Helmut Walser Smith - Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000

GERMANY
A NATION IN ITS TIME

BEFORE, DURING, AND
AFTER NATIONALISM,
15002000

HELMUT WALSER SMITH

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A DIVISION OF W.W. Norton & Company

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

For Luca

Aeneus Silvio Piccolominis Sojourns and the Cities and Towns Described in His Germania of 14578

Maximilian I: Sojourns of the Itinerant Emperor, 14861519

Major Routes of Erhard Etzlaubs Rome-Way Map of 1500

Cities and Towns Mentioned and Described in Johannes Cochlaeuss Brevis Germaniae Descriptio (1512)

Cities in Georg Braun and Franz Hogenbergs Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 15721617

The Towns and Cities in Matthus Merians Topographia Germaniae

Major Travel Destinations (Excluding Russia) of Joseph II of Austria

Friedrich Nicolais Journey through Germany in 1781

The Travels of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck in 1793

Ernst Moritz Arndts Europe as Imagined in 1802

J.G. Fichtes Republic of the Germans at the Beginning of the 22nd Century

Germany after Counterfactual Austrian Victory over Prussia in 1866

Kaiser William I Monuments in Imperial Germany, 18701902

Bismarck Monuments in Imperial Germany, 18901917

The Places and Occasions of the Public Addresses of the Traveling Kaiser, 19001905

Monuments to Writers, Artists, Musicians, and Scholars in Imperial Germany, 18201914

Germany and the New Europe in Heinrich Classs War Aims Memorandum of 1919

Burned and Desecrated Synagogues in Nazi Germany,November 1938

Ethnic German Militia Massacres of Poles, Jews, and the Handicapped, 1939

The Ghettos of Occupied Poland, 1941

Select German Army POW Camps for Soviet Solders, 19411942

Large Scale Massacres of Jews between June and December,1941An Incomplete Map

Concentration Camps, Ghettos, Killing Sites: An Incomplete Map, 19411945

T HIS BOOK IS ABOUT NATION AND NATIONALISM IN GERMANY from 1500 to 2000. Its primary argument is that across five centuries, there were radically different ways of knowing, representing, and experiencing the German nation. It contends that nations, like many other historical phenomena, are neither timeless verities nor arbitrary historical inventions. Rather, they are real or true in different ways in different periods. Put simply, there was no transhistorical concept of the German nation. There was only a nation in its time. German nationalism mapped onto these changing constellations, but it was not the thing itself. There was a Germany before, during, and after nationalism.

This argument implies that the conception of the German nationnot the ideology of German nationalismis the larger story, with the longer history. In chronological terms, German nationalism had a later beginning; it has gone through an extremely devastating middle phase; and, as is defined here, it may yet have an end. Crystallizing in an unambiguous form for the first time after the French Revolution, German nationalism was an explicitly political ideology that conceived of self and country as one, argued that allegiances to the nation should supersede other loyalties, and bound the male citizen in an unspoken, almost contractual obligation to sacrifice, die, and kill for his country. In the twentieth century, in its radical form, it brought about national cohesion through the persecution, and even expulsion and murder, of others.

Against the grain of a significant interpretive tradition, this book asserts that German nationalists did not engender or invent the German nation.humanists first defined Germany as a nation, pictured it in two-dimensional space, and created a significant number of artifacts that showed it existing among other nations), to our end point of 2000 (when history, at least for now, begins to cede to current affairs), nationalism appeared well beyond the halfway mark of the long and changing history of how Germans imagined and experienced their nation. Encompassing the century between the later part of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War, the age of nationalism, as this period will be called, was characterized by a social and cultural deepening of the nation on one hand, and nationalism as a powerful set of political ideas defining the nation on the other. Yet even in Imperial Germany on the eve of World War I, nationalism, as we will see, was a crucial but in many ways not yet dominant ideology. Nationalism became the dominant ideology of the age later still, in what we will call the nationalist age, when it provided a compelling if ultimately flawed justification for the sacrifice of life that Germany had required of its citizens during World War I. In its radical variant, nationalism in this period demanded the sacrifice of groups within the nation in order to achieve what to us seems a dystopia of ethnic homogeneity. During World War II, that dystopia ended in the death spaces implied in the Nazi idea of living space. In plain words: it ended with genocide. German nationalism, in this way of seeing it, was not the dark culmination point of a long and destructive history of Germany. Rather, it was a crucial, ultimately devastating, but also historical chapter in that history.

The second argument of the book is about the balance between war and peace in the longue dure of the German past. Shelves of books have been written on the military history of the German nation. Yet for long stretches of history, Germans conceived of their country as essentially pacific, and their neighbors have often concurred, sometimes in the form of a complaint. Martial spirit and love of fatherland hardly exist for contemporary Germans, a dismayed Madame de Stal wrote in 1810. But when her brilliant book, De lAllemagne, finally appeared after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Nations in Leipzig in October 1813, her insight seemed out of step with events, and it is hardly necessary to recount that no small part of Germanys subsequent history occurred in the shadow of militarism, military destruction, and violence. Today we know a very different Germanyone concerned with social stability and economic growth rather

Yet peace does not leave us only with blank pages, as Hegel once said of happiness. Rather, in both an absolute and a relative sense, peace has been as important to the long historical arc of the German nation as war. Consider the measure that political scientists use to gauge bellicosity: the so-called conflict catalogue.

The third argument of the book is about realism and tragedy. It is perhaps the most abstract of the three arguments, but it nevertheless might open a conceptual door to new ways of thinking about nations. It derives from a line of inquiry pursued by Erich Auerbach, a German-Jewish literary scholar who, between 1942 and 1945, wrote a remarkable work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, while in exile in Istanbul. In