Map of the Second Reich
When it comes to German history, there are few “facts” you’ll hear repeatedly including:
All of these statements are accurate to a point, but arming yourself with the German history primer in this chapter will give you a better handle on both the additional complexities and sheer nuances behind the generalization about these peoples’ long chronology.
The Internet and DNA research have stretched the chronological field for German-speaking genealogy in recent years. Not long ago, most genealogists ran out of records to research when they reached the year 1648 (the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe). Earlier records simply were not accessible. But today many of these records have been digitized or indexed and are now available online. As DNA research continues to evolve, researchers can put forth more genealogical hypotheses (and conclusions in some cases), including data stretching into “deep ancestry” from thousands of years ago.
Long before there was a Germany, there were Germanic tribes such as the Helvetii, Marcomanni, Saxons, Jutes, Angles, Suebi, Cherusci, Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Alemanni. These tribes, which have been traced back to 500 B.C. and even earlier, originated in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The first recorded references of these tribes were made by generals of the Roman Republic, such as Julius Caesar. Between 58 and 51 B.C., Caesar completed the Roman conquest of Gaul (all territory west of the Rhine River including modern-day France and the Benelux countries), including some portions of Gaul that the Cimbri and Teutones (two Germanic tribes) had occupied between 113 and 101 B.C. before being defeated by the Roman general Marius.
In conquering Gaul, Rome made itself neighbors to the land the Romans called Germania, which was occupied by a collection of tribes, including some of those previously mentioned (most prominently, the Cherusci and Marcomanni). Near the end of the last century B.C., as Caesar Augustus expanded Rome from a republic to an empire, Roman forces crossed the Rhine and began conquering much of what is now Germany, extending Rome’s borders throughout northern Europe.
The empire’s hope was that by advancing eastward, it would shorten its boundary line from the Rhine River to the Weser, the Elbe, or perhaps even the Oder (the eastern boundary of present-day Germany). The Romans’ first campaign from 11 to 9 B.C. subdued the Cherusci and forced the tribe’s chieftain Segimerus to send his sons Arminius and Flavus to Rome as hostages.
About thirteen years later in A.D. 4, the Roman commander (and future emperor) Tiberius moved farther into Germania and conquered the Chatti and Bructeri tribes. When circumstances in A.D. 6 forced Tiberius and much of his army to deal with a revolt elsewhere in the empire, it fell to Publius Quinctilius Varus to carry on the German campaign. One of his trusted aides was the former Cherusci captive Arminius, who had received a Roman military education before returning to the frontier area. But Arminius tricked Varus and led a confederation of tribes (including the Marsi, Chatti, Bructeri, Chauci, Sicambri, and Suebi in addition to Arminius’ native Cherusci) to an ambush victory in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, obliterating three Roman Legions with a combined sixteen thousand to twenty thousand men. This triumph, when it was returned to history after the Dark Ages, made Arminius (often called Hermann due to a translation error) the German people’s first nonlegendary hero.
The tribe’s victory at Teutoburg Forest kept Rome’s frontier at the Rhine, and Germania continued to evolve, starting as an uncivilized area made up of loosely organized tribes. Rome remained dominant for the next three hundred years. The populations of the Germanic tribes began increasing during this time, and they faced migration pressures from groups coming from farther east, particularly the Slavs and Huns. The Germanic tribes traded and occasionally skirmished with the Romans before they began to join the Roman armies as mercenaries in the A.D. 200s.
By A.D. 400, the western part of the now-divided Roman Empire was crumbling, and Germanic tribes reacted to this power vacuum and the pressures from the east by invading various areas formerly attached to the Roman Empire. In the chaos during and after Rome’s fall, the tribes established rough, decentralized feudal mini-states throughout western Europe, such as the Franks in what became France, the Visigoths in present-day Spain, the Vandals in North Africa, the Lombards in northern Italy, and the Ostrogoths in other parts of Italy and what was Yugoslavia (for most of the twentieth century). These tribes converted to Christianity and mixed with the population left over from the Roman Empire.
Many of the present-day areas of Germany and the lands immediately west of it still bear remembrances of the tribal domains from this early medieval era. Each of the following areas is called a Stammesherzogtum or “stem (or tribal) duchy” in recognition of the tribe that once dominated it:
Beginning in the latter part of the A.D. 500s, the Franks began to subjugate the other Germanic tribes, and this dominance reached its high point when German nationalism gained a hero in Charlemagne, the warrior king whom the Germans call “Karl der Grosse.” Charlemagne was born about 742 and came to the throne in 768. He united into one state much of what is present-day France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy. In 800, he was crowned “Emperor of the Romans” by the pope, beginning an often semi-fictional overlordship of Christian Western Europe by a single secular emperor that endured for a thousand years. An important fact about Charlemagne’s reign is that he threw back the westward drift of the Slavic peoples, which resulted in a fairly fixed linguistic border between the Germanic people and the Slavs.
Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious succeeded him in 814. The Carolingian version of the Holy Roman Empire began to divide in the very next generation, however, when Louis the Pious’ sons partitioned the holdings among themselves: Charles the Bald received areas that would form France; the share of Louis the German (also called Ludwig) was known then as “East Francia” but later would be the core of present-day Germany; and their brother Lothair was given a strip of land between Charles and Ludwig that eventually was divided by successors of the other brothers (the only remnant of the “Middle Francia” became known as Lorraine, called Lothringen in German, in memory of its first ruler).
Roughly from the point of Louis the German onward, the stem duchies considered themselves part of a “Kingdom of Germany” and, beginning in 919, elected as kings one of the dukes. Ordinarily, sons would be elected to follow their fathers, but one of German history’s truisms is that unlike France and England, where the dynasties had good reproductive luck, the dynasties of the German kingdom frequently either died out or were left only with minor sons as successors. Lack of ruling dynasties would become one of the key factors that kept the German stem duchies from uniting as a single nation throughout the Middle Ages and well into modern times.
This was also the height of manorialism (often more loosely called feudalism), a social order in which virtually every commoner was bound in some way to a superior—peasants to knights, knights to local lords, local lords to higher nobility such as counts, princes, dukes, and kings, and those higher nobles to the emperor. In exchange for being bound as serfs, the commoners received some measure of military and economic protection of their “betters.” While this social structure began dying out in other countries, it remained the social order in the German states well into modern times.
In 936, almost a century after the reign of Louis the German, the Saxon Otto I was elected King of the Germans. He was an able ruler who defeated the Magyars (forefathers of the people in present-day Hungary) in 955 and stopped their westward invasions. In 962, he became the first German king in nearly fifty years to be granted the title “Emperor of the Romans” by the pope.
Along with this coronation, Otto became the first titled Holy Roman Emperor. (While the major German nobles elected a German king formally titled “King of the Romans,” this king only became “Emperor” when crowned by the pope.) For centuries afterward, his successors would on and off pursue territories in Italy; however, in addition to the dynastic changes already noted (which often required the king-elect to grant privileges to German electoral states in exchange for votes), the more longingly a “King of the Romans” gazed at Italy, the less time and attention he spent attempting to consolidate the German states into one united kingdom; instead, the kings often had to negotiate new rights to German city-states and other minor jurisdictions to prevent disharmony and revolts while the king was away on military campaigns in Italy. This resulted in even more fractionalization of political power into literally thousands of German-speaking microstates.
The Saxons were succeeded by the Salian dynasty, which went extinct in 1125, and it was not until the ascent of Frederick I (nicknamed Barbarossa or “red beard”) and the House of Hohenstaufen in 1152 that an emperor would once again pursue power in the Italian peninsula while attempting to re-establish imperial privileges in the German states. In 1196, Frederick’s son Henry VI successfully convinced the Diet of Würzburg to make the German kingship hereditary (a major move toward establishing a ruling dynasty). But despite these successes, the Hohenstaufens fell victim to untimely deaths: Barbarossa died while on Crusade in the Middle East. A year later, Henry VI died, allegedly poisoned, leaving as heir his only son, then a boy of three who became Frederick II. Frederick II was an able ruler—he was called the stupor mundi, Latin for “the wonder of the world”—but his son Conrad IV outlived him by just four years, leading to another dynasty’s extinction.
Following Conrad’s death in 1254, the empire and imperial title were the subject of dispute for twenty years, and out of this disarray came another 150 years of even shorter dynasties, as the Houses of Wittelsbach and Luxembourg took turns supplying kings (many of which were not crowned emperor by the pope). In 1356, the reigning of Charles IV of Luxembourg issued the “Golden Bull,” a decree that limited the voting in the imperial election to seven individuals: the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, and the rulers of Bohemia, Pfalz, Brandenburg, and Sachsen.
The Hanseatic League of trading cities and their merchant guilds formed in the northern German areas during this period. Many of these were free imperial cities such as the Baltic Sea port Luebeck, which began the precursor to the league in 1241 by making an alliance with Hamburg on the North Sea.
