When one lays before oneself a map of Europe—not one showing political divisions, but one of the land’s natural features—one’s attention is immediately drawn to the Swiss high mountains. Like a great dark-brown patch they stand out. To the north of this mountain group, Europe slopes downward to the sea. From the uplands of Central Europe, numerous rivers flow into the North Sea and the Baltic. To the west of the Alpine region lies another mountainous landscape in France, separated from the Alps by the Rhône valley. Beyond that, the low plain stretches out toward the sea, from which several rivers also run outward. These mountain regions form natural boundaries. They offer no favorable conditions for life. Thus we find the great centers of civilization lying at the foot of the mountain chains. Around the Alps, in a ring, live the great peoples of Europe.
From the Alps outward, one can sketch the following in broad strokes: to the north and northwest lies the Germanic area, to the south and west the Latin cultural sphere. The boundary line between these regions runs just south of Brussels through Belgium. This is the zone where Germanic and Latin culture meet: a zone of friction. Such is the situation as we can observe it today. In the Germanic sphere lies our own country. We see that we are surrounded on all sides by Germanic peoples: to the south, the Flemish; to the west, the English; to the east, the Germans. Further north live the Germanic peoples of Scandinavia: Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes. The Germanic world thus encircles the North Sea and the Baltic.
All these peoples have lived there for centuries. Over the ages, they gradually grew out of different Germanic tribes, and as these tribes fused into larger peoples, they received the names they now bear. England takes its name from the Angles, who settled there together with the Saxons in the 5th century A.D. Denmark from the Danes. The Franks gave their name to the land that is still called France today. But when such great tribal groups as Franks and Saxons appear on the stage, Germanic history is already far advanced. We first hear of these peoples in the period of the great migrations, from the 3rd to the 5th century.
In those centuries of upheaval, beginning from the regions around the North Sea and the Baltic, the Germanic tribes set themselves in motion. The Roman Empire, which had held back their expansion, had grown inwardly rotten and collapsed. The Germanic peoples seized the chance to enlarge their domains. As agrarian peoples, they needed land to establish their farms. Healthy and vigorous, they multiplied rapidly. Northwestern Europe was like a beehive with its entrance stopped: once the obstacle was removed, the swarms burst out. They moved in two directions, pressing along both sides of the Alps into the Roman Empire, which was overrun from east and west at once. By the end of the 5th century, all of Europe lay in the power of the Germanic peoples.
In our own land, after this great shifting of tribes, three groups met. Roughly speaking, the Franks settled south of the great rivers; along the coast lived the Frisians; in the eastern regions, the Saxons. Of the smaller tribes that Tacitus names at the start of our era, such as the Batavians, we hear no more. They were small groups absorbed into larger peoples—just as the Hollanders, Utrechters, and Geldrians, once political entities, were absorbed into the Dutch nation, which emerged as a new political unit in history. Thus the names of the smaller tribes disappeared, remembered now only in occasional place-names.
A few centuries after the beginning of our era, then, we see a vast Germanization of Europe, radiating from the Germanic core around the North and Baltic Seas. That region was like a “womb of nations,” as the Romans called it—a source overflowing and flooding outward. The migrations of the first centuries A.D. were not without precedent. Already a hundred years before our era, the Cimbri had streamed southward from Jutland, spreading panic in the Roman Empire until they were finally destroyed near Milan and north of Marseille. Over the centuries, such Germanic expansions repeatedly collided with Rome. Whenever this happened, history records them as moments of crisis. But when expansion occurred at the expense of other peoples not under Roman rule—often themselves kindred to the Germans—Rome remained unaffected. Only when the expanding Germanic tribes pressed directly into Roman dominion did the clash enter Roman history.
For the gradual expansion of the Germanic world before direct contact with Rome, one must turn to Germanic prehistory—for which no written sources exist. Yet excavations and finds have provided enough evidence to trace this process in broad outline. Transferred to maps, they confirm what Roman contact had already revealed: that from the northwest of Europe, around the North and Baltic Seas, the Germanic tribes spread southward, southwest, eastward, and southeast. What appeared after the beginning of our era as a sudden storm, following the collapse of Roman resistance, had already been unfolding as a gradual movement for many centuries.
Around 1800 B.C., the Germanic heartland lay in Jutland and the adjacent Baltic shores. Over the centuries, it expanded southward until, by the beginning of our era, it pressed against Rome itself. There expansion was halted, the pressure mounting until, in the migration era, it burst forth with force. The eighteen centuries before our era that saw this southward expansion were also centuries of high culture. In the first thousand years, bronze (copper alloyed with tin) replaced stone for tools and weapons. In the following 800 years, iron in turn displaced bronze. Throughout, this culture remained Germanic.
Yet even this expansion was not an isolated event. It had its precedent in the spread of Indo-Germanic culture by peoples closely related to the Germans, usually grouped together under the name Indo-Germans, because their migrations extended from Europe to India. What we see between roughly 1800 B.C. and A.D. 500 is but a repetition. Out of the northern cultural zone of the late Stone Age, beginning around 4000 B.C., came earlier waves of migration from the very same region. The Indo-Germanic community, developing in the same area where the Germanic group would later arise, spread outward in the same directions. In the Netherlands, we find traces of this in the megalithic tombs (hunebedden), reminding us that the high grounds of our country were already inhabited by the forefathers of the Saxons and Frisians.
The likely development of these Indo-Germanic offshoots in Europe is shown in Illustration 3, depicting the situation around 2000 B.C. Later these groups moved on: the Indo-Iranians advanced into India and Persia, founding kingdoms in which they formed the leading stratum, carrying their culture with them. The Hellenes settled in Greece and along the coast of Asia Minor, creating classical Greek civilization, one of the noblest blossoms of the Indo-Germanic stock. The Italians pressed onto the Apennine Peninsula and founded the agrarian republic of Rome, which grew into a world empire, though in the end Eastern elements came to dominate, as the old Indo-Germanic line died out. The Celts were pushed westward, found by Caesar in Gaul at the dawn of our era. The Illyrians settled in the Danube basin. Each of these groups founded great cultures, which, while sharing common origins and traits, nevertheless developed a character of their own.
Recent discoveries have even revealed, in the beginnings of Egyptian and Sumerian civilization, influences of the northern cultural circle and its bearer, the Nordic race—evidence that earlier waves had already preceded the Indo-Germanic expansions.
Thus, when we speak of the history of our people, it is folly— as our schoolbooks often do— to begin with the Batavians and the Romans, as though civilization began with Rome. To the last 2000 years there precede at least 4000 years of civilization, of which we now know a fair amount. Only against the background of those 4000 years do the most recent millennia take on their true significance. When we see, in the Middle Ages, our people spreading overseas to the Baltic and the Mediterranean; when in the 16th and 17th centuries the Dutch sailed to the Indies and to America to found colonies; when in the 19th century the Anglo-Saxons, so closely related to our own Frisians, built a world empire through which Western European civilization became the world civilization; none of this can be understood without those earlier 4000 years. The key to the present lies in the past.
Originally published in De Wolfsangel, November 1936
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