Some political notions of anti-absolutism, and cultural awareness of a shared national character and literary heritage, had gained currency in late-18th-century Germany. It took Napoleon’s conquests, his establishment of puppet regimes east of the Rhine, the defeats of Austerlitz and Jena, and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) to galvanize these elements into outright nationalism. In this process, artists and intellectuals played a formative role; and given their prominence in the Romantic generation, that influence reached beyond Germany. German Romantic Nationalism was one of the prototypes of Romantic movements everywhere in Europe, with its reassessment of the thought of Herder, the posthumous impact of Schiller, and its impact on music and the visual arts.

Reichsidee, Restoration, Vormärz

Within Germany, the political developments were dominated by the domestic and foreign policies of the German principalities and kingdoms restored in 1813-15, and by the relations between the political authorities and the artists and intellectuals. Men like Arndt and Fichte, in their resistance against French-imposed governance, had initially proposed a return to some form of Reichspatriotismus, where the body politic would consist in a natural, familial harmony between the moral community of the people and the dynastic stability of the monarch. Similar forms of Reichspatriotismus were at work elsewhere in Europe, but in contrast to Denmark, the Habsburg Empire, and the United Kingdom, the German Reichsidee was born out of a disruption rather than a threatened continuity, less concerned with the regional or ethnic diversities united under the Crown, and more concerned – albeit in an oblique, non-explicit way – with the restorative dream of a revival of the broken imperial tradition. Over the decades, this Reichsidee restricted itself more and more to a Germany north of the Alps, became more and more explicitly anti-Habsburg; it excluded from its restoration vision the non-German nationalities under the Habsburg Crown, and involved instead a strong culture-historicist claim to French-ruled Alsace-Lorraine. The Reichsidee was carried exclusively in a culturally coded form, through critical writings, ballads, and songs, and in the popularity of the Barbarossa myth across the century; politically, it manifested itself in the abortive policies of the Frankfurt Nationalversammlung of 1848 and in the groundswell of popular enthusiasm that greeted and followed the Reichsgründung of 1871.

The growth of a German nationalism, while provoked by the disappearance of the Reich north of the Alps, took place in constant tensions with the German political authorities, diffracted as they were across many states. Only in some cases could those states draw on a certain amount of civic state nationalism (as distinct from German unification nationalism): notably in Bavaria and among the officialdom and the junkers of Prussia. The relationship between artists and intellectuals on the one hand and the state governments on the other were fraught. After the anti-Napoleonic concord of the period 1806-15, the restoration policies of Metternich alienated the protagonists of the Kulturnation from the authorities of the various German states. The fracas around the Wartburg Festival of 1817, followed by the murder of August von Kotzebue and the Metternich backlash of 1818, drove the student fraternities and gymnastic clubs into semi-clandestine subsistence and their nationalism into the crypto-public conviviality of tavern Stammtische and Commers-singing; only in the mid-1820s did the burgeoning choral movement herald a return of such sociability to the public sphere. Innocent, purportedly apolitical celebrations of German culture might, however, at any moment tilt over into requests for that political liberty vindicated by Schiller, Gedankenfreiheit – sometimes extended to freedom of the press, or the rule of law instead of the rule of princes, Rechtsstaat as opposed to Fürstenstaat. The Liberal revolts of 1830 were indicative flare-ups, echoed in the Hambach Festival of 1832, and the enormous public echo of the Göttinger Sieben episode of 1837 (when the abolition of the Hannover constitution eventually resulted in the dismissal of seven high-profile champions of German national culture from their professorial positions at Göttingen). Schiller commemorations throughout the century (especially in 1859) and across the German lands were all culturally disguised manifestations of the Romantic Nationalism  elaborated by the Vormärz intellectuals and poets. This type of nationalism, powerfully expressed by Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Lied der Deutschen, claimed, in defiance of the autocratic German princes, a unification of their various realms into a single, constitutional nation-state, with empowered and free citizens united in a national community by the bonds of a shared culture. Vormärz nationalism combined ethnocultural chauvinism in equal measure with Liberal or Social-Democratic ideals; after the fateful year 1848 it would fission into an increasingly conservative nationalist wing and an increasingly internationalist Socialist wing.

