The Birth of Germany, in 9 AD

choi

German history | Reformed Character; Analysing Germany’s history and how it is facing its challenges. Economist, Nov 22, 2014
www.economist.com/news/books-and ... -reformed-character
(book review on Stephen Green, Reluctant Meister; How Germany’s past is shaping its European future. Haus Publishing, 2014)

Quote: "By 1530, even Martin Luther praised the ancient German chieftain [in Latin: Arminius] as a 'war leader' (and updated his name to 'Hermann').

Note:
(a) book title
(i) English dictionary:

-meister (n; from German [noun masculine] meister master, champion): "an expert on the specified subject"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-meister
(derived terms: eg, spinmeister)
(ii) In the title, “meister: is used in its German sense.

(b) "in 9AD, when a German tribal leader called Hermann defeated three Roman legions in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest * * * on whom the Romans got their revenge a few years after his famous victory."
(i) For “battle of the Teutoburg Forest,” see the following posting.
(ii) Arminius
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminius
(section 1.2 Roman retaliation, inter-tribal conflicts, and death: Between 14 and 16 AD, Germanicus launched punitive operations into Germany, twice defeating Arminius [this is what the Economist calls ‘revenge])

(c) “Among those roots, he [author] argues, is a sense of victimhood that eventually sees the victim turn aggressor. * * * the country saw itself as the main victim of the appalling Thirty Years War of 1618-48”

Thirty Years’ War. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated.
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/592619/Thirty-Years-War
(“The ancient notion of a Roman Catholic empire of Europe, headed spiritually by a pope and temporally by an emperor, was permanently abandoned, and the essential structure of modern Europe as a community of sovereign states was established”)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/temporally
(i) By the end of Thirty Years’ War: “Spain had lost not only the Netherlands but its dominant position in western Europe. France was now the chief Western power.” Encyclopaedia Britannica

Take notice: Louis XIV of France (1638-1715; reign 1643-1715)
(ii) “The ancient notion of a Roman Catholic empire of Europe, headed spiritually by a pope and temporally by an emperor, was permanently abandoned”

temporal (adj; ultimately from tempor-, tempus time):
“lay or secular rather than clerical or sacred : CIVIL <lords temporal>”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/temporal

(d) “Such explanations may throw some light on the origins of the Holocaust, but they leave huge lacunae. How could it have happened with so little resistance? There was some opposition, which generally proved fatal—the July 20th plot [in 1944] to assassinate Hitler, the White Rose dissident group, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his supporters—but they were drops in an ocean of acquiescence. It seemed as though a nation’s collective conscience had been switched off.”

lacuna (n; plural lacunae or lacunas): “a blank space or a missing part :  GAP"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lacuna

(e) Come the end of the war [WW II], it became plain that the whole thing had been a chimera. The Germans found themselves presiding over a devastated country and a mountain of guilt. For them, it was truly a Stunde Null (zero hour).
(i) Stunde Null
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunde_Null
(ii) German English dictionary
* Stunde (noun feminine): “hour”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Stunde
* Null (noun feminine): “zero <0,02 mm - Null Komma null zwei Millimeter>”
(iii) Capitalization & Punctuation. German for English Speakers, undated
germanforenglishspeakers.com/basics/capitalization-and-punctuation/
(“As you may have noticed by now, all nouns are capitalized in German, wherever they appear in a sentence. This is a nearly unique feature in a contemporary language, and it’s helpful in parsing sentences when there are words you don’t know. We used to do it in English, as you can see in old documents like the US Constitution”)

choi

Fergus M Bordewich, The Ambush That Changed History; An amateur archaeologist discovers the field where wily Germanic warriors halted the spread of the Roman Empire. Smithsonian magazine, September 2006.
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/t ... d-history-72636736/

Quote:

(a) "To achieve his goal, he [Latin name: Arminius; transliteration into German: Hermann] concocted a brilliant deception: he would report a fictitious ‘uprising’ in territory unfamiliar to the Romans, then lead them into a deadly trap."  Web page 2

(b) "the Kalkriese battlefield was gradually forgotten"

(c) “Since the early 1990s, excavations have located battle debris along a corridor almost 15 miles long from east to west, and a little more than 1 mile from north to south, offering additional proof that it unfolded over many miles, before reaching its dreadful climax at Kalkriese.

