Religion and Patriotism in German Peace Dramas during the Thirty Years' War

Abstract

One of the most important analyses of the rise of German nationalism was Koppel Pinson's Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (1934). This study was one of the first to apply the methodology of Tawney, Dilthey, Troeltsch, and Weber to the analysis of early nationalism. Pinson held that the intellectual and social content of seventeenth–century Lutheran pietism “unknowingly” created many preconditions of the peculiar type of German nationalism that appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pinson argued that the qualities of pietism which were transferred to later German nationalism were strong emotional fervor, moral purity, the experience of conversion, and the cultivation of the German language. All social classes would be able to cultivate these spiritual aims, producing what Pinson called a general priesthood of believers, or salvation within and through the group. The identification of the qualities of the good German with those of the good Christian was for Pinson the crux of the process.