Literary historicism in German was heralded in the late 18th century by Friedrich Klopstock (1724–1803), who followed the general taste for the tribal-primitive sublime as heralded by Ossian, and applied it not only to biblical themes (Messias, 1773), but also to the German historical myth of Arminius the Cheruscan and his 1st-century-AD struggle against imperial Rome. The ode Hermann und Thusnelda (1752) was followed by the trilogy Hermanns Schlacht (1769, dedicated to the future Emperor Joseph II), Hermann und die Fürsten (1784) and Hermanns Tod (1787). These verse dramas had no success on the stage but were immensely influential as printed literature. In their wake, the figure of Arminius (or Hermann), who during the early modern period had already been metaphorically and rhetorically likened to Martin Luther – likewise a German hero resisting Roman-based hegemony – would become one of the presiding and enduring cultural icons of German nationalism. Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht of 1808 marks the transition from Klopstock’s Enlightenment Reichspatriotismus to anti-Napoleonic German nationalism.

Another national-historical theme that re-entered artistic production in these decades was that of the Nibelungen: the dragon-slayer Siegfried, and the vengeful intrigues involving Brunhilde and Chriemhilde at the court of the Burgundian king Günther and his brother Hagen. The antiquarians Bodmer and Breitinger had presented the tale, reworked into hexameters, as a “German Iliad” under the title Chriemhildens Rache (1757), around the time when a Nibelungen-themed medieval manuscript was rediscovered.

In the next generation, Goethe and Schiller turned this literary historicism from an Ossanic/Homeric into a more Shakespearean mode. Thematically, this meant that the historical themes and protagonists shifted from tribal or classical/biblical antiquity to the Middle Ages and the early modern period. In genre terms, it meant that literary historicism, having initially been expressed by the epic-dramatic verse of Klopstock and Bodmer, was now gravitating to the drama: the history play. The dam-burst of creative productivity of Goethe and Schiller’s Weimar collaboration provided Germany with a new literary canon and a fresh national-cultural self-awareness. Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773) provided the starting point. It was followed by his Egmont (1788). Faust I (1808), written in response to Marlowe’s English Doctor Faustus (1592), and inspired by the rediscovery of old chapbooks and popular wonder-tales (Görres’s Die teutschen Volksbücher had appeared in 1807). This play marks Goethe’s abandonment of the national-historicist mode, which meanwhile had been monopolized by Schiller: Die Räuber (1781), Don Carlos (1787), Wallenstein (1798) and Wilhelm Tell (1804). All of these topics are from post-classical history and pointedly non-French – even Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orléans was written to controvert Voltaire’s cynical debunking of Joan of Arc. Schiller’s heroes are above all national ones, heroically standing up against tyrannical rule in an Enlightenment-Patriotic defence of their nation’s liberty. Wilhelm Tell especially, with its many anti-tyrannical passages and urgings for the Swiss cantons to unite for freedom, would take the function of a nationally German play in the next century; Rossini’s opera version would take its message further afield across Europe. At the same time, the theatre was meant as an instrument for public consciousness-raising, not only in its choice of dramatic subjects, but also in an institutional sense. The urge to create a German national theatre was also an attempt to create something like a German public sphere, a public opinion, a common bonding agent for society apart from the suzerainty of lords and princes. Schiller argued this in his seminal essay on “The stage as a moral institution” (1784), even as the Prague Estates Theatre (1783) was dedicating itself, by the motto on its façade, to “the fatherland and the Muses” (patriae et musis).

