Die Deutschen

- Season 2

(2010)

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Charlemagne, son of a new dynasty started as ministers of the former Merovingian kings of the Franks, turned his people's realm into a Germanic empire, a Catholic rebirth of western Rome's, politically rivaling Byzantium, in alliance with the papacy. The Carolingian renaissance, a cultural restoration, was a huge success, ultimately founding a capital in Aachen. A major 'internal' obstacle was the resistance of heathen tribes, the largest of which were the Saxons. Their greatest leader, Widukind, was ultimately pressed to baptism rather then continue bloody oppression...

Frederick II Hohenstaufen was an enlightened, tolerant, yet absolute king in the Neopolitan realm of the two Sicilies where he studied nature and science from Moors in self-designed castles. Having succeed as German king, he embarked on election as Holy Roman emperor but tired of the quarrelsome electors' endless mistrusting meddling, basically retiring to Italy. Pope Innocent IV condemned the hedonistic falconer fiercely for consorting with infidels, even after he successfully led the Sixth crusade and negotiated without great bloodshed the return of Christian ...

Sketches of the humble, hence poorly documented position of women and the legacy of mighty monasteries in the Middle Ages serve as prelude to Hildegard's biography. She was an aristocratic novice in the subservient female component of the now ruined Wisigodenberg double cloister. After her magistra died from excessive asceticism, she succeed her, became a medicinal and mystic author like many monks and ultimately broke off the women as a separate nunnery. Her arrogance and unconventional mysticism, based on carnal love, nearly ended in a heresy condemnation, but pope ...

Future Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV lost his father in the Hundred Years War on the loosing French side at the battle of Crécy. The heir of the house of Luxemburg made Prague in his rich home kingdom of Bohemia his splendid capital after gaining the imperial election and surviving rival elector Louis the Bavarian's bid in a civil war. Even worse was the arrival in his reign of the Black Death, which killed one to two third of many city and regional populations in and around the empire, with grim side effects such as pogroms, which mainly wiped out debts to Jewish ...

In Frankenhausen, Thuringia, 1525, a mercenary army levied by German princes smashed the peasant mass lead by Thomas Munzer, an Altstadt middle-class-born former follower of Martin Luther, who refused to sacrifice the commoner interests to secular-princely demands in order to gain protection against papal excommunication as heresy. This worldly sequel to the ecclesiastic Reformation was Germany's first true social revolution, preaching liberty and equality as Biblical values. Munzer also found a safe harbor in Saxony, where he introduced 'vulgar' liturgy even before ...

August the strong, so called on account of his physical strength and virility in bed, was the most famous and ambitious elector of Saxony, a quiet and wealthy part of pre-united Germany. He had many children from numerous mistresses, one of which tried to blackmail her way to the throne only to end up imprisoned even after his death. August was fashionably proud of his growing weight. He bought his election as king of Poland-Lithuania, a Catholic country so he converted, to his people's horror and wrecking his marriage. His political ambitions were crushed as ...

Karl Marx was born in a bourgeois family of Jewish extraction, turned protestant in Trier, a peripheral, Catholic province of the Prussian realm. After a militant student time in the 'Burschenschaften', Karl embraced the French philosophy of communism. His revolutionary ideas soon led to exile in Paris, Brussels and London. His family life turned tragic, loosing several young children. He and wife Jenny would have starved in Soho without the support of Friedrich Engels, who even pretended to be Karl's bastard with the maid. His writings, mainly the Communist Manifesto...

King Ludwig II mounted the Bavarian throne at 19 at his father's death. His political ambition was to maintain Bavaria as truly sovereign member of the German League of 39 states established after the Vienna Congress. To resist the aggressive Prussian expansion of chancellor Bismarck, he had to side with Habsburg Austria, but was defeated on the battle field and reduced to a Prussian protectorate and forced to join the war against Napoleon III's France, which lead to the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty being declared German emperors. Ludwig withdrew in wild plans, as an...

Born into a Jewish bourgeois family, Rosa Luxemburg adopted the Marxist ideals, remaining a revolutionary spinster. Her pacifist opposition against the imperial German mobilization earned her a year in jail and contributed to a split in the Gerlan Socialist party, SPD. With Karl Liebknecht, she ended up in its radical successor. After the imperial defeat, William II abdicated and a republic was to be born, but for months her Soviet-style ideal of 'socialist democracy' rivaled the regular Western model the new government ultimately achieved, after the tired masses and ...

Gustav Stresemann was a loyal imperial subject, even after the World war I defeat as an MP. Then he was part of the new Weimar republic for a moderate center party. As the Versailles treaty conditions caused the Rhineland and, illegally, the Ruhr heartland of German industry to be (maily Franch) occupied, civil disobedience could only be organized by printing money, which fatally wrecked the Mark currency. Elections forced the true republicans to espouse his party and offer him the 'political suicide' post of dire government Reichskanzler ('imperial chancellor', i.e. ...