4
The Peoples of German Speech
Without attempting to estimate what was the speech of the early long-headed types of man on the European plain (the almost level belt from Calais via Vilna to the Urals), and without trying to dig back deeply into prehistoric time, it may be stated that in the early days of history the home of the Teutonic family of languages seems to have been on the western portion of the European plain and in the related parts of Scandinavia, no doubt with various Baltic extensions. Of its attempts to spread towards the Paris basin then, as in later times, there is little doubt, but its ultimate extension in this direction has already been discussed. It is most probable that the people who used these languages were mainly Nordic coast-dwellers and occupiers of the wet marsh and moorland country on the west side of the Elbe. In many parts their physique must have been Alpine-Nordic to a large extent.
The area of Teutonic speech historically falls into three: the Scandinavian area including Jutland north of Flensburg, the Low German plains from the Elbe to the mouths of Rhine and Maas, and the Highlands east of the Rhine, into which Teutonic speech spread, and in which it became enriched by mixture with Celtic, and, later on, with Latin and Romance elements, and so became Alemannic, and, ultimately, High German.
In Roman times Teutonic speech was thus most characteristic of the belt outside the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire, and from this basis we may trace the Teutonic peoples onwards. The forests of Germany were dense and extensive, and apparently in post-Roman times they were being attacked in two ways: the hill people were moving down and making the population more Alpine in physical type and more Alemannic in language, and the Church was founding abbeys and spreading its influence across the Rhine from the erstwhile Roman frontier-cities then becoming cities of the Roman Church in most cases. The wave of Roman civilization interrupted by the barbarian movements was thus resumed under Church leadership, and with it went the growth of towns and of intercourse, after some time making the contrast between south and north in Germany not only a contrast between hills and plains and between High German and Low German, but also a contrast between a much more Romanized and civic south and a much less Romanized and more rural north, though the Church did establish itself in the north in due course.
Alemannic became characteristic of the hill belt next beyond the region of French speech, and there replaced a Brythonic Celtic language. But farther east the languages of the hill people had by this time taken Slavonic form, so that the Alemannic belt was of but moderate width, including the Alps and their northern flanks down to the Prussian plain, but not Bohemia and the Carpathian arc which were of Slavonic speech. The downhill movement above mentioned characterized the Slavonic hill lands as well as the Alemannic, so that on the Prussian plain east of the Elbe old languages gave way to Slavonic, and in course of time the Elbe became the frontier between German and Slavonic, with the Altmark (old frontier territory) to the west of it.
The progress of Germanization eastwards to the Mittelmark, between Elbe and Oder, and the Neu-Mark farther east, towards but not up to the Vistula, must not be interpreted as meaning that these regions were still purely Slavonic in the days of the Elbe frontier. Probably German was already in use here and there, but Germanization and the spread of the Church involved agricultural development and closer settlement, and so changed the character of the country. It was done under German leadership, and brought in German settlers. In the early Middle Ages there was a recession of Slavonic on the Prussian plain, and now only one fully Slavonic region in the German area remains. This is the Wendish area, and the Wends are supposed to have spread down from the hill slopes on the northern frontier of Bohemia. The present area of the Wends is astride the upper Spree, and especially around Kottbus, and the district is called Lusatia, but in the Middle Ages they spread farther north. It is largely Germanized in speech at the present time, but preserves old features and Slav names. Slav place-names are as characteristic on the German plain east of the Elbe as are Celtic names in the non-Celtic speaking part of Scotland, and illustrate a change of language of a people already having some settled organization. This contrasts with the rarity of survival of Celtic town names on the English plain. The changes of language areas since the Middle Ages have probably been quite small. The zone west of the Vistula has remained a zone of admixture of German and Polish-speaking people, whence the 'Polish corridor to Danzig' of the recent treaties, linguistically and traditionally justifiable and yet admitted to be dangerous politically.
The relation of the Teutonic languages of Jutland to one another in origin is beyond our scope, but the dialect of the western side of the base of Jutland has remained fairly distinct as 'Frisian', and has attempted a literary development in the last century. The new treaty boundary between Germany and Denmark gives what was North Slesvig to Denmark, and is intended to run along a line in the linguistic frontier-zone. The Low German speech of the Rhine mouths, with the long isolation of the people of that region and their concentration on the work of fighting the sea, developed into Dutch.
We thus have Dutch, Frisian, Low German, High German or Alemannic, and naturally a Middle German developing between the two latter along the zone where the southern hills grade into the northern plain.
The complex topography of the south German hill country had given rise to an infinite muddle of small states, and at the end of the fifteenth century they agreed, as the people of South France had done centuries before, to 'receive' the Roman Law. This reception was effective over most of the hill country, but not in any considerable part of the plain, a natural consequence of the contrasts already noted, and a further accentuation of them for the succeeding period. In the early sixteenth century came the religious schism, during which the northern plain and the foothill region left the Catholic Church almost en bloc, while the people of the hill and valley country of South Germany remained attached to Rome. This, however, by no means adequately describes the territories of the two ecclesiastical systems, for the Roman influence on the Rhine seems to have kept the Ems region largely Catholic, while Protestantism occupied the south along the Cassel-Frankfort line, and spread through Württemberg and the Nürnberg district. The strongly Catholic regions are the Rhine (except about Mainz), the Ems basin, the upper Main area, focusing on Würzburg and Bamberg, and the upper Danube basin (the chief part of Bavaria proper). The Rhine and Danube, with the Roman frontier towns becoming ecclesiastical cities, stand out remarkably in this connexion.