At the height of the imperial confusion during the thirteenth century, Rudolf of Habsburg was elected German king in 1273. At the time, his election was merely that of a single ruler and his possessions (including those in present-day Austria that became the core of Habsburg power) soon were divided amongst his descendants, but in the fifteenth century a reunified Habsburg line would finally give the empire dynastic stability.
Also around the fifteenth century, immigrant bands of German-speaking peoples made their first forays into what is today eastern Europe, forming enclaves in areas of what are today Slovakia, the Baltic States, Slovenia, and Romania, that would retain their “German-ness” for centuries.
The Habsburgs dynasty took power in 1440. During their reign, the power struggle between the empire and its constituent states looked as if it might tip in favor of the emperors, especially when Maximilian I (who reigned from 1486 to 1519) married his son Philip to the heiress of Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and Maximilian’s oldest grandson inherited not only the Habsburgs’ many domains in Austria and elsewhere and the imperial crown, but also the newly unified nation of Spain and its many colonial possessions.
This grandson, Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor (Charles or Carlos I in Spain), had more power than any early modern European monarch and might well have used it to reverse the vacuum of power in which the thousands of German states existed if it hadn’t been for a German monk named Martin Luther. In 1517, Luther nailed ninety-five theses disputing Roman Catholic Church practices to Wittenberg’s cathedral door. (Luther would go on to translate the Holy Bible into German, which some credit as being the work that created a standardized written German language from what was a multitude of dialects across the German states.)
Luther’s questions led to the Reformation and the founding of the Lutheran Church, as well as other Protestant denominations. The net result was that western Europe no longer had a unified church. The division diminished the power held by the Holy Roman Emperor, who was seen as the chief secular representative of the formerly unified church, and restive German princes used the Reformation as an excuse for disobeying the emperor. In 1531, Hessen and Sachsen formed the Schmalkaldic League of Lutheran rulers, and within a few years Anhalt, Württemberg, Pommern, and imperial free cities such as Augsburg, Frankfurt am Main, and Hannover joined.
This time of upheavals also included the German Peasants’ War (1524 to 1525), which has been called the largest popular uprising of the common people prior to the French Revolution of 1789, as well as the threat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire from the Balkans. The Turks were only stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1529 when the Habsburgs beat back a siege of their capital city. The Turkish invasion had many consequences including taxes levied by the empire’s constituent states to defend Vienna. (And, as often happens, these taxes stayed on the books for hundreds of years past the Turkish threat, but the good news is that many of these tax lists have survived as records of German-speaking ancestors.) Another consequence was a number of non-German states such as Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Croatia became tied to the Habsburg crown (in an attempt to gain protection from the Turks), leaving the dynasty distracted from attempting to enforce more of its will in the German states.
Charles V was more passionate about unity and organization than theology. He encouraged the Roman Catholic Church to authorize the Counter Reformation in 1545 at the Council of Trent (which, much to the applause of today’s genealogists, also mandated the keeping of parish registers when the council completed in 1563). Charles had victories over the Protestants on the battlefield in the 1540s, but could not stamp out Lutheranism entirely. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 essentially authorized each German prince to choose Lutheranism or Catholicism as a state religion (a principle known by the Latin phrase Cuius regio, eius religio—“Whose realm, his religion”). In addition to this first principle, the Catholic ecclesiastical states would remain Catholic even if their clerical rulers became Protestant and some knights and individual cities were allowed to remain Lutheran even in Catholic-ruled areas. The settlement ignored other Protestant groups, such as the Reformed followers of John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli as well as the Anabaptist movement that spawned the Mennonites and Amish.
During the second half of the sixteenth century, the questions left unsettled by the Peace of Augsburg grew into more profound problems as a number of the German lords switched from Lutheran to Reformed Calvinist, including the Pfalz (1560), Nassau (1578), Hessen-Kassel (1605), and Brandenburg (1613). This added tension was balanced against a series of Habsburg rulers for whom religious conformity was not a priority. In this temporary vacuum, competing alliances of the medium and small German states—the Protestant Union and Catholic League—were formed and jockeyed to influence the selection of rulers when inheritance of states came into question.
One example that illustrates the complexities of this time is the War of the Jülich Succession. This combination of noncontiguous duchies Jülich, Cleves, and Berg in modern-day western Germany and the Netherlands had prospered under the half-century reign of Duke William the Rich from 1539 to 1592. Like his father John III, William sought a “middle way” between the competing religions of the day. The duchies remained in this straddling position under the rule of William’s son John William but when the latter died childless in 1609, the opportunity for such a stance was over; his closest heirs were on different sides of the religious divide. His niece Anna of Preussen, the wife of Elector John Sigismund of Brandenburg, was Protestant, while nephew Wolfgang Wilhelm, who later became Count Palatine of Neuberg, was Catholic. Also in the mix was Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, who coveted the rich duchies for himself. After five years of jockeying and much diplomacy plus some shows of military force, the duchies were finally divided by the Treaty of Xanten. Jülich and Berg went to Wolfgang William while John Sigismund got Cleves as well as Mark and Ravensburg.
