German Memories - Crisis With Denmark and Austria - Otto Von Bismarck's Diplomacy

Bismarck faced a diplomatic crisis in November 1863 over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein; they were claimed by Denmark and by Frederick von Augustenburg, a German duke. Prussian public opinion strongly favoured Augustenburg's claim; however, Bismarck took an unpopular step by insisting that the territories legally belonged to the Danish monarch under the London Protocols signed a decade earlier. Nonetheless, Bismarck did denounce Danish decision to annex the duchy of Schleswig to Denmark.

With support from Austria, he issued an ultimatum for Denmark to return Schleswig to its former status; when the Danes refused, Austria and Prussia invaded, commencing the Second War of Schleswig.

As a result of the German victory, Denmark was forced to cede both duchies. Originally, it was proposed that the Diet of the German Confederation where all the states of Germany were represented should determine the fate of these duchies; however, before this scheme could be effected, Bismarck induced Austria to agree to the Gastein Convention. Under this agreement, Prussia received Schleswig, while Holstein went to the Austrians.

In 1866, Austria reneged on its prior agreement with Prussia by demanding that the Diet of the German Confederation determine the Schleswig-Holstein issue. Bismarck used Austria's demand as an excuse; charging that the Austrians had violated the Convention of Gastein and sent the Prussian troops to occupy Holstein. Provoked, Austria called for the aid of other German states, who quickly became involved in the Austro-Prussian War.

With the aid of Albrecht von Roon's army reorganization, the Prussian army was nearly the equal in numbers to the Austrian army. With the organizational genius of Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussian army defeated Austria and its allies, concluding the conflict with a crushing victory at the Battle of Koniggratz. The silent rivalry between Austria and Prussia finally ended up with the Battle on July 3, 1866, with casualties of more than 30,000 soldiers dead and wounded on both sides.

As a result of the Peace of Prague, the German Confederation was dissolved; Prussia annexed Schleswig, Holstein, Frankfurt, Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, and Nassau; and Austria promised not to intervene in German affairs. Austria was excluded, and remained outside of German affairs for most of the remaining 19th and 20th centuries.

Bismarck played a crucial role in uniting most of the German states into a single unit in the absence of Austrian influence.

In his first speech Bismarck referred to the issue of German unification by his famous remark: "the great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities - that was the great mistake from 1848 to 1849 - but by blood and iron." He was referring to the failed Frankfurt Parliament as the great mistakes of 1848 and 1849. Bismarck used both diplomacy and the Prussian military in order to achieve German unification.

To solidify Prussian hegemony, Prussia and several other North German states joined the North German Confederation in 1867; King Wilhelm I served as its President, and Bismarck as its Chancellor.

German Memories - Ancient Germans Migration

I remembered an incident in my CARE days, when I visited an NGO near Nallur, the once flourishing city of the Nagas in the coastal Jaffna lagoon. I asked an elderly person who had an inkling of history as to what happened to the Nagas and the Yakkas. He told me they were all in our blood.

The assimilation transmitted genetically beneficial traits among the people all over the world and an interesting study recently revealed in the ice age old Europe, how the Germanic element of the genes helped for the survival of the dying Finns.

As ice melted about 10,000 years ago, stone-age men, perhaps early Finns, occupied the rich new lands between Norway and the Urals. Other wanderers in the North, many of whom were Germanic, followed them into those areas. According to Matti Klinge of the University of Helsinki, the dominant "genetic element" in Finland today is Germanic.

Germanic people had followed the Finns northward since the dawn of history and were accepted there amongst them. When the waves of disease swept over Europe, it is possible that the Germanic genetic traits which was the ones carrying specific immune factors, such as blood type A, survived because the immune factors were already there and did not have to be produced by a human immune response.

Even during the second and fifth centuries as the western Roman Empire lost military strength and political cohesion, numerous Germanic tribes migrating en masse in far and diverse directions. Taking them to England and as far south through present day Continental Europe to the Mediterranean and northern Africa passed on the beneficial Germanic genetic elements to other tribes.

The Germanic tribes intruded into other tribal territories, and the ensuing wars for land escalated and then the wandering tribes began staking out permanent homes as a means of protection. Much of this resulted in fixed settlements from which many, under a powerful leader.

A defeat meant either scattering or merging with the dominant tribe. In Denmark the Jutes merged with the Danes; in Sweden the Geats merged with the Swedes; in England, the Angles merged with the Saxons to form the Anglo-Saxons.

Outside of Scandinavia, present-day countries speaking a Germanic language have mixed ethnic roots not restricted to the earliest Germanic peoples. Germanic peoples were often quick to assimilate foreign cultures.

