1. Confederation or Nation-State?

Following the destruction of the old Holy Roman Empire by the armies of the first French Republic and Napoleon between 1793 and 1806, the reorganization of the governments of Central Europe became a major item on the political and diplomatic agenda. The famous Congress of Vienna, the international peace conference of 1814–15 that oversaw the reconstruction of Europe after the wars against Napoleon, created its own distinct solution in the form of the German Confederation, a league of independent and sovereign German states that lasted for fifty-one years. The Confederation is the longest-enduring governmental arrangement in Central Europe of the past two centuries (the Federal Republic of Germany celebrated its 51st birthday in 2000, but it had undergone major changes to its territory and constitution in the unification of 1990). Despite the German Confederation’s relative longevity, however, it was always a deeply disputed institution. In particular, there were persistent demands for its replacement by a single, united German nation-state. Opposition to a confederation originated partly in the nationalist idea that one nation should live under one government. As the following documents show, however, the choice between confederation and nation-state also involved the place of the German lands in a wider Europe and the goals and purposes of government in Germany.

The first group of documents contains excerpts from the German Federal Act of 1815, which established the German Confederation, the Final Act of the Vienna ministerial conferences of 1820, which supplemented this initial document, and three of the Confederation’s more important decisions: the Press Law of 1819, and the Six Articles and Ten Articles of June and July 1832. Between them these documents established the Confederation as a league of sovereign states, independent from each other and from the other European powers. They also, though, laid down a set of rules, some progressive, some repressive, that were binding on these sovereign states. The member states were required, for instance, to treat Catholics and Protestants equally and to have representative institutions in some shape or form, but they were also called upon to limit the freedom of the press and suppress political activism in the interests of political stability among their mostly monarchical governments.

These arrangements provoked nationalist opposition to the German Confederation, as illustrated in several documents included here. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), historian, author, and journalist, was a prominent opponent of Napoleon’s rule in Germany and one of the intellectuals who first formulated modern German nationalism. His 1813 poem “The German Fatherland” was written amid the defeat of Napoleon’s armies and the collapse of Napoleonic rule in Central Europe; it would be set to music and sung countless times by German nationalists in the nineteenth century. The poem put forth a very different principle for the organization of Germany than the one that would be decided on by the diplomats in Vienna soon after its composition. Particularly significant about the song is the way that Arndt established common language and culture, and certain innate virtues, especially honesty and fidelity, as the foundations of a German nation-state, but also proposed hatred of the French as another basis for it.

Johann August Wirth (1789–1848), a journalist and liberal political activist, was also a proponent of a united German nation-state. His speech before 30,000 participants in the Hambach Festival of May 1832, a mass oppositional political demonstration, called for a German nation-state and denounced Germany’s princes and their confederation. Whereas Arndt’s German nationalism was partly based on enmity toward another nation, Wirth imagined a German nationalism that would cooperate with other nationalist movements in opposing authoritarian rule throughout Europe. In the case of liberal nationalists such as Wirth, it is important to note the mutually reinforcing nature of their main goals—achieving a unified national government would provide an opportunity to reform conservative monarchical institutions in the individual German lands, while establishing state governments with broader bases of political participation would smooth the path to German unification.

The first actual attempts to create a German nation-state, as opposed to writing poems about it, took place during the Revolution of 1848–49. One crucial question that emerged during these attempts—and helped ensure their failure—was whether a German nation-state should include some or all of the territories of the Austrian Empire, home not only to many native German speakers but also to large numbers of speakers of other languages. The western provinces of the Austrian Empire had always been regarded as part of Germany: they had formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Habsburg royal dynasty that ruled Austria had supplied the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire almost uninterruptedly from 1438 to 1806 and still presided over the German Confederation. Some eighty percent of the Habsburgs’ subjects, however, were not Germans, but Magyars, Italians, Romanians, Poles, and members of other Slavic population groups. Were the entire Austrian Empire to become part of a united German realm, then that realm would, according to some definitions, not be a German nation-state. Were only the German lands within the Austrian Empire to become part of a united Germany, then the Austrian Empire would cease to exist. In provinces such as Bohemia and Carniola, moreover, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the Germans, Czechs, and Slovenes living in mixed areas, or more to the point, it would be difficult to distinguish between the German, Czech, and Slovene speakers and the many bilingual populations who did not identify themselves with any of these three nationalities and instead saw themselves primarily as Bohemians or Carniolans and as Habsburg subjects. In an effort to avoid these problems, some liberal nationalists promoted a more inclusive conception of citizenship along civic rather than purely linguistic lines, with accompanying rights and protections for linguistic minorities. Such protections were, in fact, enshrined in §188 of the constitution drawn up by the Frankfurt National Assembly, which was charged with drafting a constitution for a united Germany during the Revolution of 1848–49.

Another solution to the problem of the Habsburg lands, first tried unsuccessfully in 1849, was the creation of a “small Germany,” a united German nation-state that excluded the Germans of the Austrian Empire. With Austria excluded, such a small Germany would have been dominated by the other Central European great power, the Kingdom of Prussia. Following the revolution’s failure and the subsequent period of reaction, the National Association, founded in 1859, pressed for such a small Germany. Two key documents by the Association—their founding document, the Eisenach Declaration of August 1859, as well as their September 1860 declaration on a German constitution—implied that a small German nation-state would only be possible if the Kingdom of Prussia was led by a liberal, reforming government (again highlighting the extent to which liberal and nationalist goals were connected in this period).

