At the dawn of time, all people spoke German. People who do not speak this language should be treated with the utmost contempt and hostility. Germany, on the other hand, is a nation surpassing all others. Am I quoting some Nazi propaganda? No way. Such views were preached 500 years ago by ... German humanists.
Throughout most of the Middle Ages, the German elite stubbornly regarded themselves as the heirs of the ancient Romans. Only at the very end of the epoch did the "Holy Roman Empire" become the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation". It was then that the educated (and offended at the Italians who despised them) decided to look for their own identity - not only different, but even contradicting their alleged Roman heritage.
Around 1500, a movement was born with which you can link the roots of German nationalism, and maybe even ... Kaiserist imperialism and Nazism . As the German historian Stefan Weinfurter (author of the book "Germany in the Middle Ages 500-1500") writes, everything began with the discovery of the manuscript of an ancient treatise - Tacitus "Germania".
In 1472, this text devoted to the barbarian tribes of the Germans appeared in print for the first time, causing a real… delight of German scholars. Tacitus's work became for them a code of German customs and virtues . The Germans began to be praised for the fact that never mixed their blood with other peoples . Sounds familiar? Their most important qualities were supposedly courage and strength, but also righteousness and faithfulness.
17th-century map based on the text of Tacitus' Germania. German humanists read this book. After several centuries, it also fascinated eulogists of German racial domination ...
The "Germania", however, was only the starting point. Its publication made the German humanists amused to forge their own, truly disturbing ideas. Around 1500, the author of the so-called "Book of a Hundred Chapters" assigned Germany a special role in God's plan of salvation .
He openly stated that the biblical Adam was German . Besides, he was convinced that before the building of the Tower of Babel… all the people spoke German. This is not the end. As Weinfurter explains:
However, since German is the first language, it must also be the last. So before the end of the world, Latin will be destroyed and German will take its place, taking its rightful position. German will be spoken all over the world and Latin will remain the slave language . (…) The entire population of Romanesque origin [Italians, French - ed. author of the article] should be treated with the utmost contempt and hostility.
This vision was fully liked by the then emperor, Maximilian I. He disliked the French the most ( the eternal enemy of all of us ), but the later humanists were by no means limited to their western or southern neighbors.
As early as in the 16th century they called for competition of nations which will prove that the German nation is superior to all . A century later (in 1673) Heinrich Bebel emphasized that there is no other country in the world where there would be so much strength and bravery co in Germany.
Such opinions - persisting in the intellectual environment for several hundred years - by themselves, would not even surprise us. After all, also in modern Poland, xenophobia and a sense of superiority were perfectly fine. And yet, the similarity of the postulates of German humanists to Nazi propaganda makes people shiver down their spines ...
Source:
Trivia is the essence of our website. Short materials devoted to interesting anecdotes, surprising details from the past, strange news from the old press. Reading that will take you no more than 3 minutes, based on single sources. This particular material is based on:
- Stefan Weinfurter, Germany in the Middle Ages 500-1500 , Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, 2010, pp. 157-159.