''Germania Slavica'' is a historiographic term used since the 1950s to denote the landscape of the medieval language border (roughly east of the

Elbe The Elbe ( ; ; or ''Elv''; Upper Sorbian, Upper and , ) is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It rises in the Giant Mountains of the northern Czech Republic before traversing much of Bohemia (western half of the Czech Republic), then Ge ...

Saale The Saale (), also known as the Saxon Saale ( ) and Thuringian Saale (), is a river in Germany and a left-bank tributary of the Elbe. It is not to be confused with the smaller Fränkische Saale, Franconian Saale, a right-bank tributary of the M ...

line) zone between Germanic people and

Slavs The Slavs or Slavic people are groups of people who speak Slavic languages. Slavs are geographically distributed throughout the northern parts of Eurasia; they predominantly inhabit Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and ...

Central Europe Central Europe is a geographical region of Europe between Eastern Europe, Eastern, Southern Europe, Southern, Western Europe, Western and Northern Europe, Northern Europe. Central Europe is known for its cultural diversity; however, countries in ...

on the one hand and a 20th-century scientific working group to research the conditions in that area during the

Early Middle Ages The Early Middle Ages (or early medieval period), sometimes controversially referred to as the Dark Ages (historiography), Dark Ages, is typically regarded by historians as lasting from the late 5th to the 10th century. They marked the start o ...

and

High Middle Ages The High Middle Ages, or High Medieval Period, was the periodization, period of European history between and ; it was preceded by the Early Middle Ages and followed by the Late Middle Ages, which ended according to historiographical convention ...

on the other. The historian Klaus Zernack divides Germania Slavica into: Christian Lübke, ''Struktur und Wandel im Früh- und Hochmittelalter: eine Bestandsaufnahme aktueller Forschungen zur Germania Slavica'', Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998, p.14, * ''Germania Slavica I'' between the

and

rivers in the west and the Oder in the east, which had formed part of the Frankish and later

Holy Roman Empire The Holy Roman Empire, also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1512, was a polity in Central and Western Europe, usually headed by the Holy Roman Emperor. It developed in the Early Middle Ages, and lasted for a millennium ...

s as marches * ''Germania Slavica II'' east of ''Germania Slavica I'' and west of the

Kingdom of Poland The Kingdom of Poland (; Latin: ''Regnum Poloniae'') was a monarchy in Central Europe during the Middle Ages, medieval period from 1025 until 1385. Background The West Slavs, West Slavic tribe of Polans (western), Polans who lived in what i ...

, comprising the

Silesia Silesia (see names #Etymology, below) is a historical region of Central Europe that lies mostly within Poland, with small parts in the Czech Silesia, Czech Republic and Germany. Its area is approximately , and the population is estimated at 8, ...

n, Pomeranian, and Prussian duchies as well as the Neumark. From the late first millennium CE, Slavic tribes (collectively referred to as Wends) settled in Germania Slavica. The area underwent great social transformations associated with the influx of settlers from the West (primarily

Germanic people The Germanic peoples were tribal groups who lived in Northern Europe in Classical antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In modern scholarship, they typically include not only the Roman-era ''Germani'' who lived in both ''Germania'' and parts of ...

) during the Ostsiedlung in the

and

. The consequences of ''Ostsiedlung'' would be long lasting with the social structure of "

East Elbia East Elbia () was an informal denotation for those parts of the German Reich until World War II that lay east of the river Elbe. The region comprised the Prussian provinces of Province of Brandenburg, Brandenburg, the eastern parts of Province o ...

" (German speaking lands east of the Elbe river) being dominated by latifundia and Prussian Junkers until the

land reform Land reform (also known as agrarian reform) involves the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership, land use, and land transfers. The reforms may be initiated by governments, by interested groups, or by revolution. Lan ...

and expulsion of most ethnic Germans following the Second World War. By contrast, the rest of German speaking Europe was dominated by small farms and increasing urbanization. By analogy, the term '' Bavaria Slavica'' denotes the medieval German-Slavic contact zone in northeastern

Bavaria Bavaria, officially the Free State of Bavaria, is a States of Germany, state in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the list of German states by area, largest German state by land area, comprising approximately 1/5 of the total l ...

Historical viewpoint

The ''Germania Slavica'' was introduced by Wolfgang H. Fritze as a research term in the mediaeval terminology when his interdisciplinary working group (IAG) was founded in 1976. This term was first used by Walter Schlesinger in 1961, as an analogy to 1932 research term ''Germania Romana'' coined by Theodor Frings . The ''Germania Romana'' designated, according to Frings, the spaces "in which German language development ..has been determined by the influence of Roman substrates", essentially the areas west of the Rhine and Neckar and south of the Altmühl and the Danube (Limes). Accordingly, Fritze formulated in 1980: As ''Germania Slavica'' we refer to "the area of the medieval German eastern settlement in the Slavic populated areas east of the Elbe and Saale, insofar as it has been linguistically Germanized". Walter Lammers defined: "The space between the western border of the more or less permanent Slavic settlement and the eastern border of the new German tribes, as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries." The western border was marked by Wagria, the Wendland and the Altmark, then by the Elbe and Saale and the southern border by Upper Franconia and the Upper Palatinate (Bavaria Slavica). With regard to the eastern extent, Polish research has put the counter-term ''Slavia Germanica'' up for discussion, so that there are gears in the Pomeranian, Lusatian and Silesian regions. The western and eastern borders (defined by language diffusion) of the medieval ''Germania Slavica'' are not identical to modern state borders. Due to the different accessibility to research bases, however, at the suggestion of Klaus Zernack, for pragmatic reasons, a distinction was made between ''Germania Slavica I'' and ''Germania Slavica II'', separated by the Oder as a state border since 1945, although the historical landscapes of Pomerania and Lebus are intersected by the Oder. ''Germania Slavica 1 has'' recently been converted into a “northern” (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg) and a "southern" (Saxony) divided. Ultimately, however, ''Germania Slavica'' as a German-Slavic contact zone is not primarily about a space, but about the location of historical processes. It is therefore not a question of the (one-sided) representation of the German East Settlement, but of shaping the area with the involvement of the Slavic population (especially the Elbe Slavs), both in the period before German immigration and during the high medieval expansion of the country.

Historical viewpoint

References

See also