How many Germanys are there?
I’ve just returned from my eighth visit to Germany – a short break in Bonn, Aachen and Cologne. This set me thinking again about the idea of different Germanys.
At the end of the Thirty Years’ War in the mid 17th century, there were some 2,000 German statelets. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, there was a German Confederation of 39 sovereign states. A single Germany was only created by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War. It was not to last.
From 1945-1949, Germany as such did not exist since there were four zones of occupation in the country as a whole and in the city of Berlin. Germany was then divided into two states, West and East, between 1949 and 1990 before the collapse of communism enabled rapid reunification. Germany today comprises 16 constituent states – called Lander – with its own constitution and considerable autonomy. This story is well told in the Museum of Contemporary History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn where I spent a day of my recent visit to the country.
Yet, there is an interesting history of Germany in which the author James Hawes suggests that culturally there have long been two Germanys. A theme of the book is how, in spite of many, many territorial changes, the geographical idea of Germany has remained broadly constant over two millennia with the West Germany of 1949-1990 being extraordinarily similar to the Germani planned by Augustus Caesar around 1 AD. The east has been another story.
Dawes highlights the continuing cleavage today between the largely Catholic and industrious west and south on the one hand and the predominately Protestant and poorer north and the east on the other. He maps onto this division the voting for Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s and the voting for the extreme left and right in today’s united Germany.
August 25th, 2024 at 8:46 pm
Max Weber would disagree with the latter author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism