Germany Trip 2011!: Peace of Westphalia

History has always been one of my favorite subjects to learn about in school. I find it fascinating to learn all the background details about why certain things have ended up the way they are today and how we have learned from our past experiences. Reading these first couple chapters about the history of Germany was something entirely new to me and a lot of the information I had never learned about before and it was really interesting and at times a little more complicated and confusing than our American history. The Thirty Years War and ultimately the Peace of Westphalia was a major event that I found to be very important in the history of Germany. I feel as if the Peace of Westphalia was a platform for not only Germany but also many other parts of Europe to start building and growing separately as individual territories. One of the best parts, in my opinion, of this Constitution was that it ensured that the empire would be multidenominational and each territory allowed individuals the rights to practice their own beliefs in private or as a whole. I believe this was a step closer to separating the powers of the church and state as we do in United States. Religion can be tricky because it is a personal belief and everyone believes differently. You will have conflict if you try to force a religious belief upon someone and that was one of the main reasons for the Thirty Years War. I think America was smart when separating the powers of church and state and although this may never be something that happens in Europe, the Peace of Westphalia was a great beginning and solved one of the major problems in their government system at that time. It’s sad to think that they needed a devastating war that weakened their population from 17 million to 10 million people to make this peace, but we can be glad that it ended with this positive outcome.