German imperial ethnogenesis and Easter Bunny traditions

I'm preparing a long post on the ancient Indo-European origins of several Easter / arrival-of-spring holiday traditions, but in the meantime, a quick look into those relating to the Easter Bunny. It's already known that the Easter Bunny / Hare, who brings eggs as presents to children, and leaves them around the home to be discovered in a hunt, comes from Protestant Germans, some of whom introduced the practice to America. This is a major invention, without analogs in other Indo-European cultures.

What's more interesting is the timing: it's not an ancient Germanic tradition, but probably from the second half of the 1600s (the first reference is from 1682). This post will briefly review my overall theory of ethnogenesis, and then the specific case of the German Empire, whose origins and evolution remain only halfway understood by the public.

* * *

The Easter Bunny / egg hunt fits the pattern I've been establishing for the ethnogenesis of various imperial societies, whereby transformational new cultures arise only after an empire's integrative civil war -- the Thirty Years' War, in the case of the fledgling German Empire. They're not so very German before then -- just as Americans were not very American before the Civil War & Reconstruction, nor were the Romans so distinctly Roman until after Caesar's Civil War, and so on and so forth.

The origins of imperial cohesion and expansion stem from a people lying on a meta-ethnic frontier with a very different Other, who pose a serious threat, and may be an advancing empire in their own right. But if the relationship to the Other were the main driver of cultural evolution within the Us side, why would Our culture need to change at all? It could stay exactly the same, and we would simply feel it, display it, and perform it much more intensely. It only requires more chauvinism, not the forging of entirely new cultural markers. Higher quantity, not necessarily a new quality.

Rather, it is the internal dynamic that drives these cultural innovations within Us. Because some of Us lie close to the meta-ethnic frontier with the Other, while some of Us are comfortably far removed from it, there is now variation in how Us-like -- or how opposite of the Other -- the various Us-es are.

And those closest to the frontier will want to prioritize defense and even aggression against the Other, while those farthest from the frontier will say that's no big deal, why waste our resources, time, and delegate local authority to a new central state just to combat something that we barely feel the pain of?

Sooner than later, these internal contradictions within the Us side come to a head, and there is a civil war. But it is integrative, where the winner will incorporate the loser politically, economically, and culturally, as much as possible, into a greater empire, not just let them do their own thing unmolested. Both of the Us-es need to be united in order to take on the Other, so no, the loser cannot be allowed to go back to their comfy isolation.

The most typical cause of this civil war is over how to treat the Other -- should they be militantly resisted, pursued vindictively, conquered, etc.? Or should they be appeased in some way, paid off, given safe passage to bother someone else, etc., so as to not rock the boat too much for any of the parties concerned? When there is an intense meta-ethnic frontier, usually from the Other expanding at the expense of Us, this is not an inconsequential debate.

Those among Us that are closest to the frontier are being unwillingly transformed into leaders of a broader movement against the Other. It's an apocalyptic do-or-die situation for those on the front lines. So to reflect this transformation in political and military roles, they decide to adopt new cultural markers in order to let the other Us-es know who's leading the way, who should be deferred to culturally as a standard for the broad coalition of Us-es.

For, at the outset of this process, there is little variation on the Us side for any cultural domain -- that's what makes Us close together, in contrast to the Other, with whom We have a lot of variation. We speak the same language, albeit with different accents. We eat the same foods, albeit with some regional specialties. We practice the same religion, albeit with minor ritual differences. There simply isn't much in the existing cultural variation within the Us side to amplify or intensify, if one part of Us wants to distinguish itself as the standard-bearer of all the Us-es.

Hence, the urge to forge new cultural markers for the standard-bearing part of Us, which can then be held up as qualitatively distinctive compared to the rearguard or even unwilling part of Us. Of course there is a quantitative ramp-up in intensity after the ball has gotten rolling, but crucially it is not acting on long-standing cultural markers -- but entirely new ones.

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What became the German Empire began with the Duchy of Prussia, a small state centered around the Baltic port city of Konigsberg, which had become encircled by the Lithuanian Empire. Directly to Prussia's east lay the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been expanding since the 13th C., and already by the end of the 14th C. had merged de facto with the Kingdom of Poland, to Prussia's south and west. This encirclement by an expanding empire threw up a meta-ethnic faultline around Prussia, forcing it to cohere intensely to withstand conquest.

Lithuania and Poland represented Baltic and Slavic speakers, and although Old Prussians were originally Baltic speakers as well into the early 2nd millennium, they rapidly abandoned their Baltic language (and other aspects of culture?), and began Germanicizing themselves, in addition to importing heavy numbers of Germans, as well as having Germans within the elite stratum from the region's subjugation by the Teutonic Knights.

