Decentering Germany's Classical Center: Colonial Critique and Weimar Classicism

Abstract

This essay reflects on the interrelated topics of the Germans’ response to intra‐European conflict and their relation to extra‐European imperialism. Against the myth that the politically fragmented Germans first found unity in the realm of culture and then joined together to defeat Napoleon and his armies, we find instead fictions of fractured identities, conflicts in border zones between collaborators and resistance fighters, regional loyalties, and cosmopolitan hopes. The era often celebrated as Germany's “classical center” was in fact radically decentered. This essay shifts the focus from precolonial fantasies that anticipated the empires of Bismarck and Hitler to efforts on the part of German intellectuals raised in the Holy Roman Empire to imagine alternatives to the imperialist nation‐state and to cast a critical eye on the European conquest of the globe.