German Nation-state Research Articles

A New Voice of German Nationalism: An Analysis of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Nationalist Expression, 1799–1813

Friedrich Schleiermacher emerged as a prominent advocate for German nationalism in the Wars of Liberation from Napoleonic domination in the early nineteenth century. Alongside his work as a pastor and theologian in Berlin, and also as the co-founder of the University of Berlin, Schleiermacher developed German nationalism from a distinctly Protestant perspective, one that sought the preservation of Protestantism in the German lands under Napoleonic domination. While it would be an overstatement to suggest that Schleiermacher’s nationalism was anti-Catholic, he certainly sought to preserve and maintain Protestantism in the German lands. His vision of the German nation-state emphasized Germany’s role as a divine instrument of God’s will in the world. He assumed the cultural unity of the peoples in German lands, that is, an area of land in which the peoples are bound together by the common use of the German language. In his distinct role as a pastor, theologian, and academic, he was devoted to the cultivation of German national consciousness and the establishment of a German nation-state. Schleiermacher’s work would help to provide a cultural foundation for the emergence of the German nation-state more than half a century before the establishment of the German empire.

Till Death Do Us Part

The so-called Kulturkampf, the conflict between the German Reich and the Catholic Church in the 1870s and 1880s, is one of the most important ideological conflicts of the late nineteenth century and reveals a political theological dynamic characteristic of the modern (German) nation state. This paper analyzes the paradoxes of this conflict along the lines with Eric Santner’s analysis of political representations. During the Kulturkampf, Catholic citizens were publicly suspected of not being loyal Germans, and the Catholic Church is widely figured as an (inner) enemy in the liberal press and in modern caricatures. In these polemics, numerous political theological figures emerge: images of a gendered relation of domination of the (female) church by the (male) state, phantasies of the body politic and its precarious unity as well as of its purification respectively of the extermination of its others that continue to determine other ideological conflicts in the twentieth century.

Ambivalent meanings of the past: state critique and memory politics in 1980s (pro-)Refugee struggles in the Federal Republic of Germany

ABSTRACT Focusing on the largely forgotten early period of (pro-)Refugee activism in the 1980s West-Germany and the role of memory politics therein, this article explores the ambiguity in critiquing the nation-state. Drawing on original data collected in seven social movement archives in Germany, different ways in which German Nazism and the Holocaust are invoked to frame and critique the present (West-)German nation-state and its migration and asylum regime are scrutinised. Three ways in which Nazism and the Holocaust were invoked and discussed by Refugee activists and their supporters are differentiated: the past as ‘reminder and warning for the present’, the past as ‘discrediting and incriminating the present’, and explicit attempts not to draw analogies between the past and the present. Overall, the article makes two key contributions. First, the article makes a historical and empirical contribution as the focus on the 1980s sheds light on a period that has so far been largely ignored when it comes to the study of (pro-)Refugee activism. By tracing different ways in which memory politics has informed and been integral to Refugee activism and support, the article makes, second, an innovative contribution to studying the nexus of (forced) migration, national identity, and memory politics.

Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung als Sakralisierungspraxis

Abstract In this article, I would like to use the case of Rudolf Eucken to examine how the historiography of philosophy, and especially the interpretation of German Idealism, became a medium of national self-assurance. By referring to the philosophical classics of German Idealism, Eucken, at the end of the 19th century, develops a model of a publicly effective philosophy to which he ascribes the task of contributing to the recovery of unity and strength. My aim is to work out the social background and the social function of this characterisation of the history of philosophy. The thesis I would like to develop is that Eucken, in reaction to his perception of social crises and the inner-scientific questioning of the role of philosophy, attempts to establish philosophy as a fundamental element of the historical discourse and practices of the new German nation state. This historical discourse, into which philosophy attempts to inscribe itself, can be interpreted, following Durkheim’s sociological reflections on religion, as an attempt to sacralise the nation. This reveals the social function of this form of philosophical historiography: it becomes the theology of the new German nation state.

