Thuringia

The Hedgehog's Coffee Party.

A Story of Turingia.

CHAPTER I.

It was wintertime, and the Turingia wild lay still and white under its snowy covering.

The fir trees waved their branches in the frosty air, and a clear moon had risen over the mountains.

All was quiet and deserted, except that a faint sound of music and singing floated on the wind, coming undoubtedly from the comfortable burrow of the hedgehog family, who lived under one of the largest pine stumps.

Subjects were to be free to quit a country where their own religion was not tolerated.

the doctrines of luther for the first time received a positive sanction and if they were trampled under foot in bavaria and austria they predominated in saxony and thuringia but the sovereigns alone were to determine what form of religion should prevail within their territories the feelings of subjects who had no representatives in the diet were little attended to in the pacification in the ecclesiastical territories indeed where the unreformed religion enjoyed an undisputed supremacy the free exercise of their religion was obtained for all who had previously embraced the protestant doctrines but this indulgence rested only on the personal guarantee of ferdinand king of the romans by whose endeavours chiefly this peace was effected a guarantee which, being rejected by the Roman Catholic members of the Diet, and only inserted in the treaty under their protest, could not of course have the force of law.

If it had been opinions only that thus divided the minds of men, with what indifference would all have regarded the division? But on these opinions depended riches, dignities, and rights, and it was this which so deeply aggravated the evils of division.

Of two brothers, as it were, who had hitherto enjoyed a paternal inheritance in common one now remained while the other was compelled to leave his father's house and hence arose the necessity of dividing the patrimony for this separation which he could not have foreseen the father had made no provision By the beneficent donations of pious ancestors, the riches of the church had been accumulating through a thousand years, and these benefactors were as much the progenitors of the departing brother as of those who remained.

If those things don't lead to the party's demise, then I think we can say it's pretty resilient.

Where I would maybe take a slightly different tone to what John said is I think Saxony-Anhalt in particular is possibly the state, maybe along with Thuringia, and maybe along with Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, where the AFD has the greatest potential.

It still scored well in Baden-Württemberg and in Rheinland-Palatinate in state elections there earlier this year.

But the potential isn't the same.

Because like different state factions have different politics.

And the ones in basically Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt are pretty... pretty nasty, that's fair to say.

And they were on course to win, and they did win, and that has been all over the headlines and everyone knows that.

I think something that's underappreciated though is quite how badly the CDU did.

But in 536 this also became Frankish.

Contemporaneously with the conquest of Burgundy proceeded the conquest of Thuringia, the fair region in the heart of Germany which still bears that name, and the establishment of the overlordship of the Franks over the nation of the Bavarians, whose country stretched from the Danube across the Alps into the valley of the Adige and up to the very gates of Italy.

The date of this last addition to the Frankish dominions cannot be precisely ascertained, but may be stated approximately at the year 535.

It will be seen from this brief summary how rapidly the tide of Frankish conquest rose almost to the same high-water mark which it maintained at the time of the birth of Charlemagne.

It can never have been the speech of the people.

And though here we must speak rather by conjecture than by proof, it is probable that the old Germanic institutions of the hundred and the Gau survived here in greater vigor than on the alien soil of Romanized Gaul.

It was also through the rulers of Austrasia that the connection, frail and precarious as it often might be, was kept up between the Frankish monarchy and the great semi-independent duchies of the Thuringians, the Alamanni, and the Bavarians.

Thus already in the fissure between the western and eastern portions of the Merovingian kingdom we see the rift, premonitory of that mighty chasm which now separates the great states of France and Germany.