Germans

The term Germans generally refers to any and all citizens or inhabitants of the central European nation of Germany but can also include citizens of another country who are of German descent or whose native language is German. The shared traditions, beliefs, and social norms of the German people, along with their complicated history, form the modern German culture.

Background

According to early written records, the Germanic tribes were establishing themselves in the region that is now southwestern Germany about the same time the ancient Romans were conquering Gaul. Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) designated the Rhine River as the boundary between Roman and German territory; however, Romans feared the militaristic Germanic tribes on their borders. When Rome invaded the territory beyond the Rhine in 9 CE, three Roman legions were ambushed and destroyed at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, and the Germanic people attained permanent independence from Roman rule.

By the 800s, Central Europe had developed into a fragmented area of roughly three hundred sovereign, independent states (kingdoms, duchies, principalities, free cities, etc.). The German states were bound together in a loose political entity known as the Holy Roman Empire, which was dominated by two rival kingdoms: Austria, ruled by the Habsburgs, and Prussia, ruled by the Hohenzollerns. In 1806 the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved and the Congress of Vienna created the German Confederation, comprising thirty-nine states, including Austria and Prussia. The nation-state of Germany as it is recognized today first came into existence in 1871 when Wilhelm I was crowned the first Kaiser of the German Empire, uniting the German states.

At the close of the World War I in 1918, the newly declared Republic of Germany signed the Versailles Treaty, which held the losing Germans at fault for the war. The terms of the treaty resulted in Germany losing 13.5% of its territory and close to seven million German citizens, who were placed under the jurisdiction of foreign nations. The Rhineland region of Germany was placed under Allied occupation, and France retook the Alsace and Lorraine along with the German coal mines in the highly industrialized Saar Region. Poland took most of West Prussia and much of the Posen province. Belgium and Denmark also gained regions that were previously German, and Czechoslovakia declared its independence.

After fifteen years of crushing war reparations, compounded by the hardships of the global Great Depression that began at the end of the 1920s, many of the German people were drawn to the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis), which advocated for the restoration of lands ceded under the Treaty of Versailles as well as of other areas containing significant German populations, such as Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Sudetenland. When Hitler ascended to the German chancellorship in 1932, he promised the reacquisition of land and the reunification of ethnically German peoples (Volksdeutsche) under the doctrines of lebensraum (living space) and Heim ins Reich (back to the Reich). In the spring of 1938, Hitler’s Germany annexed Austria. A year later German forces occupied Czechoslovakia, and in September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which triggered a declaration of war by Great Britain and marked the beginning of World War II. By the end of 1940, Germany had captured Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg.

Hitler’s dream of a "thousand-year Reich" resulted in the deaths of millions over the next five years, but by 1945, the Third Reich was shattered and Hitler was dead. In June of that year, Germany was divided into four zones of military occupation administered by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. In 1949, the victorious Allied powers approved a constitution for western Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany), and East Germany adopted a communist constitution, forming the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a client state of the Soviet Union. By May of 1955, West Germany had obtained full independence but continued to share a divided city of Berlin with the GDR. Eventually, ongoing conflicts between the Soviet-aligned GDR and the West resulted in the erection of a concrete wall breaking Berlin into two separate cities in 1961. As the world transitioned from the devastations of World War II to the global tensions of the Cold War in the second half of the twentieth century, the German people remained divided and scattered, a bitter repudiation of Hitler’s dreams of a reunited and enlarged "Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation."

Impact Today

During the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union began to move toward its official dissolution in 1991, thousands of East Germans began emigrating to the West, and on November 9, 1989, the East German government announced that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Shortly thereafter, talks between East and West German officials, joined by officials from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the USSR, began to explore the possibility of reunification of the two Germanys. In 1990, Helmut Kohl became chancellor of the reunified Germany. While the immediate effects of reunification between East Germany and West Germany resulted in a sharp economic downturn, with some resulting tensions arising between the former citizens of the two entities, by 1994 conditions had improved. A member of the European Union since 1958, Germany became a founding member and leading power of the Eurozone, with one of the world’s largest economies and highest standards of living.

In the decades following the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of Hitler’s Volksdeutsche, generations of German citizens and residents have confronted what it means to be German. In the early twenty-first century, as immigration into Germany from the Middle East and North Africa has surged, with one million refugees entering the country in 2015 alone, the definition of German identity once again has become a topic of confrontation, reconciliation, and debate.

Bibliography

Blackbourn, David. The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. Print.

Cooper, Duncan. Immigration and German Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1945 to 2006. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012. Print.

Hanson, Jason D. Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848-1914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Print.

Koenig, Matthias. "Incorporating Muslim Migrants in Western Nation States: A Comparison of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany." Journal of International Migration and Integration 6.2 (2005): 219–34. Print.

Sandford, John, ed. Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Streeck, Wolfgang. "The German Political Economy Today." The German Model: Seen by Its Neighbours. Ed. Brigitte Unger. N.p.: SE Publishing, 2015. 81–86. Print.

Weiss-Wendt, Anton, and Rory Yeomans, eds. Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938–1945. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013. Print.