Grenzen der Sicherheit. Unfälle, Medien und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich ed. by Amerigo Caruso and Birgit Metzger

Reviewed by: Grenzen der Sicherheit. Unfälle, Medien und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich ed. by Amerigo Caruso and Birgit Metzger Jens-Uwe Guettel Grenzen der Sicherheit. Unfälle, Medien und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich. Edited by Amerigo Caruso and Birgit Metzger. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022. Pp. 293. Hardcover €36.90. ISBN 978-3835339064. This edited volume is a much-needed intervention in newly invigorated debates about the German Empire. The volume's concrete focus on accidents, their reception, politicization, and utilization in the Kaiserreich before 1914 provides depth and details to discussions that, after the critique of Hedwig Richter's Demokratie. Eine deutsche Affäre, have tended to unfold within, at times, rather lofty historiographical meta-levels. Grenzen der Sicherheit brings us back down to earth (even below the earth's surface level with respect to mining accidents) as the book covers everything from non-military shooting accidents (Dagmar Ellerbrock) to collisions of naval ships (Sebastian Rojek) and zeppelin accidents (Jürgen Bleibler, Rüdiger Haude), to accidents within the army (Birgit Metzger), to mining and industrial disasters (Michael Farrenkopf, Fabian Trinkaus), to the accidental deaths of prominent individuals such as Friedrich August II of Saxony (Amerigo Caruso) and the pioneer of aviation Otto Lilienthal (Peter Busse/Bernd Lukasch). Grenzen der Sicherheit provides us with the history of accidents in the German Empire and thus combines two separate debates: inquiries into the handling of physical risks and the changing attitudes towards and demands for individual and collective security on the one hand, and on the other, longstanding questions about the character of the first German nation state and the ambiguities of modernity (7–8). The book covers these issues with great verve and clarity, and the individual [End Page 157] chapters show repeatedly how significantly perceptions about risk, risk management, and related social controlling and policing mechanisms changed between the middle years of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Dagmar Ellerbrock's chapter on gun-related accidents highlights this development, as it traces both the changing public attitudes toward private shooting accidents and deaths and the correspondingly shifting policy responses, thereby clearly demonstrating that in the early years of the twentieth century these events were seen as a security problem in need of policy solutions, while the same issues had been perceived as natural risks half a century earlier. Other chapters of the book sketch out similar developments, among them Michael Farrenkopf's contribution on mining disasters and Fabian Trinkaus's piece on accidents in the iron and steel industry. Yet Grenzen der Sicherheit also shows that social and political responses did not always sync up with the growing knowledge and awareness of certain risks. A partial exception to this "norm" is presented in the book's chapters on aircraft accidents. Especially with respect to the frequent and disastrous accidents of Count Zeppelin's airships, Farrenkopf and Trinkaus both show that public reaction nevertheless remained favorable to these machines, as they were seen as symbols of German technological prowess and imperial aspirations. With respect to the book's intervention in debates about "the character of the first German nation state," Grenzen der Sicherheit answers as many queries as it raises new questions. Given this edited volume's breadth and depth, this is entirely as it should be. The book's contributions demonstrate convincingly how significantly attitudes towards what constituted (acceptable) social and individual risk(s) changed during the covered period. However, this process is at least at times described as an essentially naturally occurring one, rather than as a development driven by human actors. For example, the increasing public awareness (and fear) of gun-related accidents during the years before the beginning of war in 1914 was not just fueled by independently changing attitudes toward privately owned firearms and accidents caused by them, but also by the increased use of such weapons in unruly and densely populated working-class neighborhoods. Beginning with the massive suffrage demonstrations in the spring of 1910 and the Moabit unrests later during the same year, the increased use of privately owned weapons resulted in something of an arms race between the Prussian police and working-class demonstrators. Changing perceptions of what risks were...

