German tribes

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German tribes is a historical sociological - folklore term from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. According to this, the people of the Germans emerged from several large early medieval tribes. A distinction is made between the "old tribes" that had developed before the year 1000 and the "new tribes" that emerged after the year 1000 during the course of the East German settlement .

The continental-West Germanic language regions (excluding Langobardic ) at the time of transition from Eastern Franconia to the Holy Roman Empire (around the year 962)

This “tribal” concept is now considered to be historically imprecise and is therefore seen as a research problem. The importance of the German tribes was overestimated during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The status that should actually be assigned to them therefore requires further investigation.

Definition

The “German tribes” of the Middle Ages are currently viewed more as “peoples” in order to avoid the idea of ​​an overly “primitive” structure in politics and society. Linked to this, however, is the problem that the meaning of the Latin terminology of the early Middle Ages differs from modern translations. Today's German terms “Stamm”, “Nation” and “Volk” with the Latin equivalents gens , natio and populus were to be understood differently in their early medieval forms.

Old tribes

The list of so-called old tribes traditionally includes six "peoples" or "tribes":

tribe annotation
Bavaria The ethnogenesis of the Bavarian or Bavarian tribe was not completed until the early Middle Ages and is still controversial today. The first political unity came through the rule of the Agilolfinger , who founded the Duchy of Baiern . After the political independence 788 the Bavarians were directly subordinate to the Frankish king before 907 was the younger baierische tribal duchy, of which 976 the Duchy of Carinthia , 1156, the Duchy of Austria and finally in 1180 the Duchy of Styria were separated. The thus to today's Old Bavaria shrunken tribal duchy by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa the Wittelsbach left.
Swabia In the High Middle Ages, the south-west of Germany was organized in the tribal duchy of Swabia . Its inhabitants were the descendants of the Alemanni , who came under the influence of the Franconian Empire around 500 after the Battle of Zülpich . From 1098 to 1218 the Zähringer duchy was in fact separated from the Swabian duchy. With the death of Konradin in 1268, the tribal duchy of Swabia was extinct.
Francs The Franks in the sense of a German tribe are an ethnogenetic problem. The empire-building people of the Franks had already given their name to the area of ​​the tribal duchy of Franconia in the High Middle Ages , although this area was only "franked" late. The actual core areas of the Franks were organized in the Duchy of Lorraine at the time of the High Middle Ages , which at that time was much more extensive than today's French region of Lorraine , in which this name ultimately remained through the successor duchy of Upper Lorraine . Based on the short-lived high medieval tribal duchy of Franconia , the feeling of belonging to the "Franconians" has narrowed to today's Franconia region , whereas the inhabitants of Hesse (in the early Middle Ages still the Chatten ), the Rhineland ( Rhine Franconia ), the Palatinate and the Saarland hardly differed have retained whatever kind of Frankish tribal consciousness.
Thuringian The Thuringians first appeared at the end of the 4th century and settled parts of what is now Central Germany . In 531 the Thuringians were subjugated by the Franks . In contrast to other German tribes, the Thuringians did not develop an independent tribal duchy at the beginning of the 10th century. Only under the Ludowingians in 1131 was a political consolidation in the form of the Landgraviate of Thuringia .
Saxony The Saxons , whose settlement areas were in today's federal states of Lower Saxony , Westphalia , Saxony-Anhalt and Holstein in the Middle Ages , were only unified through the integration into the Franconian Empire and Christianization. In the High Middle Ages, the ethnic group was politically organized in the tribal duchy of Saxony .
Friezes After the West Frisians had already come under Frankish rule under Karl Martell , his grandson Charlemagne conquered all of Friesland in 785. The Frisians were able to play a special role in the Middle Ages with the help of the Frisian freedom granted to them .

With the disempowerment of Henry the Lion in 1180, the decline of the tribal duchies began, which became clear with the end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty . The territorialization of the Roman-German Empire , which had been unmistakable since the middle of the 13th century at the latest , pushed the concept of tribal increasingly into the background, but never made it disappear entirely. In particular in the Bavarian Duchy of the Wittelsbachers a strong Bavarian tribal consciousness was cultivated, which lives on until the present in the term " Old Bavaria ".

