For most of the century following Goethe’s ironic question Deutschland – aber wo liegt es? (1796), the precise definition of a German identity was a moot point; this uncertainty also affected the development of a nationally “German” architecture. Stylistic preferences – baroque, Renaissance, Gothic or Romanesque – also implied preferences for certain periods of historical glory. The memory of the Holy Roman Empire, traumatically abolished in 1806, entailed the additional complication of relations with Austria, which, as the heartland of the Habsburgs, had been a central member of the Empire but was now a separate monarchy, associated with Hungary and many other non-German lands.

How far did “Germany” extend? The photographic collection Deutsche Dome (first published in 1910 and repeatedly re-issued) accommodated in its later re-issues cathedrals and city churches from Strasbourg, Bern, Vienna, Prague and Gdańsk/Danzig. But how German, exactly, was that Strasbourg Cathedral, which Goethe, as early as 1773, had celebrated as a product of national-German genius – in what was then a French city? How German was Prague, intended by Charles IV (who ordered the building of the St Vitus Cathedral) to be the Holy Roman’s Empire capital, but also the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia? How German was Vienna, which the Habsburgs had wanted to turn into the metropolitan centre of all of Roman Christianity (as synthesized in the baroque Karlsrkirche of 1716-39)?

Against Vienna’s Pan-Catholic ambition, the more northern German lands emphasized their anti-Roman traditions. Luther had been, for Protestants, the German nation’s champion against Roman hegemony, a latter-day Arminius. Both Luther and the earlier Cheruscan hero were to be extensively celebrated in 19th-century monuments in Wittenberg (1821), Worms (1868) and the Teutoburg Forest near Detmold (1838-75). Additional monumental assertions of anti-Romance stalwartness arose along the Rhine, especially after 1871: the Germania at Niederwald near Bingen, the huge equestrian statue of Emperor Wilhelm at the confluence of Rhine and Moselle in Koblenz, the restored Hohkönigsburg in the annexed Alsace (1900-08).

In the German lands, each princely state cultivated in its dynastic capital a localist-dynastic as well as a German historicism. The most important among them, Prussia, had developed a cult of Frederick the Great, which commenced with his death in 1786 and culminated in 1851 in an enormous equestrian statue on Berlin’s Unter den Linden. It was only after 1871 that the two, Prussian and German, coalesced, as the Hohenzollern king became German emperor and was celebrated as such in countless monuments in Prussia-controlled areas (including Hannover and the Rhineland). Bismarck, in like manner, was honoured after the achievement of imperial unification in a rash of monuments and monumental turrets (Bismarcktürme, numbering 240 in total).

Between Prussia and Austria, Bavaria took up a separate position. The monumental cult initiated by the (then Crown Prince) Ludwig as early as 1815 illustrates the ambiguity of the country’s position, celebrating a Bavarian identity alongside a Pan-German one: witness the Munich Bavaria monument as opposed to the Walhalla hall of ame near Regensburg. The huge Liberation Hall near Kelheim was Bavaria’s response to Berlin’s more modest Kreuzberg monument of 1818-21 (which itself had replaced the larger original project, a Liberation Cathedral as devised by Prussia’s foremost architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel).

The completion of Cologne Cathedral, unfinished and in disrepair since the late Middle Ages, would become the most powerful sign of an imperial Hohenzollern presence on the Rhine. The idea had been mooted originally by Rhineland Romantics like Görres and the Boisserée brothers, and was fostered by the new Prussian suzerains after 1842, partly in order to placate a Catholic populace stirred up by religious conflicts over new, Protestant-inspired legislation. August Reichensperger’s Die christlich-germanische Baukunst und ihr Verhältnis zur Gegenwart (1845) argued that Gothicism was at the same time a Christian and a national style, thus reconciling these conflicting identities. By 1880, the Cologne Cathedral was finally completed (on the original architectural plans which had meanwhile come to light, like yet another “manuscript found in an attic”). By that time it had obtained a new function as a “Watch on the Rhine” guarding the German nature of that river; its great bell was cast from French cannons captured in the 1870-71 war. The Bavarian Wittelsbachs gave an acte de présence in the new edifice by donating the large stained-glass windows; within their own realm, they sponsored the restoration of that other imperial German church, destroyed by Louis XIV: Speyer Cathedral (1854-58).

So how, amidst monuments, restorations and unification under growing Prussian hegemony, did architects attempt to develop a national style? That quest, as expressed in Heinrich Hübsch’s treatise In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? (1828), had been made possible in the first place by the Pan-European shift from classicist stylistic uniformity towards historicist stylistic diversity. Goethe’s aforementioned celebration of the Gothic style in 1773 is an early indicator of this turn; but initially, the movement served to re-valorize Greek architecture as a preferable alternative to Roman, Vitruvian classicism, summarized in Winckelmann’s celebration of the edle Einfalt und stille Grösse (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur) of Greek art. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (1788-91), as a latter-day Propylaeum, gave that city an Athenian signature; Friedrich Gilly’s unrealized 1796 design for the monument to Frederick the Great recalled the Parthenon, as did Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus theatre. The Bavarian counterparts (Munich’s Propylaeum of 1854-62, the Parthenon design of the Walhalla hall of fame) also suited the Wittelsbach’s ardent Philhellenism, which had culminated in the appointment of Ludwig’s son Otto as king of the newly independent Greek state (1832-62). In fact, under Wittelsbach rule, Greece experienced a backwash of Philhellenic classicism coming from of German architects: Schinkel and others were involved in designs for new buildings and the restoration of old ones, namely in Athens.