Being World Power and Economic Utility: The Economic History of Germany’s African Colonies

As a late colonial power, Germany was seeking to conquer territories in Africa and Oceania in the last third of the 19th century. The two major purposes for founding colonies were 1) to reduce the immigration of Germans to America; and 2) to represent the young German nation state as a mature power, which can compete with the United Kingdom (called simply England in the historical sources) and with the despised Western neighbour France. The most important lobby and pressure group of German colonial aims was the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), a group of widely respected intellectuals, influential businessmen and politicians. After the accession on the throne of Emperor Wilhelm II, the colonial lobby became more influential, and the process of colonial expansion was accelerated. Nevertheless, there was an Achilles’ heel in this policy: gaining territories did not seem to be profitable in the short term. Thus, theorists and propagandists of colonization, such as Paul Rohrbach, published papers about possible measures that could have made the colonies financially fruitful territories. This thought remained vivid in the National Socialist era as well: Germany’s right to have colonies was explained on the base of the need for raw materials and the overpopulation of the German fatherland. This study has been written for the purpose to summarize the colonial economic policy of the German Kaiserreich and to briefly explain the economic plans of National Socialist German state regarding Germany’s former colonies in Africa.

Building the Cathedral of Democracy: Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in Hitler’s Shadow

Abstract After Nazi horrors disgraced German nationalism, Frankfurt’s Paulskirche became an ideal monument through which to redeem the German nation. In 1848, the first democratic German parliament convened here to debate the contours of a united, politically liberal German nation-state, only to be dispersed by reactionary forces. In 1944, the Paulskirche burned. Out of this shell, postwar politicians, intellectuals and architects fashioned a veritable ‘cathedral of democracy’ in which to celebrate the ‘better Germany’ now reborn. This article analyses formative issues at stake as the ruin was reconstructed into a sacred site for national identity after Hitler. At the same time that the Paulskirche provoked debates about whether modernist or traditional architectural styles were properly ‘democratic’ or represented an ‘authoritarian’ false path after Hitler, onlookers were disturbed that though few of the architects had been party members, most had worked for Hitler, deployed an aesthetic reminiscent of Nazism and applied tyrannical planning methods. For the greater good of ‘German democracy’, the city also confiscated the church from its Protestant congregation. Subsequent feuds about whether the Paulskirche should keep its 1948 aesthetics or be retrofitted to look as it had in 1848 served as ideological ‘events’ that once more questioned what the ‘German nation’ should represent after Hitler. At a time of overwhelming material suffering, Germans poured resources and energy into proving in physical space that Germany had a democratic past, present and future. However, debates about how that democratic tradition should architecturally manifest itself conjured shadows from the Nazi past.

Trauma eines deutschen Künstlers

From the perspective of political iconography, this article takes a rather unusual view on a group of graphic works by the German secessionist Lovis Corinth. Martin Luther, whom Corinth honored in an extensive graphic cycle in 1921, is a figure in German religious and national history who played a significant role as a paragon of manliness in the formation of the German nation-state. As the epitome of the German man who stood out for his firmness of faith, steadfastness, and will to fight, Luther was also a suitable model for Corinth himself, who wished for a better reality, especially in the disastrous situation after the First World War.

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Europa en de opkomst van Duitsland, 1830-1871

Abstract Europe and the rise of Germany, 1830-1871. The German Question in European perspective A century and a half ago Bismarck’s Reichgründung fundamentally changed Europe’s states system. It marked the end of a quest for German unity that, since the 1830s, had been a central theme of European politics. This era has so far received little attention, and only a few historians appreciate that the rise of Germany in the nineteenth century triggered not only anxiety and fear among its neighbours, but feelings of sympathy and hope as well. This article aims to chart the whole range of reactions and to reintroduce openness to this historical process. It analyses a variety of conceptions of a new European states system in order to understand how Polish, Italian, French, and British politicians and activists anticipated and tried to influence the emergence of a strong and powerful German nation state in Europe’s centre. The conditionality of their support stresses the influence of these neighbouring nations on European-German relations then and now.

