What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  Despite the geographical mayhem, German principalities garnered a reputation for several things. German speakers became famous as traders, forming the powerful Hanseatic League—a medieval maritime trading group of outposts and ships that shuttled goods across northern Europe from today’s Poland to Sweden, Germany, and Russia, expanding the network into the sixteenth century. Moreover, from the fifteenth century on, the German heartland emerged as the publishing hotbed of Europe, with Frankfurt its epicenter, pulling in thousands with her twice-yearly book fairs.

  German territories were also the first planting grounds for religious war. The criticisms lodged against the Catholic Church by Martin Luther in 1517 stirred up such a reaction that new “Protestant” followers and devout Catholics waged vicious battles over Luther’s “heretical” ideas. Pope Leo X condemned Luther in a papal bull (an edict), and Luther responded by burning it. Soon the Lutheran religion (and other Protestant variants) flourished in northern German states, while southern German states remained Catholic. Religious conflict spread like a raging venereal disease and was just as deadly. In the name of God—or rather the name of how God should be worshipped—most of Western Europe was sucked into the Thirty Years War, which sent millions to the Great Beyond.

  A third of German-speaking people lay dead by the time the Thirty Years War fizzled out in 1648.

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749–1832)

  In 1774, Goethe—perhaps Germany’s most beloved writer and a hugely influential eighteenth-century voice—published his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The tale of unrequited love was so heart-wrenching that young men across Europe were swept away in melancholy and killed themselves. Goethe also wrote lyrical poetry (sometimes set to music)—the dramatic epic Faust being such a famous example that the word “Faustian” came into common usage as shorthand for not looking at future consequences. A scientist intrigued with metals, optics, and the study of animals; a philosopher fascinated by the possibility of evolution; a conductor, a lawyer, and a professor, well-rounded Goethe eventually moved into the ducal castle at Saxe-Weimar, where he became the duke’s top political adviser and theater director.

  German speakers kept trading, expanding territories, and fighting over religion, and boundaries kept moving across the entire Holy Roman Empire. By the time Napoleon arrived on the scene and dismantled the HRE, over 300 German kingdoms, principalities, and states spread out across Europe. The 1815 Congress of Vienna, which rearranged the lands held by the defeated Napoleon, recombined territories, whittling the number of states down to thirty and placing all of them under the umbrella of a new entity: the German Confederation.

  GRIMM TALES: JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM (1785–1863, 1786–1859)

  Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were newly unemployed professors, fired from their jobs after opposing right-stripping moves of the King in Hanover. Their growling stomachs drove them to devise a new moneymaking plan. They interviewed some three dozen locals, soliciting local folktales, which they began publishing in 1812. Originally not bedtime stories, the racy tales were modified and cleaned up by the Grimms, who ultimately implanted images of Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and hundreds of others in the minds of babes. Some call their tales Freudian myths; we shan’t go into our theories on the meaning of the frog that, when kissed, turns into a handsome prince.

  The ink hadn’t dried on the Confederation’s map when a power struggle emerged. The top dog and biggest German “state” by far was the Austrian Empire, which included today’s Hungary and Czech Republic and beyond. Number two in both size and population was much smaller Prussia, a northeastern state that held today’s Berlin and part of Poland. Run by the Hohenzollern dynasty, militaristic Prussia had no intention of being overshadowed by the Austrian Empire, which by then was militarily flabby and politically weak. Or rather, Otto von Bismarck—who became Prussian chancellor in 1871—had no intention of riding in the passenger seat.

