Читать книгу The Germans: Double History Of A Nation - Emil Grimm Ludwig - Страница 21

THE CITY was a Burg, a walled fort, and thus the citizens were called “burghers.” Walls were to the city what armor was to the knight. How could the burghers have slept soundly without walls and towers, arms, pitch and stones! The Emperor had no standing army nor, for the most part, money; the princes had both, and misused them; the high clergy kept to the safety of their own cities and castles; and the highways were infested with knights, in large bands and small, some on forays from their castles, others impoverished bandits and highwaymen. This state of affairs characterized not merely the Interregnum. The German chronicles from every part of the Reich are full of it. Amid such anarchy every merchant traveling on the highway, as well as every city, was constantly exposed to attack. To get a clear picture of conditions in Germany between 1100 and 1300, one needs only to cast a glance at present-day Europe, where highwaymen, armed to the teeth, attack and rob their less well protected and wealthier neighbors without reason or warning.

The German cities became the birthplace of handicraft. Germans must always form groups; and, in Freytag’s words, “the whole nation is composed of many such groups.” These naturally grew strongest where co-operation afforded the greatest protection—among soldiers and craftsmen. Here too, since courage was not of the essence, skill and hard work, vision and persistence distinguished the Germans. The blacksmiths and brass founders, the workers in copper and gold, produced objects of surpassing beauty and utility, and the craftsmanship of skilled German workers is still shown today in the grinding of fine lenses and the accuracy of German chemical preparations. Today their skill is harnessed to those industries that still require handwork; but at that time they went in for art.

A powerful solidarity, nevertheless, held the classes together in the early German cities. In addition to the old merchant families who even today, in Roman fashion, call themselves Patricians, the city councils gradually took in craftsmen. Free city government, one of the finest chapters in German history, endured for centuries, surrendering only in our own days to an all-powerful party.

The two urban classes that faced each other—each with its own organizational pyramid—were the guilds of merchants and craftsmen respectively. The modern corporate State, so called, is but an old-fashioned imitation of these associations, then most highly developed in Germany. The craftsman might be free, as far as the prince or the bishop were concerned; but he was bound to his fellows. The German predilection for authority and submission, which stems from ancient Teutonic habits of war service and makes Germany the ideal bureaucracy and dictatorship, demanded discipline and organization as soon as free men combined into a class.

The German burgher—merchant or craftsman—could not but feel helpless in political life, since for more than a thousand years the nobility had excluded him from any part in political leadership. The habit of obedience to authority naturally led to the desire for a leader in his own limited circle—someone to whom responsibility and guidance could be left. If he himself was only given an office in his new association, possibly with authority over a few of his colleagues, he was quite willing to acknowledge those that were placed above him. The Germans have always envisioned social life in the form of a pyramid, as exemplified in the hierarchy of king, prince, nobility and gentry. And this now became the pattern for countless small pyramids in the rise of the medieval cities. The craftsman in his guild was content to haul the dead weight of his superiors, if only he was able to have a share in the pressing down on those beneath him. In the primeval forests the Germans had known no other occupation than to hunt and wage war, leaving the care of land and stock to their womenfolk and slaves. Now, from the very start, they learned to tolerate, even to seek, authority and submission. And in later ages they grew to love order more than freedom. The German guilds of craftsmen and merchants clung to their own customs and laws to an extent that seems ridiculous, and they stubbornly continued to uphold the warrior virtues of obedience and discipline in their civilian professions. At the same time their diligence and modesty were exemplary.

In Basle, Rudolf of Hapsburg once stopped to chat with a grimy tanner engaged in his unappetizing work. The artisan invited the sovereign to call at his home the next day at noon. To his amazement the King found his host living in a sumptuous house, where the tanner and his wife, dressed in finery, were expecting their royal visitor at a table set with silver. “If you are so rich,” the King asked during the meal, “why are you engaged in such dirty work?”

“It is my work,” the man replied, “that has given me this house.”