‘The Dear Old Holy Roman Realm, How Does it Hold Together?’ Monetary Policies, Cross-cutting Cleavages and Political Cohesion in the Age of Reformation

Abstract Research has rejected Leopold von Ranke’s hypothesis that the Reformation emasculated the Holy Roman Empire and thwarted the emergence of a German nation state for centuries. However, current explanations of the Empire’s cohesion that emphasize the effects of outside pressure or political rituals are not entirely satisfactory. This article contributes to a fuller explanation by examining a factor that so far has been overlooked: monetary policies. Monetary conditions within the Empire encouraged its members to cooperate with each other and with the emperor. Moreover, cross-cutting cleavages forced actors on different sides of the confessional divide to frame coherent and fact-oriented monetary-policy arguments. This helped generate trust among the estates involved in the discussions about a common currency between the 1520s and the 1550s and contributed to the success of the negotiations. Monetary policies thus helped bridge the religious divide that had opened within the Empire, and they therefore contributed to its political cohesion.

Bismarck als Projektionsfläche oder Verfassung als Kunst des Möglichen?

Otto von Bismarck was not a liberal politician at all but had a lot of liberal admirers. German liberal politicians like Gustav Stresemann or Otto Graf Lambsdorff and even Social Democrats like Willy Brandt presented themselves as at least partial admirers of Bismarck and his politics. It is surprising at first sight, because Bismarck had strong conservative roots and never pretended to be liberal. On the other hand, some effects of his politics were deeply accepted and even desired by German liberals: the creation of a strong German national state, political fight against small blimpish duchies or catholic church. Bismarck was rather a pragmatic (and sometimes opportunist) than a theorist, defining politics as „Kunst des Möglichen“ (‚art of art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best‘). Due to his lack of ideology, for many a benchmark of Liberalism, conservative Bismarck could make successful liberal politics, but also its opposite, e. g., in social politics. By his pragmatic approach and his flexibility, Bismarck became a projection screen for many liberal politicians.

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

From faith to race? ‘Mixed marriage’ and the politics of difference in Imperial Germany

ABSTRACTIntermarriage was a key site for testing politics of difference within the multicultural German Empire. Across the German states in the mid-nineteenth century, marriage between members of different religions frequently proved impossible. Until various civil marriage laws were introduced between the 1840s and 1870s, marriage remained within the remit of the church. As a consequence, marrying across confessional lines was rarely permitted. The implications were clear: marriage was seen as the embodiment of one’s culture – defined primarily in confessional (alongside socio-economic) terms, and it was also viewed as a key transmitter of culture by producing new generations of faithful observers of particular denominations. As a country divided between three confessions, religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Germany proved an important aspect of difference within the new German nation state. By the end of the nineteenth century, following the introduction of civil marriage, mass waves of migration, the growth of urbanization and the expansion of the German overseas empire, the connotation of ‘mixed marriage’ in Germany appeared to have shifted. It remained a code for crossing confessional lines, but its resonance had changed. By the late nineteenth century, ‘mixed marriage’ had come to characterize another kind of cultural mixing as well: that between races, both at home within Germany and abroad within its colonies and diasporic outposts. And, between 1905 and 1912, ‘mixed marriage’ between Germans and ‘natives’ had been banned in German Southwest Africa, East Africa and Samoa. Why and how was intermarriage a flashpoint in debates on German identity politics at the turn of the twentieth century? As this article shows, intermarriage in the German Empire mattered to families, broader communities, and legislators because it was a pivotal means through which social groups formed, interacted and maintained boundaries at a time when visions of Germany were expanding.

Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, by Benjamin W. Goossen

Benjamin Goossen’s book is an impressively researched and engaging study of its subject matter— the shifting and contested identities of a diasporic Protestant minority in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It skilfully combines transnational, social and cultural approaches to produce a work which unites the revival of historiographical interest in the place of religion in the modern world with the analytical possibilities opened up by global history. The result is an important monograph which offers new insights into its subject. Goossen’s chosen case study—the Mennonites—is indeed uniquely suited to exploring the complex interactions between the religious, national and global in the modern era. By the late nineteenth century, sizeable Mennonite populations had moved outside the confession’s historic heartlands in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and were to be found across North and South America, the Russian and German Empires and Austria–Hungary, forming a diaspora whose members’ senses of religious and national identity were plural and contested. Although many conservative Mennonites emigrated from the newly formed German Empire in the 1870s to escape compulsory military service (pacifism had long been a theological emphasis of Mennonitism), others accommodated themselves to the German nation state, even going so far as to justify the bearing of arms. It was, moreover, in Imperial Germany that nationalist Mennonites developed historical arguments claiming for their transnational confession an essentially German heritage and identity.

