Rhineland

This article covers historical parts of Germany on the Rhine. For the meaning of the word Rhineland, see Rhineland (disambiguation) .

Rhineland is a 19th century expression for territories on the Rhine that are not understood uniformly or are not clearly defined . This is not a synonym for the Rhineland , although the word may sound like that in an elevated literary language variant and is also used reduced to this heartland. Until the end of the 18th century, the term “Rhineland” was not used for the region in the area of ​​the Rhine, and this also applies to the “Rhineland”. Since the middle of the 20th century, apart from historians, the term “Rhineland” has rarely been used in general. The Duden is under the "Rhineland" the unofficial name for the former Prussian Rhine province and performs under the word Rhineland historic "settlement areas of the franc on both sides of the Rhine" at.

The Rhineland is thus an expression for a territorial area that, from the beginning of the 19th century, according to historians, primarily applies to the former ruled areas in the area of ​​the Middle and Lower Rhine . These Rhineland were mainly combined to form the Prussian Rhine Province and relate to historical dominant areas that lay on both sides of the Rhine between Kleve and Bingen between 1822 and 1945 . The Rhineland is thus an alternative settlement and cultural-historical term coined in the Prussian era, which, politically motivated, has to fall back on a much older period in order to demonstrate the unity of the Rhine regions on the basis of a “community of feeling and people”.

Settlement areas of the Franks

Central Europe in the early Middle Ages.

This definition is based on the original Franconian settlement centers on the Lower Rhine ( Salfranken ) and Middle Rhine ( Rheinfranken = Francia rhinensis or Ripuarian Franks). Since the 3rd century AD, the Franks were traceable for the first time in history and can be proven with sources. A sharp demarcation of their settlement areas is not possible at this early stage. The Frisians lived to the north and west of the area around Kleve , the Saxons , Chatti and Thuringians sat east of the Rhine, the Alemanni settled south of Mainz and west of the Middle Rhine were the slowly decaying retreat structures of the Gallo-Roman culture .

The unification of the Franconian tribes with the elimination of the Rhine-Franconian monarchy with the former center in Cologne, the expansion to the west and conquest of Gaul and the establishment of the Merovingian Empire came from the Salfranken under Clovis I. During this time, the center of gravity of the Frankish Empire shifted to the west, and the former core areas on the Rhine became the peripheral zone. To the west of the Middle Rhine , the Franconian language prevailed up to a line that still constitutes the linguistic border between the German and French languages. to the west of it the Franks were Romanized, and these Romanized areas are not counted among the Rhineland.

The empire of the Carolingians under Charlemagne

Another original area of ​​the Franks lay east of the Middle Rhine and north of the Main line, after the subjugation of the Thuringians and Chatten to the Werra and Fulda as well as into the Rhön (i.e. including large parts of today's Hesse ), which was already connected in the 6th century and under Pippin the Middle expanded to the southeast into what is now Franconia. This area, which extends far to the east and Main Franconia south of the Main, is not part of the Rhineland. North to about a height of Bonn, the Saxons advanced so far to the west in the 6th century that only a narrow Franconian strip remained on the right bank of the Lower Rhine during the Merovingian era, which was considered unsecured terrain, so that the connection of the Lower Rhine areas on the right bank of the Rhine the Frankish Reichsverband was only loose.

Under the Carolingians, the entire Rhine from the source to the mouth lay within the Frankish Empire . The Alemanni and Frisians had voluntarily subordinated themselves to the Frankish Empire at the time of Charlemagne, while the Saxons had been subjugated by force. Since Charlemagne chose Aachen as his main residence , the center of the empire shifted back to the areas on the Rhine. In addition, the Christianization that had already begun in the Merovingian era was reinforced by founding monasteries, starting from the archbishopric of Cologne , Mainz and Trier . This completed the spread of Christianity in the area between the Meuse , Moselle and Rhine . Furthermore, this area also became one of the cultural centers of the Franconian Empire, which was again in the original settlement areas in areas of the Rhine.