Despite the greatest territorial fragmentation, the Swabians also demonstrated a certain sense of togetherness in the form of the late medieval Swabian League of Cities or the Early Modern Swabian League . Since the imperial reform in 1495 and the establishment of imperial circles that were decided upon at the subsequent imperial diets, old tribal names reappeared in their designations, for example in the Bavarian Empire , the Swabian Empire , the Franconian Empire and the Lower Saxony Empire .

New tribes

A list of the so-called “new tribes”, which does not claim to be exhaustive, is even more problematic than the German “old tribes”: Märker , Lausitzer , Mecklenburg , Upper Saxony , Pomerania , Silesians and East Prussia are often mentioned in this context.

Mentioning the Austrians seems particularly problematic, since the German-speaking areas of Austria extend both over old Bavarian and in Vorarlberg over old Swabian (or Alemannic) tribal areas. In recent times, the term Austrian nation may have played a greater role for Austrians than the idea of ​​German tribal affiliation. The concept of the “new tribes” reaches its limits, especially during the time of National Socialism, where Germans abroad were mentioned, including the Baltic Germans , the Sudeten Germans , the Danube Swabians , the Transylvanian Saxons and the Volga Germans .

In 1880, Theodor Mommsen, in his pamphlet Also a Word about Our Judaism , pleaded for German Jews to be included in the German tribes and not to exclude a single German tribe from the unity of Germany, but this proposal was not able to prevail. As a result of the loss of the eastern territories of the German Reich after the Second World War and the associated expulsion of the German population previously living there, many members of the so-called "new tribes", in particular the East Prussians, Pomerania and Silesia, were transferred to the territory of the old Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR scattered.

Word usage since 1800

The idea of ​​a “German people” made up of “German tribes” emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1808 Karl Friedrich Eichhorn had spoken of the "German peoples" in his German state and legal history . The literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries then used the term “German tribes” as a matter of course. In 1810 Johann Gottfried Seume wrote that hatred and division reigned in the German tribes and that only unity could avert the ruin of the German people.

Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann also conjured up the unity of the German people “in their tribes” in his 1815 Waterloo speech . On April 28, 1919, Reich President Friedrich Ebert gave a speech in Stuttgart in which he found the following words with regard to the tendency towards centralization of the German Reich after the First World War : “The unification of the Reich and the preservation of tribal characteristics in our German districts are in and of itself no opposites. They can very well be united. ”The Weimar constitution of 1919 begins with the words:“ The German people, united in their tribes and inspired by the will to renew and consolidate their empire ”.

The Nazi modified the theory of German tribes according to his racial theory and demanded as part of its anti-Semitic policy after 1933 - first by officials and later by broad sections of the population - an " Aryan certificate ". Since members of the Jewish religion were not counted among the “German tribes”, those affected had to prove by means of Christian baptism and marriage certificates that their parents and grandparents - for SS members dating back to 1800 or even 1750 - were not Jews. The Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 stipulated that “German or related blood” was required to have “full political rights ” in the German Reich .

In 1935, Carl Erdmann referred to the Bavarian , Swabian , Franconian , Thuringian , Saxon and Frisian tribes as the German tribes that together formed the German people.

In 1985, the historian Hans Kurt Schulze stated that the German people had grown up on the basis of tribes which, although they had lost importance as political, organizational and legal associations in the course of the Middle Ages, but despite great changes as ethnic groups within the German nation have been preserved. Today's historical science still uses the term “German tribes”. However, each of these so-called tribes is a special case that should be critically examined with regard to ethnogenesis . In his work Germany - France: The Birth of Two Peoples , Carlrichard Brühl spoke of peoples rather than tribes in 1995.

The division of the German and Dutch dialect groups often follows names that correspond to the names of the German tribes. Traditionally, Franconian , Alemannic , Thuringian , Bavarian and Lower Saxony language and dialect groups are distinguished.