The national-historical theatre continued after the Weimar glory days in a voluminous series of productions which individually were ephemeral and unremarkable. The Prussian playwright Ernst Raupach (1784–1852) undertook a cycle of plays on medieval-imperial German history invoking the myth of Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufens (which in these decades was becoming a dominant theme in balladry and Romantic legend-tales). The myth of the Empire’s medieval grandeur under the Hohenstaufens, with Barbarossa as a “Once and Future Emperor”, was in itself expressive of the political trauma of 1806 (when under Napoleonic pressure the Holy Roman Empire had been abolished), and of the literary/cultural survival of a Reichsidee in the decades between 1810 and 1871. Raupach’s project had been initiated by his Agnes von Hohenstaufen, the libretto for an opera by Spontini (1827-29). In 1830, Heinrichs Tod marked the start of a 16-play cycle with which Raupach hoped to establish a post-Schiller German national theatre. These works are now forgotten, to the point of not even being known individually by title. The same combination of quantity and lack of impact is noticeable in the steady stream of Nibelungen-related tragedies that appeared from c.1815 onwards (beginning with Franz Rudolph Hermann, Die Nibelungen, 1819; Ferdinand Wachter, Brunhild, 1821; Johann Wilhelm Müller, Chriemhilds Rache, 1822; Carl Friedrich Eichhorn, Chriemhildens Rache, 1824; Raupach joined the trend with Der Nibelungen-Hort, 1834). Only the rendition by Hebbel stands out (Die Nibelungen, 1861) – next to the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1850). This shift from theatre to opera as the premier dramatic-performative genre for literary historicism is a telling one and reflects the rise of national-historical opera across Europa. A few decades later again, the rise of the cinema as a historicist medium is manifested in Fritz Lang’s film Die Nibelungen (1924, on a scenario by Thea von Harbou).

Meanwhile, however, yet another genre had become available for literary historicism: that of the tale, either in verse or in prose. Nibelungen-tales were popular with the Romantics: Tieck (Siegfrieds Jugend and Siegfried der Drachentöter, 1803-04), Uhland (Siegfrieds Schwert, 1807) and La Motte Fouqué (Der Held des Nordens, 1810). The later generation of national versifiers is represented by Emanuel Geibel (König Sigurds Brautfahrt, 1845; and Brunhild, 1857); and we see repercussions as late as 1916, when the ageing philologist Wilhelm Scherer published his war-propagandistic Nibelungentreue: Kriegsgesänge (1916). The tradition of nationalistic verse continued the canonization of Barbarossa and Arminius next to Siegfried and national primordial hero-figures.

The historical novel in the Walter Scott mode redefined the landscape of literary historicism after 1815. Although there had been some heroic-chivalric tales before Scott, the impact of the Waverley novels meant that ambitious historical novels were to subordinate chivalric adventure to the dictates of novelistic (psychological and social) plausibility and historical veracity. What is more, Scott’s example strengthened the tendency to use topics from documented national history (medieval and early modern) alongside mythical or ancient-tribal ones. In Germany, there was little novelistic activity in response to Scott except for Willibald Alexis (ps. of Wilhelm Häring, 1798–1871), a former student of Savigny and war volunteer in 1815, who wrote Scott-style novels on themes from Brandenburg history: Walladmor (1824), Der Wärwolf (1848) and a series of Vaterländische Romane (“national novels”) that stretched from Cabanis (1832) to Dorothee (1856). Within Prussia, the historical novel was soon to gravitate to a more recent historical period: that of the country’s subjection at the hands of Napoleon and its resurrection in 1813. This is noticeable in the historical novels of Alexis and also of Theodor Fontane, one of the great Realistic novelists of the later 19th century, who occasionally addressed historical themes from the Befreiungskriege period: Vor dem Sturm (1878), Schach von Wuthenow (1882). The later appeal of the Befreiungskriege as a topic of literary historicism culminates in the large-scale historical propaganda film Kolberg (1945), one of the last great cinematic efforts of the Third Reich.

