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Bavaria

State in Germany

  • 30 min read
  • 11 chapters

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Through Switzerland, Iron Age and Roman Empire

The history of Bavaria begins with the settlement of Celtic tribes during the Iron Age. The territory was then ruled by the Roman Empire and incorporated into the provinces of Raetia and Noricum in the first century AD. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Duchy of Bavaria was created in Francia in 555 AD. It later became part of East Francia and controlled territory in modern-day Austria, Slovenia and Italy. Within the Holy Roman Empire it gained elector status in 1623 during the Thirty Years' War, eventually becoming the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806. Following the Unification of Germany, Bavaria remained a kingdom within the German Empire until the end of World War I. The modern state of Bavaria was established in 1945 and became part of West Germany in 1949.

The culture of Bavaria is heavily influenced by its Catholic heritage. The Bavarian language is a group of German dialects in both Bavaria and Austria with around 12 million speakers, making it the largest German dialect. Other major cultural influences of Bavaria include its cuisine, consisting of foods such as Weißwurst and Leberkäse, its architecture, largely focused on Alpine symbolism in southern Alpine regions, and its major festivals such as the Oktoberfest in Munich.

Modern Bavaria's borders consist of Altbayern as well as parts of the historical regions of Franconia and Swabia. There are 7 administrative regions of Bavaria, 3 of which are in Franconia and Altbayern and 1 of which is in Swabia. Bavaria has a tradition of conservatism; the CSU is the largest party in Bavaria and is known as the 'sister party' of the national CDU, being collectively known as the Union.

History

Antiquity

Though Bavaria has been occupied by humans since the Paleolithic era, Celtic tribes of the Bronze Age, such as the Boii were the first documented inhabitants of the Bavarian Alps. In June 2023, archeologists discovered a bronze sword, dated to the 14th century BC, in a former Celtic village; its workmanship so well-preserved "it almost shines." During the early modern era, these peoples were retrospectively romanticized as the most ancient culture of Bavaria, even though the Indo-European languages were relative newcomers to the region. Evidence of the ancient Straubing culture, Únětice culture and La Tène culture may be found in what is Bavaria today.

Archeologists know of a large Celtic Iron Age settlement which was founded in Feldmoching-Hasenbergl north of suburban Munich. Evidence suggests up to 500 people lived in the village from 450 BC. Local life appears to have centred around what could be a town hall or temple, and continued in different forms up to 1000 AD. In Manching, Upper Bavaria, an unfortified and semi-urban society appears to have prospered between the 3rd century BC until the early 1st century AD. The settlement featured food ovens, pottery kilns and metallurgical furnaces. By 200 BC the community there was active in trade—finds of coins, along with an icon-like golden tree suggest it was trading with distant Italo-Greek communities.

In the 1st century BC, Bavaria was conquered by the Roman Empire. An imperial military camp was built 60 km north-west of where Munich sits today, under orders of Augustus Caesar, between 8 and 5 BC. The camp later became the town of Augusta Vindelicorum, which would become the capital of the Roman province of Raetia. Another fort was founded in 60 AD, west of modern-day Manching, as evidenced by a legionnaire's sandal found near remains of an ancient fort.

Middle Ages

In the 530s, the Merovingian dynasty incorporated the kingdom of Thuringia after their defeat by the Franks. The Baiuvarii were Frankicised a century later. The Lex Thuringorum documents an upper class nobility of adalingi. From about 554 to 788, the house of Agilolfing ruled the Duchy of Bavaria, ending with Tassilo III who was deposed by Charlemagne.

Tassilo I of Bavaria tried unsuccessfully to hold the eastern frontier against the expansion of Slavic peoples and the Pannonian Avars around 600. Garibald II seems to have achieved a balance of power between 610 and 616.

At Hugbert's death in 735, the duchy passed to Odilo of Bavaria from the neighboring Alemannia. Odilo issued a Lex Baiuvariorum for Bavaria, completed the process of church organization in partnership with Saint Boniface in 739, and tried to intervene in Frankish succession disputes by fighting for the claims of the Carolingian dynasty. He was defeated near Augsburg in 743 but continued to rule until his death in 748.

