A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People

by Steven Ozment

Overview

The word "German" was being used by the Romans as early as the mid–first century B.C. to describe tribes in the eastern Rhine valley. Nearly two thousand years later, the richness and complexity of German history have faded beneath the long shadow of the country's darkest hour in World War II. Now, award-winning historian Steven Ozment, whom The New Yorker has hailed as "a splendidly readable scholar," gives us the fullest portrait possible in this sweeping, original, and provocative history of the German people, from antiquity to the present, holding a mirror up to an entire civilization — one that has been alternately Western Europe's most successful and most perilous.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060934835
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/18/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	447,741
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Steven Ozment is McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University and the author of The Bürgermeister's Daughter; Flesh and Spirit; Ancestors; Protestants; and The Age of Reform, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Schaff History Prize. He lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

A Mighty Fortress

A New History of the German People

---

By Ozment, Steven E.

HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN: 0066209250

---

The Barbarian Complex

Roman-German Relations in Antiquity

Germanic tribes established themselves in the eastern Rhine valley by the mid–first century B.C., by which time the term "German" (Germani, Germania) was used by the Romans. At this time the tribes were neither racially uniform nor transregionally united but composites, "loose and shifting amalgams of peoples," who formed no coherent Germanic front. Quickly settling, they lived within, or along the borders of, the Roman Empire by agreement with the Romans, swapping their services as soldiers, farmers, and tax collectors for land and security. Of these tribes the Franks, Goths, and Lombards developed historical identities by allying with leading, or royal, families and embracing their genealogical myths.

In these centuries non-Germanic tribes shared a similar barbarian experience within the Roman Empire, which casts light on the Germanic. From the start polyethnic tribes, Germanic and non-, demonstrated an ability to accommodate and incorporate the ancient Roman and Byzantine worlds. Roughly five centuries after their appearance, Romanized and Christianized Germanic tribes would raise a new, middle European empire and culture from the ashes of the old Roman one. Between the rule of the Merovingian Frank Clovis in the late fifth and early sixth centuries and that of the Saxon Conrad in the early tenth, Germanic cultures melded with Greco-Roman, Roman Christian, and Byzantine to create the Western Europe we know today.

Romanizing Germans

A trail begins in 113 B.C., when a Germanic tribe, the Cimbri, crossed the Roman frontier of Noricum, modern Austria, in a typically frustrated tribal search for food and land, and for the first time confronted and defeated a Roman army. Four years later, in 109 B.C., the same tribe, joined by another, the Teutones, appeared in southern Gaul and vanquished a major Roman army sent to turn them back. In 105 B.C. the tribes returned in still greater numbers, this time defeating two consular armies in one of ancient Rome's great military losses. By this point the Romans respected the threat of the barbarians probing their frontiers and sent a powerful new army to beat them.

Among the early observers of the tribes when the migrations resumed was Julius Caesar, the recent conqueror of Gaul, who described their governance as informal and inconsistent, their society communal and egalitarian, their military tactics haphazard and "ignoble," the latter a reference to their ability to "compose" on the battlefield (that is, surprise and ambush). The tribes were ruled by "leading men" (in West German dialect, kuning, "leaders of the family"), whom the Romans variously called principes, duces, and reges. Chosen by an assembly of noble and common warriors (the tribal host), only the most outstanding men, as determined by royal birth, family service, and exceptional valor, might hold that exalted position.

Insinuation and Rebellion

Over the last decades of the old millennium and the first of the new Christian Era, the Romans diminished the threat the tribes posed by brutally punishing their forays and finding ways to divide and coopt them. Among the latter were simple human temptations. For stretches up to perhaps thirty miles on either side of the Roman frontier, Roman and Germanic people mixed regularly with one another. Roman language, culture, and politics came to the tribes on the wheels of trading carts, as Germans exchanged cattle and slaves (the booty of battle with foreign tribes) for Roman bronzes, glassware, and furs. Before contact with the Romans, tribal leaders ruled more by persuasion than by coercion and maintained social peace by equitable divisions of land and wealth within the tribe. The new wealth gained from trade with the Romans worked to stratify tribal society, setting new rich against poor and encouraging disproportionate divisions of tribal land. Rome's autocratic government and senatorial lifestyle also impressed future tribal leaders, many of whom were educated in Rome.

