Peoples of Europe, keep your most sacred goods

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Peoples of Europe, keep your most sacred goods! (Hermann Knackfuß)
Peoples of Europe, keep your most sacred goods!
Hermann Knackfuß , 1895
Pen lithograph

Peoples of Europe, truest your most sacred goods is a picture that the history painter Hermann Knackfuß made based on a design by Kaiser Wilhelm II. In 1895, as a gift from the German Emperor to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II.

description

Depicted is the Archangel Michael (as the patron saint of the Germans), who, surrounded by a number of Valkyrie-like women who symbolize the peoples of Europe as national allegories ( Germania , Britannia , etc.), on a Buddha floating in dark storm clouds over a European landscape from the east indicates.

With this allegorical painting, Wilhelm II wanted to call on European Christianity to a common struggle against the yellow peril and godless Buddhism .

Kaiser Wilhelm presented this picture to the Russian tsar with the request to keep influences from the east under control ("the imminent danger of a Chinese onslaught mobilized by Japan"). The tsar was so pleased with the work that the emperor was pleased to say: "Well, it works, that's very pleasant."

The female figures, seen from right to left, are personifications of France ( Marianne ), Germany ( Germania ), Russia ( Mother Russia ), Austria-Hungary ( Austria ), Italy ( Italia ) and Great Britain ( Britannia ). The last one on the far left is not named.

A few years later, on July 27, 1900, Wilhelm gave the so-called Huns speech . The occasion was the adoption of the German East Asian Expeditionary Corps against the Boxer Rebellion , in which Germans and Christian missionaries were also killed.

additional

The painting was used in Joachim Fest's documentary Hitler - A Career and was intended to illustrate the worldview of Hitler and some of his contemporaries.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Asmut Bruckmann: The European expansion. Colonialism and Imperialism 1492–1918 , Tempora Historisch -politisch Weltkunde series, Klett, Stuttgart et al. 1999, p. 79.

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