Saint Boniface completed the people's conversion to Christianity in the early 8th century. Tassilo III of Bavaria succeeded to rule Bavaria. He initially ruled under Frankish oversight but began to function independently from 763 onward. He was particularly noted for founding new monasteries and for expanding eastwards, oppressing Slavs in the eastern Alps and along the Danube and colonizing these lands. After 781, however, Charlemagne began to exert pressure and Tassilo III was deposed in 788. Dissenters attempted a coup against Charlemagne at Regensburg in 792, led by Pepin the Hunchback.

With the revolt of Henry II, Duke of Bavaria in 976, Bavaria lost large territories in the south and southeast.

One of the most important dukes of Bavaria was Henry the Lion of the house of Welf, founder of Munich, and de facto the second most powerful man in the empire as the ruler of two duchies. When in 1180, Henry the Lion was deposed as Duke of Saxony and Bavaria by his cousin, Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor (a.k.a. "Barbarossa" for his red beard), Bavaria was awarded as fief to the Wittelsbach family, counts palatinate of Schyren ("Scheyern" in modern German). They ruled for 738 years, from 1180 to 1918. In 1180, however, Styria was also separated from Bavaria. The Electorate of the Palatinate by Rhine (Kurpfalz in German) was also acquired by the House of Wittelsbach in 1214, which they would subsequently hold for six centuries.

The first of several divisions of the duchy of Bavaria occurred in 1255. With the extinction of the Hohenstaufen in 1268, Swabian territories were acquired by the Wittelsbach dukes. Emperor Louis the Bavarian acquired Brandenburg, Tyrol, Holland and Hainaut for his House but released the Upper Palatinate for the Palatinate branch of the Wittelsbach in 1329. That time also Salzburg finally became independent from the Duchy of Bavaria.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, upper and lower Bavaria were repeatedly subdivided. Four Duchies existed after the division of 1392: Bavaria-Straubing, Bavaria-Landshut, Bavaria-Ingolstadt and Bavaria-Munich. In 1506 with the Landshut War of Succession, the other parts of Bavaria were reunited, and Munich became the sole capital. The country became a center of the Jesuit-inspired Counter-Reformation.

Electorate of Bavaria

In 1623, early in the Thirty Years' War, the Bavarian duke replaced his relative the Elector Palatine among the Holy Roman Empire's powerful prince-elector, gaining both a vote in determining the Emperor thenceforth and special legal status under the Empire's laws. During the early and mid-18th century, the ambitions of the Bavarian prince-electors led to several wars with Austria as well as to occupations by Austria during the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of the Austrian Succession; on one occasion, the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach secured the election of one of its own members rather than a Habsburg as emperor.

To mark the unification of Bavaria and the Electoral Palatinate, both being principal Wittelsbach territories, Elector Maximilian IV Joseph was crowned king of Bavaria. King Maximilian Joseph was quick to change the coat of arms. The various heraldic symbols were replaced and a classical Wittelsbach pattern introduced. The white and blue lozenges symbolized the unity of the territories within the Bavarian kingdom.

The new state also comprised the Duchy of Jülich and Berg as these on their part were in personal union with the Palatinate.

Kingdom of Bavaria

When the Holy Roman Empire dissolved under Napoleon's onslaught, Bavaria became a kingdom in 1806 and joined the Confederation of the Rhine.

The Duchy of Jülich was ceded to France and the Electoral Palatinate was divided between France and the Grand Duchy of Baden. The Duchy of Berg was given to Joachim Murat. The County of Tyrol and the federal state of Salzburg were temporarily annexed with Bavaria but eventually ceded to Austria at the Congress of Vienna. In return, Bavaria was allowed to annex the modern-day region of Palatinate to the west of the Rhine and Franconia in 1815.

Between 1799 and 1817, the leading minister, Count Montgelas, followed a strict policy of modernization copying Napoleonic France; he laid the foundations of centralized administrative structures that survived the monarchy and, in part, have retained core validity through to the 21st century. In May 1808, a first constitution was passed by Maximilian I, being modernized in 1818. This second version established a bicameral Parliament with a House of Lords (Kammer der Reichsräte) and a House of Commons (Kammer der Abgeordneten). That constitution was followed until the collapse of the monarchy at the end of World War I.

