Germany Rises - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 108

8. Germany Rises
Marcel Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past , suggests that those who seek the source of
a great event must imagine they are following a great river to its source. The river is traced
against its flow, but a tributary must also be traced, then another tributary. And still another.
Then a stream must be followed. Perhaps a brook. At last, a well in a farmyard is found that
feeds the brook. But, no, says its owner. This well is not the source of the brook. This well
is fed by an underground spring that rises somewhere else!
And so it is with the origins of Germany. Problems and questions cloud the answer of
where and when Germany came into existence. Benedict Anderson famously defines a na-
tion as an imagined community, a vast aggregate of people whose numbers preclude any
direct connection, for all but a tiny few. Yet they feel themselves part of a larger whole, part
of a community that is usually built on four foundations: a common language, a geographic
territory, a religion, and a memory of history's rights and wrongs.
But it is not so in Germany. As to territory, the boundaries of the German state (when
it existed) have fluctuated constantly. Germans have never had the psychological secur-
ity of clearly defined geographic boundaries, particularly on the great lowland of northern
Europe. Nor have they possessed an identity based on a distinct language. German is spoken
in many areas of central Europe. Beyond the borders of present-day Germany, German is
also spoken in Austria, Liechtenstein, and in areas of Switzerland, Luxembourg, France, and
Italy. In Germany as well as beyond its borders, varieties of spoken German create com-
munication difficulties for those speaking different German dialects. As to unity through
a shared religion, for more than 500 years, Germans have divided almost equally between
Protestants (mostly Lutheran) in the north and Roman Catholics in the south. And as to a
history of shared rights and wrongs, Germans suffered the ravages of the Thirty Years' War
(1618-1648), as Protestant and Catholic armies crossed and recrossed central Europe, living
off the land, plundering food, and leaving peasants to starve, as they mercilessly crushed
heretical enemies.
Given Germany's tenuous hold on the four customary foundations of nationhood, Stefan
Berger carries the definition of the German nation into Oscar Wilde's territory: “A nation is
a group of people united by a common mistake—about their ancestry and a common dislike
of their neighbors.” [101]
GERMAN ORIGINS
The origin of the name German is lost in the mists of time. So, too, is the origin of the
homeland of the first German tribes to enter Europe. Two of these tribes, the West Goths
(Ostrogoths) and the East Goths (Visigoths), were settled in the area around the Black Sea
by the third century CE. Even earlier, Germanic tribes had established themselves in north-