GERMANY 



2468 



GERMANY 



NEW LOCATION MAP 



47 16' and 55 53' north, and thus occupied 

 approximately the same north and south posi- 

 tion as Newfoundland and Labrador, but 

 other conditions 

 differed so that a 

 traveler would 

 not suspect this 

 similarity. 



I n t er e s ting 

 Measurements. 

 The area of the 

 empire was 208,- 

 825 square miles 

 slightly greater 

 than that of the Canadian province of 

 Yukon, or of the combined states of Colorado 

 and Wyoming. Among the states of Europe 

 it was third in size, only Russia and Austria- 

 Hungary surpassing it, though its hereditary 

 enemy, France, almost equaled it; while its 

 population in 1911 of 64,925,993 made it second 

 only to Russia among the European countries. 

 Defeat in the War of the Nations reduced its 

 area 35,135 square miles, with a possibility of 

 greater losses by vote of the people affected. 

 The area of the country since the entente im- 

 posed its will on the Germans is therefore 173,- 

 690 square miles, and there may be further 

 shrinkage. 



Not far from 6,000,000 people are separated 

 from Germany, and 1,600,000 were killed in the 

 war. The population, therefore, is about 57,- 

 325,000. 



The People. The Germans, or as they call 

 themselves, Deutsche, are Teutons that is, 

 they belong to that great division of the human 

 race which includes the Scandinavians, the 

 English, the Dutch and most of the inhabit- 

 ants of Canada and the United States. The 

 typical German has fair hair and blue eyes, 

 and is rather solidly built; but it is estimated 

 that less than one-third of the inhabitants of 

 the Empire are of this type, by far the greater 

 number belonging to an intermediate brown- 

 haired type. 



Temperamentally the Germans have certain 

 very distinct characteristics. Perhaps the chief 

 of these is thoroughness. Without the quick- 

 ness of the French or the bulldog determina- 

 tion of the English, the German accomplishes 

 results by a stolid perseverance which ignores 

 all obstacles. "German stolidity" has become 

 proverbial, but the term stolidity is by no 

 means uncomplimentary, for no people has 

 delved deeper and more effectively into philos- 

 ophy, though some of it has proved baneful; 



no people has wrought out more painstaking 

 and accurate scientific systems, or has produced 

 literature, whether of the realistic or the imag- 

 inative type, of more importance. 



All the inhabitants of the United States may 

 be called, in a certain sense, Americans; all 

 those of the Dominion, Canadians, but all the 

 inhabitants of the former empire were not in 

 this same sense Germans. These non-Germans 

 were not immigrants who dwelt in the country 

 without becoming a part of it, but were people 

 living on their ancestral soil and who spoke the 

 language which their predecessors have spoken 

 for centuries. Thus there were Poles in the 

 provinces of Silesia and Posen ; Danes in Schles- 

 wig-Holstein ; French in Alsace-Lorraine; 

 Czechs in Silesia in all, a population of over 

 6,000,000 of non-German blood. The treaty of 

 peace returned these partly alien people to their 

 original linguistic groups, on the basis of Presi- 

 dent Wilson's idea of the "self-determination of 

 peoples." All Germans in Germany do not 

 speak exactly the same language or dialect. In 

 the northern district there is the so-called Low 

 German, or Plattdeutsch, while in the highlands 

 of the south, High German is spoken. This lat- 

 ter is the language of German literature, and is 

 making its way little by little into the terri- 

 tories which once knew only Plattdeutsch 

 (see GERMAN LANGUAGE; PLATTDEUTSCH). 



With its total population of 64,925,993 before 

 the War of the Nations, Germany had a den- 

 sity of 310.9 to the square mile consider- 

 ably less than England, Belgium or the Neth- 

 erlands, and about ten times that of the United 

 States as a whole. The distribution of the 

 inhabitants is very uneven, for one kingdom 

 of the country, Saxony, has about 800 to the 

 square mile. Considerably more than half 

 of the people live under urban conditions, that 

 is, in communes of more than 2,000 inhabitants. 

 There are twenty-four cities each with a pop- 

 ulation greater than 200,000, and the total num- 

 ber of those with more than 100,000 is forty- 

 eight. The chief cities, most of which receive 

 detailed description in separate articles in these 

 volumes, are Berlin, the capital; Hamburg, 

 Leipzig, Munich, Dresden, Cologne, Breslau, 

 Frankfort-on-the-Main, Nuremberg, Hanover, 

 Stuttgart and Bremen. 



The Germans have a much stronger tendency 

 to emigrate than have the French, for example, 

 and it is estimated that during the nineteenth 

 century no fewer than 6,000,000 people left 

 their ancestral homes. By far the larger num- 

 ber of these went to the United States. 



