German History 1
German History 1 /
An Outline
of
German History
Prepared by
German-American World
Historical Society
Researched by
Johannes Rammund De Balliel-Lawrora

   Introduction
The History of Germany is the history of her people and her long road to a nation-State.  This
road runs , in great undulations over a good thousand years, from the end of the Roman Empire
to the present day.  Germany is not only geographically, but also historically the name the
Romans gave to the territory between the Rhine, Elbe and Danube Rivers, settled by the
German-speaking tribes of the Saxons and Frisians in the north, the Franks in the west,  the
Thuringians in Central Germany, and the Swabians, Alemanni and Bavarians in the south.  
These tribe-like organizations are even today recognizable in the Laender which together form
the Federal Republic of Germany.

The most powerful of the German tribes, that of the Franks, took over the leadership during
the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire.  Charlemagne (Charles the Great), the
Frankish King, gathered the German people together in a single, large empire united under the
banner of Christianity.  When in 800 A.D/ the Pope crowned him Emperor, he had become the
successor to the Occidental emperors in a reanimated imperium north of the Alps.  Under his
successors this empire was divided into a West Frankish, the present France, and an East
Frankish, the present Germany, the latter emerging, under Otto the Great (936-973), as an
entity later called the Holy Roman Empire.

Henceforth, this outline is about the German and Germanic Races, their many tribes and their
many languages.

The establishment of this outline is to give the German people, as well as other diverse ethnics,
the opportunity to learn more about the Germans.

If you wish, you are invited to comment, add to, or correct any information portrayed here.  We
hope that the readers will enjoy these pages, as well as other sections of this site, and we
welcome you to join our organization as supporting members, and /or as our friends.

A tremendous part of these pages are provided from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; and
other sources.

Sincerely,

Johannes Rammund De Balliel-Lawrora
















      Germania

Germania was the Latin acronym for a geographical area of land on the east bank of the Rhine
(inner Germania), which included regions of Sarmantia as well as an area under Roman control
on the west bank of the Rhine.  The name came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it from a
Gallic term for the peoples east of the Rhine that likely meant "neighbor."

History:

Germania was inhabited by different tribes, the vast majority Germanic but also including some
Celtic, Baltic, Scythian, and proto-Slavic.  The tribal and ethnic makeup changed over the
centuries as a result of assimilation and, most importantly, migration.  The Germanic people
spoke several different dialects.

The classical world knew little about the people who inhabited the north of Europe before the
2nd century BC.  In the 5th century BC the Greeks were aware of a group they called Celts
(Keltoi).  Herodotus also mentioned the Scythians but no other barbarian tribes.  At around 320
BC, Pytheas of Massalia sailed around Britain and along the northern coast of Europe, and what
he found on his journeys was so unbelievable that later writers refused to believe him.  He may
have been the first Mediterranean to distinguish the Germanic people from the Celts.  Caesar
described the cultural differences between the Germanic tribesmen, the Romans, and the
Gauls.  He said that the Gauls, although warlike, could be civilized, but the Germanic tribesmen
were far more savage and were a threat to Roman Gaul and so had to be conquered.  His
accounts of barbaric northern tribes could be described as an expression of the superiority of
Rome, including Roman Gaul.  Caesar's accounts portray the Roman fear of the Germanic
tribes and the threat they posed.  The perceived menace of the Germanic tribesmen proved
accurate.  The most complete account of Germania that has been preserved from Roman times
is Tacitus' Germania.


Tacitus wrote in AD 98:

For the rest, they affirm Germania to be a recent word, lately
bestowed.  For those who first passed the Rhine and expulsed the
Gauls, and are now named Tungrians, were then called Germani.  
And thus by degrees the name of a tribe prevailed, not that of the
nation; so that by an appellation at first occasion by fear and
conquest, they afterwards chose to be distinguished, and assuming
a name lately invented were universally called Germani.





