Germany and the Germans | Page 2

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.