Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Chronological table
- Map 1 The German Confederation, 1815
- Map 2 The German Customs Union, 1834
- Introduction
- I Three weeks in March
- II The German nationalist movement's road to the creation of the Reich
- III Documentary appendix
- Notes
- Bibliography and source material
- Notes to bibliography
- A critical bibliography of works in English
- Index
III - Documentary appendix
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Chronological table
- Map 1 The German Confederation, 1815
- Map 2 The German Customs Union, 1834
- Introduction
- I Three weeks in March
- II The German nationalist movement's road to the creation of the Reich
- III Documentary appendix
- Notes
- Bibliography and source material
- Notes to bibliography
- A critical bibliography of works in English
- Index
Summary
This figures as a summary at the end of a fictional traveller's account, supposedly composed by an enlightened French citizen, writing to a brother in Paris about his experiences in Germany a few years before the start of the French Revolution. It belongs to the tradition of texts criticising society by observing domestic conditions through the eyes of foreign visitors with their alien points of view. The author was born in Hoechst in 1754 and was part of the southern Catholic Enlightenment, i.e. was among those publicists who provided the accompanying music to the Josephine reforms. In this text Germany appears as a wealthy and potentially powerful country, and, thanks to her princes, as more enlightened and more inclined to philosophy than her neighbours but unfit for national unity, because the German national character runs counter to it. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was taken for granted, mostly with reference to ancient Greece, that a high level of culture and a dismembered state were mutually dependent.
Source: Johann Kaspar Riesbeck, Briefe eines reisenden Franzosen iiber Deutschland (Zurich 1783), ed. Wolfgang Gerlach (Frankfurt a.M. 1967), pp. 330–6.Germany, including Silesia, is around one fifth larger than France. The total area comprises 12,000 German square miles. The country's soil is very different, however; a large part of it is so productive that no other state in our part of the world, apart from Southern Europe and France, is as fertile.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Course of German NationalismFrom Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763–1867, pp. 103 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991