“Perhaps the most important single discovery was evidence of a wall 4 feet high and 12 feet thick, built of sand and reinforced by chunks of sod. “Arminius learned much from his service with the Romans,” says Wilbers-Rost. “He knew their tactics and their weak points. The wall zigzagged so that the Germans on top of it could attack the Romans from two angles. They could stand on the wall, or rush out through gaps in it to attack the Roman flank, and then run back behind it for safety.” Concentrations of artifacts were found in front of the wall, suggesting that the Romans had tried to scale it. The dearth of objects behind it testifies to their failure to do so.


Note:
(a) Herman (name)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_(name)

, whose section 1 Middle Ages shows people named Herman who predated Martin Luther "updated" Arminius to Hermann.
(b) “Germanicus [a Roman general], ordered to campaign against the Cherusci, still under the command of Arminius, pursued the tribe deep into Germany. But the wily chieftain retreated into the forests, until, after a series of bloody but indecisive clashes, Germanicus fell back to the Rhine

Cherusci
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherusci
(The Cherusci were a Germanic tribe that inhabited parts of the plains and forests of northwestern Germany, in the area possibly near present-day Hanover, during the 1st century BC and 1st century AD)
(c) Kalkriese
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalkriese
(a 157 m (515 ft) hill)

(d) "By 1875, as German militarism surged, Hermann had been embraced as the nation’s paramount historical symbol; a titanic copper statue of the ancient warrior, crowned with a winged helmet and brandishing his sword menacingly toward France, was erected on a mountaintop 20 miles south of Kalkriese, near Detmold, where many scholars then believed the battle took place. At 87 feet high, and mounted on an 88-foot stone base, it was the largest statue in the world until the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886."
(i) Hermannsdenkmal
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermannsdenkmal
(German for Hermann monument)
(ii) German English dictionary
* Denkmal (noun neuter): "monument, memorial"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Denkmal
* Schlacht (noun feminine): "battle"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schlacht

(e) “Amateur archaeologist Tony Clunn of Britain’s Royal Tank Regiment was hoping for a chance to indulge his interest when he arrived at his new [NATO] posting in Osnabrück in the spring of 1987. * * * Clunn, who retired from the army with the rank of major in 1996, told me, as we sat drinking tea in a café next to the Varusschlacht (Varus Battle) Museum and Park Kalkriese, which opened in 2002.”

Osnabrück
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osnabrück
(a city)
(f) “Along with coins, he discovered shards of lead and bronze, nails, fragments of a groma (a distinctive Roman road-surveying device)”

groma surveying
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groma_surveying


The principal battlefield for all these intermittent conflicts was the towns and principalities of Germany, which suffered severely. During the Thirty Years’ War, many of the contending armies were mercenaries, many of whom could not collect their pay. This threw them on the countryside for their supplies, and thus began the “wolf-strategy” that typified this war. The armies of both sides plundered as they marched, leaving cities, towns, villages, and farms ravaged. When the contending powers finally met in the German province of Westphalia to end the bloodshed, the balance of power in Europe had been radically changed. Spain had lost not only the Netherlands but its dominant position in western Europe. France was now the chief Western power. Sweden had control of the Baltic. The United Netherlands was recognized as an independent republic. The member states of the Holy Roman Empire were granted full sovereignty. The ancient notion of a Roman Catholic empire of Europe, headed spiritually by a pope and temporally by an emperor, was permanently abandoned, and the essential structure of modern Europe as a community of sovereign states was established.