German Memories - Kaiser William II & The First World War

William gave the German nation an extra strength on the international level only by constructing a powerful navy which he had inherited from his mother, a love of the British Royal Navy, the world's largest at that time. He made a reality of what he once confided to his uncle Edward VII that his dream was to have a "fleet of my own some day" like the British. William's personal "likes and dislikes" caused by his fleet's poor show in front of his grandmother Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations led him to take steps towards the construction of a powerful navy against his cousins in Britain.

William well utilised the talents of the dynamic naval officer Alfred von Tirpitz. He appointed him as the head of the Reich Naval Office in 1897 and the new admiral had come out with his Tirpitz Plan, the "Risk theory" where he advocated how Germany could force Britain to accede to German demands in the international arena through the threat posed by a powerful battle-fleet concentrated in the North Sea. But building this powerful fleet of more expensive Dreadnought type of battleships cost a lot to Germany imposing financial strains in the coming years.

William got into the trap of the First World War when his close friend the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered on June 28, 1914. William offered Austria-Hungary to crush the secret organization that had plotted and slayed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He encouraged Austria to use force against the suspected Serbian movement which was responsible for his murder. But he was further trapped by his exploitative elites in Berlin by sending him away to his annual cruise of the North Sea on July 6, 1914, as they wanted to manipulate things in his absence for war to increase German dominance in Europe. They feared William might undermine their war effort - something of which William, for all his bluster, was extremely apprehensive.

William made erratic attempts to stay on top of the crisis via telegram, and when the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was delivered to Serbia, he hurried back to Berlin. He reached Berlin and started his last minute attempt to avert the war.

But beyond his knowledge and control in Austria the warring-attempts were in full swing. Unknown to the Emperor, Austro-Hungarian ministers and generals had already convinced the 84-year-old Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria to sign a declaration of war against Serbia.

When William learnt that the First World War was unavoidable by a document stating that Russia would not cancel its mobilization on the event of Austro-Hungarian mobilization against Serbia, he wrote a lengthy commentary containing the startling observations: "For I no longer have any doubt that England, Russia and France have agreed among themselves........knowing that our treaty obligations compel us to support Austria.......to use the Austro-Serb conflict as a pretext for waging a war of annihilation against us.......Our dilemma over keeping faith with the old and honorable Emperor has been exploited to create a situation which gives England the excuse she has been seeking to annihilate us with a spurious appearance of justice on the pretext that she is helping France and maintaining the well-known Balance of Power in Europe for her own benefit against us."

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 Memories - Early European Migration & Life-Style

Though our discussion touched on many of the early human migration what attracted us most was the 400, 000 year old wooden projectile spears which were found at Schoningen in northern Germany. These wooden projectile spears are thought to have been made by the Neanderthals' ancestors.

The Neanderthals disappeared completely from this world some 30,000 - 40,000 years ago. The Cro-Magnon probably came in contact with the Neanderthals, and is often credited to have caused or finalized the latter's extinction. To what extent Cro-Magnons interbred with Neanderthals - if at all - is still a matter of debate and we came out with some controversial argument.

The Cro-Magnons could be descended from any number of subspecies of Homo sapiens that emerged from Africa approximately 100,000 years ago. The Cro-Magnons were the earliest modern humans to enter into Europe perhaps around 50,000 years ago, during a long interglacial period of particularly mild climate, when Europe was relatively warm, and food was plentiful.

Some of the oldest works of art in the world, such as the cave paintings at Lascaux in southern France came into our discussion which were as old as shortly after the Cro-Magnons' migration. These early humans used manganese and iron oxides to paint pictures and even they were believed to have created the first calendar around 34,000 years ago. The Cro-Magnons even knew how to make woven clothing and constructed huts out of rocks, clay, bones, branches and animal fur.

The last ice age plunged Europe into a much colder and harsher environment, and covered much of the north of it with inhospitable glaciers. As the glaciers began to retreat, about 20,000 years ago, humans migrated northward again. It was this Mesolithic population, the descendants of Cro-Magnons who were dwelling in Europe around 7000 BC when the Neolithic people first began to enter there from the Asiatic portion of today's Turkey.

If the Neolithic immigrants to Europe were indeed Indo-European, then populations speaking non-Indo-European languages in today's Europe the Basques of the Pyrenees are the descendants of Mesolithic people since their language is related to none other in the world and also the Basque population has a unique genetic profile. The Uralic speaking peoples, the Finns and others represent this Mesolithic generation.

The other current non-Indo-European languages of Europe - Turkish, Maltese, and Magyar - were introduced in pre-historical times.

Our discussion went back into the Neolithic European lifestyle in between the Mesolithic and Bronze Age periods in Europe, roughly from 7000 BC to 1700 BC. The Neolithic Europeans were living in small-scale, family-based communities, subsisting on domestic plants and animals supplemented with the collection of wild plant foods and with hunting, and producing hand-made pottery, that is, made without the potter's wheel.

There were some Neolithic Europeans in southeastern Europe living in heavily fortified settlements of 3,000-4,000 people in Greece whereas in England there were 50-100 people together as highly mobile cattle-herders.

The Neolithic European peoples were warlike, and they imposed themselves as an elite on the Mesolithic populations, who adopted their language. The Neolithic Proto-Indo-Europeans were a patrilineal society. They had domesticated the horse and the cow which played a central role, in religion and mythology as well as in daily life. A man's wealth would have been measured by the number of his animals.

They practised a polytheistic religion centered on sacrificial rites, probably administered by a priestly caste. Important leaders would have been buried with their belongings, and possibly also with members of their household or wives under the human sacrifice called Suttee.

German Memoirs - German Strike on Romans and Invasion into the Roman Empire

Whatever the persecution Germans faced historically what Dietmar Doering was telling me came into mind as to how the Germanic tribes under the command of Arminius (Hermann) by one stroke against the Roman Forces in Germania and the subsequent Germanic tribes invasion into the Roman Empire changed the trend of the world.


The remains of the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum [Credit: Andreas Tille]

As one historian said: "If the Romans could not have been defeated and the Germanic tribes had accepted the Roman culture and language like the Gauls (today's France) did, the largest percentage of today's Europe would likely consist of Latin languages. Germanic-based German would be as extinct as the Celtic language of Gaul. The Germans of today would probably speak a language similar to French.

If Britain had not been conquered by the Germanic Anglians and Saxons, today's world language English would never have come into existence. Instead they would still speak a variety of Latin, or again Celtic. Maybe North America would have been conquered and settled by the British nevertheless, but then still today's U.S. citizens would speak modern Latin or maybe even Celtic. The same would have occurred to many peoples in Africa and India, who were subdued by the English and assumed their language.

If the Romans had succeeded to integrate the Germanic people, maybe the continuing Roman rule would have merged the European peoples into a permanent nation of Roman citizens. Possibly, Europe then might even have remained politically united in a single state.

Maybe even the history of North and South America would have run a different course. A large European empire, with domestic trade from the Atlantic to the Euphrates river in the Middle East, would likely have had less interest in colonizing remote areas than the two national states that were rivaling with their neighbors, Spain and England.

However, perhaps it was especially the fragmentation of Europe into many rivaling states that spurred European peoples to their greatest achievements, by fanning, striving and competing with each other. These often led to bloody wars, but more often to fast technological progress, business-friendly politics and wealth, military might, explorations and conquests, and glorious achievements of culture and art - whereby the leading nations of each period were not held back by the slower ones or by a torpid central government."

By destroying the ailing Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes ultimately made possible for the peoples of the western world a much brighter development and greatness, which contributed, spirally to the development of the entire world.

German Memories in Asia