[November, 1997]
To forget and—I would venture to say—to get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation. [1]
An historical survey of any sort concerning the extent and nature of nationalist ideology in nineteenth-century Europe poses a whole range of potential pitfalls for the unwary. Our own world is one in which the pre-eminence of the nation state as the basic political unit appears supreme: ‘everyone’ has a nation and ‘everyone’ has a nationality. An awareness of the very ubiquity of the modern nation state needs to stand as a warning against teleological explanations of its genesis. In addition to this, the very meanings of the terms at our disposal—nation, nationalism, patriotism and so forth—remain fluid and unfixed: both because they stand for phenomena which have themselves undergone considerable historical evolution (and over a relatively short period of time), and also because they remain today ‘loaded’ with contemporary meanings and concerns: the terminological barriers to historical clarity are also considerable.
When one turns one’s attention from nineteenth-century nationalism in general to German nationalism in particular, however, the potential for errors of teleology and subjectivity are compounded. For Germany occupies a special—if invidious—place in our century: As a consequence much of the historiography of the German nation takes the form of historical explanation for the events of 1933 and 1945. Inquiring into German history can be limited to a search only for those factors that can be seen (rightly or wrongly) to lead toward subsequent developments; or, alternatively, the thesis is advanced that, because of the particular features of the German experience in the twentieth century, that the whole of German history is in some way ‘peculiar’—that German national development stands out as exceptional when measured against a general European ‘model’. [2]
As a result of the difficulties posed by the problems outlined above, some consideration of general problems of method and approach will be necessary before we are in a position to undertake a more specific consideration of the extent and nature on nineteenth-century German nationalism (specifically, for the purposes of this study, for that period falling in between the French Revolution of 1789 and the revolutions of 1848-9).
Fundamental to the approach adopted in this survey is the view that there is no unbroken tradition of German ‘nationalism’ stretching back into the Holy Roman Empire of the latter half of the eighteenth century, ascending in a linear fashion towards some ‘inevitable’ conclusion in 1871 (or beyond). As John Breuilly has commented, ‘the idea of German nationality had many, changing and often conflicting meanings, so it can hardly be seen as a constant or growing element which at some point “combines” with state power.’ [3] The ‘patriotism’ of the would-be reformers of the Empire; the patriotic nationalism of the Prussian reformers of the Napoleonic era; the nationalism of German liberalism and of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848: these different phenomena are not—despite certain superficial similarities—different expressions of the same thing, but rather declarations of fundamentally different philosophies and political projects, expressed by representatives of different social groups; and which, moreover, occur in varying historical contexts.
The point is clearly an important one. If it is accepted, then it has a direct bearing on the extent of the social base of German nationalism. For it immediately poses the question: if the ideological content of nationalism undergoes periodic shifts in this fashion, then whose political or social interests are actually being expressed in each of its particular manifestations?
Underlying this approach of mine is a more general set of assumptions about nationalism and the process of the formation of nation states in general: specifically with reference to the historical relationship between the categories of nationality (or ‘people’) and the nation state itself. Now, nationalist historiography establishes a direct causality between these two categories: put quite simply, it is the former that leads to the latter. With regard to German historiography, the idea has been expressed by Friedrich Meinicke as follows (although every modern nation that has produced its own history has its own version of the thesis):
The principle is not: Whoever wants to be a nation is a nation. It is just the opposite: A nation simply is, whether the individuals of which it is composed want to belong to the nation or not. A nation is not based on self-determination but on pre-determination. [4]
But the very experience of the formation of nation states belies the assumptions behind this kind retrospective reading of history. It is not so much that this approach inverts the actual relationship between nationality and the state, as Mary Fulbrook’s comment: ‘historically, the formation of states with a centralised government administering and controlling a clearly defined geographical territory preceded the articulation of ideas of the nation’, would imply. [5] The concrete reality is in all respects far more complex. Arguing against simple causality in general for the German case, John Breuilly comments that:
It is clear that a unified Germany was created long before nationalism was a strong and active political sentiment, certainly before it was a widespread and popular feeling. Equally, however, it is clear that Bismarck would not have appealed to the idea of Germany unless in his view it possessed some independent political significance. [6]
There is clearly a more complex and reciprocal (one could even say dialectical) interaction between political nationalism and the formation of a nation state. The reasons why this should be the case for Germany in the decades between the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848-9 form the substance of what follows.
