German environment

Black Forest

The climate and landscape of northern Europe and Scandinavia are very different from those of West Asia and the Mediterranean, and they present very different problems to the people living there. The most important difference is that it is much colder in the north than it is in the south. In the winter it snows, and in the fall and spring it rains, while on the other hand in the summer it is nice out, and not terribly hot as it is in the south.
Because there is so much more water in the north, trees grow there better than they do in the south, and there are great forests. In the ancient and medieval periods, one great forest stretched from the Atlantic coast of France all the way across Germany and Poland into Russia, with only little clearings in it here and there for people. The Black Forest in Germany is one of the little pieces of that forest left today (it was called Black because it was so crowded with trees that it was dark).

The soil in the north is generally more clayey than further south, where the soil tends to be more sandy. The heavier, stickier northern soil is much harder to plow, and because of this people didn't want to farm there so much.

Olive trees will not grow so far north, and because olive oil was a staple food all around the Mediterranean, the lack of it made Mediterranean people not want to go too far north. The Celts and the Germans, living in the north, had to get their fat from butter instead of olive oil. This meant that they ate very different kinds of foods, cooked differently from the Greeks and the Romans.
Although wine grapes do grow in Germany today, in antiquity and the middle ages they also would not grow so far north, and so people in the north drank beer instead of wine. These two things together created a big cultural difference between the Germans and the Romans.

Another difference was that the Black Forest had plenty of wild animals in it - rabbits, deer, and wild boar. So people who lived in ancient Germany ate more meat than people in the Roman Empire, and they didn't raise that meat themselves. Instead, men spent a lot of time hunting in the forest.

To find out more about the environment of Germany, check out these books from your local library or from Amazon:

Europe, by Jo Ellen Moore (1999). For kids, a basic geography of modern Europe, including information about animals.

Germany in Pictures, by Jeffrey Zuehlke (2003). A basic geography of Germany for kids, with pictures. It's about modern times, not history, but the geography's more or less the same.

The Ancient Celts, by Patricia Calvert (2005). Covers all aspects of ancient Celtic society (in Germany and elsewhere), using archaeological evidence to show the lives of farmers, soldiers, and craftspeople.

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