Central Europe in Pre-Medieval Times: What Is Germany, Anyway?

Modern people are used to using the word ‘Germany,’ but many do not know that Germany, at least as it is known today, is much younger than the United States. The modern nation-state of Germany was founded in 1871.

But the region of Germany — the area of people who speak the German language, share the German culture, and have a German civilization and society — is much older. Germany as a political nation-state is only a little bit more than a hundred year old, but Germany as a people is several thousand years old.

When the Romans began to explore central Europe, they found a German civilization which was already well established, as historian Mary Fullbrook writes:

The area now known as Germany shows evidence of settlement since prehistoric times: Neanderthal man is a well-known archaeological find, and there are traces of stone, bronze and iron-age settlements right across central Europe. The Roman Empire extended across the western and southern parts of what is now known as Germany, and there are Roman foundations and remains in many German towns, such as Trier, Augsburg, Mainz, Cologne, Regensburg and Passau.

By the last years of the Roman Republic and the first years of the Roman Empire, the German tribes were a well-established presence in Europe. They spoke a variety of Germanic languages; the German language would appear a millennium later. These tribes were independent of each other, and there was nothing like a German or Germanic nation.

At times, however a few tribes might form a mutually beneficial alliance against a common enemy, as seems to have been the case in the Cimbrian War, around 100 B.C., in which approximately four Germanic tribes faced and defeated the Romans. A much larger number of Germanic tribes collaborated in 9 A.D. in the defeat of the Romans at Teutoburg Forest.

The Romans, bitter about losing to the Germanic tribes, sometimes wrote derogatory descriptions of them. Other Roman authors, intent on issuing a veiled critique of Roman society, praised the Germanic tribes as having virtues which the Romans lacked. In any case, Roman descriptions of them are not entirely reliable, as Mary Fullbrook notes:

A frontier fortification (essentially a ditch and bank) known as the limes can still be seen between the rivers Main and Danube. The Roman Empire had considerable impact on those parts which it occupied. Beyond it lay what the Romans called ‘barbarians’ (meaning foreigners). The Roman author Tacitus (c. AD 55–116) gives us an intriguing, if not entirely reliable, glimpse of the Germanic tribes in his Germania. He describes their social and political organisation, their modes of warfare, concepts of crime and punishment, styles of housing, dress and hairstyle, their marriage practices, funerals, agricultural techniques, and habits of drinking, banqueting, quarrelling and sloth. Apart from praise for the chastity of German women, Tacitus’ description of Germany and the Germans is not entirely flattering: the Germans must be a native people, not immigrants from elsewhere, for ‘who would … [want] to visit Germany, with its unlovely scenery, its bitter climate, its general dreariness to sense and eye, unless it were his home?’ There are more qualified descriptions of differences among the individual Germanic tribes, ranging from the Swabians with their intricate hairdos, through the relatively civilised Hermunduri who traded with the Romans, to the far-flung Fenni (living in what became Lithuania) who are characterised as ‘astonishingly wild and horribly poor. They eat grass, dress in skins, and sleep on the ground.’

Although both Tacitus and Julius Caesar were less than complimentary in their descriptions of Germanic life, both men eventually praised the tribes for their ethics, justice, courage, and common sense.

Tacitus in particular gave a surreptitious analysis of Roman society without ever mentioning Roman society. He knew that his readers would automatically compare his description of Germanic tribes to their own Roman culture, when he, e.g., wrote that among the Germanic tribes it was customary for the bride and groom to be of approximately the same age. Tacitus was pointing to the pattern in which some wealthy older Roman men were in the habit of marrying significantly younger women — after those men had divorced a previous wife.

Although sometimes described as wild and barbaric, the Germanic tribes were literate. A variety of Germanic writings, dating between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D., display a proficient use of a runic alphabet.

By the 300s, the Goths, one of the tribes, had developed an advanced literary civilization, including written commentaries on various texts.

Up until around 600 to 800 A.D., many of these tribes were semi-nomadic. After that time, they became more settled. Some of these tribes are associated with the names and customs of regions within modern Germany: Saxons and Bavarians, for example. Others are associated with dialects of the German language, e.g., Swabians and Alemannians. Some tribes founded Germanic nations which are not connected to modern Germany: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc.

Of the many Germanic tribes, perhaps the most influential was the Franks.

Before it finally fell, the Roman Empire receded from much of Europe back into its original territory in Italy. The result was a power vacuum. Various regions were in disorder and lacked management.

The Franks saw that some organizing principle was needed if civilization was to maintain itself at a high level. In the mid-400s, the Franks moved from the east into Gaul, the piece of land which is roughly the same as present-day France. A Frankish dynasty, or royal family, called the Merovingians established order in Gaul and saved it from a decline into chaos. Eventually, the Merovingians gave way to the Carolingians, and under leadership of this second Frankish dynasty, the Franks established stable social structures in much of Europe, enabling progress in education, science, and the arts.

While there was no Germany until 1871, the Germanic tribes played a vital role in creating, organizing, and maintaining European civilization for the two millennia before that year.

