name; and now a name is drawing me on—Germany—vast, unseen Germany! ”

“ According to Article XIV, any former German who holds a position in the German Empire in any part of the world, in the service of a German religious society or of a German school, is looked upon as a German citizen "by assumption." ”

“ As a people made up of the most extraordinary mixing and mingling of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element as the "people of the centre" in every sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves:--they escape DEFINITION, and are thereby alone the despair of the French. It IS characteristic of the Germans that the question: "What is German?" never dies out among them. ”

“ If we wish to know the capacity of their race for self-government, we must go to Germany, and if possible find it there. The German race comes nearest to our own and excels it in some respects, though wanting the necessary political elements with which we are gifted. ”

“ But not only the Slavs, the French and other nations also were—according to these theorists—formed by the Germans, just as even Christ Himself was of German origin. In a word, the whole world is and must be German. ”

“ Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland for the most part, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and our own islands, are all in language, in blood, and in institutions, German most decidedly. But all South America is peopled with Spaniards and Portuguese; all North America, and all Australia with Englishmen. I say nothing of the prospects and influence of the German race in Africa and in India: it is enough to say that half of Europe, and all America and Australia, are German, more or less completely, in race, in language, or in institutions, or in all. ”

“ BUT—shall Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, Frenchmen, Greeks, Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Canadians, Australians and Americans—for we too may ultimately feel the spike of the German boot—shall all these peoples, numbering some 300,000,000 of the most civilized, most enlightened on earth suffer constantly and face unnatural death every generation so that some small part of Germany's populace may continue to exist? ”

“ In several ways Germany has excellence and possibilities of great service to humanity. In original research and invention, in applied science and in science itself, in scholarship, and in social and industrial development and organization, the German has shown himself to be a pioneer. ”

“ My earnest hope is that every member of this illustrious race, while he may cherish the particular country of his birth as he does his home, will extend his devotion beyond its narrow limits, and exult in the name of a German, and recognize the claim of Germany to the love and affection and patriotic exertions of all her sons. ”