THE SHORTEST HISTORY of GERMANY James Hawes To the memory of my father, Maurice Hawes, and the future of my third son, Karl Maurice Hawes v. Oppen, whose lives crossed for a few hours on 25 February 2015 CONTENTS Title Page Dedication Foreword In the Proto-Beginning… PART ONE The First Half-Millennium (8 BC–526 AD) The Romans create the Germans, then the Germans take over Rome PART TWO The Second Half-Millennium (526 AD–983 AD) The Germans restore Rome PART THREE The Third Half-Millennium (983 AD–1525 AD) There is a battle for Germany PART FOUR The Fourth Half-Millennium (1525 AD–the present) Germany goes two ways Acknowledgements Copyright Foreword If not now, when? The West is in full retreat. The Anglo-Saxon powers, great and small, withdraw into fantasies of lost greatness. Populists all over Europe cry out that immigration and globalisation are the work of a nefarious System, run by unseen masters with no national loyalties. Hardly believing his luck, Tsar Vladimir watches his Great Game line up; the Baltic and Vizegrad states shiver. Germany’s Foreign Minister from 1998-2005 sees very little hope left: Europe is far too weak and divided to stand in for the US strategically; and, without US leadership the West cannot survive. Thus, the Western world as virtually everyone alive today has known it will almost certainly perish before our eyes. Joschka Fischer, The End of the West, 5 Dec 2016 Meanwhile, a New York Times headline wonders whether the Liberal West’s Last Defender might be Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany. Germany? The land where, within living memory, Adolf Hitler was democratically confirmed in power (though only just, and only thanks to a very specific group of voters, as we’ll see) and proceeded to unleash all-out war in pursuit of a murderously racist dominion? Can Germany really have changed so drastically in a single lifetime? Yes, it can. But to understand this – and why Germany may now be our last hope – we have to throw away a great deal of what we think we know about German history, and start afresh. So let’s begin at the very beginning. Or rather, a little further back, at the proto-beginning… In the Proto-Beginning Around 500 BC, at our best guess, in a collection of Iron Age huts in southern Scandinavia or northernmost Germany, one branch of the Indo-European population of Europe began to pronounce certain consonants differently from everyone else. Where it probably started, c. 500 BC Exactly who and where and when and why, nobody knows for sure, or ever can. We can, though, reconstruct what happened. Take those question-words. Other languages went on using a c/k/qu sound (as in the Latin quis, quid, quo, cur, quam) and still do today (quoi, que, che, kakiya and so on); but the ancestor of Danish, English, German and suchlike now peeled off and started using a hv/wh/h sound, leading to the modern hvad/what/was and so on. The First Germanic Sound-Shift is also known as Grimm’s Law because it was set down by Jacob, elder of the folktale-collecting Brothers Grimm. Its effect can most clearly be seen in modern English, which uses both Germanic and non-Germanic, Latin-derived versions. p became f: paternal – fatherly f became b: fraternal – brotherly b became p: labia – lip c/k/qu became hv/wh/h: century – hundred h became g: horticulture – gardening g became k: gnostic – know t became th: triple – three d became t: dental – teeth The tribes who (we deduce) started using these new sounds in about 500 BC are known as the proto-Germans. We have no idea what they called themselves, because at this stage they had no contact whatever with the peoples of the Mediterranean, who had things like aqueducts, libraries, theatres, elections and written history. We do know that by about 150 BC, the proto-Germans had started interacting with the Mediterranean world. From this period, Roman-made wine-drinking sets start turning up all over Germany. We also know that shopping was a new experience for them, because in all Germanic languages, the word for buying things (kaupa/kopen/shopping/kaufen etc) is taken straight from the Latin word caupo, which means small trader or innkeeper. We can imagine First Contact taking place in some trading-post on the Rhine or the Danube, where the proto-German elite exchanged furs, amber, their blond hair (prized by Roman wig-makers) and above all slaves, for drink. This trade seems to have continued peacefully until some tribes from the north called the Cimbri and Teutones gave the Roman Republic a mortal scare from 112 BC until 101 BC, when they were finally wiped out by the great general Marius. Later patriots would claim them as early Germans, but to the Romans they were just generic barbarians. Certainly, no one ever called them Germans at the time. In fact, as far as we know, no one ever called anyone a German until 58 BC. Fittingly, the whole grand story starts with one of the most famous men in history.