What did it mean to be German in, say, 1780 and how had this changed by about 1900?

Any attempt to answer this question has to engage with two different kinds of debate about the nature of national identity in Europe between the French Revolution and the First World War. As has so often been remarked, the period between 1789 and 1914 – often known as ‘the long nineteenth century’ – was the great age of nationalism. Opening with the French Revolutionaries' ‘invention’ of the nation in the 1790s and closing with the mass nationalist agitation that accompanied the outbreak of the First World War, the nineteenth century witnessed Europe's transition from a continent of undemocratic, dynastic, territorial states to a Europe in which the nation-state, governed through representative institutions, was emerging as the predominant form of political organisation. These changes went hand in hand with socio-economic and cultural modernisation: demographic growth, industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation, the growth of literacy, increased geographical and social mobility and so on. Some theorists of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and John Breuilly, have seen these two phenomena as interdependent in different ways. Others, such as Adrian Hastings and Liah Greenfeld, have questioned the extent to which nationalism was an essentially modern phenomenon, arguing instead that it emerged in different cultural and political communities at different times and in different ways. Which of these schools of thought best reflects the German experience?