A Brief History of Germany, Second Edition

Jason Coy

Description

A Brief History of Germany, Second Edition provides a clear, lively, and comprehensive account of the history of Germany from ancient times to the present day. It relates the central events that have shaped the country and details their significance in historical context, touching on all aspects of the history of the country, from political, international, and economic affairs to cultural and social developments. Illustrated with full-color maps and photographs, and accompanied by a chronology, bibliography, and suggested reading, this accessible overview is ideal for the general reader.

Coverage includes:

• Prehistoric Germany


• Germania: Barbarian Germany


• Medieval Germany


• Reformation Germany


• Confessional Germany and the Thirty Years' War


• Absolutism and Enlightenment


• Napoleonic Germany and the Revolution of 1848


• Unification and Empire


• The Great War and Weimar Germany


• Nazism and World War II


• The Cold War: Division and Reunification


• Contemporary Germany

Sujets

• Histoire
• Lifestyle
• Geography
• Demography
• Politics
• World
• Germany
• History
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438199535
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

A Brief History of Germany, Second Edition
Copyright © 2021 by Jason P. Coy and Daniel C. Ryan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Facts On File An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-4381-9953-5
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Introduction Chapters Prehistoric Germany Germania: Barbarian Germany Medieval Germany Reformation Germany Confessional Germany and the Thirty Years War Absolutism and Enlightenment Napoleonic Germany and the Revolution of 1848 Unification and Empire The Great War and Weimar Germany Nazism and World War II The Cold War: Division and Reunification Contemporary Germany Support Materials Documents Chronology Bibliography Suggested Reading
Introduction

