ABSTRACT
‘Indecisive Germany’ or rather ‘Germanies’, as contemporaries called her, was in fact subjected to a parcelling process pushed to its extreme limits. Many politicians are surprised that a government as peculiar as that of Germany has been able to endure so long. As a natural consequence, the national spirit was still unformed in Germany while everywhere else in Europe it was crystallized in the sovereign. Germany at the end of the seventeenth century—the happy land of cosmopolitanism—was therefore open to foreign influences. Since Germany, ruined by the horrors of war, was incapable of producing anything original in art or literature it was quite natural that Italian and French influences, welcomed with open arms, should find a soil propitious to their development. The Rhinelanders turned their eyes towards Western civilization, which seemed brilliant and desirable in comparison with what was offered them by a Germany depopulated, exhausted, plunged in poverty, and political anarchy.