                                                                                              Tacitus, Roman Historian

Regions:

Germania was defined by Rome as having two regions:  Lesser Germania, west and south of the
Rhine, occupied by the Romans, and Greater Germania (Magna Germania) east of the Rhine.  
The occupied Germania was divided into two provinces:  Germania
Inferior (Lower Germania) (approximately corresponding to the
southern part of the present day Low Countries) and Germania
Superior (Upper Germania) (approximately corresponding to
present-day Switzerland and Alsace).  The Romans under
Augustus began to conquer and defeat the Germania Magna in
12 BC, having the Legati (generals) Germanicus and Tiberius
leading the Legions.  By AD 6 all of Germania up to the Elbe
river was temporarily pacified by the Romans as well as being
occupied by them.  The Roman plan to complete the conquest and
incorporate all of Magna Germania into the Roman Empire was
frustrated when Rome was defeated by Arminius, the
Cherusci Chieftain in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in AD 9.  
Augustus then established the boundary of the Roman Empire
as being the Rhine and the Danube.

Germanic Languages

The GERMANIC LANGUAGES are a group of related languages
constituting a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family.
The common ancestor of all languages comprising this branch is
Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium
BC in Iron Age northern Europe.  Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants is
characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change
known as Grimm's law.  Early Germanic varieties enter history with the Germanic peoples who
settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire from the second century.

The most-spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 400 and 100
million native speakers respectively.  The group includes other major languages, such as Dutch
with 23 million and Afrikaans with over 16 million speakers, and the North Germanic languages
including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic (Viking), and Faroese with a combined total of
about 20 million speakers.  The SIL ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages.

Characteristics:

Germanic languages possess several unique features, such as the following:

1.  The leveling of the Indo-European (IE) tense and aspect system into the present tense and
past tense (also called preterite).

2.  A large claass of verbs that use a dental suffix (/d/ or /t/ instead of vowel alternation
(Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense; these are called the Germanic weak verbs;  the
remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs.

3.  The use of so-called strong and weak adjectives:  different sets of inflectional ending for
adjectives depending on the definiteness of the noun phrase; (modern English adjectives do not
inflect at all, except for the comparative and superlative; this was not the case in Old English,
where adjectives were inflected differently depending on whether they were preceded by an
article or demonstrative).

4.  The consonant shift known as Grimm's Law; (the consonants in  High German have shifted
farther yet by the High German consonant shift).

5.  A number of words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European
familes, but variants of which appear in almost all Germanic languages.  See Germanic substrate
hypothesis..

6.  The shifting of stress accent onto the root of the stem and later to the first syllable of the
word, (though English has no irregular stress, native words always have a fixed stress regardless
of what is added to them).

Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than to some other language
families such as the Romance or Slavic languages.  Roughly speaking, Germanic languages
differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend
toward analyticity.  Some,  such as German, Dutch, and Icelandic have preserved much of the
complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language.  Others,
such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans have moved toward a largely analytic type.

Another characteristic of Germanic languages is the verb second or V2 word order, which is
quite uncommon cross-linguistically.  This feature is shared by all modern Germanic languages
except modern English (which nevertheless appears to have had V2 earlier in its history), but
has largely replaced the structure with an overall Subject Verb Object snytax.

Writing:

The earliest evidence of Germanic languages comes from names recorded in the first century by
Tacitus (especially from his work Germania), but the earliest Germanic writing occurs in a
single instance in the second century BC on the Negau helmet.  From roughly the second
century AD, certain speakers of early Germanic varieties developed the Elder Futhard, an early
form of the Runic alphabet.  Early runic inscriptions are also largely limited to personal names,
and difficult to interpret.  The Gothic language was written in the Gothic alphabet developed by
Bishop Ulfilas for his translation of the Bible in the fourth century.  Later, Christian priests and
monks who spoke and read Latin in addition to their native Germanic varieties began writing
the Germanic languages with slightly modified Latin letter.  However, throughout the Viking
Age, Runic alphabets remained in common use in Scandinavia.

In addition to the standard Latin alphabet, many Germanic languages use a variety of accent
marks and extra letters, including umlauts.  Historical printed German is frequently set in
blackletter typefaces (e.g. fraktur or Schwabacher).

History:

All Germanic languages are thought to be descended from a hypothetical Proto-Germanic,
united by their having been subjected to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law.  
These probably took place during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe from ca. 500 BC,
but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo European suggests a
common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronz Age.  It,
however, is not impossible, that the early Germanic tribes, then called by other names, viz.
Franks, Bavarian, Schwaebisch, etc., were present in Asia, more than 2,000 years before the
advent of Jesus Christ.  When the Germans first appeared in the old Roman Empire, the
Roman military, unable to suppress the Germans, permitted the Germans to permitted to lead
the Roman military; whereas many of the Germans became military leaders and generals of the
old Roman Empire.  It must however, be remembered, that it was Carl the Grosse
(Charlemagne) was the first to begin Christianizing Greater Europe.