But these petty conflicts were of little consequence compared to the problems that erupted when it became apparent that the Jesuit-educated, fervently Catholic Ferdinand II would inherit the Habsburg domains. The conflict that became known as the Thirty Years’ War began when Bohemia rejected Ferdinand as their king in a most interesting way: The Bohemian officials threw two of Ferdinand’s officials out a third-story window of the hall where they were meeting! It was a highly destructive war that turned the German states into a battleground for a generation, severely altering everyday life for many common people. Many farming areas were ruined and some villages were entirely wiped out as a result of the long conflict. Many of the villages that survived were severely depopulated. The Thirty Years’ War also destroyed many records; for example, relatively few German church books dated from earlier than the end of the conflict exist.
When it all ended, the Peace of Westfalen put to rest the ideal of religious unity and instead laid the foundation for modern international relations between nation-states (including the principle that allegiance to a political ruler trumped any overlapping loyalty to a higher religious authority). The peace also put the Reformed religion on equal par with Lutherans and Catholics; rulers of the German states could choose any of the three for their subjects to follow (Anabaptists were still left out of this arrangement and were persecuted nearly everywhere; as a consequence, those who survived the seventeenth-century persecutions became eighteenth-century immigrants to America).
The war and resulting peace did nothing to stop the further fracturing of the German states; as the decades and centuries passed and dynasties died out (and had their holdings split up, just like the example of Jülich-Cleves-Berg), the fragmentation left some sixteen hundred political entities in the Holy Roman Empire, some no larger than a city, others consisting of several disconnected pieces and relatively few large enough to sustain full economic independence. The depopulation caused by the war led rulers to make invitations to people from other areas to become their subjects; for example, the Elector of the Pfalz solicited Swiss farmers from their mountainous domains to bring his domain back into cultivation.
The rivalry between France and Austria that had so much to do with the Thirty Years’ War did not end with the Peace of Westfalen. French King Louis XIV, who ruled 1643 to 1715, feared being encircled by the Austrian and Spanish branches of the Habsburg family. He also felt that the Rhine River was France’s “natural border” and was involved in several wars that attempted to conquer the Dutch and German states already occupying those areas. First in the Low Countries and then throughout the Rhine Valley, Louis made war that again flattened many areas just recovering from the Thirty Years’ War. In the War of the League of Augsburg (also known as the War of the Palatine Succession) from 1688 to 1697, French troops burned many Palatine cities to the ground. Then the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1714 took its toll on more areas. All the wars increased people’s desires to immigrate to America. When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed toleration to French Protestants known as Huguenots, many Huguenots immigrated to German states east of French control.
Another legacy of the Thirty Years’ War was the rise of the Hohenzollern family. As owners of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, this dynasty had been part of the empire’s Electoral College since 1415. Albert, a Hohenzollern relative, secularized the lands of the Teutonic Knights into the Duchy of Preussen in 1525, which became part of a state known as Brandenburg-Preussen in 1618. The Hohenzollern holdings expanded under the rule of Frederick William (known as “The Great Elector”) from 1640 to 1688, and the stage was set for his son, Frederick I, in 1701 to declare himself King “in” Preussen (the phrasing being the product of Preussen being outside the Holy Roman Empire, within which no state could be headed by a king except for Bohemia, which was also ruled by the Habsburg emperor).
The added prestige accorded the Hohenzollern state of Brandenburg-Preussen (by the eighteenth century generally called just “Preussen”) meant Austria was no longer the undisputed leader of the German states. As previously referenced, the Austrian Habsburgs began to pay more and more attention to their growing non-German holdings, especially as they began to win more territory in the Balkans from the Turks. The Hapsburg family encouraged Germans to settle these eastern territories to create a buffer of German-speaking subjects between Austria and the Ottoman Empire as the Ottomans retreated. Many of these German enclaves would remain intact through the end of World War II.
With Austria continuing to spend more energy on eastward expansion, Preussen’s King Frederick (II) the Great, who ruled from 1740 to 1786, continued his state’s expansion to the west and south of its north German base. Frederick fought the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa in both the War of Austrian Succession (1740 to 1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756 to 1763) and won Silesia, a wealthy and mineral-rich area.
