East and West and never the twain shall meet – the Romans cottoned on fast, so what’s the future for a country so divided and with a rising far-right party scoring well in a federal election?

There’s a very good overview of the 2,000 years of the part of central Europe which we now know as German and Austria called The Shortest History Of Germany (by a James Hawes). I stress that it is an overview and is not a detailed, academic history. But, like me. you might initially want and overview and later go on little by little to refine what you have learnt little by little and fill in the cracks.

One of Hawes’ central contentions is that since the Roman occupation of part of Germany, the part of the world has been quite radically divided into two quite distinct spheres, along a line which runs more or less as the same course of the river Elbe.

Hawes contends that when the Roman empire came to expand into that part of the continent, they had so much trouble first conquering the tribes east of the Rhine, then holding on to the territory they had conquered, that they eventually decided that trying to do so really wasn’t worth the hassle.

The worst encounter with those tribes was in the first decade AD when an estimated 20/25,000 Roman soldiers of three of its best legions were wiped out in the Teutoburg Forest by a Teuton tribe under the leadership of Armin / Herman.

So, Rome decided, that’s it – let those savages stew in their own juice.

OK, the Elbe is further east than the Rhine, but the course of the Elbe was a very good line to draw. The divide was not hard and fast. The Romans did allow trading to carry on across the Rhine into the area west of the Elbe, but they never bothered with the territory to the east of the Elbe.

Hawes fleshes out his notion by contending that from the Middle Ages and until unification ‘West Germany’ – and I mean the term in a geographical sense, not a national or political sense – looked west for its alliances, cultural links

 

and trade, and regarded itself as ‘belonging’ to western Europe.

Conversely, ‘East Germany’ and its people felt far greater kinship with the Slavic peoples to their east, and made their alliances and cultural and trading with them. And frankly both sides of Germany had rather less to do with each other than we might think.

Hawes also contends – and research, archives and documentation of different kinds could well bear this out – that there was also a notable religious and political divide between ‘West’ and ‘East’ Germany.

The west was, largely, Roman Catholic and the East was largely Lutheran. And the values of both the parts of Germany reflected the values we (perhaps generalising a little) associate with Catholics and Prots.

That is a plausible notion and if nothing else might explain some things. But as far as the map here is concerned, Hawes writes that support for the National Socialists was rather lukewarm west of the Elbe but enthusiastic to the east.

Again this suggestion might well be tested by looking up voting patterns etc (although not by me). As a ‘half-German’, I do get a little pissed of by ‘traditional’ lazy Brit stereotyping of the Nazi era that ‘the Germans were all Nazis’ – bollocks!

There most certainly was resistance to the Nazis from the start, but as you could end up dying and eventually dead in a concentration camp for opposing the thugs in charge, it is not surprising that many kept their heads down and opted for a quiet life. And Brits better not try to persuade themselves that the vast majority would not have done the same.

And that brings me to the map here: except for a part of East Berlin and a tiny part of ‘East’ Germany, ALL of ‘East’ Germany Germany voted solidly AfD. On the other hand in ‘West’ Germany the Afd only scored in a small part of the Rhineland Palatine and apart from isolated and small areas which went the social-democrats, the CDU/CSU held sway.

And that fits in rather neatly with Hawes’ contentions.