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.