The contrasts between north and south have been discussed for the Middle Ages, but they have diminished on the whole in later times. Germany's vernacular literature gained its great impetus from Luther's fine translation of the Bible. He used a Saxon dialect of mixed High and Middle German, and, as in other countries affected by the Great Schism, the language of the Bible became the literary and political language to a large extent, thanks in great part to the practice of requiring every confirmand to learn a portion of Scripture in the vernacular, and to the consequent spread of the reading habit and the demand for books. The growth of newspapers, schools, and public discussions has spread this Middle German as the standard speech of the whole country, but Frisian and Alemannic dialects do still survive within the borders of the new German republic.
Intermixture between Nordic and Alpine stocks has spread the dominant broad-headedness of the Alpine over most of what is now Germany, but it is often combined with characters derived from the Nordic side (fair colouring and certain facial features), and a good deal of Nordic physique survives in the north-west and in Württemberg, as well as on the forested Thuringian hills. This spread of broad-headedness may be thought of alongside of the spread of modified High German and of the spread of southern rulers like the Hohenzollerns northwards, and it will then be seen how, in many ways, the south has permeated the north in more modern as well as in more remote times. It is useful to bear these things in mind as an offset against the danger of over-emphasizing the effects of the spread of Prussian political organizations over the south in the nineteenth century; it is also well to remember how much of that organizing power is traceable directly and indirectly to the Huguenot refugees finding homes in the hospitable Brandenburg of the seventeenth century.
If the cathedrals are the sign and token of the people's effort in the Paris basin, the Universities, based upon that of Paris, are the characteristic feature of civilization in the hill region of Germany, and, if prose is the triumphant expression of the French genius, lyrics and music are the glory of the German. The sharp criticism and startling clarity of French thought, growing where all the racial stocks of Europe jostle one another in a good wine country, stands in unceasing contrast to the more laborious stodginess of the more or less Alpinized German with his heavier menu in both food and drink. The quick enterprising Nordic element is present here and there; but it is the Alpine patience and appetite for detail that has increasingly dominated the psychology of the German people, working out into a power of combination that has had remarkable results in the industrial period.
Just as we have had occasion to trace Romanization in the German belt, so we are able to follow Germanization in the Slavonic belt, but this time with differences. In the first place, there are settlements of Germans in forest clearings, as noted already for the plain east of the Elbe. But for the most part the western zone of the Slavonic belt had been Christianized, in large measure via Bohemia, before efforts at Germanization developed seriously, and so it was the next stage of social development that was affected by the German spread, namely the growth of towns. We thence find some areas of Germanized rural population, but also, through what have become Poland and Transylvania, German groups in the towns, and a similar movement into Russia has been a feature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The most important area of Germanized people in the Slavonic belt is what is now known as East Prussia, the disconnected province of the German Republic (1919). This is the zone of gradation from the broad-headed people of Central Europe to the long-headed Baltic folk speaking old languages, of which the now extinct Prussian was one, related to Lithuanian. Christianity had spread down the Vistula before the Germanizing process had got far across the Oder, so that agricultural organization, fixing the popular language, made the lower Vistula mainly Slavonic on its western side. The next stage of progress of the Roman tradition had now to be across the Vistula into East Prussia, and it took place at the suggestion of the ruler of Danzig and the monks of Oliva near by. It was carried out by the Teutonic Knights, and involved Germanization at least of the formerly Prussian-speaking people near the coast. The Masurians farther inland among their marshes were, and remained, more Slavonic, but felt the Germanizing influence sufficiently to secede, along with their northern Germanized neighbours, from the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. The result is a curious one: the modern East Prussians are mainly Polish-speaking, but largely Protestant, among the Masurian Lakes, and German-speaking, and, for Germans, rather unusually long-headed on the coastal plain. In the recent plebiscite even the Masurian Poles showed marked aversion to incorporation in the re-created and intensely Roman Catholic republic of Poland, and it seems probable that, when treaty allocations are finally made, the Masurians as well as the coastal peoples will remain under Germany. East Prussia is a rural region with large estates, and this fact, added to that of its position as a sort of German frontier outpost, has made it intensely patriotic and very conservatively minded. The East Prussian population becomes mixed with people of Lithuanian speech across the Niemen, but Memel, as a town, is naturally largely German. Its fate is (April 1922) not yet settled.
The other groups of German speech and associations in Eastern Europe beyond the Vistula and Austria are in no case sufficiently large to be described as peoples, though they form important communities, and it may be useful to give a short list here.
In Hungary they occur in numbers in the Pécs district (south-west), around Budapest, north-west of the Bakony Wald, &c.
In Yugoslavia there are groups in the Backa, between the lower Theiss and the Danube, and in the Banat.
The enlarged Rumania has a number of German groups in the metalliferous district east of the Banat, between the upper Maros and the upper Alt, especially near Sibiu (formerly Hermannstadt), around Cluj (formerly Kolozsvar) and Bistrita (Bistritz), in Bukovina, and also in southern Bessarabia.
Numerous groups are studded along the Bug and around the southern side of the Pripet Marshes. In South Russia there are again several groups in the Odessa region and north of the Sea of Azov. Still larger numbers live along the Volga in the Saratov region. The German settlements in Transylvania, often loosely styled Saxon, date in large part from the twelfth century, and the people came in considerable numbers from the Rhine in its 'Low German' section; the Bukovina and Russian areas received their German influx towards the end of the eighteenth century.