CHAPTER III

EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA

No strong national existence is possible without a sufficiently broad local basis. During the first years of their known history the Germans occupied a much greater part of Europe than they owned later. Toward the west and south their expansion met resistance for a long time, in the fortified boundaries of the Roman empire on the Rhine and the Danube. But toward the East, their abodes or at least their sphere of political influence, extended far into what today is Russia. When in the middle of the third century the Goths sailed across the Pontus and pressed south through the Thracian sea to plunder Athens and the temple of Diana at Ephe­sus, their dominion reached from the modem East Germany to far beyond the Carpathian mountains, and a hundred years later, under Hermanrick, the em­pire of the Goths extended from the Theiss to the Don and from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. During the migration of nations the Germans yielded not only these territories to the Slavs and the Mongolian tribes pressing forward on their way from the interior of Asia, but vacated also the whole eastern part of the original

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