A clear defining moment in the history of the development of the nation state is the French Revolution of 1789-92: for E. J. Hobsbawm, for example, the nation that emerged after the Revolution ‘was the body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them a state which was their political expression. For, whatever else a nation was, the element of citizenship and mass sovereignty was never absent from it.’ [7]
It is worth contrasting this revolutionary French model of the nation with the Germany that existed contemporaneously with it. Of course, there is in fact no ‘Germany’ as such at this point of European history for us to consider. There was the Holy Roman Empire, which, in political terms, was comprised of an agglomeration of large sovereign states, Free Cities and petty principalities—both lay and ecclesiastical—practically sovereign but still owing some allegiance to the Emperor. These disparate territories were bounded by—and overlapped with—the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire.
Within this patchwork of states and overlapping dynastic sovereignties, the would-be German patriot had more than one call on his loyalties. Every German had at least two states to answer to—the local territorial state and the Empire: ‘“Fatherland” could mean either of these or the German nation as an abstract cultural entity without borders.’ [8]
In cultural terms, there were also many German ‘nations’ co-existing within Imperial confines; including, for that matter, Danes, Poles and Czechs amongst others. The territorial and cultural limits of any German nation of the future were by no means inevitable—or even particularly obvious—at the end of the eighteenth century.
That this diverse and complex network of states and sovereignties did produce ‘German patriots’, however, is undoubtedly the case; although to designate such people as ‘nationalists’ in the modern sense would be to over-estimate their goals and aspirations. The objective basis for their appearance was a result of the extension of the state apparatus—a long term trend stretching over some centuries in ‘absolutist’ Europe:
In a word; the state administration required educated officials. ... Since every territorial ruler jealously defended the autonomy of their own administration, insisting on his own territorial institutions, there were more universities in German that anywhere else: from Keil to Graz, from Konigsberg to Freiburg there were in 1775 no fewer than 40—twice as many as in France. [9]
The political concerns of this layer of professional ‘middle class’ Germans—educated and mobile both geographically and socially—was centred on a belief in what Michael Hughes has called a ‘kind of political “third way” between the corporative state of Estates, regarded as reactionary, and the enlightened absolutist monarchy. [...] It was based on the involvement of the people, by which was understood the middle classes, in the state.’ [10]
To read in to the wave of Reichsreform literature produced by this group in the later eighteenth century a programme of modern nationalism is to rather overstate the case, however. Although conscious of the existence of a German Volk, the principle concern of this movement was not some project of German ‘unification’, but rather the reform of an already existing ‘federal’ Reich. F. C. Moser’s contemporary definition of a ‘patriot’ explained that: ‘A true patriot is [...] a godly, honest, steady, patient, courageous and wise man, with a thorough knowledge of the laws and constitution, of the causes of prosperity and defects in his fatherland, which he uses to find the best help and the most enduring improvements.’ [11]
This ‘true patriot’ of course was also a representative of a very small social elite whose concerns were far removed from the overwhelming majority of ‘ordinary’ Germans, rooted in a peasant environment and—where literate and informed—more concerned with Bibles, almanacs and Church prayers than with political reform. Any conception of the ‘nation’ that this layer of patriots was to develop did not develop into any popular nationalist movement: the social and economic barriers to such a development were at this point insurmountable.