  “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”

  —Otto von Bismarck

  Statesman and strategist Bismarck was a master manipulator, playing psychological chess while other European leaders were shooting marbles. His first priority: booting Austria from the German Confederation. Tricking the Austrians into fighting a quick war alongside Prussia for northern Danish duchies, Bismarck found a technicality in the victory to declare war on Austria. Prussia quickly won, and Bismarck’s condition for peace was simple: Austria had to leave the Confederation. Then Bismarck’s eyes turned to France, which held the coal-rich Elsass-Lothringen region (aka Alsace-Lorraine). For this, he tricked Napoleon III into starting a war. Prussia quickly won, and France handed over the region. Bismarck then proceeded to part three of his plan: in 1871, he announced the unification of Germany as the German Empire, with Prussian king Wilhelm I as her royal head and Bismarck as political leader. From then on, Bismarck contented himself with statesmanship and alliances, fine wines, and cigars, and Western Europe found herself in deep peace until 1914.

  In the late nineteenth century, Germany was roaring along—and advancing so rapidly she was scaring the neighbors. The German industrial machine was churning, and the standard of living soared as farmers moved to the cities, which were orderly and even boasted modern plumbing. The muses were alive: Hermann Hesse published his first works; Nietzsche became the controversial philosopher of the hour; and the operas of Richard Wagner blew the world away, underscoring the genius of German classical composers going back to Beethoven, Schubert, Handel, and Bach. Karl Benz unveiled his new machine in 1885—an automobile powered by an internal combustion engine—and Gottlieb Daimler invented the gas-powered motorcycle that same year; luckily, chemist Heinrich Hertz invented aspirin and helped alleviate the headaches from the new urban racket. Contact lenses, X-rays, and Zeppelins were but a few more German creations of the era.

  Headstrong Kaiser Wilhelm II took the German imperial crown in 1888. Threatened by Bismarck, he forced him to resign, the first of the Kaiser’s many mistakes.

  Few doubted the brilliance of the German mind, but not all trusted it. Many warily eyed Germany’s growing military might. In 1906, the anxious British unleashed their new weapon: HMS Dreadnought, a huge, fast, and terrifying warship that had the potential to blow everybody else’s navies out of the water. The great arms race was under way.

  Peace was shattering: the volatile Balkans erupted in several wars over nationalism and territorial squabbling, and conflicts brewed up in African colonies. Armies were building up, revving their motors. And cocksure Kaiser Wilhelm II kept shooting off his mouth, further destabilizing an already twitchy Europe.

  * * *

  The Kaiser was hunting in Norway in 1914, when he heard the news: a Serb had killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand. His advice to Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, the archduke’s uncle: put the Serbs in their place. The Kaiser, after all, was itching to take his new weapons for a spin. On July 18, 1914, Germany and Austria invaded Serbia—an act that would kick off a chain of events from which Germany still hasn’t fully recovered. The First World War had begun.

  The “Summer War” dragged on for four dismal years, causing the worst physical destruction, loss of life, and financial drain that Europe had seen. The stagnant, trench-heavy war finally heaved its last gasp in 1918. Seen as the instigator of the most brutal military showdown then known to man, Germany was the target of postwar wrath. At the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the victors—Britain, Russia, France, and the U.S.—went overboard: they ensured not only that Germany paid, but that she was utterly devastated.

  “They [will] be shunned and avoided like lepers for generations to come.”—Woodrow Wilson in 1919, on the future of the German people after World War I5

  In 1919, the new Germany was unveiled as the Weimar Republic. The weak government, with a $33 billion war reparation bill hanging around her neck, was destined to fail; she started unsteadily and soon slipped into chaos, with uprisings, strikes, assassinations
, and chronic shortages of food and fuel. The currency became worthless as a result of hyperinflation; lifetime savings vanished as the value of the mark dropped from a prewar exchange rate of 4.2 marks per dollar to about 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar.6 Germans pushed wheelbarrows of cash to the shop to buy bread. Some found a better use for the marks: burning them for oven fuel.

  Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928)—a cabaret-style satire—jabbed the corrupt Weimar Republic and swept Berlin as the most popular play of the 1920s (the opening song later became Louis Armstrong’s “Mack the Knife”).