The second half of the 1700s also saw many German-speakers immigrate to the Russian Empire at the invitation of Catherine the Great (who was born a German princess in Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg). These German enclaves in Russia endured until the twentieth century. It is estimated that between the colonizing authorized by Catherine and Maria Theresa, as much as 85 percent of the emigration from the German states in the 1700s went east, rather than west to America.
Those 15 percent who went west to North America totaled about eighty thousand people who became the ancestors of millions of people living in America today. The eighteenth-century emigration was spurred by the destructive wars against France and the partible inheritance rules (in which real estate was divided among siblings and farms quickly fell below subsistence level) used by many of the states.
The nobility, for their part, discouraged emigration because in this pre-capitalist society, they looked at their population as part of their wealth. Among the creative laws to tamp down the urge to leave was a requirement to prepay taxes on future inheritances (some of these tax records have survived). Those who chose to leave legally had to pay an “exit tax” on any property they took with them to be released from their serfdom. It’s estimated that between a quarter and a third of those leaving for America in the eighteenth century left illegally—often, under cover of night—but sometimes still turn up in later German records. Whether legal or illegal, about a third of the families leaving could not afford the passage to America upfront, though many of those who might have been subject to indentured servitude to pay back their shipping costs found a friend or relative already in America to help them with the cost and avoid working for a stranger.
Despite the rivalry of Preussen and Austria, the two states did join together with Russia to “partition” the territorially large, but politically weak, state of Poland. Three times between 1772 and 1795, the larger powers helped themselves to slices of the Polish state, resulting in Poland disappearing from the map of Europe for more than a century. Preussen and, to a lesser extent, Austria encouraged German-speaking settlers to move into the previously Polish areas that they had added to their empires.
Centuries of disunity had left some two hundred German-speaking entities scattered like shards of shattered glass across the landscape between France, Austria, and Preussen. Following Louis XIV’s last stab at European dominance, the continent’s major powers entered a rough balance of power. Alliances changed but no single state or group of states could break the deadlock. And with German politics held captive to what was called Kleinstaaterei (the “condition of small states;” most were so small they could be crossed on horseback in a single day), there was little incentive to consider new technologies and infrastructure that England was beginning to explore. And then the French Revolution, and the emperor who came out of it, changed everything. Napoleon I had more to do with the rearrangement of the German states than any German ever did.
In the eighteenth century, the German states lay politically, economically, and literally on the fulcrum of a seesaw. They were surrounded by two primarily German-speaking states (Preussen and Austria) along with habitual enemies France and Britain. While alliances shifted during the century, principally during what historians call the “Diplomatic Revolution of 1756,” the basic antagonisms of France vs. Britain and Preussen vs. Austria remained constant. The British monarchs became more involved in the German states starting in the 1710s after the rulers of Hannover became kings in England as the closest Protestant relative of the Scottish-English Stuart dynasty. They became further involved a few generations later when four German states “rented” mercenary soldiers (the so-called Hessians because some of them did come from Hessen) to fight in the American Revolution.
This balance of powers was altered profoundly by the French Revolutionary Wars. The French Revolution of 1789 alarmed Europe monarchs, who all claimed to rule by “divine right” rather than from the people. In 1791, before France beheaded King Louis XVI and became a republic, Preussen and Austria lead an alliance of major powers in an invasion of France called the “War of the First Coalition.” The tide turned, however, in 1793 after France instituted the first modern conscription system, boosting the manpower available for its army severalfold. After this greatly enlarged army was trained, France went on the offensive in 1794 and overran the German states west of the Rhine River (as well as making gains into the Italian states and conquering much of the Low Countries). This area would remain French for about twenty years. A happy byproduct was that the French, who had introduced civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths within France starting in 1792, required the occupied German states also to keep such records.
France’s intrusion into the German states would not stop with the occupation of the Rhine’s west bank, however. Preussen and Austria both signed peace treaties with the French Republic that allowed the Rhine as the border though neither power was yet reconciled to France’s gains. It took another conflict—the “War of the Second Coalition,” in which Preussen and Austria were joined by Russia—before Austria realized the superiority of the French, now led militarily and politically by Napoleon Bonaparte, and signed the Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, which stated the west bank belonged to France “in complete sovereignty.”
Article 7 of the treaty also guaranteed compensation of territories to the Holy Roman Empire’s hereditary princes who had lost some or all of their land to the French conquest. The Habsburg emperor attempted to keep his German leadership by working out a scheme to compensate the rulers of lost territories by reassigning them land east of the Rhine at the expense of smaller states already there, which suited Napoleon (who would become Emperor Napoleon I in 1804) because he believed that the resulting larger states would be more beholden to him.
