Nationalism before the Nation State

Abstract

This volume aims to deepen our understanding of the history of German Nationalism through the analysis of its different representations in culture and literature. In the current climate of growing Nationalism and populism in so many societies around the world, it is more important than ever to understand the roots and the history of Nationalism – not only in its political phenotypes such as states, but also underlying ideologies and thought patterns. While German Nationalism in the twentieth century has been the object of much scholarly interest, this volume is innovative in exploring the phenomenon during the time before a German nation state existed. When the first German Empire was founded in 1871, nationalist tendencies and ideologies had already been virulent throughout the nineteenth century, and even earlier, leaving their mark on political discourse as well as on literary and other aesthetic productions. In this regard, Germany is a case in point of the late Benedict Anderson’s theory of the Nation as an 'imagined community': The German nation had been imagined long before it ever took political shape. In this volume, contributors explore how these imaginings worked, what shape they took, and which effects they had on contemporaneous literature and philosophy, covering the period between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.