ABSTRACT
In most accounts of German origins one is brought up against a gross error. The writers begin German history with the so-called Volkerwanderung, and go more or less fully into the story of Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and so on, without asking themselves what all this has to do with German history. The Scandinavian peoples unquestionably belong to the Teuton group, yet no one has dreamt of including in German history the history of the Scandinavian peoples. Among the Teuton peoples the Germans form a special group, and—an important point for us—not originally an assembled group. They were not associated together from the first; quite on the contrary, they only came together and grew into a community in the course of time. Fighting was from the beginning, in the old German state, the life’s calling of a particular caste—the knights. The Church in the earliest German nation was a state church, as it had been in the Frankish Empire.