There were Romanized Norsemen in Normandy, and the societal elite in medieval Russia among whom many were the descendants of Slavified Norsemen, though it was contested by some Slavic scholars in the former Soviet Union calling it the "Normanist theory".

In England assimilation happened by the migrating Angles, Saxons and Jutes who merged with the indigenous Celtic speaking Britons, resulting in an English identity for the inhabitants of that land.

In the latter part of mid-11th century, French-speaking Norsemen arrived and similarly altered what was known as Anglo-Saxon England and set the English language on the path from Old English to Middle English.

As in England, Scotland's indigenous Brythonic Celtic culture succumbed to Germanic influence due to Teutonic invasion; while the Scottish Highlands and Galloway retained a Gaelic heritage due to the recent invasions from Ireland which supplanted the British culture there, the Scottish Lowlands became English speaking.

France saw a great deal of Germanic settlement, and even its namesake the Franks were a Germanic people. Entire regions of France (such as Alsace, Burgundy and Normandy) were settled heavily by Germanic peoples, contributing to their unique regional cultures and dialects. But most of the languages spoken in France today are Romance languages, while the people have a heavy Gallic substratum that predates Latin and Germanic settlement.

Portugal and Spain also had a great measure of Germanic settlement, due to the Visigoths and the Suevi (Quadi and Marcomanni), who settled permanently. The Vandals were also present, before moving on to North Africa, where they were absorbed into the local population. Many Spanish words of Germanic origin entered into the Spanish language at this time and many more entered through other avenues (often French) in the ensuing centuries.

Italy, especially the area north of the city of Rome, has also had a history of heavy Germanic settlement. Germanic tribes such as the Visigoths, Vandals, and Ostrogoths had successfully invaded and sparsely settled in Italy in the 5th century AD. Most notably, in the 6th century AD, the Germanic tribe known as the Lombards entered and settled primarily in the area known today as Lombardy. The Normans, a partially Germanic people, also conquered and ruled Sicily and parts of southern Italy for a time.

Germany itself assimilated Slavic and Baltic peoples to the east in medieval and modern times; after World War II their descendants spread to other parts of Germany.

Going further back, most of the current territory of Germany was occupied by Celtic and Nordwestblock tribes who were eventually linguistically assimilated into the Germanic peoples.

German Memory in Asia - Memories of the Old Europe

While we were passing a junction, the driver told, he wanted to visit a deity, because he had made a vow some time back and turned the vehicle towards a more isolated passage. Though he was Catholic by religion his faith in deity worship is not strange in Sri Lanka.
Ancient nature worship and Hindu traditions are deeply rooted in the daily life of many people.

Steffani, a German Praktikum (Internship) student and Romy were watching intently what was happening in that small temple of deity worship. But the deity and nature worship is not strange to Europe. Before Christianity was introduced into Europe, there were deities and also everywhere a variety of Pagan religious practices.

Pagan practices were only abolished when the Pagan temples were demolished by the later emperors of the Roman Empire and others in the Europe. Germanic Pagan religion played its own part in ancient Germany.

Germanic paganism refers to the religious practices of the Germanic nations preceding Christianization. The well documented form of Germanic paganism is 10th and 11th century Norse paganism. There are various references found in the ancient writings of Germanic peoples and in Roman descriptions. The information can be supplemented with archaeological findings and from the remnants of pre-Christian beliefs in later folklore.


Germanic paganism was a polytheistic religion with similarities to other European and West-Asian pagan traditions, such as Finnish paganism, Sami religion, Slavic paganism, Baltic paganism, Roman paganism, Greek paganism and Vedic religion. The principal gods are known as Odin, Thor and Tyr.

The surviving accounts indicate spectacular human sacrifices. A unique eye-witness account of Germanic human sacrifice survives in Ibn Fadlan's account of a Rus ship burial, where a slave-girl had volunteered to accompany her master with his burial.

The Heimskringla tells of Swedish King Aun who sacrificed nine of his sons in an effort to prolong his life until his subjects stopped him from killing his last son Egil. According to Adam of Bremen, the Swedish kings sacrificed male slaves every ninth year during the Yule sacrifices at the Temple at Uppsala.


The Swedes had the right not only to elect kings but also to depose them, and both King Domalde and King Olof Tratalja are said to have been sacrificed after years of famine.
Odin was associated with death by hanging, and a possible practice of Odinic sacrifice by strangling has some archaeological support in the existence of bodies perfectly preserved by the acid of the Jutland peat bogs in Denmark, into which they were cast after having been strangled.
An example is Tollund Man. However, there were no written accounts that explicitly interpret the cause of these strangling, which could obviously have other explanations.