Whether the barriers to the reform of the Empire were equally insurmountable is now an idle question, of value only to the connoisseurs of the historical game of the ‘counterfactual’. For the possibilities of political development of the Reich were short-circuited by the real historical events of 1789. The new ‘model’ of the nation offered by France rendered the old dynastic system of territorial sovereignty redundant, both conceptually and, by means of the almost incessant wave of revolutionary war released by the new state, very practically: ‘the viability of every ancien régime in Europe was thrown into question, as different historical times crossed on the battlefields of revolutionary war.’ [12]
The practical consequences of this period for Germany are well known. First, the dissolution of the Empire was effected and its eventual replacement by the German Confederation achieved under the auspices of the Congress of Vienna and with the guidance of Metternich. Although arguably the most radical and dramatic territorial and political reorganisation seen in Europe up to that time, care must be taken in interpreting these developments as some kind of precondition for the future formation of a German nation: the essential tension between a fragmented ‘German’ territory balanced between Austro-Prussian ‘dualism’ remained, albeit in a somewhat rationalised form. The answer to the question ‘Where is Germany?’ (if not ‘Where should Germany be?’) was no more clear in 1815 than it was before 1789. [13]
An examination of the ideological impact of the French Revolution requires a certain degree of circumspection. Most important for our concerns here is the view subsequently developed by nationalist historiography of significant pan-German national opposition to Napoleon—even going as far as to designate the years 1812-13 as a German ‘war of liberation’. This view is of course a convenient one for apologists for a retrospective patriotism, but its actual historical validity really needs to be questioned: Hobsbawm even goes as far as to designate this particular notion as a ‘pious fiction’. [14]
In reality, the most consistent opposition to Napoleon came in fact not from the German states (or even from Prussia) but from Austria, which took part in every major coalition against France. Other states had different ambitions. The south-western German states—Bavaria, Baden, Wurtemberg—formed the nucleus of Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine (1806), and Saxony remained one of Napoleon’s most loyal German allies. The dynamic of the new German states emerging from the old empire was towards their own self interests rather than being motivated by a nationalism either particularly ‘pro-German’ or ‘anti-French’. Where opposition to France did develop it tended at first to focus around the more prosaic concerns of resentment to onerous taxation and the burdens of supporting an army of occupation.
The balance-sheet of the impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars on German national consciousness is that they had little initial direct ideological influence, but that they created the conditions within which a German national consciousness was to develop; their significance for Germany, in fact, was the profound effect they had on the European state system, a significance which had less to ‘do with creating the national future than with destroying the past.’ [15]
If expressions of German ‘nationalism’ before 1815 remained confined to an affirmation of a romantic, linguistic and ‘ethnic’ patriotism, then the period between 1815 and the Revolutions of 1848-9 saw a shift of nationalism to the terrain of what John Breuilly has called ‘effective politics’. [16] It would be misleading, however, to view this development simply as an evolution in form of an essentially common set of ideas: 1815 can be seen as something of a turning point for German nationalism in that it marked the division between two substantially different sets of ideologies—albeit sometimes sharing a similar terminology—advanced by different social layers. In contrast to the romantic backward-looking cultural patriotism of the would-be reformers of the old Empire, post-1815 Germany saw the development of waves of liberal reformers who used genuinely ‘German’ national conceptions as a vehicle for their political goals.
There were still vestiges of the old patriotism remaining, however: principally in the form of the student Burschenschaften, which began to be organised, initially at Jena, from 1815. Their social weight need not be over-estimated: of the 10,000 German students in 1817, only around 10 per cent belonged to the Burschenschaften. [17] That said, however, they were responsible for the events of the Wartburg Festival of 1817, which was to mark the three hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing up of his Theses at Wittenburg. Speeches were made, critical of the failure of the new rulers to establish liberal constitutions, and anti-liberal books were burned. The significance of the event lies not so much in—to use Schulze’s phrase—a ‘merging of nationalism and liberalism’, [18] but rather in that the events suggested the emergence of a ‘new’ form of nationalism: nationalism as a vehicle for liberal political objectives. It was a pattern that was to be repeated in the decades leading up to 1848.
In the initial years following 1815 liberal reformers did not in general espouse ‘national’ (or, at least, not pan-German national) sentiments: their attention tended to concentrate more on the governments of the individual German states. Within these states, constitutional reform following 1815 (in the ensuing 10 years 29 of the 41 member states of the Confederation had constitutions of one sort or another) had facilitated the formation of a limited climate of public opinion in which liberal reformers could participate. But the constitutional freedoms of this period were limited: the constitutions themselves were ‘granted’ by the monarch, who remained the source of sovereignty (except in Wurtemberg, where the constitution was the result of an agreement between the king and the estates), and were not always universally enacted.