Anti-French feeling inspired a dislike for the baroque and a penchant for Gothic, which also expressed itself in the restoration of medieval castles along the Rhine (many of which had been destroyed in Louis XIV’s Palatinate Wars). Under newly-established Prussian control, the Rhine valley furnished the Hohenzollerns with a Romantic-medieval repertoire which was scarce within the Prussian heartland (and in fact best represented by the Polish/Old Prussian Marienburg/Malbork, erstwhile headquarters of the Teutonic Order and extensively renovated since 1815). Ruins like Stolzenfels near Koblenz, once restored (1836-42), combined a picturesque setting with a Romantic-medieval style far removed from, and counterbalancing, the stolid official state architecture of Prussia proper.

Protestant church architecture began to invoke historical examples after the Prussian envoy in Rome (and later in Britain) Christian von Bunsen had vindicated, in his Thesen über christliche Baukunst (1824), Protestantism as the legitimate successor of early Christianity. Thus, the ancient Roman palatial aula in Trier was restored in 1856 into a Protestant church, the Basilica. The Friedenskirche in the palace park of Sanssouci also briefly left its traces in the “Roman arches” style (Rundbogenstil) of Bavaria and Württemberg. It was, however, overshadowed by the great flourishing of Neo-Gothicism, which itself is more a generally European than a specifically German phenomenon. In Germany it was adopted, and conceived of, as a typically national style, anti-Romanesque, anti-Roman and the native counterpart to the southern styles of the Renaissance and baroque. Besides the aforementioned paradigmatic cases of Cologne and Speyer, we see this in the restoration or completion of churches and/or spires like those of Ulm (1844-90), Regensburg (1859-69), Meissen (1903-09), the Lambertikirche in Münster (1888-89) and the Wiesenkirche in Soest (1872-82). A momentary awkwardness occurred when it became clear that the Cologne flagship was modelled on the Cathedral of Amiens, not the other way round (as had previously been assumed). Although Romanesque churches were also restored in great number, the Neo-Gothic style remained the prescribed model for new Catholic church buildings until the end of the century. Protestant churches in the north opted for native brick; although Gothic was used as a style (witness George Gilbert Scott’s Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, 1844), the Protestant seating arrangement, centred around a pulpit rather than aligned towards an altar, saw advantages in the more congenial floor plan of the Italian Renaissance. Neo-Renaissance inspiration can be traced from Dresden’s Frauenkirche and Hamburg’s Michaeliskirche to Julius Raschendorff’s Berlin Cathedral (1894-1905).

Secular architecture in the newly re-established Empire was fond of recalling the earlier imperial heyday of the Hohenstaufen by deploying a Neo-Romanesque style. The restoration of the Imperial Manor (Kaiserpfalz) at Goslar (1867-90, with murals by Wislicenus) expresses the historicist association with Barbarossa, long a myth of national regeneration in German Romantic poetry; so does the Kyffhäuser “Barbarossa” monument of 1890-96. Other examples of Neo-Romanesque monuments are the aforementioned Wilhelm statue in Koblenz, Hamburg’s enormous Bismarck monument (1905) and the 1913 monument to the Battle of Leipzig. In secular, religious and dynastic architecture, the style presents itself in the regional administrative building in Koblenz (1902-05), the Royal Palace of Posen/Poznań (1905-13), Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (1891-95) and the Neue Kirche in the annexed city of Metz (1901-04).

There were some elements of ethnic diversity: the synagogues of Germany’s emancipating Jews were often given an Orientalizing style, sometimes even with shiny golden onion domes (Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin, 1859-60). Since different styles were preferred for different styles of building (medieval fortresses for prisons, Gothic for civic institutions and city halls), cityscapes by the end of the century presented an eclectic aspect; witness Vienna’s Ringstrasse with its Neo-Gothic city hall, its neoclassicist parliament building, its neo-baroque theatre and opera, and its Neo-Renaissance museum and university. Neo-baroque was, uniquely, a Viennese (and covertly anti-Prussian) architectural gesture, paving the way for a self-consciously elegant fin-de-siècle movement evolving, with Otto Wagner (1841–1918), towards Art Nouveau and away from historicism.

In turn, Art Nouveau “Secessionism” was to become popular in the various subsidiary Habsburg capitals of Central Europe as a way of celebrating national identity and emancipatory progress (e.g. the work of Wagner’s pupil Jože Plečnik, 1872–1957, in Prague and Laibach/Ljubljana). In Germany, it briefly became the preferred architectural style for the suburb-based, artistically-minded higher bourgeoisie. As such, it also stood in sharp contrast to the petit-bourgeois, nostalgic fondness for the vernacular architecture of Romantic Gemütlichkeit, rustic, half-timbered, low-ceilinged, paned-windowed, and evoked mainly in inns and rural tourist destinations.

The foundation of the traditionalist Deutsche Bund Heimatschutz in Dresden in 1904 affected architectural design: traditonal vernacular forms and materials were nostalgically invoked while being applied towards more modern, Art Nouveau-inspired purposes. Heimatschutzstil was often applied in workers’ company towns (Arbeitersiedlungen) and public buildings: schools and small-town railway stations, post offices and town halls. It remained popular throughout the Weimar period.