GERMANY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
By Simon Winder
[1] The optimism of the central Middle Ages (the 'high' Middle Ages as they are sometimes called, with the implication of a top point on a graph or on a
rollercoaster) comes sadly undone for Germany in the fourteenth century. The crusades had more or less given up and the Holy Roman Emperor was no
longer the powerful figure he had been, but life for the hundreds of self-supporting, fairly small-scale regions of Germany had continued to be tolerable,
with a rising population, reasonable security and established systems of justice. All this changed for the unhappy generations arriving after 1280 or so.
One striking fact that cannot be ignored when spending too much time wandering around local churches in Germany is, through the sheer density of
memorials, the unfairness of your fate based on when you were born. Sculptures and, later, paintings stare back at you asserting or even boasting their
subjects' secure, civic, prominent and enjoyable existence. But other birth dates intersect with the most ghastly events. Indeed, more often than not
memorials tend to come from prosperous times and a lack of memorials means something has·gone seriously wrong – that the community has temporarily
lost its enthusiasm for marking its own providential happiness. We are ourselves of course acutely aware of this in the twentieth century, where specific
age groups suffered millions of deaths while in some parts of Europe others could come through almost unscathed
[ilesos] – and·in others of course, such
as Poland or the western Soviet Union in the early 1940s, there was no generation left undevastated.
[2] The first half of the fourteenth century was a comparable nightmare, with similar or worse percentages of dead (albeit in a much smaller overall
population) to those experienced in Central and Eastern Europe in the Second World War (1939-1945). In some places the Thirty Years War was to offer
something similar. Within the period for which we have worthwhile records these three points (the 1340s, the 1630s and the 1940s) are the worst times
to have been alive in Central Europe's history.
[3] The crisis of the fourteenth century began with an immense famine. It seems to have rained and rained and rained. Crops completely failed over huge
areas. It was so wet that salt could not be dried to preserve meat. Transport was always too poor to allow for much food to arrive from non-afflicted areas,
but in any event there were hardly any of these. People were driven to eat the seed corn needed for the following year's crop. It has been suggested that
the story of Hansel and Gretel stemmed from this awful time. Germany was at the heart of a general Northern European torture. There had always been
famines, but this was the one that became known as the Great Famine, killing off an unknown but massive number of people. Having absorbed such a
nightmarish blow, Germans then had to face the Black Death in 1349 – a still mysterious epidemic that swept across Eurasia, killing many millions. The
statistics are conjectural but prosperous places such as Bremen and Hamburg seem to have lost up to two-thirds of their inhabitants, whole villages ceased
to exist and were·never re-founded, entire regions became depopulated. The combination of the Great Famine and the Black Death seems to have reduced
the number of Germans by about forty per cent. It is perhaps the event in Europe's history least possible to visualize. Some historians have suggested that
Europe's civilization, that of a vigorous intellectual life, of the great cathedrals, of an expansive and outward-looking world, should be viewed as coming
to an end by 1350. Buildings such as Bamberg Cathedral should perhaps be seen much as we look at Machu Picchu, as fascinating remnants of a dead
culture, even if in Europe's case they were re-used by subsequent inhabitants. Though probably too extreme, it is a useful way of thinking about just how
much we really have in common, as “Europeans,” with this earlier period – we yearn for continuity as it makes us feel happy, but perhaps that continuity
is there in a more tentative way than we would like to think.
Adapted from Chapter 3 of the book Germania.
With respect to the memorials that can still be found in many local churches in Germany, the information in the article most supports which of the following?
