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"It's enough for the Greeks to mimic the Germans to regain what they once had." Ludwig Von Maurer, Das griechische Volk(1834).
Last we left off reading about the affect that the Germans had on German Made Greece. From Kingship to even Flagship todays Neo-Hellene is the ultimate creation of what their German masters would have them be. Not to take away from the superstar of the nineteenth century Lord Byron, who catapulted the cause for their war for independence, but the Germans had him beat by a full century. They even went so far as to put Hellas into production before Greece existed as such(1). According to scholar Stathis Gourgouris "The force of this cultural pre-construction in Greece cannot be underestimated, considering especially that the sociopolitical conditions prevailing at the end of the War of Independence point to an irreducible social and cultural discontinuity, to a zero point in the operation of those significations that were conceivably to propel and uphold the images of a new national identity.....Thus, the recourse of the new image of Hellas(both as cultural construct and as social system) began immediately upon the brief rule of Governor Kapodistrias and became efficiently implemented with the takeover of the Bavarian monarchy and its explicit desire for centralization and Hellenization. In fact, the cultural image of a modern Greece was put into production with much greater urgency than was a political-economic infrastructure, despite the obvious importance of the latter in a newly constituted State.(2)
German manufacturing was in full effect before the inhabitants of modern Greece even knew who Zeus was. What happened in Greece was the invention of a myth of nationality that provided, at the deepest level, a metaphysical rationale for life and death: a meaning for what would otherwise be our futile, meaningless existence. No matter if the myth took various forms, for any myth is always the sum of its many variations.(3)
The seeds were planted and German production plants were popping up everywhere in German Made Greece. The University of Athens (1837-) was the first institution of higher learning in the new Kingdom and was founded by King Otto on the German model(4). A Bavarian even ensured that Otto's kingdom would come supplied with excellent lager beer available to all newly made Greeks-its originator's name Fuchs having been Hellenized to Fix which is available today in Modern Greece(5). YouTube - Fix Beer Commercial
But we are missing the most important aspect of German manufacturing in modern Greece....the German made term 'Hellenism'. Hellenism, which was a term created by the German Johan Gustav Droysen, was the vehicle for expansionism spinning the wheels of the Megal Idea. The nationalist pseudo historian of the time was Constantinos Paparrigopoulos who was trying to put together the myth of an unbroken cultural descendency from ancient Hellas to German Made modern Greece. Unfortunately he faced much criticism from a German , believe it or not, named Jakob Phillip Fallmerayer. Fallmerayer charged that the modern Greeks were not the descendents of the dead ancient race of Hellenes. In his opinion, and rightfully so, the modern inhabitants of Greece were a conglomeration of Slavs and Albanians and whatever else settled in the Balkans. Paparrigopoulos had to not only prove the megali idea valid, but he also had to prove Fallmerayer wrong. He could not connect the pieces however.
In his works previous the 1850's ancient Macedonia was a distinct nation not related to the ancient Hellene city-states-'the Macedonian nation accomplished, in the general history [of civilization], a different mission from that of the Hellenic nation'(6).
Paparrigopoulos was at a cross roads. He could not figure out how to by-pass the time of Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great as well as the Roman empire and the East Roman empire (Byzantine empire) to modern times. Droysen ultimately gave Paparrigopolous supposed weighty arguements that the ancient Macedonians were actually ancient Hellenes who supposedly spread Hellenic culture eastward with the reign of Alexander the Great. Droysen inspired in Paparrigopoulos a refined understanding and use of the theroretical principles of German historicism(7). Through Johan Gustav Droysen the pseudo historian Paparrigopoulos invented the fallacious term "Macedonian Hellenism" and put the pieces together of an unbroken mythological culture that stretched back from millenia's to modern times. And there we have it. Germans inventing everything neo-hellenic for the neo-hellenes.
But we are not finished here. There are many more things to bring up about German Made Greece like their Flag, their early German law system, German made libraries, German centralized police,etc. All this modernization and the Germans still had to drag the Greeks, screaming, into the nineteenth century(8). There is so much more to expose yet you the reader would end up reading a book instead of a 5 minute synopsis.
However I will give one more myth a bit of exposure because what I've left out of this equation that blends into the myth of continuation (German made Hellenism) is the one myth a modern Greek is taught since birth. That they are ancestors of the dead race of ancient Hellenes because they speak the same language (another false conception because the languages of ancient and modern are not identical).
Historian Andrew Baruch Wachtel gives an explanation on where this sort of thinking originated;
"In the Balkans...nations were created first, thanks to the hard work of a handful of European-oriented men; states for these nations came later. The model for Balkan nation builders therefore was not France, but rather Germany, where intellectuals carefully nurtured a sense of national consciousness well before the existence of a unified state. On the German model, the primary definition of a nation was linguistic: a nation was a nation (and could, therefore, hope for an independent political existence in the form of a state) insofar as its citizens spoke a common language. Although Balkan intellectuals and linguists tended to claim that a given language had already existed from time immemorial and thereby provided the necessary glue for a nation, this was generally not the case.Each putative language was in fact comprised of multiple dialects of equally ill-defined neighboring languages. Because the vernacular had been used for limited purposes since the Ottoman invasion, much work had to be done to transform these languages into vehicles suitable for a full range of modern administrative, commercial, and cultural purposes."(9)
And Wachtel gives us a perfect example of how the modern Greeks utilized this German linguistic nation building process by explaining the work of one Grigorios Zalikoglou (most likely a Vlach) who goes on to write that their language is the same as the language of the ancient Hellenes. Wachtel writes;
"Zalikoglou insists that modern and ancient Greek are the same language, though as the writer of a grammar he must have recognized that there are enormous differences between them. But because he needed linguistic continuity to buttress his claims for the historical continuity of the Greek nation, he overlooked this fact. Although he uses the language of race ('blood descendents'), he excludes anyone who does. Finally, language trumps any other potential marker of national identity - thus a Muslim would be considered Greek if he speaks the language, but a Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christian would not be, even if he could prove direct descent from Plato."(10)
Of course the rules changed later on with the Vlach Rigas Velenstinlis who asserted that any Orthodox Christian was a Greek.
From what we now know we can see the true nature of German Made Greece and how they ultimately manufactured newly assembled ethnic Greeks before a state of Greece was even created.
"Greece is the most artificial of all artificial nations that resulted from the dissolution of the Ottoman empire." Yerasimos Kaklamanis (Analysis of Neohellenic Bourgeois Ideology,page 13).
Sources
1,2- Dream Nation by Stathis Gourgouris pages 86-87.
3- Inventing Greece by David Bien; Journal of Modern Greek Studies - Volume 23, Number 2, October 2005, pp. 217-234
4- Greece The Modern Sequel form 1821-Present by John S. Koliopoulos and Thanos M. Veremis page 164
5- The Greek Passion, by Kenneth Young page 159
6,7- European historiographical influences upon the young Konstantinos Paparrigopolous,by Ioannis Koubourlis; The Making of Modern Greece, Edited By Roderick Beaton, David Ricks pages 59-60.
8- The Greek Passion, by Kenneth Young pages 158-159.
9,10- The Balkans in World History, by Andrew Baruch Wachtel pages 77-78.
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