The division of territory in the Treaty of Meerssen 870

When the Carolingian Empire was divided up after the death of "Charlemagne", the core area ( Austrasia ) , which was largely populated by Franks from the end of the 3rd and 4th centuries, was assigned to the Middle Kingdom of Lothar I in the Verdun Treaty of Partition (843) . In the Treaty of Meersen (870), however, the north-eastern area of ​​this "Middle Kingdom" was taken over again by Eastern Franconia and the old settlement area of ​​the Franks was largely reunited under the German King Ludwig . However, over the centuries until the 20th century there was a constant conflict of interest between France and Germany over the political affiliation of many of these areas on the left bank of the Rhine.

The population structure in the early Middle Ages at the time of the Carolingians is shown above. In the High Middle Ages , the Franconian settlement areas in the area of ​​the Rhine belonged almost entirely to the three archbishoprics of Cologne, Mainz and Trier. With the suffragan dioceses of Liège and Utrecht, Cologne was mainly responsible for the Franconian areas north of the Moselle area, which are currently known as the Rhineland east of the Meuse. The Archdiocese of Trier, part of the Duchy of Lorraine at that time, comprised the Moselle area and all other southern suffragan dioceses in this duchy, while the Archdiocese of Mainz included the southern areas of today's Upper Rhine with the suffragan dioceses of Strasbourg , Speyer and Worms .

The main focus of the dominion for the Archdiocese of Cologne were large areas on the left bank of the Rhine populated by Franconians, while on the right bank of the Rhine north of the Main confluence with the Rhine only a relatively narrow strip was part of the historical Franconian settlement area. Due to the strong territorial fragmentation, which began especially after the High Middle Ages with the then clearly lower secular power base for the German emperors and the archbishops (later the prince-bishops ), there was no historically grown political unit of these countries on the Rhine over the centuries. To make matters worse, up to the beginning of the 19th century, local rulers in this area often allied with France for a time in order to gain territorial advantages for their ruling house.

Church provinces and bishops in Central Europe around 1500

Origin of name

The word “Lande” as the plural of “ Land ”, which appears antiquated and literary in the parlance of the 21st century, is at the same time a historicizing one, cf. Country (historical) . It was originally applied to the House of Burgundy in the early 15th century . There the Lower Lands (i.e. Flanders , Brabant , Holland and Luxembourg ) are distinguished from the Upper Lands (i.e. the Burgundian heartland of today's Franche-Comté ).

The Prussian linguistic usage knows the term "Lande" in other geographical contexts, such as the Hohenzollernsche Lande and the "Lande between Rhine and Maas". The latter relate to four of the French revolution armies to 1794 in the coalition wars established "department Réunis" (i. E. The Saar department , the Donnerberg department , the Rur department and the Rhine and Mosel department ), the front of the Congress of Vienna to the collapse of the empire under Napoleon.

A transfer of the "land" term to the Rhine regions north of the Palatinate can only be proven from the beginning of the 19th century. After the Congress of Vienna, the areas on the left bank of the Rhine north of Alsace-Lorraine with Rheinhessen were annexed to the Grand Duchy of Hesse , the Palatinate to the Kingdom of Bavaria and all other Rhine areas to Prussia . Of these now Prussian areas, only the former Duchy of Kleve , the County of Moers and areas of the "Upper Quatier of the Duchy of Geldern " belonged to Prussia before the beginning of the 19th century . New acquisitions were the dissolved Duchy of Jülich-Berg , all areas of the Archdiocese of Cologne and the Archdiocese of Trier . All these Prussian "west lands" that were on or in the area of ​​the Rhine were combined in 1822 to form the Rhine Province . Synonyms for this territory, which until 1945 also existed within the unified German Empire, are Rhineland , Rhine Prussia or Prussian Rhineland .

The amalgamation of individual territories that had existed since the Middle Ages via the preliminary stages of the Grand Duchy of Lower Rhine and the Province of Jülich-Kleve-Berg in 1822 to form the Rhine Province therefore initially turned out to be an artificial step. By the Prussians Prussian region on the Rhine were still "Rhine province as to about 1,830 s called" made them the land on the Rhine . For example, in 1828 "the Rhine provinces" were invited to the provincial assembly. It was only after 1830 that the previous provinces of the Rhineland became the "unified" Rhine province .

In the course of the following century up to the Weimar Republic, the Rhineland became a cultural area with common roots, motivated by efforts to demarcate France, which claimed the Rhine as a “natural eastern border”, on the one hand, and Prussia on the other, from different perspectives by writers and philosophers and historians discovered and created. Depending on the political situation, the term is sometimes broadly and sometimes narrowly interpreted in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic. In the process, myths and facts are often blurred, so that even today the Rhineland as a cultural identity is very difficult to grasp and define.

As criteria for the cohesion of the "Rhineland" as the "Franconian section of the river basin of the Rhine" (Martin Spahn), various historians of the Weimar Republic place the adherence to Catholicism, a liberal mindset and distance from Prussia, the river as a road and the road with it formed associated economic area.

Use of the designation Rhineland

The former more frequent use of the designation Rhineland under the Prussians from 1815 and after 1871 also in the Empire is currently largely only used to a limited extent by historians. An example of the earlier use is the first travel guide about the "Rhineland" by Karl Baedeker in its first edition from 1854. This also referred to the area from Basel on the Upper Rhine to the Dutch border near Kleve. Another example is the cultural magazine Die Rheinlande , whose publisher was the writer Wilhelm Schäfer until 1905 and then the Association of Art Friends in the countries on the Rhine . This magazine - sideline monthly for German art - appeared from October 1900 to 1922. Schäfer understood its title as programmatic. All countries “on the Rhine” were understood as part of a cultural area of ​​the Rhineland. With the magazine he wanted to get to the bottom of the cultural characteristics of the Rhineland, which he understood primarily as a cultural landscape or cultural area, and to "rediscover" its art.

Today the areas on the Upper Rhine are no longer counted as part of the Rhineland. A common interpretation of the "Rhenish" from the settlement and art-historical point of view now refers to the areas between the Meuse as the western border, the Moselle as the southern border and the Rhine as the eastern border. This limitation is also used by the Reclams art guide "Rheinlande - Westfalen", 1959 edition. Disregarding Rheinhessen , which is also included, a holistic record of the monuments on both sides of the Rhine from around Mainz is made.

The "Institute for historical regional studies of the Rhineland" founded by Hermann Aubin in 1920 at the University of Bonn , which was co-financed by the Prussian Rhine Province from 1925, originally had the political background to defend against French claims based on regional history, church history, everyday history, social and linguistic community structures to explore overlapping areas on the Rhine. The institute was dissolved after 1945, but there is currently still the “Department of Rhenish Regional History” at the university. The research topics have changed little to this day, but today, free of ideological constraints, they concentrate on a core region of the Rhine from Koblenz to Düsseldorf , including the Eifel . Furthermore, in 1925, an "Association of the historical regional studies of the Rhineland" was founded, which is still active today.

A typical example of the current use of the expression "Rhineland" is the Historical Atlas of the Rhineland . Its predecessor, the "Historical Atlas of the Rhine Province" under Wilhelm Fabricius from 1897, already had the Prussian Rhineland as its spatial content. With reference to the various historical domains, the Rhineland, map sheets and additional extensive works by various authors on the cultural area were created for this area with the support of the Gesellschaft für Rheinische Geschichtskunde and the Landschaftsverband Rheinland for the area in the area of ​​the Rhine from the beginning of the 1980s published on both sides of the Rhine between the Dutch border and south to the Rhine Palatinate . The key points for the map sheets are Millingen van de Rijn / NL to Oelde in Westphalia in the north and Thionville / F on the Moselle to Lambrecht in the Palatinate in the south .

There are now extensive additional historical studies and elaborations on the maps of the Rhenish territories: Berg, Geldern, Kleve and Kurköln , while there are even larger gaps for Jülich and Kurtrier . The most diverse aspects were examined (e.g. settlement and language history, cultural geography, pre-Romanesque church buildings, Jewish settlement in the Middle Ages, population development from the Congress of Vienna to the present day and many other topics). These more recent contributions in the field of education and culture and their development in the Rhineland include the contributions by Andreas Rutz and Kurt Wesoly, which include sources on the designation "Rhineland".

A more recent list of “Articles in Journals and Collected Works up to 1915” was published in 2010 on the “History of the Rhineland”.

literature

Book cover of Die Rheinlande in Farbenphotographie , Berlin and Cologne 1921

• Contributions to the statistics of the Royal Prussian Rhineland . Mayer, Aachen 1829, digitized version (ULB Düsseldorf).
• Max Bär : Books about the history of the Rhineland. Bonn 1920, digitized version (ULB Düsseldorf).
• Sabine Brenner (Sabine Brenner-Wilczek): Awaken the Rhineland from its slumber! To the profile of the cultural magazine »Die Rheinlande« (1900–1922). Vol. 10 of the series “Archive - Library - Museum” of the Heinrich Heine Institute, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-89978-022-1 .
• Ludwig Mathar : The Carolingians in the lands between the Meuse, Moselle and Rhine. A historical overview . In: Eifel calendar. Stollfuß, Bonn 1943, p. 32.
• Rhenish images of life. Society for Rhenish History. Droste, Düsseldorf 1961–1988. 11 volumes published.
• Edmund Renard (the younger) (as editor): The Rhineland in color photography (= Germany in color photography, volumes 6 and 7). Publishing house for color photography Carl Weller, Berlin 1921, 1922

Web links

• Historical Atlas of the Rhineland
• Society for Rhenish History

Individual evidence

1. ^ Joseph Hansen, in: Rheinland und Rheinländer , 1925, Koblenz, p. 9. Online version, Rheinland und Rheinländer
2. ^ Duden Volume I, Bibliographisches Institut Mannheim, Vienna, Zurich, Dudenverlag, 24th edition, March 2006, p. 853 and previous editions
3. ^ Wilhelm Janssen, in: Rhineland - Concept and thing , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, p. 33. Online version
4. ^ Wilhelm Janssen, in: Rhineland - Concept and thing , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, pp. 31 to 42. Online version
5. ^ "Baedeker" travel guide, edition: 1854, From Basel on the Upper Rhine to the Dutch border near Kleve .
6. ^ Delseit, Wolfgang, "Schäfer, Wilhelm", in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 22 (2005), pp. 515-516. Online version
7. ^ Heinrich Heine Institute: The Rhineland . Data sheet for the journal Die Rheinlande  in the German Digital Library , accessed on June 21, 2015
8. ↑ Website of the “Rheinlande” association. Online version ( memento of the original dated November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
9. ↑ ^{a b} Wilfried Krings; in: Historical Atlas of the Rhineland - An Interim Balance Sheet, 1992, Volume 46, p. 298.
10. ↑ Kurt Weseler / Andreas Rutz (eds.), 2010, pp. 10 + 31. Online version
11. ↑ Bernhard Walcher / Vormärz im Rheinland, 2009, pp. 10 + 31. Online version
12. ↑ Max Bär, in: Bücherkunde zur Geschichte der Rheinlande , Bonn, 2010.

Remarks

1. ↑ In addition to those listed, both Cologne and Mainz were for other dioceses (Cologne: Münster and areas in Westphalia), (Mainz: Paderborn , Bamberg , Hildesheim , Halberstadt and Brandenburg ) as well as other feudal counties and lordships that were significantly more east of the Rhine, responsible.
2. ↑ On the right bank of the Rhine, only a relatively narrow strip belongs to the Rhineland in the north, which is bordered by Münsterland, Westphalia and Bergisches Land. However, the western areas from the Ruhr area, Bergisches Land, Siebengebirge, Westerwald and Taunus to about an eastern borderline Essen, Wuppertal and Rheingau also historically belong to the Rhineland. However, the western part of the Taunus and the Rheingau did not belong to the Prussian Rhine Province.