Outside Prussia, vernacular medieval history in the Walter Scott mode appears to have been strongly represented in west-central Germany, e.g. Ekkehard (1855) by the Karlsruhe- and Heidelberg-based Joseph Victor von Scheffel. In Württemberg, Ludwig Uhland’s native region, authors like Wilhelm Hauff (1802–1827) and Louise Zeller (1823–1889) were active. Hauff’s novel Lichtenstein (1826) and his tales Der letzte Ritter von Marienburg and Jud Süß (1827) were inspired by Scott. Zeller’s novels (Der Kampf um Hohentwiel, 1847; Friedrich von Hohenstaufen der Einäugige, 1853; Der letzte Hohenstaufe, 1855; Heinrich des Vierten Vermählung mit Bertha von Susa, 1856) are a further instance of the Barbarossa myth, and reflect both the intensifying political nationalism of the times and the gradual decline of the historical novel as a prestigious genre.

Ludwig Uhland himself had earlier produced national history-plays on feudal themes (Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, 1817; Ludwig der Baier, 1819), but the genre of the history-play maintained itself particularly in, or with a focus on, the non-German parts of the medieval Empire: Clemens Brentano’s 1814 Die Gründung Prags and Franz Grillparzer’s Libussa (1848) thematized the mythical foundation of Prague, a theme quickly recuperated by the Czech national movement; Grillparzer (1791–1872) had earlier played to Austrian Reichspatriotismus with his play on the Habsburgs’ historical victory over the Czech Přzemysl dynasty (13th century) in König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1825). Baltic-German playwrights were productive between the mid-1840s and the end of the century with patriotic-historical plays, starting with Otto von Orgies’s Johann Huss (1846) and Gudrun (1862); the East-Prussian lyrical poet Joseph von Eichendorff supported the restoration of the ancient headquarters of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg/Malbork with a play, Der letzte Held von Marienburg (1830). Outside the theatre, this fascination for the outer marches of the medieval German Empire is evinced by the Austrian Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868): the Bohemian-German nobility is thematized in Stifter’s tale Der Hochwald (1842) and the long novel Witiko (1865). Late examples of Baltic-German history novels are the tales by Eberhard Kraus, Im Zuge der Pest: Roman aus Kurlands Vorzeit and Germanenblut im Osten (both 1895), evincing the new aggressive ethno-nationalism that was on the rise by the turn of the century.

Although Stifter was, even in 1865, still deliberately modelling his Witiko on Scott, by this time the grounds were shifting. The rise of Realism with its focus on contemporary society was pushing the historical novel into the literary margins; the historical novel survived mainly as a genre for woman readers (catered for by authors like Louise Zeller) or juvenile readers, with whom Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom would become massively popular. Dahn, a fervent ethnic-nationalist and active supporter of the Alldeutscher Verband, as well as a noted academic, published many tales set amongst the Germanic tribes of the Dark Ages and the early Middle Ages. Thirteen “Novellas from the Migration Period” (Kleine Romane aus der Völkerwanderung) appeared between 1882 and 1901, but his most popular work by far was Ein Kampf um Rom, on the Ostrogothic-Byzantine wars in 6th-century Italy. Dahn also wrote the libretto for Heinrich Hofmann’s opera Armin (1877, on Arminius the Cheruscan, written following the 1875 completion of his enormous monument).

Meanwhile, canonical authors like Fontane had moved to the Realistic novel, while national-identitarian needs were also catered for in the genre of the rustic idyll (Dorfgeschichte or Heimatroman) by authors like Ludwig Ganghofer (1855–1920). The genre became particularly important for a Swiss sense of identity thanks to the work of Gottfried Keller (1819–1890; Die Leute von Seldwyla, 1856 and 1873) and, for the juvenile market, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi books (1881 ff.). Occasionally, however, even the rustic tale had a historicist appeal by being set in the past; this tradition stretches from the section “Der Oberhof” in Karl Immermann’s (1796–1840) Münchhausen (1838-39) and Die Judenbuche (1842) by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) into the 20th century – most importantly, the fanatically nationalistic Der Wehrwolf (1910) by Hermann Löns (1866–1914).

The historical novel regained popularity after 1918 among serious authors, from Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Joseph Roth to Hans Fallada and Günther Grass. While they were still used as a genre for narrative reflection on national destinies, this was no longer done either in a Romantic or in a nationalist mode.