After the rise of Prussia in the early 18th century, Bavaria preserved its independence by playing off the rivalry of Prussia and Austria. Allied to Austria, it was defeated along with Austria in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and was not incorporated into the North German Confederation of 1867, but the question of German unity was still alive. When France declared war on Prussia in 1870, all the south German states (Baden, Württemberg, Hessen-Darmstadt and Bavaria) aside from Austria joined the Prussian forces and ultimately joined the Federation, which was renamed Deutsches Reich (German Empire) in 1871.

Bavaria continued as a monarchy, and retained some special rights within the federation (such as railways and postal services and control of its army in peace times).

Part of the German Empire

When Bavaria became part of the newly formed German Empire, this action was considered controversial by Bavarian nationalists who had wanted to retain independence from the rest of Germany, as had Austria.

As Bavaria had a heavily Catholic majority population, many people resented being ruled by the mostly Protestant northerners in Prussia. As a direct result of the Bavarian-Prussian feud, political parties formed to encourage Bavaria to break away and regain its independence.

In the early 20th century, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Henrik Ibsen, and other artists were drawn to Bavaria, especially to the Schwabing district in Munich, a center of international artistic activity at the time.

Free State of Bavaria

World War I led to the abolition of the monarchy all over Germany in 1918. The Bavarian monarchy was the first to fall when on 8 November 1918 Socialist politician Kurt Eisner proclaimed the People's State of Bavaria. Eisner headed a new, republican government as minister-president. On 12 November, King Ludwig III signed the Anif declaration, releasing both civil and military officers from their oaths, which the Eisner government interpreted as an abdication.

After losing the January 1919 elections, Eisner was assassinated in February 1919, ultimately leading to a Communist revolt and the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic being proclaimed 6 April 1919. After violent suppression by elements of the German Army and notably the Freikorps, the Bavarian Soviet Republic fell in May 1919. The Bamberg Constitution (Bamberger Verfassung) was enacted on 12 or 14 August 1919 and came into force on 15 September 1919, placing the Free State of Bavaria inside the Weimar Republic.

Extremist activity further increased, notably the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch led by the Nazis, and Munich and Nuremberg became seen as strongholds of Nazism during the Weimar Republic and Nazi dictatorship. In the crucial German federal election, March 1933, the Nazis received around 43% of the votes cast in Bavaria.

As a manufacturing centre, Munich was heavily bombed during World War II and was occupied by United States Armed Forces, becoming a major part of the American Zone of Allied-occupied Germany, which lasted from 1945 to 1947, and then of Bizone.

The Rhenish Palatinate was detached from Bavaria in 1946 and made part of the new state Rhineland-Palatinate. In 1949, Bavaria became part of the Federal Republic of Germany, despite the Bavarian Parliament voting against adopting the Basic Law of Germany, mainly because it was seen as not granting sufficient powers to the individual states (Länder), but at the same time declared that it would accept it if two-thirds of the other Länder ratified it. All of the other states ratified it, so it became law. Thus, during the Cold War, Bavaria was part of West Germany.

Bavarian identity

Bavarians have often emphasized a separate national identity and considered themselves as "Bavarians" first, "Germans" second. In the 19th-century sense, an independent Kingdom of Bavaria existed from only 1806 to 1871. A separate Bavarian identity was emphasized more strongly when Bavaria joined the Prussia-dominated German Empire in 1871, while the Bavarian nationalists wanted to keep Bavaria as Catholic and an independent state. Aside from the minority Bavaria Party, most Bavarians now accept Bavaria as part of Germany.

Another consideration is that Bavaria is not culturally uniform. While inhabitants of Altbayern ("Old Bavaria"), the regions forming the historic Bavaria before further acquisitions in 1806–1815, speak a Bavarian dialect of German, Franconia in the north and Bavarian Swabia in the southwest have a distinct culture including different dialects of German, East Franconian and Swabian, respectively.

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