Romans ‘created modern Germany’s divisions — not the Berlin Wall’
Research links Roman rule to regional differences in personality and wellbeing, with a 1,900-year-old border still shaping the Germany of today
It is commonplace to assert that the old boundary between capitalist West Germany and the socialist East can still be seen on virtually every statistical map, ranging from how people vote, how regularly they eat sausages and what they cook on Christmas Eve.
Yet a study has suggested that the legacy of the Berlin Wall is a mere flash in the pan compared to a divide that is nearly 1,900 years older.
If you really want to understand how modern Germany is structured, it argued, you should look instead to the ancient frontier of Roman rule.
By about AD150, after a number of disastrous attempts to pacify the Germanic tribes, the Romans had cut their losses and built a gigantic line of fortifications.
The walls, forts, ditches, palisades and watchtowers stretched more than 350 miles from the mouth of the Rhine in the northwest, to Regensburg on the banks of the Danube in the southeast.
On one side, there was — at least as the Roman historian Tacitus described it — a hostile desolation of thick woods populated by beer-swilling noble savages in badly tailored trousers.
On the other was civilisation: sophisticated cities such as Augusta Treverorum (Trier), Mogontiacum (Mainz) and Aquae Granni (Aachen), with baths, aqueducts and sewage systems, linked to each other and to the rest of the world’s most powerful empire by a network of well-made roads.
This border lasted little more than a century before slowly crumbling away under the pressure from waves of German raiders.
Yet when Martin Obschonka, a professor of economic psychology at Amsterdam University, started mapping attitudes and mental traits in modern Germany, he noticed something curious.
It has been well established that the north and the south of the country tick quite differently. What Obschonka observed, though, was much more specific.
“On several maps, a visible divide appeared roughly between Cologne and Munich,” he said.
This line appeared to hug the contours of the Limes Germanicus, the old imperial frontier. Perhaps, Obschonka and his colleagues thought, it was time to follow Monty Python’s Life of Brian and look at what the Romans had ever done for us.
Over the past few decades there have been plenty of statistical analyses that examined the lingering effects of historical developments — from the 18th-century partitions of Poland to feelings about the eurozone crisis in the parts of Greece that were treated most cruelly under Nazi German occupation.
Few, however, have tried to trace the evolution of health, culture or habits of mind over the best part of two millennia.
“Our study is somewhat unique in that it examines such a long timespan, particularly with such a psychology and culture focus,” Obschonka said.
The researchers started with survey data on the wellbeing and personality traits of more than 100,000 Germans. They then mapped the findings on to 96 districts either side of the line.
“Our study is somewhat unique in that it examines such a long timespan, particularly with such a psychology and culture focus,” Obschonka said.
The researchers started with survey data on the wellbeing and personality traits of more than 100,000 Germans. They then mapped the findings on to 96 districts either side of the line.
They also tried to take account of several other factors that might have influenced the course of each German region’s culture. These included environmental phenomena such as soil fertility, average sunshine hours, rivers and outbreaks of plague.
The team also considered proximity to coalfields, the French occupation during the Napoleonic wars, the Cold War split between east and west and membership of the Hanseatic league — a powerful northern trading alliance in the Middle Ages.
After all these tweaks, the people on the Roman side of the line were still found to display a significantly lower level of neuroticism in the personality survey, as well as slightly higher levels of agreeableness and openness.
They were, in other words, a little more easygoing and adaptive than their compatriots to the north and east. They also tended to live about a year longer and be marginally more satisfied with their health.
These positive traits had a particularly strong link to the density of ancient Roman road networks.
A memorial near Bielefeld to Arminius, a chieftain of the Germanic Cherusci tribe — best known for commanding an alliance of Germanic tribes at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which three Roman legions were destroyed
The central theory of the paper, published in the journal Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, is that the Romans left behind not only strong institutions and trade links to the rest of Europe, but also relatively benign attitudes towards things such as innovation and entrepreneurialism.
Dieter Gosewinkel, a history professor at the WZB social science research centre in Berlin, who was not involved in the study, said that the statistical work appeared to be “OK”. However, he said the idea of a causal link between the Roman empire and modern-day psychology was “insufficiently developed and even ahistorical”.
Gosewinkel argued that other factors are much more plausible, such as the early spread of Christianity, the influence of French culture, the Protestant-Catholic divide and the distribution of heavy industry from the 19th century.
“The article … confirms a folkloric argument about the ‘happier German southwest’ in the Limes zone while contributing only very little to a real explanation,” he said.
Obschonka acknowledged that a lot of other history had happened in Germany since the age of Nero and Augustus, and that Roman rule was not the only feasible reason for the trends his team had identified. But the impact of that period on the country’s culture and habits can still be felt, he said.
“It is truly interesting that we still detect these effects despite the many subsequent historical influences that may have shaped these regions after the Roman period.