From the time of their earliest attestation, the Germanic varieties are divided into three
groups, West, East, and North Germanic.  Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the
sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible throughout the
Migration period, so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify.

The sixth century Lombardic language, for instance, may constitute an originally, either North
or East Germanic variety that became assimilated to West Germanic as the Lombards settled at
the Elbe.  The Western group would have formed in the late Jastorf culture, the Eastern group
may be derived from the first entury variety of Gotland (see Old Gutnish), leaving southern
Sweden as the original location of the Northern group.  The earliest coherent Germanic text
preserved is the fourth century Gothic translaton of the New Testament by Ulfilas.  Early
testimonies of West Germanic are in Old High German (scattered words and sentences sixth
century, coherent texts ninth century), Old English (coherent texts tenth century).  North
Germanic is only attested in scattered runic inscriptions, as Proto-Norse, until it evolves into
Old Norse by about 800.

Longer runic inscriptions survive from the eighth and ninth centuries (Egggium stone, Roek
stone), longer texts in the Latin alphabet survive from the twelfth century (Islendingaboek),
and some skaldic poetry held to date back to as early as the ninth century.

By about the tenth century, the varieties had diverged enough to make inter-comprehlensibility
difficult.  The linguistic contact of the Viking settlers of the Danelaw with the Anglo-Saxons left
traces in the English language and, is suspected to have facilitated thecollapse of Old Englsih
grammar that resulted in Middle English from the twelfth century.   However, the English
language was named after the Germanic tribe "The Angles", and to this day, the English
language has been confirmed as part of the West Germanic languages.  It should be noted that
spoken Angle, Saxon and Viking, very closely resembles "old English", and the West Germanic
Languages in which Plattduetsch (low German) is a part, very closely resembles the English
language from England (also named after the "Angles") and the United States of America, are
classified as a Germanic language.  The German Department of New York University clarifies
this as does the various encyclopaedias published throughout the world.  When Henry
Morgenthau stated in his rhetoric to destroy the Germanic races through sterilization and
genocide, he would have had to destroy one-third of the world's population, all because of one
man, who was born in Bohemia, which at the time of his birth, was part of the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  That individual was "Adolf Hitler".

The East Germanic languages were marginalized from the end of the Migration period.  The
Burgundians, Goths, and Vandals became linguistically assimilated to their respective neighbors
by about the seventh century, with only Crimean Gothic lingering on until the eighteenth
century.

During the early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular
development of Middle English on one hand and, by the High German consonant shift on  the
continent on the other, resulting in Upper German and Low Saxon, with graded intermediate
Central German varieties.  By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable
differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North
and, although both extremes are considered German they are harly mutually intelligible.  The
southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, while the northern varieties
remained unaffected by the consonant shift.

The North Germanic languages, on the other hand, remained more unified, with the peninsular
languages largely mretaining mutual intelligibility into modern times.

Classification:

Note that divisions between and among subfamilies of Germanic rarely are precisely defined;
most form continuous clines, with adjacent varieties being mutually intelligible and more
separated ones not.

Note: See Classification (List) of Germanic Languages on German History 2!!!






















                             Austrian-Hungarian Empire



















                      Map of the United States of America
              Blue denotes the plurality of Germans in America











                                 Deutschland am Rhein
















                      Cornelius Tacitus, Roman Historian
              His Research, on Germania, gave the German
                  name collectively to the German Tribes.


















                          This Castle in Trier, Germany,
                     closely resembles the architecture of the                                   
                                  Fritz Reuter Altenheim.
                      Trier was built by the Romans over
                           2000 years ago.  Trier is the
                              oldest city in Germany.



















    Map of the Three Germanic Tribes in the Sudetenland
                 "Bohmen, Muehren and Schlessen"
These Ethnic Germans were expelled from the Sudetenland,
                                  circa 1945-1950.
































              































                                                                                 
Arminius,
The Cherusci Chieftain

Statue
of
Arminius
in the Teutoburg Forest