Free State of Bavaria
Bavaria is the Texas of Germany. Bavarians have a fierce sense of pride and independence. Bavaria is a German State located in the southeast of Germany. There are fifteen other federal states whose customs, idiosyncrasies and dialects are just as fascinating. Within Bavaria there are seven regions, each with its own traditions, and there is a dispute between people from the very south and the others, who are called Franconians. The Bavarians are different from other Germans, and are more closely related to the Austrians. While the rest of Germany is predominantly Lutheran, Bavaria is predominantly Catholic like Austria.
The Swabians and Saxons have won great battles, the Hanoverians have produced great sportsmen, and the Bavarians are known as rowdies. During the Great War, Bavarians were known as the greatest fighters in the German army, surpassing the Prussians. No other place in Germany has preserved its traditional culture as well as Bavaria.
Bavarians are known as beer drinking, lederhosen wearing folk. Munich is one of the most liveable cities in Germany (much more so than Berlin). Bavarians are known as laid back, down to earth folks who do not want to be bothered by \”Pruessiche Dummkoepfe\”. Although the 17-day Oktoberfest is fun to attend, it has become much more of a tourist attraction, rather than a party for locals. Bavarians speak a dialect called “Bayrisch.” To the traditional German speaker their words are hard to decipher and there are many words in Bayrisch that do not exist in the German language.
Few Bavarians probably seriously consider founding their own state. Bavaria already has "state" in its official name of "Freistaat Bayern" - the free state of Bavaria. But Germany's southernmost state could probably survive on its own. It's the largest German state area-wise. With more than 13 million inhabitants, it has more people than Sweden or Portugal and one of the highest economic performances of any German state. Should the wish for more Bavarian autonomy arise, then it would be because of the "Länderfinanzausgleich" - an agreement that the more wealthy German states support the poorer ones. Bayern would like to pay less into the large pot. Bavarian secessionists do exist: the conservative politician Wilfried Scharnagel (CSU) calls for Bavaria's separation from Germany in his 2012 book. But so far, no larger movement has arisen.
The Bavaria Party (BP) is a separatist political party in Germany's southern state of Bavaria. Founded in 1946, it describes itself as patriotic Bavarian. With roughly 6,000 members, the BP is the only party in the state that demands an independent Bavaria within the European Union. The BP has already drafted an amendment to Bavaria's Constitution with the aim of seceding from Germany. In Bavaria's 2013 state elections, the party made its best showing in decades by winning 2.1 percent of the vote. But it has a ways to go toward making the leap over the state parliament's 5 percent hurdle before it can even consider proposing a referendum on independence.
CSU MP Peter Gauweiler claimed in a 2005 article entitled "What if Bavaria became independent?" that Bavaria was "historically the oldest state in Europe" as it predated all the nations. "The Bavarians are loyal to Germany as to a father and mother," he added. "But sometimes you have to leave father and mother."
"Bavaria Can Also Go It Alone" is the title of a book calling for Bavarian independence published in 2012 by Wilfried Scharnagl, longtime editor-in-chief of the "Bayernkurier" weekly. A 2011 study by the Hanns-Seidel Foundation, which is affiliated with the Christian Social Union - the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, found that more than 20 percent of Bavarians questioned were pro-independence, and 16 percent could at least imagine independence. Weber conceded that he has his work cut out for him to convince a majority of Bavarians of the virtues of a separate state.
Conservative, prosperous Bavaria might not mind keeping the billions of euros in subsidies it is required to transfer to German federal states that are not as well off. Geographically, it is Germany's largest federal state and in 2012, Bavaria had the second-strongest economic performance in Germany after populous North-Rhine Westphalia. Adidas, Audi and BMW are internatioanally-renowned Bavarian brands.
A vast majority of "Merkur-Online" readers - 83 percent- questioned in March 2014 felt the rich southern region could go it alone. But 16 percent of the users commented: Nonsense, Bavaria needs Germany and vice versa.
Bavaria is pregnant with an all embracing interest; her cities, towns, villages, mountain ranges and peaks so full of the romance of folk-lore, legend and the eternal tragedies of the past. The very atmosphere in which they exist is potent with an aroma of the most fascinating and awesome periods of the world's external and spiritual developement. Great tragedies indeed halo her, as the setting sun haloes the silent peaks, lifting her to heights of infinite grandeur in the annals of the strange and inscrutable ways of Destiny.
Bavaria is a hilly rather than a mountainous country. A large portion, more especially south of the Danube, is a plateau country of considerable elevation, and indeed, the whole of the main portion of the kingdom may be described as an upland valley, averaging about 1,600 feet above the sea-level, intersected by numerous large streams and ridges of low hills. On all sides it is surrounded by hills of a greater or less altitude, either quite upon the frontier or only at small distances from it. The whole southern frontier is formed by a branch of the Noric Alps, offsets from which project far into the southern plateau of Bavaria.
In all Bavarian history there was a very marked and potent difference between them and their far earlier civilized southern neighbors. Namely, a searching for the inner meaning, a stern discipline of the senses, and curiously high sense of morality (for those barbaric days), stamped them, even then; their ancient laws and customs denoting a high standard of principles and faith. This strikes one all the more deeply as at that time the unbridled licentiousness, vice, luxury, degeneracy, and complete laxity of all morals, found its most dominant expression amongst the Romans.