Confessionalization, the Rhine Crisis, and the Nationalversammlung

These tensions were compounded by the confessionalization of politics that affected much of western Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. Prussian legislation regarding mixed marriages ran afoul of Catholic canon law, and led to frictions in Prussia’s new, Catholic possessions: the Cologne Rhineland and Silesian Poznań/Posen. In time, these tensions would culminate in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and would in turn exacerbate Bavarian-Prussian antagonism. However, the Rhine Crisis of 1840 helped to paper over these cracks under a shared anti-French outcry, and intensified cultural nationalism regarding the unresolved territorial question of the Rhineland. France had, during the Congress of Vienna, managed to hold on to Strasbourg and Alsace despite the strong culture-historicist claims laid on these territories by German cultural protagonists like Arndt and Görres. Germans were alarmed at the spectre of France possibly coveting the entire Rhineland for its western marches, and in the process a Pan-German “defence of the Rhine” was sparked off, leading to numerous poems and publications, and feeding into the great cultural project of the restoration and completion of Cologne Cathedral – under Prussian sponsorship, but with participation from all German lands. Henceforth, great public cultural projects would be used as a deliberate instrument to promote a sense of Pan-German concord, and of solidarity between the people and their princes. From the Bavarian Walhalla to the Prussian Kyffhäuser, Arminius, and Germania monuments, the 19th century would pursue German unification in bronze and stone as much as with Bismarck’s famous “blood and iron”.

The rise of Prussia as new heartland of a second German Empire was materially boosted by its control over the Confederation’s most hotly contested cultural frontiers: the Rhineland and Schleswig-Holstein. It was here that the cascading series of wars was set in motion, which would eventually lead to the imperial acclamation of 1871. Shortly after the Rhine Crisis of 1840, the tensions with a centralizing Denmark over the culturally mixed, heteronomic lordships of Schleswig-Holstein (members of the German Confederation) mounted. Danish centralism left the ageing cohort of cultural protagonists, notably Arndt and Grimm, severely frustrated and did much to make them look to Prussia to vindicate German claims in arms. Significantly, the Frankfurt Nationalversammlung of 1848, which began (and failed) as an attempt to create a united-German constitutional monarchy, spent most of its energies on either drawing up an imperial constitution (which would offer an imperial crown for all German lands, minus the Habsburg ones, to the Prussian king), or on irredentism, urging unremitting war against Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein. The 1848 war with Schleswig-Holstein proved fruitless, and the offer of an imperial constitution was shrugged off by the Prussian monarchy; the defeat of the 1848 aspirations signalled the final defeat of the Romantic honeymoon in German state politics.

Rise of Prussia, Reichsgründung, Gründerzeit nationalism

Prussia’s leading role took shape in the framework of a German Customs Union, Zollverein, which had been established in 1834 and which included all of Germany minus the Habsburg lands. Its foreign policy was played out on many chessboards at once, including Austria’s attempts to check Italian unification and its support for the papacy, and France’s involvement in this theatre. In 1864-66 a renewed war with Denmark, this time victorious, and an equally decisive war with Austria/Bavaria (1866), saw all German lands north of the Alps first bound up in so-called Schutz- und Trutzbündnisse, then part of a North German Confederation (1867), or else fully annexed (Hannover, Hessia, Nassau, Frankfurt). A war with France was then provoked in 1870, which resulted in a resounding victory. The joint war effort had forged all German monarchies into a common front; the war was represented to the home front as yet another iteration of the unresolved question of the Rhine as “Germany’s River, not Germany’s Frontier”, yet perennially threatened by the encroaching designs of the eternal enemy, France; Strasbourg, Alsace, and Lorraine were (re-)annexed; and these conditions together seemed an almost prophetic redress for the unmaking of the old empire in 1806. A new empire was proclaimed by the German princes, assembled in the neutral, victorious meeting ground of Versailles, acclaiming the Prussian king as their emperor and overlord.

The following years (known as the Gründerzeit) were characterized by triumphalist nationalism and chauvinistic self-celebration (sowing the seeds of a self-aggrandizing overreach that assumed pathological proportions in Wilhelm II and came to ruin in the Great War). The Empire joined, belatedly, the European “Scramble for Africa”, developed colonial ambitions, and assumed a leadership role on the European continent that sooner or later had to raise eyebrows in Britain. After the death of Victoria’s German Prince Consort, Albert, and the marriage between the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra of Denmark (who had not forgotten 1864), Britain, in a major reversal of the European balance of power, allied with its erstwhile enemy, France, to check the ambitions of its erstwhile ally, Germany. The result was mounting German unease at what it perceived as an encirclement policy. Domestically, nationalism was moving beyond the (now fulfilled) quest for unification. Racial thought, never far from the thought of men like Arndt, systematized by Arthur de Gobineau’s Sur l’inégalité des races humaines, and propagated by the likes of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the Wagner circle, caught hold in German politics. The Alldeutscher Verband (1891) took German nationalism into a völkisch direction that generationally marked the survivors of 1918 and cast a long shadow over the 20th century.