The actual compensation of territories was accomplished through “mediatisation” and “secularization.” In 1803, the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire passed its last significant law, known by the typically long German name: Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (in English, “final recess of the high imperial diet”). In the first phase of compensation, the territories of Roman Catholic officials who had dual status (so-called “prince-bishops” and “imperial abbots”) were ceased and redistributed to the nobles who had lost territories west of the Rhine. This process of “mediatisation” joined microstates and imperial free cities with neighboring secular states, effectively moving these small states from under the immediate control of the emperor by making them part of a larger state. The age of Kleinstaaterei was over.
And the changes continued. Napoleon enticed most of the remaining German states to secede from the Holy Roman Empire and form the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806. This collection of French client states extended from the east bank of the Rhine River—the west bank being considered part of France, proper—to the boundaries of Austria and Preussen, the territories of the latter having been reduced and Preussen’s march westward temporarily thrown back. The Habsburg ruler, Francis II, saw the Holy Roman Empire’s demise coming and had changed his sovereign title from Archduke of Austria to “Hereditary Emperor of Austria” in 1804. In 1806, he abdicated the title of Holy Roman Emperor, officially ending the empire. Some of the confederation’s states close to France (such as Hessen and Baden) also adopted the keeping of vital records around this time. The confederation dissolved in 1813 as Napoleon returned a loser from his disastrous Russian campaign.
The French and Napoleon had dominated Europe for just a decade and a half. Yet that relatively short time period would prove to be a true turning point in German history. After Napoleon I’s initial abdication in 1814, the Congress of Vienna attempted to re-create the balance of power that existed before the French Revolution. Royalty and nobility (or the foreign ministers) of more than two hundred states and princely houses from across Europe used the principle of “legitimacy” to attempt to restore the exact pre-Napoleonic rulers to a particular territory. However, this was not so in the German states.
Economic and political change during the Napoleonic era meant there would be no attempt to “turn the clock back” to Kleinstaaterei (the small-state era). Capitalism had entered the region during this time, making the states ripe for the shift from an agrarian society to one that was increasingly industrialized. And the Napoleonic consolidations had caused a light bulb to go off in the heads of the petty rulers of the region. As feudal lords of microstates, they were big fish in a fishbowl-sized pond. True, they had ultimate power, but they also had responsibility for everything from finance to foreign affairs to emigration policy. Many of these minor nobles felt like overseers on a very large farm than anything more grand. In the newly created larger states, these rulers still retained sizable chunks of land in their private hands, were given seats in the equivalent of a Senate or “House of Lords” in the newly enlarged territories, and instead of needing to provide money to their peasants (part of the responsibility of a lord under feudalism) they could spend their money on lavish palaces, entertainment … or whatever their hearts desired. Though they had slightly less power, they gained a great deal more privilege outside of the feudal system.
The Congress of Vienna created a German Confederation as a sort of successor to the Holy Roman Empire. This confederation consisted of about forty states and was under the presidency of Austria. The members of the confederation were pledged to come to the assistance of each other in time of war and they jointly maintained fortresses at Mainz, the city of Luxembourg, Rastatt, Ulm, and Landau.
While Preussen made certain that its eastern territories were outside the border of the German Confederation, the Congress of Vienna awarded Preussen much of Sachsen, the Rheinland, Westfalen, and Wittgenstein, and making Preussen’s holdings within the German Confederation nearly equal to Austria’s holdings within the confederation (excluding Austria’s substantial Hungarian territories).
In 1834, Preussen established the customs union called the Zollverein, which simplified the kingdom’s toll and tariff system and allowed the Preussens to move goods more efficiently from one portion of the kingdom to the other (the halves of the kingdom were separated by independent German states). The Zollverein—which excluded Austria—also was a way to enhance Preussen’s leadership of the German states. The customs union opened up a common market, ended tariffs between states, and standardized weights, measures, and currencies within member states. This enhanced Preussen efficiency and led to further industrialization in the German states, but also had the effect of spurring emigration to America. Many emigrated to avoid the mandatory military service establish by the Zollverein. Others left because of unemployment. After moving from rural farms to urban factories, many people were left without a means of feeding themselves if they became unemployed.
Another event of genealogical interest that took place during this time period was the Preussen Union of churches. In 1817, King Friedrich Wilhelm III united the Reformed and Lutheran churches under the name Evangelical Church in Preussen. Some congregations dissented and eventually became known as “Old Lutheran” congregations.
