Bavaria [antikvár]

Munich, after a ivoodcut from SchedePs Chronicle of the World, 149) Draw two lines on a globe between the North Cape and the boot of Italy, between Cape Finisterre and the estuary of the Danube (the river which was once the ill-defined boundary between Europe and Asia), these two lines would then intersect at a point quite near where the first globe was made, and where today 10.5 millión citizens of Bavaria live in a country of 70,500 square kilometres. It was near Nuremberg that Martin Behaim made the first miniatűré globe of the earth, which is now exhibited among the treasures of the Germán National Museum. In 1492, when the scholarly Behaim made his tiny globe, it lacked the New World of America which was discovered in the same year. In the half-millenium since that time, our world and its political frontiers, states, peoples and races have undergone profound changes, perhaps the most significant of which have taken place in the most recent decades of our mercurial century. Yet the borders of the Bavarian State have remained practically unchanged throughout the chaotic history of the last 150 years. Ignoring the former administrative territory of the Rhenish Palatinate and the Coburg district which became part of Bavaria in 1920, Bavaria has the same frontiers which were drawn by map-makers to define the Bavarian Kingdom after the crises and battles of the Napoleonic era. In the most recent and dismal epoch of Germán history, Bavaria has had good fortune rather than her own deserts to thank for her survival. Yet Bavarian national traditions, preserved unimpaired for gererations, are essential to the clarification of misconceptions surrounding the Bavaria of the present day. They make it clear why Bavaria considers herself to be a self-determining state within a federation, why /