While Germany has a history that stretches back to antiquity, it is important to remember that it was first unified as a nation-state only in 1871, making it in a sense even younger than the United States. Located in the heart of Europe, without natural boundaries, Germany has experienced centuries of immigration, confrontation, and negotiation. Consequently, the arrangement of its constituent parts has changed repeatedly, with individual territories joining together or breaking apart. Thus, Germany's boundaries, and what it means to be German, have always been unstable and have evolved continually throughout the region's long and troubled history.
Situated along ancient migration routes, the area known today as Germany has become home to an endless stream of migrants since prehistoric times. In fact, paleontologists have recovered traces of early hominid habitation in Germany going back almost 50 million years, as distant ancestors of modern humans migrated there from Africa. During the last ice age, extinct relatives of humans called Neanderthals, named after the German valley where their remains were first discovered, followed these earliest migrants into the region. They were joined around 40,000 years ago by another group of migrants, early humans known as Cro-Magnons, who lived alongside them in the area that comprises modern Germany. Remarkably, some of the most important archaeo-logical finds relating to these prehistoric peoples have been made in Germany within the last few years. These recent discoveries have even prompted some archaeologists to think that an area on the Swabian Alb in southern Germany may have been where early humans first discovered music, and perhaps even art itself, around 35,000 years ago.
During the Bronze Age, beginning in the third millennium B.C.E. , Celtic peoples migrated into the area and built their own sprawling civilization in central Europe, one that lasted centuries. The actual historical record, however, does not begin in Germany until the so-called Migration Period, when Greek and Roman writers first described the inhabitants of the region. During this turbulent time, from roughly 300 to 500 C.E. , nomadic peoples speaking Germanic languages—including the tongues that would one day develop into modern German and English—migrated into the area now known as Germany from the east, encountering the Celtic peoples already living there. In the centuries that followed, these warlike Germanic tribes gradually supplanted the Celts and encroached upon the Roman Empire along its Rhine and Danube frontiers. For the Romans, the fierce peoples across their borders, inhabitants of a shadowy land they called Germania, were frightening barbarians bent on destruction. However, modern scholarship presents a different picture of the Germanic tribes, accentuating the role they played in creating the hybrid civilization that prevailed in medieval Europe after the collapse of Roman imperial administration.
After the collapse of Roman authority in the western provinces in the late 400s C.E. , one of these Germanic peoples, the Franks, gradually brought the various Germanic tribes under their authority and Christianized the remaining pagans in the region. Frankish rulers, including the famous Charlemagne, portrayed themselves as heirs of the Roman emperors and, in the 800s C.E. , established the foundations of the Holy Roman Empire. The empire, a decentralized imperial institution that bound the individual Germanic duchies into a loose confederation, would dominate political life in central Europe until modern times. After Charlemagne, the Carolingian Empire dissolved, fragmenting into several diverse kingdoms. The eastern portion of the Frankish realm, where a Germanic language was spoken, became a distinct kingdom under a Carolingian ruler known as Louis the German. The creation of a Germanic state in central Europe, whose rulers would inherit the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, was an important milestone in the development of German identity, as language and political allegiance fused.
During the medieval and early modern eras, the imperial structure provided the fragmented German territories with an administrative and legal framework, while preserving the liberty of hundreds of individual German princes and towns. The unity of the Holy Roman Empire was shattered, however, during the 16th century, with Martin Luther's protest against the Catholic Church. This dramatic event, a turning point in German and global history, split Germany and eventually all of Europe into rival confessional camps, Protestant and Catholic. The nadir of this religious strife was reached in the 17th century, when the Thirty Years' War plunged central Europe into decades of warfare and misery. In the wake of this ruinous struggle, one that saw the territorial monarchies of Europe wage their wars on German soil, plaguing her with rapacious mercenary armies, the empire was left devastated, with large areas depopulated. The Thirty Years' War greatly diminished the power and prestige of the Holy Roman Emperor and destroyed the delicate balance within the empire between imperial authority and territorial autonomy. Thus, the empire no longer functioned as a confederation of principalities, but rather became the arena for a struggle for dominance by a few powerful princes. In this competition, the centralized, militarized state of Prussia emerged as the dominant power in northern Germany, with Austria, the ancestral home of the Habsburg emperors, the most powerful principality in the south. These developments would have dire consequences for Germany in the modern era, as German nationalism took on autocratic and militaristic overtones.
The modern period was ushered into Germany by Napoléon's revolutionary armies, who helped facilitate the collapse of the venerable Holy Roman Empire and the foundation of an ambitious German nation-state in its place. In 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, the French dissolved the Holy Roman Empire and spread revolutionary, nationalist ideals within Germany. After the defeat of Napoléon, the German states were joined in the Austrian-led German Confederation, a loose alliance established in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna in a futile attempt to restore the old political order in central Europe. The rise of Prussia, an aggressive military powerhouse, led to the declaration of a German empire in 1871, a unified Germany ruled by a Prussian monarch. Under Prussian leadership, Germany underwent rapid industrialization, and militant German nationalism flourished in the late 19th century. The reckless ambition of the Prussian ruling house and Germany's delayed unification prompted the new German nation to demand inclusion among the major powers of Europe, pressures that contributed to the outbreak of World War I. World War I proved a disaster for Germany, and the peace afterward, a disaster for the world. According to the punitive Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forced to accept a series of crushing and humiliating terms. The trauma of war ending in defeat fostered a combination of political discontent and economic depression in the country that crippled the fledgling postwar regime, the ill-fated Weimar Republic, Germany's first democratic government.
Germany's first experiment with democratic government proved abortive, ending in tragedy in 1933. Amid political and economic chaos, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, a radical fascist group, took control in Germany after their fanatical leader, Adolf Hitler, was appointed chancellor. Under autocratic Nazi leadership, Germany descended into a nightmare of totalitarian dictatorship and racist oppression of its Jewish citizens. In the end, Hitler's "Thousand Year Reich" lasted only a decade but brought the Germans catastrophic defeat in World War II and the genocidal madness of the Holocaust. After the war, the victorious Allies partitioned the smoldering wreckage of Germany, a division that was ossified during the cold war. The U.S., British, and French zones of occupation were combined to establish the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, in 1949, with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) forming in the Soviet zone. While West Germany returned to democratic government and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, East Germany was part of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact, its isolation from the West symbolized by the Berlin Wall. In 1989, in the course of the peaceful Wende revolution, the East German government collapsed and the wall came down. In 1990, East Germany was reunited with West Germany, forming today's unified, federal democracy.
Having emerged from the trauma of its past, today's Germany is a federal parliamentary republic, with its capital and largest city in Berlin. Having experienced mass immigration from Eastern Europe and the Mediterrane