At the time, in the fourteenth century, the attitude of the kings toward the rising cities had already undergone a change. In their fights with the bishops, the kings now often turned to the burghers who shared this enmity toward the episcopate. In the struggles between the princes too the cities became factors to be reckoned with; on one occasion they actually decided a royal election.

In the early days the great cities themselves produced everything their citizens required. There were then actually more cities manufacturing cloth than there are today. But specialization soon set in, adding to the radius of capital. Bruges in Lower Germany, the greatest international trading-center in the West, established close contact with the large cities along the Middle Rhine. The citizens of Augsburg and Ratisbon invested their money in Tyrolean and Saxon mines. Bavarian merchants settled in Prague. Thus arose the great banks of the Fuggers and Welsers.

The Jews were closely linked with the money interests.

Charlemagne had had a weakness for them. Even in later centuries they were protected by German princes, so that the early relationship between Germans and Jews may be called harmonious.

But the qualities that spoke in their favor then were those they shared with the German character, and that was to be their undoing later on. Just like the Germans, they too regarded themselves as the chosen people, they too were predisposed toward assimilation, rapidly taking on the customs of those among whom they lived. They too combined imagination and curiosity with business sense and efficiency. In addition, natural instinct and skill in languages gained them success in the Orient, whence they imported treasures. When a prince sent out a Jewish trader to bring back silver daggers from Byzantium or rare furs from the Caucasus, the trader could be relied upon to return not only with the finest wares, but also with a sheaf of curious tales to be related while an especially fine piece of silk was spread out before the princess as a gift.

And then, suddenly, around the year 1090. there came the first persecutions. As soon as the German burghers discovered their own talents as businessmen they felt a natural jealousy of those who had long before them acquired wealth by trading. Suspicion was first cast on the shrewd competitors as aliens, because that was the easiest course. At the same time the initial enthusiasm for the Crusades offered a welcome pretext. When Godfrey of Bouillon issued the call to fight the enemies of Christ at home first, he kindled the flames of fanaticism with this single slogan, giving those who sought to expropriate the Jews a ready-made pretext.

Nor did the Church take a part. Later when the legend of ritual murder, so called, was invented, both Pope and Emperor, otherwise bitter enemies, spoke out against it. The renewed persecutions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were justified by the allegation that the Jews engaged in usury. Since the first persecutions the Jews had turned to moneylending, gaining certain privileges that lent themselves to usury. The reason was that since the Jews could neither own land nor belong to any guild the king had granted them certain privileges entitling them to practice usury, which went against the Christian doctrines. Even in antiquity the interest rate had risen to 50 per cent; now it passed 60 per cent. On the other hand, the Jews ran the risk that individual debtors might invoke the protection of the bishop to evade repayment. Thus they preferred to grant loans on houses, and through their co-religionists in other lands they soon became an international money power to which emperors and kings, princes and cities were in debt.

On a small scale, many burghers now were also in debt to the Jews. Why not set fire to the houses of the Jews, they asked themselves, thus destroying the irksome debt contracts? Such action might even constitute a good Christian deed! It was fear of such threats that drove the Jews from the country into the cities.

A little later, in 1385, when Emperor Wenceslaus was caught in the struggle between the cities and the nobility, he ordered a great plundering of the Jews in Bohemia and Southern Germany, during which all debt claims were destroyed. Nuremberg alone was enriched by two million gold marks, and other cities grew rich in the same way. The Emperor now knew on which side to find advantage.

Charles IV of Luxemburg headed the movement against the Jews. Then as today, the Jews’ greatest enemy was a pale misanthrope and visionary, seeking to avenge his own wretched childhood and to conquer his sense of inferiority, often found in the depth of the soul of those who persecute the innocent. This time the people, responding to his call, let themselves go in unbridled license. In Spires and Vienna many Jews preferred to burn themselves to death. Certain Rhineland cities, deeply in debt to the Jews, got together and confined hundreds of them in wooden houses on an island in the Rhine which they then put to the torch. The emperor himself presented a certain noblewoman with the house of a Strasbourg Jew.

A certain Alsatian chronicler of the time profoundly formulated the main reason for these and all later sufferings: “Their talent,” he said, “is the poison that kills the Jews.”