This essay deals with Saxon identity and broadly with how this identity has developed over the last two hundred years. It summarises and assesses the validity of certain “positive” stereotypes that have been used in descriptions of Saxon people and analyses how contemporary politicians, most importantly the state's first post-unification Prime Minister, Kurt Biedenkopf, have used them.

When the German Democratic Republic (GDR) joined the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and ceased to exist in October 1990, the Freistaat Saxony was reconstituted and became a state (Land) within the federal structure of the newly unified country. After the Second World War, this federal structure was imposed upon western Germany, later the FRG, by the victorious western Allies as a central part of their strategy for a democratic re-structuring of the country. The German states — a total of sixteen since unification — enjoy considerable power. Most importantly, their parliaments control education, communal affairs, police and radio. However, they are not entirely autonomous, and the Basic Law takes precedence over state constitutions. At the same time, however, states (Länder) such as Saxony have striven to forge an identity within the new Germany, and most often an identity that reflects supposedly unique and positive aspects of their respective cultures and pasts.

Saxony's Prime Minister, Kurt Biedenkopf, for example, set out in his 1990 government statement the constituents of what he regarded as the state's main contribution to a united Germany: