A historiography of the Holy Roman Empire began to take hold just as the Empire itself was approaching dissolution: thus Franz Dominicus Häberlin’s Neueste teutsche Reichsgeschichte (1774-86) and Christoph Gottlob Heinrich’s Teutsche Reichsgeschichte (9 vols, 1787-1805). Häberlin’s book was the continuation of his world history (Auszug aus der allgemeinen Welthistorie, 12 vols, 1767-73), and reflected the universalism of the Holy Roman Empire – much as Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire had been, in effect, a history of the European Middle Ages. At the same time the materials gathered could be used for nationally-themed disquisitions such as Peter Wolfter’s Enlightenment-Patriotic Abhandlungen zur Beleuchtung der Teutschen Geschichte (1792). Wolfter, an obscure librarian and lecturer at Heidelberg, had edited the multi-volume Deutsche Kaiser- und Reichsgeschichte by one Johann Heinrich Ludwig von Wickelmann, member of the Regensburg Diet, and in 1789 published what might be the first, abortive sign of a German national history: Geschichte der Veränderungen des teutschen Reichsstaats. The most influential exemplar of this Patriotic tradition was the Swiss Johannes von Müller (Schweizer Geschichte, 1786 ff.), who taught in Göttingen and influenced the historicism of the young Ludwig of Bavaria.

After 1805, the old Reich no longer provided the institutional framework or archival basis for such national histories. (However, the Reichsgeschichte genre resurfaced in the Habsburg successor empire as part of Austria’s Reichspatriotismus: Arnold Luschin von Ebengreuth’s Österreichische Reichsgeschichte, 1896.) Although some important works appeared which evoked the medieval history of the Empire (Friedrich von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit, 6 vols, 1823-25), German historians were not in a position to follow a French-Romantic model of taking “the nation” as the protagonist of a political history, given the diffraction of the German lands over many states. Therefore, as German history-writing began its development towards Rankean, archive-based professionalization, the established roll-call of eminent figures (besides Ranke mainly classical historians like Droysen, Heeren, Niebuhr, Mommsen), while important for the development of the discipline, stands to some extent aloof from the developing national historicism of Germany as a mnemonic community. The one overtly nationalistic historian of the period, the Jena professor Heinrich Luden, whose Geschichte des teutschen Volkes (12 vols, 1825-37; dedicated to Ludwig I of Bavaria) was conceived in the enthusiasm of the Liberation Wars, was disavowed by the Ranke school. Even a highly committed German nationalist such as Dahlmann wrote on Danish, English and French history rather than on that of Germany. A congruence between “national history” and nationalism, such as it was effected early on by the French Romantic historians, and the historians of subaltern nations from Ireland to Lithuania and Bulgaria, only blossomed after 1871. Prussia, as heartland of the new Reich, had its state-endorsed apologists in Heinrich von Sybel (author of the anti-Habsburg propagandistic tract Die deutsche Nation und das Kaiserreich, 1862, and the 7-volume Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I. vornehmlich nach den preußischen Staatsacten, 1889-94), in the notorious Heinrich von Treitschke (Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1879-94), and in the early work of Friedrich Meinecke (Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung 1795-1815, 1906). A properly archive-driven study of the early history of the Germanic Stämme was conducted by the völkisch-inclined professor-novelist Felix Dahn (Die Könige der Germanen, 11 vols, 1861-1911; Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, 4 vols, 1881-89). These national historians became active after German unification had been achieved and after the process of academic professionalization had been well and truly concluded. This may explain why those historians of German historiography who focus on the institutionally consolidated discipline tend not to look too far back beyond 1871 when tracing the nation-building role of German historians, and/or trace the impact of nation-building on historiographical practice, rather than vice versa. Treitschke’s s notion of Volkstum is not often traced back to its originator, Jahn, or to his maître à penser, Arndt.

Prior to 1871, the need for a national German history could not be served either by a political or by a state-framed history. What filled the void was either a turn to pre-state antiquity (in effect continuing the mode of antiquarianism) or by writing the nation’s cultural/literary history. An example of the former is Hans Christoph von Gagern’s Nationalgeschichte der Deutschen, which appeared in two portions, one (1813) on the pre- and early history of the Germanic tribes, the other on Germanic tribal history from the Goths to the rise of the Franks (1825-26). Gagern had been a delegate at the Vienna Congress and had there defended the interest of middle-sized German states on behalf of William of Orange-Nassau and his Netherlandic aspirations; his preoccupation with Germany as a modular cluster-nation requiring a federal state (something already advocated by Wolfter) was expressed in his Nationalgeschichte (indeed, that is what the title implies), and would in 1848 cause him to welcome the initiative of a Nationalversammung, chaired by his son Heinrich von Gagern.

