Part 2

Not only have we been enriched by this mass of sober and industrious people in the past, but Peter Muehlenberg, Christopher Ludwig, Steuben, John Kalb, George Herkimer, and later Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, Sigel, Osterhaus, Abraham Jacobi, Herman Ridder, Oswald Ottendorfer, Adolphus Busch, Isidor, Nathan, and Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, Frederick Weyerheuser, Charles P. Steinmetz, Claus Spreckels, Hugo Muensterberg, and a catalogue of others, have been leaders in finance, in industry, in war, in politics, in educational and philanthropic enterprises, and in patriotism.

The framework of our republican institutions, as I have tried to outline in this volume, came from the "Woods of Germany." Professor H. A. L. Fisher, of Oxford, writes: "European republicanism, which ever since the French Revolution has been in the main a phenomenon of the Latin races, was a creature of Teutonic civilization in the age of the sea-beggars and the Roundheads. The half-Latin city of Geneva was the source of that stream of democratic opinion in church and state, which, flowing to England under Queen Elizabeth, was repelled by persecution to Holland, and thence directed to the continent of North America."

In these later days Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann, prophesied the building of the Panama Canal by the Americans, and also the prodigious growth of the United States toward the West.

In a private collection in New York, is an autograph letter of George Washington to Frederick the Great, asking that Frederick should use his influence to protect that French friend of America, Lafayette.

In Schiller's house in Weimar there still hangs an engraving of the battle of Bunker Hill, by Mueller, a German, and a friend of the poet.

Bismarck's intimate friend as a student at Goettingen, and the man of whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American historian Motley.

The German soldiers in our Civil War were numbered by the thousands. We have many ties with Germany, quite enough, indeed, to make a bare enumeration of them a sufficient introduction to this volume.

On more than one occasion of late I have been introduced in places, and to persons where a slight picture of what I was to meet when the doors were thrown open was of great help to me. I was told beforehand something of the history, traditions, the forms and ceremonies, and even something of the weaknesses and peculiarities of the society, the persons, and the personages. I am not so wise a guide as some of my sponsors have been, but it is something of the kind that I have wished and planned to do for my countrymen. I have tried to make this book, not a guidebook, certainly not a history; rather, in the words of Bacon, "grains of salt, which will rather give an appetite than offend with satiety," a sketch, in short, of what is on the other side of the great doors when the announcer speaks your name and you enter Germany.

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY

Eighty-one years before the discovery of America, seventy-two years before Luther was born, and forty-one years before the discovery of printing, in the year 1411, the Emperor Sigismund, the betrayer of Huss, transferred the Mark of Brandenburg to his faithful vassal and cousin, Frederick, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was at one time one of the great trading towns between Germany, Venice, and the East, and the home later of Hans Sachs. Frederick was the lineal descendant of Conrad of Hohenzollern, the first Burgrave of Nuremberg, who lived in the days of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1189); and this Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of Emperor William II of Germany. It is interesting to remember in this connection that when we count back our progenitors to the twenty-first generation they number something over two millions. When we trace an ancestry so far, therefore, we must know something of the multitude from which the individual is descended, if we are to gather anything of value concerning his racial characteristics. The solace of all genealogical investigation is the infallible discovery, that the greatest among us began in a small way.

If you paddle up the Elbe and the Havel from Hamburg to Potsdam, you will find yourself in the territory conquered from the heathen Wends in the days of Henry I, the Fowler (918-935), which was the cradle of what is now the German Empire.

The Emperor Sigismund, who was often embarrassed financially by reason of his wars and journeyings had borrowed some four hundred thousand gold florins from Frederick, and it was in settlement of this debt that he mortgaged the territory of Brandenburg, and on the 8th of April, 1417, the ceremony of enfeoffment was performed at Constance, by which the House of Hohenzollern became possessed of this territory, and was thereafter included among the great electorates having a vote in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was Henricus Auceps, or Henry the Fowler, (so called because the envoys sent to offer him the crown, found him on his estates in the Hartz Mountains among his falcons), who fought off the Danes in the northwest, and the Slavonians, or Wends, in the northeast, and the Hungarians in the southeast, and established frontier posts or marks for permanent protection against their ravages. These marks, or marches, which were boundary lines, were governed by markgrafs or marquises, and finally gave the name of marks to the territory itself. The word is historically familiar from its still later use in noting the old boundaries between England and Scotland, and England and Wales, which are still called marks.

Henry the Fowler was also called Henry "the City Builder." After the death of the last of the Charlemagne line of rulers, the Franks elected Conrad, Duke of Franconia, to succeed to the throne, and he on his death-bed advised his people to choose Henry of Saxony to succeed, for the times were stormy and the country needed a strong ruler. The Hungarians in the southeast, and the Wends, the old Slavonic population of Poland, were pillaging and harrying more and more successfully, and the more successfully the more impudently. Henry began the building of strong-walled, deep-moated cities along his frontier, and made one, drawn by lot, out of every ten families of the countryside, go to live in these fortified towns. Their rulers were burgraves, or city counts. Titles now so largely ornamental were then descriptive of duties and responsibilities.

In the light of their future greatness, it is well to take note of these two frontier counties, or marches. The first, called the Northern March, or March of Brandenburg, was the religious centre of the Slays, and was situated in the midst of forests and marshes just beyond the Elbe. This March of Brandenburg was won from the Slays in the first instance by the Saxons and Franks of the Saxon plain. When the burgrave, Frederick of Hohenzollern, came to take possession of his new territory he was received with the jesting remark: "Were it to rain burgraves for a whole year, we should not allow them to grow in the march." But Frederick's soldiers and money, and his Nuremberg jewels, as his cannon were called, ended by gaining complete control, a control in more powerful hands to-day than ever before.

The second, called the Eastern or Austrian March, was situated in the basin of the Danube. These two great states were formed in lands that had ceased to be German and had become Slav or Finnish territory. The fighting appetite of the German tribes, and the spirit of chivalry later, which had drawn men in other days in France to the East, in Spain against the Moors, in Normandy against England, were offered an opportunity and an outlet in Germany, by forays and fighting against the Finns and Slays.

Out of the conquest and settlement of these territories grew, what we know to-day, as the German Empire and the Austrian Empire. Out of their margraves, who were at first sentinel officers guarding the outer boundaries of the empire, and mere nominees of the Emperor, have developed the Emperor of Germany and the Emperor of Austria, the one ruling over the most powerful nation, the other the head of the most exclusive court, in Europe.

When a man becomes a power in the world, these days, our first impulse is to ask about his ancestry. Who were his father and his mother; what and who were his grandfathers and grandmothers, and who were their forebears. Where did they come from, what was the climate; did they live by the sea, or in the mountains, or in the plains. We are at once hot on the trail of his success. Be he an American, we wish to know whether his people came from Holland, from France, from England, or from Belgium; where did they settle, in New England, in New York, or in the South. We no longer accept ability as a miracle, but investigate it as an evolution. If the man be great enough, cities vie with each other to claim him as their child; he acquires an Homeric versatility in cradles.

Whatever one may think of William II of Germany, he is just now the predominating figure in Europe, if not in the world. This must be our excuse for a word or two concerning the race from which came his twenty-fifth lineal ancestor.

It is exactly five hundred years since his present empire was founded in the sandy plains about the Elbe, and a thousand years before that brings us to the dim dawn of any historical knowledge whatever about the Germans. When the Cimbrians and Teutonians came into contact with the Romans, in 113 B. C., is the beginning of all things for these people. In that year the inhabitants of the north of Italy awoke one morning to find a swarm of blue-eyed, light-haired, long-limbed strangers coming down from the Alps upon them. The younger and more light-hearted warriors came tobogganing down the snow-covered mountain-sides on their shields. They had been crowded out of what is now Switzerland, and called themselves, though they were much alike in appearance, the Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they could neither read nor write: "Literarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant." Very little is to be found concerning them in the Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time are lost. It was toward the middle of the century before Christ that Caesar advanced to the frontier of what may be called Germany. He met and conquered there these men of the blood who were to conquer Rome, and to carry on the name under the title of the Holy Roman Empire. Caesar met the ancestors of those who were to be Caesars, and with an eye on Roman politics, wrote the "Commentaries," which were really autobiographical messages, with the Germans as a text and an excuse.

Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar, and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen. "Vice is not treated by the Germans" (German, the etymologists say, is composed of Ger, meaning spear or lance, and Man, meaning chief or lord; Deutsch, or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to the nation), he tells his countrymen, "as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age." With Rooseveltian enthusiasm he writes that the Germans consider it a crime "to set limits to population, by rearing up only a certain number of children and destroying the rest."

The republicanism of Europe and America had its roots in this Teutonic civilization. "No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command. When anything is advanced not agreeable to the people, they reject it with a general murmur. If the proposition pleases, they brandish their javelins. This is their highest and most honorable mark of applause; they assent in a military manner, and praise by the sound of their arms," continues our author.

The great historian of the Roman historians, and of Rome, Gibbon, lends his authority to this praise of Tacitus in the sentence: "The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany; and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners."

Rome, which was not only a city, a nation, an empire, but a religion; Rome, which replied to a suggestion that the people of Latium should be admitted to citizenship, "Thou hast heard, O Jupiter, the impious words that have come from this man's mouth. Canst thou tolerate, O Jupiter, that a foreigner should come to sit in the sacred temple as a senator, as a consul?" Rome welcomed later the barbarians from the woods of Germany not only as citizens and consuls, but as emperors; and their descendants rule the world.

It was no Capuan training that finally distilled itself in a Charlemagne, an Otho, a Luther, a Frederick the Great, and a Bismarck; in an Alfred, a William the Conqueror, a Cromwell, a Clive, a Rhodes, or a Gordon; in a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Jackson, and a Lee.