Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.

If the French faced the 200th anniversary of the Napoleonic Empire with some trepidation about how to commemorate the infamous Corsican, the British celebrated the Battle of Trafalgar as an enduring national victory. A grand exhibit in the National Maritime Museum in London, “Nelson and Napoleon,” observed this event in 2005. In contemporary Germany, however, the commemoration of 1806 has occurred mainly among small circles of specialists and remained largely absent from popular historical consciousness. In recent times, besides the exhibition on the Holy Roman Empire in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, only small local exhibits and substantial articles in magazines like Die Zeit and Der Spiegel recall 1806. Past momentous occasions such as 1848, 1914–1919, 1933–1945, and 1949 clearly overshadow in contemporary historical memory the tumultuous decades that surrounded the Napoleonic Wars. This tendency to overlook and underestimate the significance of the early nineteenth century also remains evident among scholars who work on later periods of German history. In the shadow of World Wars and the Holocaust, the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between 1792 and 1815 seems distant to the contemporary audience. But why do historians also tend to disregard the importance of this era of warfare and domestic, social, and economic transformation—a period so rich in complexity—and its enduring consequences for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe?

“The fate of Europe sits on a razor's edge, if war starts now, it will be dreadfully feared. Neutrality will be impossible,” worried Hamburg enlightened merchant and philanthropist Caspar Voght in April 1803. He added, “Should war come, Bremen and Hamburg will be occupied by the French or the Prussians, and the rivers will be blockaded. God give us peace.” His fateful words preceded the French occupation and annexation of northern Germany and the corresponding imperial Continental System, which shattered the north German coastal economy. When he returned to Hamburg in September 1812, Voght shared his impressions in another letter: In what misgivings, with what spirits did I approach the city from Harburg, the once fortunate shores, the towers of the once so prosperous city! I landed. Everything I saw and heard demonstrated the ruin of earlier prosperity, [the city] stripped of its attributes, cloaked in the fog of a threatening future. How my heart bled … The city empty and desolate, benefactors of the poor impoverished, the poor without help, my life's work destroyed.

The commemoration and remembrance of war in modern Germany has played a potent political role in both undermining and legitimizing diverse German states, and war stories have been particularly salient to the formation of German national identity in the century that experienced two world wars and the Cold War. The public commemoration of war and war heroes designed to legitimize a German state, however, dates at least to the nineteenth century, when the Wars of Liberation, fought against Napoleon between 1813 and 1815, provided the new Kaiserreich with opportunities to foster specific visions of the past that highlighted national unity and dynastic loyalty. As recent studies have demonstrated, building national unity in a new state created from former independent polities required a patient process of reconciling the region to the nation. A careful examination of nineteenth-century commemorations illustrates that they actually advanced national allegiance as well as affirmed regional solidarity. Public commemorations of the Wars of Liberation in the former republican north German city-state of Hamburg reveals both growing appeals to national unity and a celebration of traditional civic culture and authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, these public festivities enabled Hamburg's growing population to practice national and local politics simultaneously.