Three hundred years before the Migrations, Tacitus wrote of the "lofty heroic ideals, and pure traditions" which he found among the Germans. Apart from being a warrior-like race, these Celts were tillers of the soil, living in rude huts on their farms, or in the deep woods as hunters, full of a wild elemental picturesqueness and epic poetic worth. Their warrior-like course they were driven to inevitably, in that the lands they knew of, were unable any longer to support their swiftly growing races, and they were forced to descend over the peaks and snows to find new lands to colonize. It was the Celts who opened up the salt and copper mines, latter one of Bavaria's most lucrative sources of revenue.
The Bavarians take their name from the Boii, a Celtic tribe who inhabited the districts which, when conquered by the Romans, became the Roman provinces of Vindelicia and Noricum. After the fall of the Western Empire this territory was overrun by various Germanic tribes who formed themselves into a confederation like that of the Franks and Marcomanni and called themselves Boiarii. The confederacy of the Boiarii was made tributary first to the Ostrogoths and then to the Franks.
Finally the sovereignty over them was assumed by Charlemagne, and on the death of that monarch the kings of the Franks and Germans governed it by their lieutenants, who bore the title of margrave, afterward converted into that of duke, and latterly (1623) into that of elector. In 1070 Bavaria passed into the possession of the family of the Guelphs, and in 1180 it was transferred by imperial grant to Otho, count of Wittelsbach. On the extinction of the direct line of that family in 1777, the elector palatine, Charles Theodore, added the Palatinate and the duchies of Juliers and Berg to the Bavarian dominions. In 1799 the Duke Maximilian Joseph of Deux-Ponts came into possession of all the Bavarian territories. The Peace of Luneville (9 Feb. 1801) essentially affected Bavaria.
While it lost all its possessions on the left bank of the Rhine, and also the lands of the Palatinate on the right bank, it obtained, on the other hand, by an imperial edict, an indemnification by which it gained, in addition to the amount lost, a surplus of 2,109 square miles and 216,000 inhabitants. In 1805 Bavaria was raised, by the Treaty of Presburg, to the rank of a kingdom, with some further accessions of territory, all of which were confined by the treaties of 1814 and 1815, by which also a great part of the lands of the Palatinate was restored. In 1848 the conduct of the king of Bavaria, in maintaining an open liaison with Lola Montez, had thoroughly alienated the hearts of his subjects, and quickened that desire of political change which had previously existed.
The people, early in March 1848, demanded immediate convocation of the chambers, liberty of the press, public judicial trials; also that electoral reform should be granted, and that the army should take an oath to observe the constitution. The king having refused to grant these demands, tumults occurred, and King Louis announced his resignation of the sceptre to his son, Maximilian II, under whom the reforms and modifications of the constitution were carried out. Maximilian died in 1864 and was succeeded by Louis II. In the war of 1866 Bavaria sided with Austria, in consequence of which it was obliged, by the treaty of 22 August in the same year, to cede a small portion of its territory to Prussia, and to pay a war indemnity of $12,150,000. Soon after Bavaria entered into an alliance with Prussia, and in 1867 joined the Zollverein under Prussian regulations.
In the Franco-German war of 1870-1 Bavaria took a prominent part, and since 1871 it was one of the constituent states of the German empire, represented in the Bundesrath by 6, in the Reichstag by 48 members.
In the evening of June 13, 1886, two men were found dead in the shallow waters of the idyllic Lake Starnberg outside Munich. One was King Ludwig II, creator of a castle fantastic enough to inspire Walt Disney, and the last king of independent Bavaria, a throne he had been removed from four days earlier on the grounds of mental incapacity. The other was Bernhard von Gudden, one of the psychiatrists who had signed the report declaring the king too "paranoid" to rule.
Exactly how they died has still not been cleared up - the official version is that Ludwig, seized with a suicidal melancholy, rushed into the water, the physician tried to stop him, and the king ended up strangling, or drowning, von Gudden in the struggle. Then he either drowned himself deliberately or suffered a heart attack.
King Ludwig's untimely death suited the powers around him - his disgruntled ministers, his uncle and successor Prince Regent Luitpold, and above all Bismarck, who had cause to doubt Ludwig's loyalty to the German empire he had forged in 1871. Ludwig's brother Otto succeeded, but he being also insane, his uncle, Leopold, became regent.
In personal appearance the Bavarians were stout and vigorous, well adapted to bear the fatigues of war, and are generally considered good soldiers. They were accused of being indolent and somewhat addicted to drinking, but were brave, patriotic, and faithful to their word. Their manners and customs toward the close of the 18th century were described as very coarse, and they were said to be deeply imbued with superstitious bigotry; but since the more general diffusion of knowledge a great change for the better had taken place.
Many of the peasantry wore long, loose, snuff-colored coats, lined or edged with pink, and studded in front with silver or white metal buttons, thrown open to display a smart waistcoat of various and brilliant colors; their hats were often ornamented with artificial flowers. Many of the Bavarian women were handsome, lively and graceful. They dressed smartly and display much taste in their attire. Some of them wore blacksilk handkerchiefs, decorated with flowers or ribbons, tied tightly round their heads, some caps of silver or gold tissue, and all had their hair neatly braided.
Bavaria (German, Bayern; French, Bavidre), was a kingdom in the south of Germany, the second largest state of the empire, composed of two isolated portions, the larger comprising about eleven twelfths of the monarchy, bounded on the east by Bohemia and Upper Austria; on the south by Salzburg and the Tyrol; on the west by Wurtemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Hesse-Nassau; and on the north by Hesse-Nassau, Weimar, Meiningen, Reuss, Coburg, and the kingdom of Saxony.
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