A middle class began to develop and grow as capitalism took hold in the German states during the German Confederation era. Some of the German states’ rulers had allowed constitutions to be written and rights enumerated for the people in their domains during this time, and the larger cities were breeding grounds for republican sentiments. When revolution again broke out in France in 1848, it quickly spread through German states. The people wanted a say in their government and they wanted to unite under a single national identity—German—instead of the individual state identities.
The Revolutions of 1848 first touched the German states in March of that year when an assembly of people from Baden adopted a constitution demanding a bill of rights. Similar resolutions and popular uprisings broke out in many other states—Sachsen, Preussen, Austria, and Bavaria included—and delegates from across the German states were sent to Frankfurt am Main to write a constitution under the name of “Fundamental Rights and Demands of the German People.”
The group meeting in Frankfurt became a national assembly. Though it took most of the year, the assembly finally decided to offer the King of Preussen the title of “Emperor of the Germans.” But during the year, Preussen’s King Friedrich Wilhelm IV had gone from initially promising major republican reforms to imposing his own version of a constitution on the Preussen people—and privately said that he’d reject the German crown because it was offered “from the gutter.” Publicly, he told the assembly that all the rulers of the other German states would need to consent to the arrangement, a degree of unanimity that he knew would be impossible.
As the rulers of the German states recovered from the initial shock of protests, they withdrew support from the ideals of the national assembly in Frankfurt; the assembly was finally dissolved in May 1849 at the behest of Austrian troops. Many of the German states’ intellectuals and most of those harboring republican sympathies left the continent—some headed for England while many came to North America, where a republican form of government was not a dream but a reality. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848 re-established the relatively weak German Confederation.
While Austria’s army had intimidated the assembly in Frankfurt into permanent adjournment, the Habsburg empire had been shaken by the revolution, especially by the revolt of the Hungarians. As a result of the turmoil, Hungary became an equal partner in the empire as demonstrated by the state’s new name, Austria-Hungary. The troubles in Hungary and the continuing decline of the Ottoman Empire continued to distract the Habsburg monarchy from the German states. Preussen, on the other hand, had no such distraction, and when Otto von Bismarck was named Preussen’s prime minister in 1862, Preussen began an earnest final march toward a new German Empire.
During his nearly thirty years in power, Bismarck would use democratic processes at times (as well as co-opting liberal ideals such as old-age and disability pensions from the government) to achieve his goals, but he was an autocrat at heart: “The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood,” he said in an address to a committee of the Preussen parliament.
Bismarck engineered three wars to move Preussen from its emerging preeminence among the German states to the formation of a second German empire or Reich. First he defeated Denmark in the Second War of Schleswig in 1864 and added the Danish border duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Preussen. However, rather than ceding these duchies to Preussen, Austria-Hungary sought to have the Diet of the German Confederation to decide the fate of Schleswig-Holstein.
This led to a conflict known both as the Austro-Preussen War and the Seven Weeks’ War, the second war engineered by Bismarck. The Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 (a decisive Preussen victory over Austria-Hungary and several smaller German states) brought an end to the fighting. The peace terms drawn up at the Peace of Prague dissolved the German Confederation and allowed Preussen to annex not only Schleswig-Holstein but also Frankfurt, Hannover, Hessen-Cassel, and Nassau. Austria promised to stay out of German affairs.
A year later, in 1867, Bismarck engineered the formation of the North German Confederation with the Preussen King Wilhelm I as its president and himself as chancellor. The North German Confederation included all the remaining independent German states except Bavaria (which included the Pfalz area west of the Rhine), Württemberg, Baden, and part of Hessen.
In 1870, Bismarck engineered his final war—the Franco-Prussian War—and it would prove to be the confirming catalyst for German unity. Bismarck was fortunate to have as an opponent the French Emperor Napoleon III (the more-style-than-substance nephew of the original). Through strategic maneuvering, Bismarck provoked France into declaring war against Preussen, which brought the southern German states to Preussen’s side in the fight. Preussen won a relatively easy victory in a matter of months, finishing off Paris after a siege. Bismarck offered the southern German states some of the concessions of the war on the condition that they agreed to be unified as part of a new German Empire. As part of the peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace and part of Lorraine—territories that had been fought over for centuries—became part of the new empire. On January 18, 1871, Preussen’s King Wilhelm was proclaimed German emperor in the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. As with the original empire, the emperor was considered “first among equals,” but Preussen was without a doubt the empire’s dominant state.