Another obstructive Roman tactic was to encourage intertribal conflict, to which the tribes were already predisposed. In the eyes of their enemies, the barbarians' great strength was also a great weakness—namely, their lip-smacking taste for battle, which Tacitus, with some exaggeration, described as "a reluctance to accumulate slowly by sweat ... what could be gotten quickly by the loss of a little blood." That warrior spirit turned the tribes against one another before the Romans interfered, creating intertribal fissures for their enemies to probe. Over time, devotion to factional leaders rather than to duly elected ones, and the placement of group gain over tribal welfare, created freelancing retinues within the tribes. These were tight-knit gangs that gained superior status by raiding neighboring tribes for cattle, slaves, and other wealth-producing loot. Their victims retaliated against the tribe as a whole, adding foreign aggression to the internal disruptions caused by the retinues. Such native anarchy and tyranny also gave the Romans a foothold within the tribes, allowing them to bypass the protective order of leading men and warrior assemblies.

Finally the Romans sought to have their way with the tribes by transplanting the sons of leading men to Rome, where, to their material benefit, they grew up as Romans. Such transplantation was both by invitation and by hostage taking. Selected elite barbarians were in this way Romanized, many thereafter residing in Rome for the remainder of their lives, while others returned to their homelands as assimilated servants of the Roman Empire. It would be too much to call these repatriated tribesmen brainwashed, since as a rule they served the Roman Empire willingly, gaining new land and wealth for themselves while continuing to enjoy membership in the cosmopolitan Roman world. Where these pro-Roman chieftains survived their tribal enemies, they also helped make the barbarian world less threatening to Romans. As a result of such tactics and measures, most barbarians, Germanic and non-, living along or within the Roman frontiers, chose service over challenge before the fourth century ...

Continues...

---

Excerpted from A Mighty Fortress by Ozment, Steven E. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

	List of Maps	xi
	Introduction: Looking for the Good German	1
I	From First Tribes to First Empire
1	The Barbarian Complex: Roman-German Relations in Antiquity	17
2	From Merovingians to Hohenstaufens: Germanic Rule in the Middle Ages	35
II	The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
3	Man and God: Germany in the Renaissance and Reformation	65
4	Europe's Stomping Ground: Germany During the Thirty Years' War	107
5	Enemy Mine: Absolutism and the Rise of Prussia	125
III	Enlightenment, Reaction, and a New Age
6	Trojan Horses: From the French to the German Revolution	147
7	Absolute Spirit and Absolute People: The Intellectual Torrents of the Nineteenth Century	179
8	Revolutionary Conservatism: The Age of Bismarck	203
IV	Germans in the Modern World
9	The Last Empire: From Wilhelmine to Weimar Germany	227
10	The Barbarian Prince: The Rise and Fall of National Socialism	255
11	The Composite German: Germany Since World War II	289
	Notes	327
	Index	385

Editorial Reviews

Readable and absorbing. An enjoyable and well-done work that is ideal for the general reader.” — Booklist

“Brilliant. A highly stimulating book and a pleasure to read, combining serious scholarship with verve and good storytelling.” — The Washington Times

“Clever and fascinating.” — The Chicago Tribune

“Insightful. . . . Persuasive. . . . Remarkable.” — First Things

“A masterly synthesis. (It) fizzes with bold hypotheses and subtle allusions. A heroic feat of scholarship.” — The New Criterion

From the Publisher

Clever and fascinating.

The Chicago Tribune

Brilliant. A highly stimulating book and a pleasure to read, combining serious scholarship with verve and good storytelling.

The Washington Times

Insightful. . . . Persuasive. . . . Remarkable.

First Things

Readable and absorbing. An enjoyable and well-done work that is ideal for the general reader.

Booklist

A masterly synthesis. (It) fizzes with bold hypotheses and subtle allusions. A heroic feat of scholarship.

The New Criterion

Readable and absorbing. An enjoyable and well-done work that is ideal for the general reader.