In addition, it was becoming increasingly clear that the very structures of the Confederation itself were capable of being used as an instrument of intervention against individual state-level reforms, or even as a vehicle for—largely Austrian instigated—common policing measures against the liberal reformers across the Confederation. For example, following the Wartburg affair and the subsequent assassination of the anti-liberal dramatist Kotzebue by a member of the Jena Burschenschaft, a secret session of the Confederation Diet passed—at Metternich’s behest—the Carlsbad decrees, which imposed a strict censorship on periodicals and newspapers and subjected the universities to strict supervision. This pattern of events was repeated in the 1830s following the Hambach festival of 1832.
The effect of such measures was to impress on reformers the necessity—in response to Confederation-wide repression—of forging a national, or at least an ‘inter-state’, dimension to their activities. It was not so much that liberals turned into nationalists: rather that political reform was increasingly projected onto a scale larger than the individual state—although the full extent of what ‘national’ meant in German terms was still far from obvious, as the tortuous debate on the Kleindeutsch versus the Grossdeutsch alternatives in the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament were to indicate.
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that German territory was essentially pre-industrial in the first half of the nineteenth century—although significant economic development was to occur from the mid 1830s, in part under the stimulus of improved infrastructural transport systems and the piecemeal abolition of customs barriers. The consummation of this latter process was realised in 1834 with the creation, under Prussian hegemony, of the Deutscher Zollverein (customs union), which initially embraced 18 German states. Although the economic impact of the Zollverein should not be overstated, its formation was a development of no little import, since it ‘more clearly delimited an economic “Germany” from the external world encouraged a sense of economic nationalism.’ [19]
Thus in the first three decades of the German Confederation liberal reformers tended to be pushed into national ‘German’ conceptions of reform, partly by virtue of considerations of practical politics from above and partly under pressure from social and economic changes from below. However, it would be misleading to interpret this movement as some kind of mass, popular nationalism. Liberal reformers were drawn from a minority of the educated middle-class of state officials and intellectuals, itself something of a minority in society overall. Moreover, the liberal movement itself was both loosely organised and regionally disparate, and it co-existed with other political currents orientating to neither liberalism nor nationalism.
The true gap between the mass of the people (or at least the urban population) and the national-liberal reformers was sharply exposed in the Revolutions of 1848-9, and in particular in the composition and concerns of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. The principle interests of the Parliament were the drafting of a constitution it had no power to enforce and the establishment of a nation state it had no ability to convene. The restrictive franchise under which the Parliament was elected result in a gross over-representation of the liberal middle class: 68 per cent of the deputies were either civil servants or officials, while only four artisans and one peasant were elected. Outside of the ‘pedantic legalism’ [20] of the Parliament’s debates, a mass movement—largely artisanal in character—attempted to mobilise around social demands. Divorced from this real mass movement, and unable and unwilling to enforce any of its decisions, in 1849 the Parliament ultimately—perhaps inevitably—collapsed.
The lessons of 1848-9, of course, are legion; but for our purposes here one consequence of its failure is manifest: liberal nationalism, always the preoccupation of an elite minority, was at an end. Nationalism was to be writ large in German history after 1848—writ larger, in fact, than ever before—but, as it did in 1815, it again changed both its form and purpose:
Before 1848 nationalism [...] was, as a coherent body of ideas, largely the possession of an urban middle-class intelligentsia. They had sought to provide a new and national basis for government that was established by consent between the people or the nation on the one hand, and the government on the other. [...] After 1848 nationalism became an instrument used by conservative politicians to justify the continuation of monarchical power and to promote war. Above all, nationalism proved a powerful force for reconciling the internal class conflicts of the state. [21]
It was a Bismarckian legacy bequeathed by the Frankfurt Parliament that was to be reaped by Germans in the next phase of German nationalism.