Lithuania and Poland were also intensely Catholic -- in that era, as a contrast to the Orthodox churches to their south and east, as the Protestant Reformation had not yet started. However, as Prussian ethnogenesis began, their founding duke Albert adopted Lutheranism in 1525, at the start of the duchy's existence. This was the first Protestant state church. He was originally head of the Teutonic Order, aligned with the Roman Catholic Church, but his encirclement by Catholic superiors provided the motive to adopt a new state church, to heighten the Us vs. Them feeling with respect to religion.

Prussia was still inferior in status, though, and the dukes of Prussia had to pay homage to their Polish overlords.

Duke Albert came from the House of Hohenzollern, who had recently established themselves as the ruling house of Brandenburg (in 1415), and who made Berlin their capital. They gradually acquired the rights of succession in both Brandenburg and Prussia, which culminated in 1618. The next year, the same person (George William) became the leader of both Brandenburg (elector) and Prussia (duke), formalizing their union. But Prussia was still not a fully independent polity, having to pay homage to Poland.

The next round of Brandenburg-Prussian expansion took place during the ruinous civil war among German speakers, the Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, at least until the German-speaking sides agreed to the Peace of Prague in 1635.

It is dubious to lump Brandenburg-Prussia with the Habsburgs (ruling the Duchy of Austria, and serving as Emperors for the fragmented and impotent Holy Roman Empire), as though they constituted two "Us" factions within a civil war, as opposed to an external war. Habsburg Austria was in fact undergoing its own intense ethnogenesis, along the meta-ethnic frontier to their south and east, where the Anatolian Muslims of the Ottoman Empire were making deep incursions into Europe through the Balkans. This pressure eventually led them to oversee the defense against the Ottomans alongside the Czech (Bohemian) and Hungarian regions. And as already mentioned, different churches within Christianity can be powerful meta-ethnic markers as well, as when Prussia had become encircled by Lithuania and Poland, or as when Orthodox Russia eventually expanded into Poland and Lithuania.

What is easier to construe as a real civil war is the struggle among the northern German Protestant states to unify around their new religion, to heighten their difference with Catholics such as Poland, Lithuania -- and yes, even their fellow German-speaking brethren in Austria. An integrative civil war eventually unites all of those who face the same meta-ethnic Other, the one who caused them to start cohering in the first place.

Because Prussia and Austria were forced into defending themselves against entirely separate meta-ethnic nemeses -- Poland-Lithuania, and the Ottomans, respectively -- there could be no civil war that would integrate both of those groups together. This fundamental difference in who their meta-ethnic nemesis was, determined the answer to "the German question," i.e. would one nation-state unite all German speakers, or would the schism remain? The solution had nothing to do with intellectual debates about romantic nationalism, language, etc.

And indeed, Prussia and Austria evolved into separate peer empires, with distinct national / imperial cultures, over the Early Modern and Modern periods. Even after their collapse during the World Wars of the 20th C., they remain separate and different from each other, notwithstanding their shared German language.

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This schism among German-speaking proto-empires began during the Thirty Years' War, where in general the major Protestant groups were fighting the major Catholic groups. However, this war also served as a civil war among the Protestants themselves. Their major leader, culturally and politically, had been Saxony, with Hanover after them. And yet Brandenburg-Prussia had begun expanding, so perhaps they would become the new leaders of the northern Protestants. Protestant leadership was up in the air, raising the stakes considerably, and making a civil war amongst them inevitable.

Saxony has never become an empire during any time in history, as they have been safely ensconced in central Germany from every expanding empire that might force it to cohere and develop a new identity. They were not on the faultline against the Romans (that was the Rhine River in western Germany, which seeded the Frankish Empire). They have no coastline and there were no major cities lying on the main river, the Elbe, during the era of Viking naval raids (who instead raided Paris via the Seine and seeded the French Empire). Dresden, which does lie on the Elbe, was not a city until the early 2nd millennium, so the Vikings of several centuries earlier ignored the region. There were several bulwarks in the east against invasions from Steppe peoples, namely Lithuania and Russia (both of whom became empires). And any invasion from Anatolia or the Balkans got bogged down before reaching Germany, such as the Byzantine expansion that seeded the Bulgarian Empire, and the Ottoman expansion that seeded the Austrian Empire (including Bohemia and Hungary).

They may have been incorporated into other empires, like the Frankish, but they did not lie on a meta-ethnic faultline with anyone, so they never cohered intensely and never developed a fierce collective identity that they converted into territorial and cultural expansion.