Islam and France: The Appearance of ‘Islamophobia’ in the Francophone World

In maintaining its global network of territories, colonies, and protectorates, the French Empire encountered, and learned to deal with, Islam. Tasked with supervising local societies, French administrators developed various attitudes toward Muslim populations.

One French bureaucrat, Andre Quellien, is credited with inventing the word ‘Islamophobia’ in his writings about how to manage the locals in Africa and in the Middle East. Quellien sees Islam as a benign force in local societies, a force with colonial administrators can harness to keep the peace, as historian Pascal Bruckner writes:

In 1910, Andre Quellien, a writer working for the French minister of the colonies, published a work entitled Muslim Politics in French West Africa. Addressed to specialists and imperial officials, it offers moderate praise for the religion of the Quran as “practical and indulgent,” and better adapted to the “natives,” whereas Christianity is “too complicated, too abstract, too austere for the rudimentary, materialistic mentality of the negro.”

In short, Quellien is advising the French Empire to let the locals keep their Islamic traditions and beliefs. The French, in Quellien’s opinion, should not bother introducing the locals to Christianity.

He advises the French to avoid Islamophobia, and rather to see Islam as an ally. Islam will help the French with their task of keeping order in the colonies. Was Quellien correct in his assessment? Arguments can be made on both sides: on the one hand, Islam’s authoritarian bent seems to support civil authorities; on the other hand, Islam would eventually be a part of overthrowing those civil authorities, dismantling the French Empire, and instituting local autocrats.

Pascal Bruckner reminds the reader that the word ‘Islamophobia’ was first introduced in the context of managing the colonies which were parts of a global empire:

The author of this report thought it important to emphasize that so long as it was treated tactfully, Islam would become French colonialism’s best ally and favor European influence and control.

The indigenous religions of Africa were, in many places, eradicated by Islamic invaders. Prior to the Muslim conquests of the late 600s and early 700s, Africa hosted a variety of religions, including local anamistic traditions, as well as Judaism and Christianity. These belief systems coexisted peacefully.

As a colonial administrator, Quellien saw Islam as a useful force because it kept a potential anamistic revival at bay.

Because the religion of the Prophet “wrests these peoples away from fetishism and its degrading practices,” Quellien argued that it was imperative to stop seeing Islam as fanaticism and to treat it instead with a benevolent neutrality, thus foreshadowing the great Arabist Louis Massignon (1883 - 1962), a left-wing Catholic who specialized in Muslim mysticism and advocated dialogue between Islam and the Roman Catholic Church.

While he perhaps didn’t foresee the danger which Islam would be to the French Empire, Quellien did see the need for a balanced view of Islam. Some European authors had developed idealized and naive images of Islam, overlooking the brutality of Islamic civil law.

European universities had highly developed studies of Semitic Philology and Orientalism, but the academic nature of the these studies centered on ancient texts, and were unaware of the practical realities of Muslim society in the Near East and in Africa.

Thus Quellien denounced the “Islamophobia” that was rampant among colonial officials, but he was just as opposed to the “Islamophilia” peculiar to Romantic orientalism: “singing the praises of Islam is just as biased as describing it unjustly.”

In his analysis of Islam, Quellien is less concerned with truth and justice, and more concerned with keeping the peace. The primary task of an imperial administrator — and this is true, whether in the French Empire, the Russian Empire, the Roman Empire, or any other empire — is keeping the domestic peace and producing revenue. It is in this context that Quellien sees Islam as useful.

Islam must be objectively considered as a tool for governing. Here, Quellien writes as an administrator concerned about social peace: he deplores the temptation to demonize a religion that keeps the peace in the empire, no matter what abuses — minor ones, in his view — it may commit, such as the continuing practices of slavery and polygamy.

While some accounts of imperialism include the notion that empires impose, or attempt to impose, their own religious culture onto their colonies, Quellien here advises the opposite: he urges the French Empire to resist the urge to introduce Christianity into the colonies.

He argues that it is better to leave the locals under the rule of Islam. This will make the colony more manageable for the French.

Since Islam is colonialism’s best ally, its followers must be protected from the harmful influence of modern ideas and their ways of life must be respectded (an attitude found today on the far left and in English-speaking countries).

Quellien is unsentimental and almost machiavellian in his clear-eyed assessment of Islam as a tool for controlling local populations. He is mercenary in regard to concepts like truth or justice, seeing rather that Islam will be useful for managing locals. He does not address the question of whether Islam will bring truth and justice.

Quellien can be seen as either brilliant in his insight, or as foolishly naive. Only a few decades after he wrote, a destructive wave of uprisings would take away the order which the French had been able to establish in their various colonies.

The locals would be left under the arbitrary and authoritarian rule of various dictatorships. Civil order would decline, as would the standards of living. Islam would be a part of the uprisings and of the regimes which were established in the vacuum created by the French exit from the colonies. No longer moderated by the presence of French colonial administrators, Islam would become more powerful in society, fanning the flames of militant political fanaticism, and establishing intolerant social structures.