It should be evident by now that the different appearances of German ‘Nationalism’ over the sixty years surveyed here took on a number of different forms as it sought to represent the interests of different social groups within historically different ‘German’ societies. Common to all its manifestations, however, is the fact that nationalism remained the concern of a small, privileged layer within society: educated, middle class, and often predominantly state officials or members of the intelligentsia. In a pre-industrial society, perhaps this is, if not inevitable, at least to be expected. Indeed, it has been argued—and with some justification in my view—that German nationalism as a popular force only emerges after Unification itself, in the period from 1871 to 1914. [22]
The German case is not exceptional in this respect. The formation of a nation state does not mark the end of the dissemination of nationalist ideology amongst wider social layers: on the contrary, the general pattern of European national state formation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sees precisely a concentrated period of mass ‘national incorporation’ subsequent to the establishment of a ‘modern’ state. This is true, for example, as much for Britain and for France as it is for Germany: both the Union of 1707 and the Revolution of 1789 respectively (as well as the Unification of 1871) were followed by intensive ideological crusades to forge a sense of national legitimacy for the ‘new’ state amongst far wider social strata that those in the immediate leadership of the process. In this sense it is clear that in this respect the German case is not an exceptional one at all in general form, even if it is distinct in detail.
Prior to 1848 at least, however, the true weight of nationalism as an organised political force is indicated by the fact that the biggest popular mobilisation in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century was not the 468 students who attended the Wartburg Festival in 1817, nor the 30,000 who attended the Hambach Festival in 1832 but the more than a million pilgrims who went to Trier in 1844 to see what they believed to be the Holy Robe of Christ. [23]
The uncomfortable conclusion is that—if it is explanations for, say, 1933 that are being sought—then the truth, historically speaking, lies rather closer to home than some would have us believe.
[1] Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R, Ishay (eds.), The Nationalist Reader (New Jersey, 1995), 145.
[2] One example of the former approach, atypical only in its extreme nature, is A. J. P. Taylor’s The Course of German History (London, 1988)—one of the best known ‘popular’ English language histories of Germany—whose central premise is summed up in the statement that ‘it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler that it is an accident when a river flows into the sea’ (vii). With considerable justification, T. C. W. Blanning describes this work as ‘a wild mixture of insight and perversity [...] marred by an extreme Germanophobia and distorted by a teleological perspective.’ (‘The French revolution and the Modernisation of Germany’, Central European History 22 (1989), 109.) The second approach, the notion of a ‘special’ German historical path (Sonderweg) is both accounted for and dispatched by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley in The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984).
[3] ‘The National Idea in German History’, in John Breuilly (ed.) The State of Germany (London, 1992), 22. This general point forms the essence of what is a very convincing argument.
[4] Quoted by Robert Berdhal, ‘New Thoughts on German Nationalism’, American Historical Review 77 (1972), 66.
[5] ‘Introduction: States, Nations and the development of Europe’, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), National Histories and European History (London, 1993), 3.
[6] Breuilly, ibid., 22.
[7] E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge, 1992), 18-19.
[8] Michael Hughes, ‘Fiat Justitia, Pereat Germania? The Imperial Supreme Jurisdiction and Imperial Reform in the Later Holy Roman Empire’, Breuilly, The State of Germany, 40.
[9] Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism (Cambridge, 1991), 45-6.
[10] Hughes, ibid., 40.
[11] Quoted in Hughes, ibid.
[12] Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), 269.
[13] Far more significant for the future course of German history (although this was of course not apparent at the time) were the changes wrought on Prussia. The gain of Rhine-Westphalia at the Peace of 1815 not only doubled the kingdom’s population, but it also shifted its whole historical axis towards the more economically advanced (and more ‘Germanic’) west. Unknown at the time, of course, but of exceptional significance for the course of future developments, the new territories contained enormous as yet unexploited mineral deposits and were as a consequence destined to become the most colossal industrial zone in Europe.
[14] E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1988), 107.
[15] James J. Sheehan, ‘State and Nationality in the Napoleonic Period’, Breuilly, The State of Germany, 57.
[16] John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester, 1993), 98.
[17] Schulze, ibid., 57.
[18] Ibid., 57.
[19] Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 101.
[20] The phrase is Roger Price’s: The 1848 Revolutions (Harlow, 1981), 48.
[21] Price, ibid., 63-4.
[22] Breuilly, ‘The National Idea’, 13-15, 25.
[23] Blanning, ibid., 118.