Commemorative historicism, festive culture and nationalism were tightly intertwined in 19th-century Germany. As early as 1813, Ernst Moritz Arndt proposed to turn the Battle of Leipzig into an annual day of celebratory thanksgiving; his inspiration was obviously partly religious and partly taken from the public festivities which had become part of French public life after 1790. In fact, bonfires in various locations would mark the Leipzig victory in 1814 and following years.

The Leipzig victory day coincided in 1817 with the tercentenary of Luther nailing his theses on the Wittenberg church door. At Wittenberg itself, the occasion was marked ceremoniously, with the Prussian royal family in attendance; on this occasion, the first stone was laid for a statue to Luther (the first in Germany to someone who was neither a monarch nor a victorious general or a Catholic saint, completed in 1821). Outside Wittenberg, the double occasion triggered a more activist celebration: at the Wartburg (also a place with Luther connections), the patriotic student fraternities that had been established in the preceding years in various German university cities congregated, and instilled the usual cortège-and-bonfire festivities with a distinctly political message. That message was both socially anti-absolutist (the students reminded the restored princes of the popular support which had carried anti-Napoleonic resistance) and nationally anti-French; a combination which (merging in calls for the unification of the German monarchies into a larger Germany) remained characteristic of this type of German nationalism until 1848. Among the students present at the Wartburg in 1817 (where symbols and effigies of oppressive aristocracy and of pro-French attitudes were burned in the bonfire) were Jan Kollár (then a student at Jena), Hans Ferdinand Maßmann, and Karl Sand, who a few months later assassinated the playwright August von Kotzebue, vehemently despised on the grounds of his sharp, reactionary attacks on the student fraternities. This political murder prompted the absolutist backlash known as the Karlsbad Decrees, which imposed censorship, proscribed so-called “demagogues” and their sympathizers (a measure which affected men like Maßmann, Jahn, and Arndt), placed gymnastic clubs and student fraternities under a cloud of suspicion, and discouraged public festivities. One flare-up was the so-called “Hambach Feast”, held in 1832, when attendants at what had ostensibly been organized as a “fair” committed themselves to liberal ideas: freedom of the press and a unified, constitutional Germany. A public oath was sworn in the phraseology of the Swiss “Ruetli Oath” as immortalized in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell: “Wir wollen sein ein einig Volk von Brüdern, / In keiner Not und trennen und Gefahr. / Wir wollen frei sein, wie die Väter waren. / Eher den Tod, als in der Knechtschaft leben.”

As such political gestures were suppressed, they re-emerged under the seemingly innocuous guise of cultural piety. Schiller above all, the author of the symbolically meaningful Wilhelm Tell, became a venerated figure, whose public commemorations (1829, 1839) were, in fact, coded demonstrations for the unification and liberalization of the German lands. The commemoration of 1859 marked the high tide of this trend; the events among émigrés outside Germany were especially noteworthy. The 1859 commemoration, with its insistent invocation of the Wilhelm Tell play, also boosted the commemorative cult around William Tell in Switzerland.

Much as political feasts had been galvanized by the participation of student fraternities, the cultural commemorations were given greater festive colour by the participation of male choirs. Student fraternities and male choirs shared a common repertoire of songs, and presumably some continuity and throughput of membership as university graduates settled down into a middle-class, middle-age lifestyle. Male choirs, established in most German towns, began to organize regional and nationwide festivals with, in every case, a repertoire and public presentation celebrating the bonds of solidarity between the various German lands. The choral festival of Magdeburg, 1828, commemorated the 15th anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig; the programme of the 1839 Hameln festival invoked the “common German fatherland”, while the 1844 Freising one aimed “to steel the sense of Germanity”; the Stuttgart 1847 one pledged German support for Danish-governed Schleswig-Holstein.

The period between 1848 and 1870 witnessed, with more muted undertones of government critique, a continuation of cultural self-celebrations, commemorative or otherwise, and a continuation of the message of unificatory nationalism. In 1861, a nationwide choral festival held in Nürnberg attracted 20,000 participants and visitors (among them a young Friedrich Nietzsche) and asserted fortissimo a Pan-German nationalism. Various national choral festivals marked, in 1863, the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig (and the death on that battlefield of the nationalist icon, the poet Körner). Meanwhile, a spread of monuments was beginning to spawn its own festivals, organized to mark their completion and inauguration. Undertaken under royal patronage, this rendered national historicism respectable and part of officially-endorsed German nationalism, especially after the victory of 1871 and the imperial unification under Prussian rule. Thus, the festive inauguration of the Luther monument in Worms (1868) foreshows that of the Arminius monument in the Teutoburg Forest near Detmold in 1875 and the Germania at Rüdesheim in 1877, and the inauguration of restored buildings such as the Goslar Kaiserpfalz and Cologne Cathedral (1880s). The culmination of all this takes us back to where Arndt started the commemorative cult in 1814: Leipzig. A huge monument to the Battle of the Nations was festively inaugurated there, with much pomp and circumstance, on the battle’s centenary in 1913.