In his popular book Education. Everything you need to know from 1999, the author Dietrich Schwanitz lists the six German tribes including the Frisians. In contrast, the term has hardly been used in political parlance since 1945. Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are an exception here . In Bavaria the term "Bavarian tribes" is used to refer to the three parts of the country: Altbaiern , Franconia and Swabia . Across the board, residents of Baden-Württemberg are commonly referred to as Swabians . Because of the large number of 2 million Sudeten German war expellees who were taken in, patronage over the Sudeten German ethnic group as the "fourth tribe of Bavaria" was certified by the Free State of Bavaria in 1962 .

See also

literature

  • Josef Nadler : literary history of the German tribes and landscapes .
    • Vol. 2: The new tribes from 1300, the old tribes 1600–1780 , Regensburg, 1913
    • Vol. 3: High flowering of the old tribes up to 1805 and the new tribes up to 1800 , Regensburg, 1918
  • Reinhard Schmoeckel : Before Germany existed . Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2002, ISBN 3-404-64188-4 .
  • Werner Besch, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann, Stefan Sonderegger: Language history: a handbook on the history of the German language and its research . 2nd edition, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2003 [1] .
  • Hans-Werner Goetz: The "German tribes" as a research problem . In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer, Dietrich Hakelberg (eds.): On the history of the equation "Germanic-German" . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, pp. 229-253 ( online ).
  • Till van Rahden: "Germans of the Jewish Stamm". Visions of Community between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850 to 1933. In: Mark Roseman, Nils Roemer u. Neil Gregor ed., German History from the Margins, 1800 to the Present. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006, pp. 27-48.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Werner Goetz: The "German tribes" as a research problem . In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer, Dietrich Hakelberg (eds.): On the history of the equation "Germanic-German" . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, pp. 229–253 ( online ), here p. 247.
  2. ↑ Hans-Werner Goetz: The "German tribes" as a research problem . In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer, Dietrich Hakelberg (eds.): On the history of the equation "Germanic-German" . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, pp. 229–253 ( online ), here p. 231.
  3. ↑ Cf. for example Carl Erdmann: Der Name Deutsch. In: Charlemagne or Charlemagne? Eight answers from German historians . Berlin 1935, pp. 94-105.
  4. ↑ Hans-Werner Goetz: The "German tribes" as a research problem . In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer, Dietrich Hakelberg (eds.): On the history of the equation "Germanic-German" . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, pp. 229–253 ( online ), here p. 235.
  5. ↑ Hans-Werner Goetz: The "German tribes" as a research problem . In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer, Dietrich Hakelberg (eds.): On the history of the equation "Germanic-German" . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, pp. 229–253 ( online ), here p. 235.
  6. ↑ See also Berlin anti-Semitism dispute .
  7. ↑ Johann Gottfried Seume: To the German people in 1810 : “[…] | Hatred and division reign in our tribes, | Only unity can restrain ruin. | [...] ".
  8. ^ Karl Moersch, Peter Hölzle: Counterpoint Baden-Württemberg . DRW Verlag, Leinfelden-Echterdingen 2002, p. 35.
  9. ↑ § 2 Paragraph 1 and 3, Reich Citizenship Law. 15 September 1935 . On: documentarchiv.de.
  10. ^ Carl Erdmann: The name German. In: Charlemagne or Charlemagne? Eight answers from German historians . Berlin 1935, pp. 94-105.
  11. ↑ Hans Kurt Schulze: Basic structures of the constitution in the Middle Ages . Volume 1: tribe, allegiance, feudal system, manor. Urban-Taschenbuch, Stuttgart 1985, p. 37.
  12. ↑ Hans-Werner Goetz: The "German tribes" as a research problem . In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer, Dietrich Hakelberg (eds.): On the history of the equation "Germanic-German" . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, pp. 229–253 ( online ), here p. 238.
  13. ^ Carlrichard Brühl: Germany - France: the birth of two peoples . 2nd edition, Cologne [ua] 1995, p. 243ff.
  14. ^ Dietrich Schwanitz: Education. Everything you need to know . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-442-15147-3 .
  15. ↑ Bavaria's "four tribes" on the homepage of the state government ( online )