“Wake up Germany!”: the Development of the German National Idea in Literature and Journalism of the Thirty Years War (1618—1648)

Abstract

In the 17th century a new round of development of the national idea began in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire. It was due to influence of the Thirty Years' War (1618—1648). Poets and writers of the Baroque era became the “wake-ups” of the nation. They were perceived the Thirty Years' War as a national disaster that affected all Germans without exception. The poets from the era of the Thirty Years War have constantly called their native lands “our Fatherland is Germany” and contracted their poorer situation with a number of positive moral features, which, in their opinion, constituted a “German national character” or a “German spirit”. Writers used as a historical basis for their constructions and relied on the well-known ideas about Germany and the Germans formulated in Tacitus' Germany. German poets claimed that the Germans were “God's chosen people” (this phrase became a leitmotif in many literary monuments of the era) and the German nation is “the most daring, most noble and most ancient nation under the sun” — as Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen wrote.