Nineteenth-Century Germany 
Nation Building and Unification
Introduction
19th Century German history is replete with arguments about the past; about nature, about religion, and about progress. This site seeks to explore some of those arguments. Growing numbers of books began to stitch together a literate and reading public, perhaps one that could be described to have a public opinion. The self conscious literary and philosophical debates of these years did something else; they forwarded the idea that Germany was a land of poets and thinkers. A major strand of the cultural history of the 19th century consisted of the debate between Germans who wanted to deny this reputation, and those who insisted that it described a special German virtue. When the German intellectuals went to war in 1914, it was the supposedly a superior and profound German culture that was brandished against the enemy.
While many historians may argue about where nineteenth-century German history should begin, few disagree that it should end with WWI as a watershed. Total war magnified every strain and tension in pre-war Germany; social, generational, political. It led to revolution, and left its mark on everything from painting and literature to the subsequent era of mechanised human destruction in which Germany played such a large role. The Great War ripped the fabric of society for those who lived through it. Ninety years later it continues to stand out as a turning point in modern history, the first great catastrophe of our century from which so much else flowed.
Germany consisted of several separate entities whose inhabitants owed loyalty to an even larger number of people—not just as local rulers, but church, guild and feudal lord. In so far as there were clear territorial boundaries in the Holy Roman Empire, they divided it internally as much as they defined it externally.
Napoleon’s success on the battlefield simplified German geography. It turned hundreds of separate states into mere dozens, and gave those states a stronger sense of their own borders. Austria and Prussia, already rivals in the eighteenth century, now pursued their interests within the German Confederation that replaced the Holy Roman Empire. Revolutions had produced no German nation-state, but enforced a loose Confederation. Bismarck and the Prussian army provided the answer to the question of “Germany” by defeating Austria, thus leading the way to a German Empire in 1871. For German nationalist historians, Germany’s unification had been natural and inevitable. In fact, it was neither. Austria remained a major factor in German history until 1866, and with Bavaria and Saxony, proposed alternative actions until Prussia was pitted against every German state on the battlefield. What we call the unification of Germany was actually a partition.
I am bored. The great things are done. The German Riech is made.
Otto von Bismarck
Unification meant that there was physically a Germany on the map as well as in the head, with paradoxical results. The characteristic nineteenth-century process of state building worked after 1871 to create the Germans, rather than Prussians, Bavarians, or Saxons. A common flag, anthem, and currency encouraged German identity within the boundaries of the new nation state even if other identities, religious, regional or dynastic, did not dissolve. However, German national sentiment could not be contained within the form established under Bismarck. Before that time, German nationalists had found it hard to envision a German nation which would include Austrians who spoke the same language. If Germany was defined in terms of language, culture, or race, how could it end at the borders created by Bismarck? A new nationality law in 1913 emphasised the importance of ethnic German bloodlines over place of birth. There were enormous implications in all this for the twentieth century. Any history of Germany in the age of mass migration and imperialist thinking has to include some consideration of Germany abroad, from Lancaster to Alsace-Lorraine.
