GERMANY today occupies pretty much the territory ascribed to it
by Tacitus, between Rhine and Vistula, and by later Roman
writers between the Alps and the North Sea. A glance at the map
shows that Germany is in the very centre of Europe. 'O heilig Herz der
Völker, O Vaterland!' sang Hölderlin. It is 'das Reich der Mitte'; in the First
World War we were fighting 'the Central Powers'. This central position
means inevitably, through all history, concentric pressure; and the Ger-
mans, it is obvious, can only subsist in measure as they resist this pressure;
'by the place we occupy, crushed in between our neighbours,' Bismarck
told the Reichstag in 1888, 'God has made it impossible for us to sink
into degenerate sloth.' The German tribes have repeatedly broken
through their present frontiers; to west and south, however, they have
always been assimilated with the races they have overrun. There are
golden-haired ¹ Spanish nobles, descendants of the Goths, who took pos-
session of Spain as well as of Aquitaine; there are blond Italians in the
Lombard plain, where once Langobardi had a Germanic kingdom. The
very name of the hereditary foe, the French, recalls the kingdom of the
West Franks; that is, of Germany west of the Rhine. In one region only
have the German tribes absorbed subjected races: in 'Ostelbien', the lands
east of the Elbe. The process of extinction can be followed: as at Berlin,
which as a village of Frisian and Low Saxon colonists existed side by side
with the original Wendish population at Kölln till the German settlement,
spreading over broad fields, by sheer weight of wealth and numbers
hemmed in and effaced the once more favoured village on the dumpy
hill. But the Germans who in the Middle Ages colonized East Prussia
were only recovering territory which was Germanic at the dawn of
history; there is plenty of evidence that Germanic tribes migrated south
from the region round the Vistula. In modern times, however, German

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