Booklist

It takes erudition and verve to attempt a history that covers the life of a controversial people over two millennia. Harvard historian Ozment has plenty of both, yet the result is oddly unsatisfactory. Ozment (The Burgermeister's Daughter, etc.) quickly and wisely dismisses any notion that a history of Germany must be focused on the Third Reich. Instead, the travails of political disunity serve as his narrative anchor. Neither the ancient Germanic tribes nor their medieval and early modern successors could forge any long-lasting unity. Only under Bismarck did a unified political entity emerge, and it soon succumbed to visions of grandeur that resulted in two world wars and a Holocaust, renewed territorial losses and political divisions. Ozment's focus on disunity provides narrative coherence to a long, contentious and complex history, but the costs are huge. Particularly the early chapters read like "one damned thing after another" as a succession of tribal leaders, princes, kings and emperors march across the pages. So many important issues that might grasp a reader's interest are left out. There is nary a mention of economics, legal and social practices among the Germanic tribes, of women and working life. When discussing the Nazi worldview, the author has an unfortunate tendency to equate Jews and Christians as Nazi targets. It is certainly true that the Nazis were deeply anti-Christian, but the Jews were singled out for total physical annihilation. Ultimately, Ozment does not provide a history of the German people, but a tale of their rulers and a few leading intellectuals. 8 pages of b&w photos, maps not seen by PW. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The aim of this sweeping new history of Germany is to examine the whole of the German experience instead of dwelling on the dark aberration of the Third Reich. Ozment (ancient & modern history, Harvard) has authored several important works on German history, but this new book may stand as his chief legacy. In a concise and readable manner, he surveys 2000 years of German civilization, from ancient and barbarian times through the present, highlighting key political and cultural personalities along the way to add life to what could have been just a dry overview. A central theme for Ozment is that "Germans have embraced ideals of order and authority without totalitarianism, and pursued freedom and equality without liberal democracy." Their historical experience has made them more wary of anarchy rather than tyranny, and so they have relied on "good order" and discipline to guide their politics throughout the centuries. Ozment regards the Weimar Republic and National Socialism periods as "novel experiments" that must be viewed in light of the long course of German history. Both provocative and accessible, this work will have wide appeal. The final chapter, "The Composite German," which covers Germany since World War II, would be ideal for comparative government courses at the college level. Recommended for most libraries. Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Can a more than 2000-year-old civilization be defined by its last 150 years?" The answer here appears to be a qualified yes. German history stretches into deep antiquity, writes Ozment (History/Harvard Univ.; Ancestors, 2001, etc.), though it properly fragments into tribal subcategories: the history of the Ostrogoths is not necessarily that of the Franks, the latter the subject of an uncomfortable truth-namely, that France and Germany share common ancestors in a "common barbarian past." (A French scholar who pointed this out was sentenced to jail time in his homeland.) Why, then, do the French not speak German? Perhaps because, as Ozment observes, "By the standards of the ancient world, the Germanic tribes were magnanimous in triumph, allowing Roman language, law, government, and religion-Roman Christianity-to shape medieval Europe." Ozment's survey of German history packs a vast amount of information into a comparatively few number of pages, and it hits on all the expected high points: Charlemagne's empire, the Reformation, Frederick the Great's enlightened regime, the Bismarckian union of duchies, principalities, and free states to form modern Germany, while giving plenty of weight to the darker episodes, particularly the 12-year rule of Hitler. Can all of these historical data, and particularly those of more recent vintage, be used to construct a psychobiography of the German people, as so many have tried to do before? Ozment initially resists the idea, writing, "Germans are among the most difficult Europeans to fathom and the one European people without whom the story of that civilization cannot intelligibly be told." Yet by the end of this well-told overview, he is comfortable inwriting that the "present-day German is five persons in one, three of whom remain ineradicably German" and in hazarding the opinion that Germans of the future will be, if the past is a reliable guide, less given to individualism and more inclined to order, leading to "a tighter democracy by comparison with that of today." A useful and welcome survey, though some may take issue with Ozment's generalizations. Agency: Writer's Representatives

Kirkus Reviews