After using the “blood and iron” of wars to achieve his goals, Bismarck shifted gears to promote peace during which Germany’s economy could grow unencumbered. In 1878, at the end of a Russo-Turkish war that would have made the Ottoman Empire almost a vassal of the Russians, Bismarck called Europe together for the Congress of Berlin, which reduced the scope of Russia’s victory and created an overall balance of power that kept Europe nearly war-free until the outbreak of World War I (which Bismarck is reputed to have foreseen already in 1888: “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans”).
Map of the Second Reich
Industrialization in Germany intensified after unification. Bismarck’s conservative tendencies didn’t prevent him from undercutting the appeal of socialism by supporting old-age pensions, accident insurance, medical care, and unemployment insurance. To some degree, Bismarck’s Germany invented the modern welfare state. The paternalistic programs dampened the outflow of emigrants to America. Part of Bismarck’s modernizations included civil registrations of births, marriages, and deaths. Though the French and some German states had started this process in the mid-1800s, it didn’t become an official requirement across all of Germany until 1876.
Germany was the strongest land power on the European continent upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, but it had to fight a two-front war because Britain, France, and Russia had formed the Triple Entente alliance in the early years of the twentieth century. After four exhausting years and millions of German deaths, Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and Germany surrendered.
In the ensuing peace negotiations among the victors, Germany returned Alsace-Lorraine to France and a portion of Preussen land was ceded to a newly re-created nation of Poland. The Rheinland area was also demilitarized, and Germany was forbidden to have an army larger than what was barely able to police the nation.
Germany after World War II
The 1920s in Germany was a turbulent time. The Weimar Republic was formed as the first attempt at democratic rule in a nation that, for the most part, had never experienced anything except the class structure of monarchy and nobility. The republic kept intact many of the states of the Second Reich, and its constitution contained a nod to Germany’s authoritarian past: In times of crisis, the president was allowed to dissolve the parliament and rule by decree.
Germany experienced hyperinflation and a variety of attempted coups from both Communists and the emerging right-wing Nazi Party, and the onset of the Great Depression made the nation ripe for a leader promising to put Germans back to work and restore pride in themselves. That leader, unfortunately, turned out to be Adolf Hitler.
Hitler did indeed put many Germans back to work; his public works projects included Germany’s superb system of four- and six-lane highways known as the Autobahn. The dark side of Hitler and his Nazi Party was its notion of German superiority and racism against Jews and other minorities. As pitch black as this dark side proved to be, it has left a legacy of records for genealogists. Germans were required to prove that they were of the “Aryan race” and put together Ahnenpasse (literally, “ancestor passports”) with several generations’ names and dates. Candidates for officers of the elite (and brutal) SS corps needed to prove their non-Jewish lineage back five generations, and microfilms of these records have ended up in the U.S. National Archives.
The defeat and conquest of Germany at the end of World War II resulted in further territorial losses (East Preussen, Silesia, and most of Pommern went to either Poland or Russia after the war), and many Germans were expelled from these ceded areas. What was left of Germany was divided into zones ruled by the victors of the war. In 1949, the French, British, and Americans united their zones into what became known as West Germany, while the Russians kept their zone separate as East Germany. Russia ruled East Germany as a puppet Communist state while West Germany became a federal republic with about a dozen states (each called a Land; plural, Länder) that combined some of the historically separate states (Baden and Württemberg, for instance, became one Land as Baden-Württemberg).
West Germany also became a haven for many German-speaking people who abandoned their enclaves in Eastern Europe as the Russian Red Army advanced in the last year of World War II. Many of these people had lived in these enclaves for centuries before this displacement. Even the Sudetenland, the mostly German-speaking area of Bohemia adjacent to Germany, was stripped of its German-speaking people.
Given the Third Reich’s misuse of ancestry, genealogy became somewhat of a dirty word in Germany after World War II. Many villages, however, did keep alive projects to produce compilations, primarily from church records, of individuals named as village residents. Called an Ortsippenbuch or Dorfbuch, these books allow researchers an easier-to-read entrée into a particular village’s records.
Depending on when your German-speaking immigrants left for America, they may be close relatives or distant cousins to present-day residents of Germany. But either way, today’s Germans have a deep appreciation for today’s descendants of emigrants. They are usually accommodating of tourists coming to research their German ancestry and many villages produce collectibles oriented toward heritage tourism such as stained-glass pieces with the village crests, mugs and steins, plates and anniversary books (which are often celebrating 700th, 800th, 900th, or even a millennium since their founding).
Genealogy in today’s Germany has recovered from the bad reputation foisted upon it during the Nazi years. In contrast to America, most Germans pursuing genealogy today are men, and many of them delight not only in seeking their own ancestors but also in identifying the descendants of German immigrants around the world.