Germania

“ To the four quarters of the globe the wild alarm Germania est delenda is trumpeted as a so-called duty of human civilization; isolated Germany can respond only with her resolute Victory or Death. What shall be the end? ”

“ Counting an average of 100,000 for any single nation, the total population of Germania Magna would have amounted to five millions. This is a rather high figure for a barbarian group of nations, although 10 inhabitants to the square kilometer or 550 to the geographical square mile is very little when compared to present conditions. But this does not include the whole number of Germans then living. We know that German nations of the Gothic race, Bastamians, Peukinians and others, lived all along the Carpathian mountains away down to the mouth of the Danube. ”

“ Evening Landscape—Sunset. (17X11.)
(Durr Collection.)
D-154. Germania. (108X90.) Christian Köhler.
The struggle of the German people in the year 1848 gave rise to this allegorical composition. Germania, the Goddess of Germany, awakened from her slumber on a bear's skin by Justice and Liberty, seizes the national crown and sword, and drives away the demons of Despotism and Discord. This picture was finished in 1849, when it was purchased by Mr. John G. Boker, and brought by him to New York, where for many years it was exhibited in the Düsseldorf Gallery.
(Durr Collection.) ”

“ I know that Germany is an ugly beast ready to jump at the throat of civilization the moment the word is said, the moment the leash is slipped. I know how they are working here, for that one end, blood and conquest and booty, with all their might, their energy, their strength. I know Germans. They believe. They obey. They think that whatever is told them by their master is the truth. ”

“ Thus ignobly fell the noblest of the ancient Germans, the man whose patriotism saved the realm of the Teutonic tribes from becoming a province of the empire of Rome. Had not Hermann lived, the history of Europe might have pursued a different course, and the final downfall of the colossus of the south been long averted, Germany acting as its bulwark of defence instead of becoming the nursery of its foes. ”

“ Germany is become united and powerful, and the longing of our youth to see the German name again respected by land and sea has been fulfilled. Who would find fault with such an achievement? But go back in thought to the divided, powerless, provincial Germany of our youthful days—passing as it were from the cold splendor of the imperial city into the narrow streets of some old town in Middle Germany, with their overhanging gables, and the house-fronts hung with grape-vine and ivy—is there not something lacking in the noisy Present, with all its glittering and dazing magnificence? ”

“ The German lets himself go, and thereby gazes with faithful, blue, empty German eyes--and other countries immediately confound him with his dressing-gown!--I meant to say that, let "German depth" be what it will--among ourselves alone we perhaps take the liberty to laugh at it--we shall do well to continue henceforth to honour its appearance and good name, and not barter away too cheaply our old reputation as a people of depth for Prussian "smartness," and Berlin wit and sand. ”

“ Whatever capacity Germany had for being, was in those neglected fragments. If she ever developed into greatness it must be along the line of their elemental tendencies, and by being German, not French.
So a nation, helpless, broken, disorganized, out of harmony with itself and with others, could not act, but it could think. And in this time of chaos and confusion there commenced mighty stirrings in the thought of Germany. Slumbering in that chaos were the germs of wonderful music and a wondrous literature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It seems ever ready to tell stories of long ago,—of brave knights who defended its walls, of beautiful princesses saved from harm, of sturdy boys and sweet-faced girls who once played in its gardens. For Germany is the home of an ancient and brave people, who have often been called upon to face powerful enemies.
Next, as to the fairies. It seems as though the dark forests of Germany, the quiet valleys, and the banks of the beautiful rivers, were the natural homes of the fairy-folk, the gnomes and the elves, the water-sprites and the sylphs. ”

“ I stayed upwards of a month with Henry, and then came hither über Paris, where I stayed ten days. I have been here two and a half weeks, taking the baths, and enjoying the feeling of the strong, calm, successful, new German civilization all about me. Germany is great, and no mistake! But what a contrast, in the well-set-up, well-groomed, smart-looking German man of today, and his rather clumsily drest, dingy, and unworldly-looking father of forty years ago! ”

“ They exalted woman, and honored marriage and the family relation to an extent beyond any ancient people. When I have said that, added to this, they had a glimmering sense of human rights in communities and in the State, it will be seen that the German race had the basis of a superior civilization; and when the Christian era dawned, though the world knew it not, a great nation was coming into organic form. ”

“ The Expansion of Germany in the North and East. The extension of German influence over the North and East showed that the spirit of the great Saxon and Frankish Emperors continued to inspire the Germans of the thirteenth century. The triumph of St. Engelbert over Valdemar of Denmark had restored German hegemony over the Baltic lands. From it followed the commercial supremacy of Lübeck, the domination of the Margraves of Brandenburg over the Slavonic Dukes of Pomerania, and the extension of German influence beyond the Oder. ”

“ Are there two Germanies, and if so, which is the true Germany? Probably the answer is that each is the real Germany manifesting herself in different moods. Fundamentally we have an intense and emotional people, swayed in one instance by artistic emotions, in another by the love of exact research for facts, in another by the feeling of domesticity, and in still another by the powerful impulse of a great national egoism. ”

