Peoples of Europe, preserve your most sacred goods!

Peoples of Europe, preserve your most sacred goods! (German: Völker Europas, wahret eure heiligsten Güter!) is a picture made by the history painter Hermann Knackfuß after a design by Emperor Wilhelm II in 1895, as a gift from the German Emperor to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II

Description[edit]

Depicted is Archangel Michael (as patron saint of the Germans), who, surrounded by a number of whale-like women symbolising the peoples of Europe as national allegories (Germania, Britannia etc.), points to a Buddha hovering in dark storm clouds over a European landscape from the east.

With this allegorical Wilhelm II wanted to call on European Christendom to fight together against the Yellow Peril or godless Buddhism.

Kaiser Wilhelm presented this painting to the Russian Tsar with the request to keep the influences from the East under control (the imminent danger of a Chinese onslaught mobilised by Japan). The Tsar was so pleased with the work that the Emperor was able to state with satisfaction: "Well, it works, that is very pleasing."

The female figures, seen from right to left, are personifications of France (Marianne), Germany (Germania), Russia (Mother Russia), Austria-Hungary (Austria), Italy (Italia) and Great Britain (Britannia). The last on the far left is not named.^[1]

A few years later, on 27 July 1900, Wilhelm delivered the so-called Hun speech. The occasion was the adoption of the German East Asian Expeditionary Corps against the Boxer Rebellion, in which Germans and Christian missionaries were also killed.

Further[edit]

The painting was used in Joachim Fest's documentary film Hitler - A Career and was intended to illustrate the world view of Hitler and some of his contemporaries.

References[edit]

^ Asmut Brückmann: Die europäische Expansion. Kolonialismus und Imperialismus 1492-1918, series Tempora Historisch-politische Weltkunde, Klett, Stuttgart et al. 1999, p. 79.

External links[edit]

illustration in the context of Poems critical of religion by Ludwig Thoma
Illustration at the DHM
www.uni-hamburg.de/Japanologie (PDF; 470 kB)

[1] Asmut Brückmann: Die europäische Expansion. Kolonialismus und Imperialismus 1492-1918, series Tempora Historisch-politische Weltkunde, Klett, Stuttgart et al. 1999, p. 79.

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