  In 1923, a short, bitter Austrian who headed a new political party plotted to toss the regional Bavarian government. Brandishing guns, he and dozens of colleagues broke into a beer hall where the Bavarian prime minister was holding a meeting. “Silence!” he yelled, shooting his gun into the air. “The revolution has begun!” Police put down the attempted coup, and Adolf Hitler—mastermind of the failed beer-hall putsch—spent the next year in prison, dictating his memoirs to cellmate Rudolf Hess. Published in 1925 under the name Mein Kampf (My Struggle), his book didn’t sell diddly then, but would later become a school textbook and a bestseller—though it’s said few people ever got through it. Future book sales made Hitler a millionaire.

  Originally, Hitler’s manuscript had the pithy title of Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice. In the Netherlands and Czech Republic it’s illegal to own a copy of Hitler’s autobiography, whatever it’s called.7

  The Depression of 1929 only worsened conditions in the Weimar Republic. Amid the gloom, however, one ray of hope beamed through. A rousing orator coaxed Germans out of their collective depression, vowing that Germany would be great again. Little by little Germans started listening.

  ADOLF HITLER (1889–1945)

  Born in Braunau, Austria, the offspring of a government employee and his niece, Adolf Hitler—whose father changed his last name from Schicklgruber—was beaten by his father, but coddled by his mother, who led him to believe he was brilliant. Orphaned at eighteen, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he fancied his calling was to be an artist—but the Art Academy didn’t agree, rejecting his application several times. Moving to Munich, he fought in WWI and was temporarily blinded by British mustard gas. He heard of Germany’s defeat while in a hospital bed, blaming Jews for his blindness and for the war that Germany had just lost. Believing Jews to be the root of all evil, Hitler vowed to deport them from Germany. After the war, he was transferred to German military intelligence. His assignment: spread anti-Semitic feelings and infiltrate the nationalist German Workers Party.8 In 1920, he took over the party and added “National Socialist” to the name; three years later, he led the failed putsch in Munich that landed him in jail. Released in 1924, Hitler found the party had crumbled in his absence, but he rebuilt it—complete with a propaganda machine. He didn’t appeal to intellectuals or the wealthy—and was generally loathed in Berlin—but the budding politician changed tactics. The masses didn’t respond well to a simple attack on Jewry, but they swallowed his anti-Semitic propaganda when he slammed the ailing Weimar Republic as well. In the 1930 elections, Nazis took 18 percent of the vote, becoming Germany’s second most popular party. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed to sit in the chancellor’s (prime minister’s) seat. Dozens of Hitler’s political enemies died within two days, killed by henchman Heinrich Himmler. Several weeks later, the president passed away as well. Hitler absorbed that role into his new one—Führer. Within weeks, all other political parties were banned, thousands were arrested, and tens of thousands of books blazed in squares. The Führer called for a boycott of all “non-Aryan” goods and posted storm troopers outside Jewish stores under signs demanding “Germans defend yourselves! Buy only at Aryan stores!”9 Half the German Jewish population soon fled, their properties seized by the government. Meanwhile, most of the world looked at the strange little man as a passing fad, a nonthreat, a joke.

  KRISTALLNACHT

  By 1938, Hitler had stripped away Jews’ citizenship and rights, and had begun deporting some out of the country, though not yet to death camps. His program intensified that November. When Herschel Grynszpan—a German Jew living in Paris whose family had been deported to Poland—shot embassy secretary Ernst von Rath, Hitler used the murder as an excuse to step up his anti-Semitic program. That bullet shot in Paris echoed across Germany in the shattering of windows. During the “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht in German), Hitler launched his first full-scale pogrom. Over two days of rioting, amid the crashing of windows of Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues, Nazi forces rounded up 30,000 Jews, bludgeoned some to death, and sent the rest to concentration camps. The Holocaust had begun.

  Hitler quickly demonstrated his intentions to make the 1919 Treaty of Versailles null and void: he rearmed the military with Panzer tanks; he built a new navy; and he tested new fighter planes and fire bombs in practice runs in Sweden and real battles in Spain—all with nary a peep from the international community. (See “Spain,” page 147.) He annexed Austria—expressly forbidden by the 1919 treaty; the lone protest came from Mexico. He demanded Sudetenland, in northwestern Czechoslovakia; the leaders of Britain and France handed it to him. Eyebrows indeed rose when Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. But it wasn’t until Nazis marched on Poland on September 1, 1939, that the world sat up and took notice. Two days later, Britain, France, and Australia declared war.