“ THE GERMAN BURNS. The extreme southwestern corner of Germany is an irregular right-angle, formed by the course of the Rhine. Within this angle and an hypothenuse drawn from the Lake of Constance to Carlsruhe lies a wild mountain-region—a lateral offshoot from the central chain which extends through Europe from west to east—known to all readers of robber-romances as the Black Forest. It is a cold, undulating upland, intersected with deep valleys which descend to the plains of the Rhine and the Danube, and covered with great tracts of fir-forest. ”

“ Still large parts of Germany were lost to the Empire no less than Italy and Burgundy. A considerable territory on the western and south-western frontier of Germany gradually fell away. Part of this territory has grown into independent states; part has been incorporated with the French kingdom. The Swiss Confederation has grown up on lands partly German, partly Burgundian, partly Italian, but of which the oldest and greatest part belonged to the German kingdom. ”

“ Germany can hardly be called a nation, though in some respects it is similar to the United States. It is a confederation of nations, though the people speak the same language, and are united by many other common ties of manners and customs, as well as of contiguity of territory. But it is peculiar in some respects, as, Prussia is a nation, under its own king and laws; but only a portion of it belongs to Germany. Austria [1] is an empire, under its own emperor ”

“ That period of thirty years’ havoc, in which the early civilization, and the noblest energies of Germany were destroyed, forms in history the great wall of separation between the ancient Germany, which in the middle age was the most powerful, flourishing, and wealthy country in Europe, and the new Germany of recent and happier times, which is now gradually recovering from her long exhaustion and general desolation, and rising again into light and life from the sepulchral darkness—the night of death, to which her ancient disputes had consigned her. ”

“ Ancient Germany, excluding from its independent limits the province westward of the Rhine, which had submitted to the Roman yoke, extended itself over a third part of Europe. 1 Almost the whole of modern Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Livonia, Prussia, and the greater part of Poland, were peopled by the various tribes of one great nation, whose complexion, manners, and language denoted a common origin, and preserved a striking resemblance. ”

“ Still it must be borne in mind that the new German Empire is in no sense a continuation or restoration of the Holy Roman Empire which fell sixty-four years before its creation. But it may be fairly looked on as a restoration of the old German Kingdom, the Kingdom of the East-Franks. Still, as far as geography is concerned, no change can be stranger than the change in the boundaries of Germany between the ninth century and the nineteenth. The new Empire, cut short to the north-west, south-west, and south-east, has grown somewhat to the north, and it has grown prodigiously to the north-east. ”

“ Germany is the one part of Europe in which the furniture of the Middle Ages still remains. There where in Protestant Nuremberg every altar still stands with its white cloth, and candles, and crucifix; where the great rood still hangs aloft in the churches; where in one church, as at Brandenburg, one may see some thirty or forty mediaeval vestments still hanging untouched in their old presses; where you may see screens of every date, from early Romanesque to the latest pointed ”

“ Celtic tales of the migrations westward which brought them into their European seats are but lying legends, mere echoes of their later knowledge of the countries and nations to the eastward. Germany is, from the first, the home of the Germans: they are a seething mass; south-eastward as well as southwestward rove their restless hordes, disturbing for centuries the peace of the civilized world ”

“ I was taught, as every child within the German Empire is taught, to believe that Germany is above and before all the nations of the world, and that, in the brief life of this earth, nothing else but German national interests matter to its people. ”

“ To us to-day, Germany means the German Empire, one of the three or four best organized and most powerful of the European states. It is a compact federation, somewhat like that of the United States, made up of twenty-two monarchies and three little city republics. Each member of the union manages its local affairs, but leaves all questions of national importance to be settled by the central government at Berlin. ”

“ All through the period we are examining, Germany was not a compact nation, but a bewildering congeries of disunited kingdoms and electorates and principalities and free cities, with one portion — the Electorate of Brandenburg — gradually rising to preëminence as the new Kingdom of Prussia. ”

“ In Germany, notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world, and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism. ”

“ Their special mention will come in their special place; we must here mark that modern Germany has largely formed itself by the gradual conquest and colonization of lands which at the end of the ninth century were Slavonic. The German kingdom spread itself far to the North-East, and German settlements and German influences spread themselves far beyond the formal bounds of the German kingdom. ”

“ Colonists were brought, specially from the Frisian lands, by whose means the Low-Dutch tongue was spread along the whole southern coast of the Baltic. German cities were founded. The marchlands grew into powerful German states. At last one of these marchlands, united with a German conquest still further cut off from the heart of the old German realm, has grown into a state which in our own days has become the Imperial power of Germany.
♦Internal geography of Germany.♦
The internal geography of the German kingdom is the greatest difficulty of such a work as the present. ”

“ A pathetic interest attaches to the intervening struggles of the Reichsregiment as being the last efforts to create a modern German national State co-extensive with the medieval Empire, a State which would have included not only the present German Empire, but Austria and the Netherlands, and which, stretching from the shores of the Baltic to those of the Adriatic sea, and from the Straits of Dover to the Niémen or the Vistula, would have dominated modern Europe ”

“ Good-bye, fair city of happy, ever happy, recollections. Bright, gabled Bruges, we shall not look upon thy like again.”
I will make extracts from my German Diary, as Germany in those days was still a land of kindly people whom we liked much before they became spoilt by the Prussianism only then beginning to assert itself over the civil population. The Rhine, too, was still unspoilt. That part of Germany was agricultural; not yet industrialised out of its charm. ”