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Glass, silver gift, amber, and stoneware drinking vessels from the German world

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Dinesh ^club

. . . There are tall glasses from Switzerland, stoneware tankards from Cologne, covered beakers from Austria, silver-gift mugs from Hamburg and from the German-speaking merchant cities of the Baltic coast, from Lubeck to Riga. Most astonishing of all is the tankard made entirely out of amber -- the exotic, expensive, exclusive material found abundantly in East Prussia. Looking at this array, it is clear that Germans everywhere not only enjoy beer, but enjoy it in quantity and in style.

They seem to have been doing so for at least 2,000 years. In fact it is almost the first think that any foreigner mentioned about them. Around A.D 100 the Roman historian Tacitus, in his ‘Germania,’ talks of the fair-haired, blue-eyed tribes which had given the legions such trouble along the Rhine, of the more distant ones who gathered amber on the Baltic, and of one thing that they all had in common:

A liquor drinking is made of barely or other grain, and fermented into a certain resemblance to wine. To pass an entire day at night in drinking disgraces no one.

Later archaeology confirmed Tacitus’ observation of heavy, happy, beer drinking among the German tribes. This is in part why beer later became a touchstone of being German, as Peter Peter, the food correspondent of the ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,’ explains:

There is a lot of archaeological evidence that the ancient Germans who heroically fought against the Roman Empire consumed enormous quantities of beer. Many nineteenth-century painters depicted the ancient Germans in a way that combined bear and beer: lying on bearskins, swigging enormous quantities of beer from gilded ox horns. So beer in the nineteenth century became a national cause. Look at the enormous nineteenth-century beer halls, especially in Munich: those architects were inspired by Wagnerian dreams of Nordic heroes.” ~Page 179

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

2 years ago.

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