And so, during the Thirty Years' War, Saxony, ruled by the House of Wettin, preferred to play the role of controlled opposition to the Catholic Habsburgs of Austria. Saxony would defend Protestant rights in Protestant lands, but they would remain within the Holy Roman Empire, not challenge Austria / the Habsburgs politically or militarily, not seek foreign policy contrary to them, and in general serve as junior partners to the Austrians, pacifying their fellow Protestants in the north.

This weakness of Saxon identity reached an absurd conclusion by the end of the 1600s, when the leader of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, sought the open spot of being king of Poland / grand duke of Lithuania. As a Protestant, he would be required to convert to Catholicism -- and he did! He made this worse by having his son convert, so that the future rulers of Saxony would be Catholic indefinitely, not a one-off era ruled by an eccentric. He did in fact rule as the leader of Poland-Lithuania, as did his son, after a war of succession -- and then that was it. They had jumped onto a sinking ship, as the Lithuanian Empire was already long in the tooth, impotent, and dominated by Sweden and Russia. Within a century, it would cease to exist altogether, carved up by Russia, Austria, and Prussia -- not by Saxony.

Remember that Poland-Lithuania was not just any ol' Catholic polity -- it was the very meta-ethnic nemesis that caused the expansion of Prussia in the first place. This would be like a southeast Italian leader in the 3rd C. BC deciding that, y'know, why don't I also become leader of the Gauls or the Carthagenians -- not to conquer them, but to accept an open spot at the top of their otherwise intact polity and military -- and having to convert to their culture in order to fulfill the invitation! Or if in America of the 1840s, some back-East governor decided to become the head of Mexico, not to conquer it, and having to convert to Catholicism and speak only Spanish in order to do so! Ridiculous, and a clear sign that the region that he ruled would never lead the entire empire after its integrative civil war.

Instead of weakly-held-together Saxony, it was Brandenburg-Prussia who won the internal struggle among the Protestants during the Thirty Years' War. The Saxon goal of appeasing the Habsburgs in order to be left unmolested lost out in favor of the Prussian goal of consolidation of the north and separation from Austria.

Territorially, Saxony added only Lusatia, while Brandenburg-Prussia gained Farther Pomerania, the Duchy of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Kammin, and Minden. Soon after, Prussia won freedom from Polish vassalage (in 1657), and was more responsible than Saxony for driving out the invading great power of Sweden from the German lands (for instance, by participating in the Scanian War, which Saxony sat out). By 1701 Prussia was elevated into a kingdom, and at the end of the Great Northern War, finalized their possession of much of Swedish Pomerania.

By the mid-1700s, Saxony brought further shame upon itself by siding with the losing French side of the Seven Years' War, while Prussia was a leading member (along with Britain) of the winning side, although there was no change in territory at the end. And from there, Brandenburg-Prussia gradually unified all of modern Germany by 1871, including southern Catholic states like Bavaria. This was only the culmination of several centuries of cohesion and expansion by Prussia -- the struggle for Protestant-led German unification had already been lost by Saxony back in the mid-1600s.

Even during Russian occupation after WWII, and right through the post-Soviet era, the political and cultural capital of eastern Germany -- and Germany as a whole -- has been the Hohenzollern capital of Berlin, not the Wettin capital of Dresden or its cultural center of Leipzig.

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And so, it is no surprise to see that the first reference to Easter Bunnies bringing eggs is from 1682, after the civil war in Germany had concluded, whether that is construed as one including Austria on the internal side or not. At a minimum, it was a struggle among the Protestant powers, which Brandenburg-Prussia won and Saxony lost. But after that was settled, consolidation of the Protestant north of Germany could proceed more or less unhindered by internal contradictions. They had to let bygones be bygones, and develop a new, distinctive Protestant culture in the emerging German Empire -- not only in contrast to Catholic Poland and Lithuania, but their German-speaking cousins in the emerging empire of Catholic Austria.

Far from representing a primordial Teutonic heritage, nor even the cultural status quo of the 1500s at the outset of imperiogenesis, the creations that became the standard throughout Germany were revolutionary inventions to mark the birth of a new people. Not only were they different from Poland, Lithuania, and Austria -- they were starkly different from who they themselves were only a couple centuries earlier, having been tested and transformed by their location along a meta-ethnic frontier with an expanding Other.

A new people need a new culture, and that included both a religious component, like the Lutheran Church, as well as folk rituals like the Easter Bunny and egg hunts to celebrate special holidays like the arrival of spring, not to mention high culture like German classical music (whose seminal early figure, Bach, specifically built up the Lutheran Church's new culture).