German British

George Frideric Handel spent most of his adult life in England and became a British citizen by parliamentary resolution.

As German British German immigrants and their descendants in are the United Kingdom , respectively. Today many Germans live in the UK, many Brits have German roots, including the royal family .

history

The Anglo-Saxons were the first Germans to settle in the British Isles around 440. The term "England" ( land of fishing ) is derived from the Anglo-Saxons, a tribe from today's Germany . Gradually, the Old English language evolved from the Anglo-Saxon dialects.

German Hanseatic merchants came to the country in the Middle Ages . In the sixteenth century, numerous Protestants fled the Holy Roman Empire as a result of post-Reformation religious wars. A significant German congregation had formed in Great Britain by the late seventeenth century. It was mostly made up of businessmen, confectioners and other economic migrants from Hamburg.

From 1709 to 1710, thousands of Germans emigrated from the Electoral Palatinate to England. For one winter they had to endure the consequences of the French invasion and, among other things, a radical policy of recatholization. Queen Anne's government had invited the refugees to settle within the British Empire. They came to London first . Some stayed in the London area, but the majority were forwarded, including a. to Ireland and the North American colonies .

In 1714 Duke Georg zu Braunschweig-Lüneburg ascended the British throne, with which he founded the House of Hanover . Each subsequent monarch married a German. Only Edward VII married a Danish princess of German origin; his son, who later became Georg V , married a German again. The British royal family kept the name "Saxe-Coburg and Gotha" until 1917. In the First World War , King George V reacted by renaming his house to "Windsor" and renouncing all German titles to the fact that the royal family was receiving support due to anti-German sentiments lost.

During the time of National Socialism , numerous German Jews fled to the United Kingdom, for example Sigmund Freud , Max Born , Nikolaus Pevsner or Julius Posener . While some of them went back to Germany after the end of the Second World War , others stayed there, such as the members of the Freud family.

Eminent Germans in the British Isles

• Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861), Prince Consort of Queen Victoria
• Mathilde Blind (1841-1896), writer
• Clement Freud (1924–2009), writer and journalist
• Lucian Freud (1922–2011), painter
• George I (1660–1727), British king
• Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759), Baroque composer
• Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), Renaissance painter
• Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), portrait painter
• Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983), art historian
• Nathan Mayer Rothschild (banker) , banker

Population and composition

The United Kingdom Census 2001 put the number of Germans in the United Kingdom at 266,136. This makes the Germans the fourth largest group of foreigners after the Irish, Indians and Pakistanis.

Web link

• German-British Society

Footnotes

1. ^ England Oxford English Dictionary
2. ↑ Die Hanse und England , Walter Stein, 1905 , available at www.lexikus.de, accessed on February 8, 2016.
3. ↑ See mass emigration of the Palatinate (1709)
4. ↑ See House of Windsor
5. ↑ See George V (United Kingdom)
6. ↑ Exodus , Elke-Vera Kotowski in: Information sheet of the Central Council of Jews in Germany , Volume 13, No. 4, April 26, 2013, accessed on February 8, 2016
7. ^ Country-of-birth database. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development , accessed September 13, 2014 .