Germany

Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? asked Goethe in 1796 (ironic as usual). ‘Germany? but where is it? I don't know where to find that land. Its learning begins where its politics end.’ Metternich had a similar sense that neither Italy nor Germany constituted ‘nations’, and dryly stated that their names were at best cartographical, geographical notions:

Metternich's cynicism did not stop, of course, the unification and independence of a new state under the name of Italy; but as we have seen, even the author and minister Massimo D’Azeglio proclaimed shortly after the establishment of the new kingdom that ‘now that Italy has been made, our task is to make the Italians’. A century later, at the establishment of the European Economic Community, De Gaulle still confided that there were only two well-established nation-states in the entire six-member EEC: France and the Netherlands; whereas the other four – which included, besides Belgium and Luxemburg, again Germany and Italy – were only nineteenth-century contrivances.

The German road to unification, from the dissolution of the First Empire to the proclamation of the Second, in 1871, is one of the great examples of the unificatory force of nationalism, as is the Italian Risorgimento. These processes can be, and have often been, described in terms of political interests, military force, dynastic ambition and political decision-making. But the driving power, behind all that, of cultural and ideological movements needs all the more to be emphasized here. The Reichsgedanke which actuated the Hohenzollern dynasty of Prussia was not just a hard-nosed, longterm dynastic agenda, but also and to a considerable extent the product of Romantichistoricist intellectuals. The last king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who mounted the throne in 1840, was the product of an education imbued with national historicism; the last emperor, Wilhelm II (who reigned 1888-1918) no less so.