The history of Germany as a Kulturnation was addressed mainly by philologists: the qualification “national” in Gervinus’s Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (5 vols, 1835-42) was deliberate, as its introduction shows, treating literary production in each period not only as an autonomously aesthetic enterprise, but as an expression of the German nation’s cultural and social development and its position amidst its neighbours. That collectivist view of nations as moral agents going through a social evolution and interacting mutually on the European stage (applied to political history by Michelet in France) took a more cultural direction in Germany and had an ethnographic offshoot with Ernst Moritz Arndt’s Versuch in vergleichender Völkergeschichte (1843).

Arndt’s Völkergeschichte was continued in an academic-professional context after 1871 by Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), who, as history professor at Leipzig, stood outside the statist-Prussian school of Sybel and Treitschke. On the one hand, documenting the economic life of societies between the municipal level and the macroregional, Lamprecht foreshadowed the later Annales school; on the other hand, he considered himself a cultural historian, and as such attracted criticism from his more positivistic and sociologically oriented contemporaries; these criticisms and Lamprecht’s vindications formed what is now known as the Methodenstreit. Lamprecht saw “Culture” in essentialist ethnic terms, and, much as in Arndt’s Völkergeschichte, predicated it on an a priori assumption of the moral superiority of the German national character and on an ethnographic model of the determining nature of landscape and ethnicity for the course of historical developments. Despite the conflicts of the Methodenstreit, his Deutsche Geschichte (13 vols, 1891-1908) perpetuated Arndt’s Pan-German national chauvinism in no less nationalistic terms than those of the statist-positivistic Prussians, Sybel and Treitschke – witness also his popularizing and indeed overtly propagandistic Deutscher Aufstieg 1750-1914 (1914). After 1918, Lamprecht’s ethnic and spatio-cultural approach fed into Volksgeschichte and Raumgeschichte, and in figures like Franz Steinbach and Adolf Helbok would get increasingly entangled with völkisch and Nazi ideologies.

The Romantic, pre-1848 historicist roots of national-cultural history had been largely a historicist celebration of the persistence of the German Nation independently of a state framework. This literary and artistic historicism should not be seen, in Meinecke’s Prussian-teleological terms, as a Kulturnation moving towards its destined fulfilment of becoming a Staatsnation (Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 1908), but, contrariwise, as intellectuals dealing with the vacuum of a vanished Reich that could no longer provide a political-institutional frame for their historicism. In that vacuum they turned instead to tribal antiquity, language, ethnicity and culture; the legacy of the Reich became a mere Reichsidee, merging into a Romanticized memory of Arminius, Siegfried and chivalric emperors like Barbarossa.

This cultural historicism was retold in legends, ballads and history paintings, by non-historians: antiquarians, philologists, balladeers and narrators, rather than by academically-based historians. Philologists, historians and archivists did contribute towards a German national historicism in the area of source repertories. Jacob Grimm himself collected material for a legal mentality history in his Deutsche Rechtsaltertumer (1828; an influence on Michelet). Johann Friedrich Böhmer, a Frankfurt-based Nazarene adept driven by nostalgia for the old Reich, started a diplomatic inventory of the Regesta imperii from 1829 on. This became part of the great enterprise which, between the dissolution of the old Reich and the proclamation of its 1871 successor, proved the closest and most substantial approximation to a national history: the massive Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Together with Georg Heinrich Pertz, Böhmer directed its activities from 1824 on.

Alongside these academic repertories, cultural historicism continued to draw primarily on the repertoire of the cutural icons canonized between 1805 and 1825: Arminius, Siegfried, Barbarossa. In addition, the Freiheitskriege themselves, i.e. the anti-Napoleonic agitation and campaigns of 1806-15, became a historical myth in the later nationalist-historical consciousness, reaching from the cult of Queen Louise (the fervently anti-Napoleonic queen of Prussia and mater dolorosa of the Wars of Liberation) to the 1944 historical movie Kolberg. In this cultural historicism, for all the intensity with which it circulated intermedially, the paucity of historical novelists presents a remarkable parallel to the paucity of national historians.