  From there it was dominoes falling. In April 1940, Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway; in May, they stormed Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. In September, the blitz on England began. And soon millions of Jews and war prisoners were hauled to concentration camps. By 1942, some camps had chambers where most new arrivals were gassed, in other camps they were worked to death.

  Eleven million died in concentration camps, including 6 million Jews. Hitler is held responsible for the deaths of between 45 million and 60 million people who perished during World War II.10

  Too many soldiers, too many arms, too many sophisticated weapons, and too many people willing to try them out: all were factors in the war that kept going for six years. Thankfully, petroleum supplies began to dry up, slowing down the pace of the fighting. Horrifying new weapons—among them atomic bombs—dramatically pounded in the last nails. The nadir of human existence finally ended.

  Hitler is believed to have committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in a bunker not far from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Details of the death are sketchy—including whether it was by cyanide or by a shot from a pistol—since Soviets were the first on the scene. They claimed to have cremated the corpse.

  In February 1945, Allied leaders met at Yalta to figure out how to crawl out of the black hole of war and revive Europe. Churchill and Roosevelt erred grievously by allowing Stalin to be involved in the reconstruction plan.

  From 1945 to 1949, West Germany put many remaining Nazis on the stand in the highly publicized Nuremberg Trials, finding most of them guilty.

  THE BERLIN AIRLIFT

  It’s hard to say exactly when the Cold War began, but many point to Berlin in 1948, when all of Germany was divvied up and occupied by the Four (Allied) Powers—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Located in Soviet-controlled East Germany, the capital Berlin was divided into four occupied sections as well, with the Soviets occupying East Berlin. The troubles began when West Germany introduced a new currency, the deutschmark, to stabilize the economy. Stalin responded by closing all East German roads that led to West Berlin, strangling the other quadrants by cutting off all food and fuel. Stalin figured that the Americans, British, and French would simply give up their quadrants. Instead they dropped the needed goods into West Berlin by plane. The Soviets looked on open-mouthed as food drop missions continued for the next 462 days. Expensive, inefficient, and dangerous, the airlift was the only way to keep West Berlin (surrounded as it was by Soviet-occupied territory) from becoming engulfed by Communism; West Berlin was s
o potent a symbol that it was deemed worth the effort.

  Berlin was split between the Communist East and Democratic/capitalist West for the next forty-two years, which mirrored the situation in all of Germany Communist East Germany officially became known as the German Democratic Republic; West Germany was called the Federal Republic of Germany—the name used for the whole country today.

  The United States took an active role in designing West Germany’s future, and the Soviet Union shaped East Germany, establishing multifamily households and monthly work plans, and requiring that East Germany join up in the armed alliance of Communist countries—the Warsaw Pact, which was the Communist answer to NATO. East Germans weren’t pleased. During the first twelve years, 2.5 million East Germans snuck over the border. In 1961, without warning, the East German government hastily erected a thick, fortress-like forty-three-kilometer long wall topped with barbed wire, lit by floodlights, and patrolled by guards and dogs. This literal manifestation of the “Iron Curtain” prevented further defection.

  1968

  It began as just another Vietnam protest, but West Germany’s 1968 demonstrations marked the start of a new era. Millions of young Germans took to the streets, rebelling against the establishment (“the swine system”) for linking arms with the U.S. and NATO and condemning the older generation for following Hitler’s mad dream. Seen as a social revolution by many, the often violent 1968 protests resulted in more educational freedom, more honesty, and a desire to improve Germany’s world image; even women’s liberation came out of that era. Some of the most vehement ’68ers became politicians, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer among them; others became radicals, who terrorized Germany for the next twenty years.