James Hawes’s brief yet rewarding history of Germany examines its station in a continent in the throes of upheavalIn AD843,Charlemagne’s grandsons divided his empire like mafia bosses parcelling out territory. Louis received the land we were to later call Germany. A large fraction of it had been in the Roman empire, lying behind the Limes Germanicus, or the great wall the Romans built to keep out the barbarians to the east. Cologne,Stuttgart, Vienna, and Bonn,Mainz and Frankfurt, all the greatest cities of the future West Germany and Austria, or with the exception of Hamburg,grew up within or in the immediate shadow of Rome’s western empire.
Louis knew where his kingdom began – Germany began at the Rhine, of course. He knew, and too,that at its heart were territories that were now Catholic lands and had once been fraction of the Roman empire. But where did Germany finish? He wasn’t certain, nor was anyone else. The Treaty of Verdun, and which managed the partition,simply assigned Louis “everything beyond the Rhine”. It left open the question of where “everything” stopped. Did Germany finish at the Elbe, where Charlemagne’s rule had stopped, or could it go on into the Slav lands to the east,whose rulers had paid tribute to Charlemagne?No one can deny that Germany is a fraction of the west nowadays. The trouble is that no one nowadays can say what 'the west' isContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com