Inclusion and exclusion—We and the Other. Response to Vamik Volkan’s Key-note Lecture

This response is focused on the following question: What may be the specific group analytic point of view on phenomena as the resurgence of nationalism in the western world, the so-called refugee crisis and the confrontation with Islamism and Islamist terror? The guideline of this response will be the idea of the ‘group of individuals’, which Norbert Elias characterized as his main contribution to group analytic theory. The response will emphasize the significance of the Other for the formation of personal and collective identities. It will argue that we face the Other, not only outside our own group, but also inside, and that xenophobia goes hand in hand with the denial of real differences and conflicts inside one’s own group. Finally, the history of the German nation-state is discussed as an exemplary case.

Remembering German-Australian colonial entanglement: an introduction

The role of German actors in European colonialisms, especially before the foundation of the German nation state in 1871 and Germany’s entry into imperialism proper with the so-called protectorates ...

Shaping the National Body: Physical Education and the Transformation of German Nationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century

The following article reconstructs the curricular story of physical education between the Prussian prohibition (1820) and reintroduction (1842) and broad dissemination of ‘gymnastic exercises’ between 1842 and 1871 and its full implementation around 1900 in Germany, focusing on the interrelation between constitutional reforms, nationalism and the development of a state-directed educational system, directed towards making the loyal future citizens. The successive formation of a German nation-state is being understood as the historical context of the implementation of gymnastics in the school curriculum; a process that in its success depended on the rise of nationalism as a dominant political ideology in the course of the nineteenth century.

Monarchical State-building through State Destruction: Hohenzollern Self-legitimization at the Expense of Deposed Dynasties in the Kaiserreich*

The German War of 1866 was a turning point in the consolidation of Prussian hegemony over the emerging German nation-state. This article engages with a neglected aspect of this process by investigating the destabilizing effect of Prussia’s territorial expansion at the expense of fellow monarchies in Hanover, Hessen-Kassel, Nassau and Schleswig-Holstein. It argues that the hostile response of ruling houses related to the deposed dynasties and the disapprobation of legitimists at home placed the Hohenzollerns in a difficult position, as they often found themselves caught between the informal yet palpable pressure of Europe’s ‘Royal International’ and the policies pursued by their chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. To escape this dilemma, King (from 1871 onwards Kaiser) Wilhelm and his successors sought to bring about a reconciliation with the alienated dynasties through treaty settlements, intermarriage and the appropriation of their rivals’ symbolic capital in public speech acts. The way in which the Hohenzollerns courted their detractors betrayed a versatility that scholarship on the Prussian cult of monarchy has yet to fully appreciate. In fact, the Hohenzollern court’s long-term preoccupation with sectional reconciliation reveals much not only about royal diplomacy in the second half of the nineteenth century but also about the workings of Germany’s monarchocentric federal edifice and the role of civic initiative in the promotion of monarchical legitimacy.

Racializing Homophobia: Tracing Sexual Political Discourse within Europe’s “Refugee Crisis” in Berlin

Discourses relating to gender and sexualities have long been a tool for the perpetuation of racialized “othering” and have contributed to the strengthening of national identities and boundaries as they reproduce binary constructions of “us” and “them.” As the German nation-state reinvents itself as multicultural, tolerant, and sexually liberated, these discourses serve to mark the racialized body as a site of backwardness, sexism, and homophobia, and thus justify its segregation and exclusion exemplified in the restrictive practices of housing, mobility restrictions, and deportation of asylum seekers and migrants. This paper aims to trace the unfolding of discourses in and between some dominant organizational structures in Berlin that advocate for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers. It argues that the claim for citizenship of some formerly excluded sexual others is contingent on the promotion of a very specific notion of sexual identity and participation in the orientalisation/ethnicisation of homophobia.