The discursive articulation of a German character and identity involved so many authors, from Jahn to Dahn, and took place over so many genres, that a full survey cannot be attempted here. The focus will instead be on the self-image of the Germans’ national character. A Europe-wide discourse of ethnotypes concerning national characters had been firmly established and more or less systematized from the early 18th century on. The established polarity of Roman civility (and French chivalry) vs German boorishness, or (with a different valorization) post-Roman Latinate refinement vs German honesty, persisted into the Napoleonic period and was given a new topicality by the rise of that French emperor. Activists like Arndt (Geist der Zeit, a series of anti-French tracts, 1805 ff.) and Jahn (Deutsches Volkstum, 1810) denounced both the wickedness of the wily, scheming French and the stupidity of their naive German victims. At the same time they called for a return to the more stalwart aspects of straightforward, unaffected German honesty and manliness (taking the examples of Arminus and Luther as guiding lights) so as to defeat the arrogant, pedantic and condescending French hegemons.

This ethnotypical polarity was rhetorically used in the poetry of the day (not least Arndt’s own) but would also become all-dominating in other genres and in the discourse surrounding other media of cultural production. Napoleonic law (and later even Roman Law) was resisted as an alien encroachment upon native custom, initially by Savigny and his successor Georg Friedrich Puchta (who saw the Volksgeist, unlike Savigny, as a motivating autonomous force rather than as a container-term for inherited public opinion), then by the anti-Romanists Georg Beseler (Volksrecht und Juristenrecht, 1843) and Otto von Gierke (Deutsches Genossenschaftsrecht, 1868 ff.; Der germanische Staatsgedanke, 1919).

The Romantic intellectuals claimed democracy not as a French-Revolutionary import, but as a native, tribally-descended birthright, and criticized autocracy among the German princes as part of their moral Frenchification (exemplified by their lack of resistance against Napoleon). In the Grimms’ book reviews, the hard-working, deeply penetrating work ethic of the self-effacing German scholar was praised over the flashy but superficial work of the French. In ethnohistorical disquisitions, from Fichte’s Reden an die Deutsche Nation on, the German nation stood out for its fidelity to the language and customs of the tribal ancestors (unlike the tribes that had vanquished the Roman Empire and had adopted the papist priestcraft and the Romance languages of the conquered territories). Even in musical discourse, the values of a German national music, rooted in a deep empathy with the nation’s landscape and traditions, were extolled over the glib elegance of the Italian and French schools. The pattern was established in the musical reviews of the Romantic period even before Wagner attacked Meyerbeer and Parisian grand opera.

This characterological polarization had its most important geopolitical expression in the long-standing quarrels over the Rhineland, from French-governed Strasbourg to its Prussian-governed outflow below Cologne. Against the French geopolitical desire to make the river their eastern frontier, the Rhine was proclaimed to be characteristically, historically and ethnically German. Vigilantly resisting and denouncing real, remembered or imagined French encroachments towards the Rhine remained a constant concern from Arndt’s Der Rhein, Teutschlands Strom, aber nicht Teutschlands Grenze well into the 1920s. Indeed, Treitschke’s justification of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, entitled Was fordern wir von Frankreich?, explicitly invoked Arndt as having already spoken the final words on the issue in 1813. Thus, the argument that was made in 1813 by German intellectuals in the face of French military power and annexationist unilateralism was repeated verbatim in 1871 by German intellectuals in the service of German military power and annexationist unilateralism. Both in 1813 and in 1871 the case was made with reference to Germany’s moral/cultural right, but in 1871 that argument read as a cover for, rather than as a challenge to, military/geopolitical might.

The idea of a characterological profile defining the German nation (Herder had used the notion of a Denkungsart, Savigny had coined the idea of a Volksgeist) also loaded the ethnonym Deutsch with a positive moral connotation. Phrases like echt deutsch, recht deutsch and richtig deutsch proliferated in the course of the century, always with the implied, self-congratulatory meaning of “faithfully representing the authentic German traditions and character, and displaying the virtues of honesty and manliness that are the nation’s proper hallmark”. Emanuel Geibellooked forward in 1865 to the blessings of a reunited, newly imperial Germany in his poem Deutschlands Beruf (“Germany’s calling”), and prophesized that in international affairs “the German character will heal the world” (Am deutschen Wesen mag die Welt genesen). This moralizing boastfulness characterized the self-congratulating nationalism of the post-1871 Gründerzeit after 1871. The Protestant ethos with which the German self-image had been invested by northern intellectuals from Arndt to Treitschke, and the cult of Luther as the great articulator of the German language, character and morality, helped to fan the flames of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.

The idea that the German Empire, for all its militarism, was driven by the same moral sense of Kultur as it had been in 1813, was still all-pervasive in the wartime justifications that followed the outbreak of the First World War and the widespread accusations of wartime atrocities committed by German troops in Belgium and elsewhere. Intellectuals from Ernst Haeckel to Thomas Mann vindicated the German invasion of neutral Belgium and the conduct of the war with arguments invoking the essentially peaceful and civilized, honest and forthright character of the German nation – thus in lectures and tracts written for the home front and in propagandistic declarations directed at international public opinion. The word Kultur became, in the process, a term of scornful sarcasm for English and French propagandists. It should be noted, however that the self-image of honest, stalwart manliness was shared by Victorian nationalists and imperialists in Britain, and derived from a common ethotypical tradition of anti-Catholic and anti-French self-positionings.