did feudalism help or hinder germany
Answers
Essentially, the Holy Roman Emperor owned all of the land.
Powerful individuals were given land and title in exchange for their military service, governance of said land and people, and the oft forgotten duty of giving advice to the monarch.
Those individuals could then in turn give pieces of their land to lower level vassals in return for their service in the same way, until you get to having little knights with little manors who serve the local lord who serves the duke who serves the prince who serves the emperor.
The lord of the land could make the laws and enforce them at will*. Essentially mini-dictators, except that they had to obey the greater federal laws of the king. A peasant or lower noble could ask the king or emperor to interfere if those laws were broken, and the monarch could use that as an excuse to unseat that noble, which usually then required a war if that noble was powerful, or he would ignore the complaint.
The vassal structure was not very rigid, and a lower level lord or even a knight could be directly appointed by the emperor with no intermediate lord (Imperial Knights!), meaning that there was no lord, baron, duke or other type of noble in-between that the knight owed fealty to. This helped the emperor be less dependent on super powerful vassals who could simply kill him.