Germans

• 1. Introduction

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  Germans -- Deutsche in their own tongue -- number roughly 100 million people worldwide, most of them living in Germany itself. But what it means to be German has been one of the most contested questions in European history, shifting across centuries of empire, reformation, war, and reunion. At what point did the descendants of Franks, Saxons, and Alemanni become Germans? How did a people who spent most of their history living in hundreds of fragmented principalities come to see themselves as one nation? And how does a country carry an identity that was, within living memory, twisted into something murderous? Those are the questions this documentary explores, beginning long before anyone called themselves German at all.

• 2. Before the Name

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  Julius Caesar, writing in the 1st century BC, used the word Germani to describe the peoples he encountered on both sides of the Rhine river, treating that river as a natural dividing line between Gaul and what he called Germania. His account was partly strategic -- he argued the Rhine border had to be held to block dangerous incursions -- but it gave Europeans their first documented vocabulary for these northern peoples. Scholars broadly agree that Germanic languages were already dispersing westward toward the Rhine from around 500 BCE, originating near the Jastorf culture beside the Elbe river. The Nordic Bronze Age of southern Scandinavia also shows material and population links to the Jastorf culture, though whether those links represent ethnic continuity remains an open question. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the 1st century, painted a fuller portrait of these peoples. He described them as a diverse group spread across a territory far larger than Germany, stretching east to the Vistula river and north into Scandinavia. What defined early Germanic identity was language, not yet any political structure.

• 3. Franks, Feudalism, and the Eastern Kingdom

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  German ethnicity as something distinct began to crystallize in the medieval period, among the descendants of Germanic peoples who had lived under heavy Roman influence between the Rhine and the Elbe. Among those groups were Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Thuringii, Alemanni, and Baiuvarii, all speaking related dialects of West Germanic. The Frankish leader Charlemagne united large parts of Europe under a single rule by the early 9th century, and Pope Leo III crowned him emperor in 800. After his successors partitioned the Carolingian Empire at the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the eastern portion eventually evolved into a distinct German-speaking political entity. Under Otto I, that eastern kingdom became the core of what would be called the Holy Roman Empire. The stem duchies of Lotharingia, Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia, Thuringia, and Saxony formed its backbone, but their leaders jealously guarded their own independence, and German kings were elected by noble families who frequently preferred weak monarchs. That structural preference for fragmentation would shape German political life for centuries. Meanwhile, German-speaking populations moved steadily eastward from the 11th century onward -- a process known as the Ostsiedlung -- settling as merchants and craftsmen in places like Gdansk and assimilating with Slavic communities, which means many modern Germans carry substantial Slavic ancestry. During the 13th century, the Teutonic Knights conquered the Old Prussians and laid the foundations for what would eventually become the powerful state of Prussia.

• 4. Reformation and the Thirty Years' War

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  Johannes Gutenberg's invention of printing changed the conditions under which faith could be discussed and challenged. A German monk named Martin Luther used those new conditions to push for reforms within the Catholic Church, and his efforts produced the Protestant Reformation. The religious divisions that followed proved catastrophic. The Thirty Years' War, driven in large part by religious schism, tore apart the Holy Roman Empire and its neighbors and killed millions of Germans. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the fighting, but on terms that sharply reduced the central authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. Protestant Prussia emerged from that aftermath as one of the most powerful German states, governed by the House of Hohenzollern, while the Habsburgs continued to defend Roman Catholicism. Charles V had already stretched Habsburg authority well beyond German lands -- he personally inherited Hungary, Bohemia, the Low Countries, Castile, Aragon, Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, and the Duchy of Milan. The Bohemian and Hungarian titles remained tied to the imperial throne, making Austria a multilingual empire in its own right. The Low Countries drifted toward the Spanish crown. Germany, meanwhile, remained a patchwork.

• 5. Nationalism and Unification

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  Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, ending more than eight centuries of its existence. The Napoleonic Wars catalyzed something new: a national awakening among Germans. By the late 18th century, the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder had articulated a vision of German identity rooted in language, and that idea helped spark a nationalist movement that sought to draw all German speakers into a single state. The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 was a short-lived attempt by German revolutionaries to build that unified homeland; it failed. Prussia countered with proposals for an Erfurt Union of German states, but Austria blocked that initiative through the Punctation of Olmütz in 1850, restoring the German Confederation. Prussia then worked through economic means -- the Zollverein customs union -- to extend its influence. Under the strategist Otto von Bismarck, Prussia defeated Denmark in the Second Schleswig War, then Austria in the Austro-Prussian War, building the North German Confederation. In 1871, the Prussian coalition defeated the Second French Empire in the Franco-Prussian War and annexed the German-speaking region of Alsace-Lorraine. After taking Paris, Prussia and its allies proclaimed the German Empire. What followed was rapid industrialization, growing overseas colonies, and a sharp increase in emigration -- mainly to North America -- contributing to a German diaspora that today includes communities in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Australia, and across the former Soviet Union.

• 6. The Nazi Rupture

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  The Treaty of Versailles dissolved the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires after World War I, leaving millions of Germans as ethnic minorities in newly established countries. What many Germans experienced as national humiliation, combined with authoritarian and antisemitic traditions and the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, created conditions in which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power democratically in the early 1930s. The Nazis defined Germanness in a precise and exclusionary way. Their category included Austrians, Luxembourgers, eastern Belgians, and ethnic Germans scattered across Europe -- the so-called Volksdeutsche. It expressly excluded German citizens of Jewish or Roma background. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Tens of millions of soldiers and civilians died in World War II. In the aftermath of Germany's defeat, roughly 12 million Germans were expelled from Central and Eastern Europe. The country was partitioned, and any confident sense of German national identity became, as one formulation of the period put it, suspect if not impossible. Both West Germany and East Germany built their post-war identities by deliberately distancing themselves from the Nazi past -- and from each other.

• 7. Identity After Reunification

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  West Germany and East Germany reunified in 1990, and Germany became a focal point of European stability rather than instability. The political discourse of the reunification period revolved around the idea of a shared, ethnoculturally defined Germanness, though the 1990s also saw a rise in xenophobia. Modern definitions of German identity have moved in different directions simultaneously: some stress constitutional patriotism -- a commitment to pluralism and the German constitution -- while others invoke the Kulturnation, the idea of a nation bound by shared culture rather than blood or borders. Remembrance of the Holocaust, which Germans call Erinnerungskultur, the culture of remembrance, has become a structural part of German identity rather than merely a historical episode. The German language remains the primary criterion for what the source calls national belonging. Today, Germany is ranked third among countries of the world in total Nobel prize recipients, and its sixteen Lander, or states, express the regional diversity that has been a feature of German life since long before any German state existed.