The “Greater Germans,” the proponents of a German nation-state that included the Germans of the Austrian Empire, organized their own society in 1862, the Reform Association, to press for their version of a united Germany. Comparing their founding declaration with that of the National Association, it is clear that the “Greater Germans” had a more favorable opinion of the German Confederation.

An important impetus for the Greater Germans was religious and confessional conflict. A large majority of the inhabitants of the Austrian Empire were Roman Catholics, and Austria had always been the Catholic great power in Central Europe, opposed to predominantly Protestant Prussia. If Austria’s Catholics were excluded from a united, small German nation-state (as they were to be in 1866), then Catholics would become a permanent minority in Germany. The September 1862 declaration of the Katholikentag, the annual assembly of Roman Catholic clubs, organizations, and societies from across Central Europe, makes clear that Germany’s Catholics linked the question of a small versus a greater German nation-state with the threats faced by the Catholic Church across all of Europe.

The government of the Austrian Empire instituted a diplomatic initiative in the early 1860s to gather support among the governments and people of the many German states for its position against both the Kingdom of Prussia and the small German nationalist movement. Part of this diplomatic initiative was the July 1863 proposal for the reform of the German Confederation. For all its evocation of German nationalism, the proposal shows the considerable difficulties that the government of a multinational Austrian Empire had with the idea of a German nation-state.

Near the end of this section comes an excerpt from Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismarck’s famous “Blood and Iron” speech, which he delivered at a meeting of the budget committee of the Prussian parliament on September 30, 1862. At that time the liberal-dominated parliament was refusing to pass the Prussian government’s military budget. In condemning the actions of the parliament’s liberals, many of whom were affiliated with the National Association, Bismarck made clear that he favored the creation of a small German nation-state, dominated by Prussia, although not a liberal and reformed Prussia, as the National Association advocated. In effect, he was calling for the creation not so much of a small Germany as a greater Prussia, which, in effect, is what materialized after Prussia’s victory over Austria in the war of 1866.

2. Authoritarian or Parliamentary/Constitutional Rule?

Another hotly contested issue during the period was the nature of governmental power. Should the executive—in this case, the German monarchs—be able to rule in an authoritarian fashion, or should their power be limited by a constitution that explicitly laid out the powers of an elected legislature and guaranteed the right to public discussion of political affairs? The new German Federal Act included a paragraph stipulating that each member state should have an “estates-based constitution” [landständische Verfassung], but what that would mean in practice remained the subject of much debate.

A prominent proponent—and practitioner—of relatively authoritarian (or, as contemporaries would have said, “absolutist”) rule was Austrian Chancellor Clemens von Metternich (1773–1859). In his letter of June 17, 1819, to his personal secretary and political operative Friedrich Gentz, Metternich denounced the enemies of absolutist rule, whom he identified as trouble-making intellectuals. Metternich was particularly hostile to both freedom of the press and parliamentary government, arguing that, while they might be acceptable in England or France, they were impossible in the German states. In his political testament, written in 1820, he expanded the argument made in his letter to Gentz—asserting that the common people accepted authoritarian rule, whereas opposition to it came from the middle class and from anticlerical free-thinkers—and called on monarchs across Europe to join together in taking action to preserve their rule. Gentz, in turn, produced the influential memorandum to the Carlsbad Conference in 1819 that attempted to spin the interpretation of the estates constitution clause of the German Federal Act away from ideas about representative or parliamentary government; liberals such as Wirth and Carl Welcker would continue to fight against this conservative interpretation for decades.

Implementing Metternich’s proposals was easier said than done; even authoritarian governments that resolutely rejected constitutions and elected legislatures still needed to cultivate public opinion. In 1844, Prussian Cultural Minister Friedrich Eichhorn (1779–1856) wrote a letter to Prussian Interior Minister Adolf Heinrich von Arnim (1803–1868) to express a concern that he shared with Metternich—discomfort about the anti-government activities of trouble-making intellectuals, in this case, in Prussia’s Rhine province. To compete with the problematic intellectuals, Eichhorn sought funds to subsidize a newspaper that would offer a conservative, pro-government voice and seek to win over public opinion.

The Staats-Lexikon was a prime example of the sort of liberal attempts to sway public opinion that Eichhorn sought to counter. It was a twelve-volume encyclopedia of political concepts that first appeared in the 1830s; its editors and authors were proponents of political liberalism and a constitutional form of government. In the featured excerpts from the entry “Constitution,” Carl von Rotteck (1775–1840), Professor of Law at the University of Freiburg, one of the editors of the Staats-Lexikon and a liberal leader in the Grand Duchy of Baden, carefully noted the difference between absolutist and constitutional government and argued that all of Europe was faced with a choice between the two.

The two sides came into sharpest conflict during the Revolution of 1848–49. Most German supporters of a constitutional government assumed that such a regime would be a constitutional monarchy. A king or other princely figure would be head of state, deriving his powers from a constitution, powers that would still be substantial, if less than those of an absolute monarch. Advocacy of a republican form of government—a further step away from absolutism—was, on the other hand, only really common during the revolution. In 1848–49 Carl Schurz (1829–1906) was a student at the University of Bonn and a democratic and republican political activist. Following the defeat of the revolution, he fled to the United States, where he was active in the anti-slavery cause and the new Republican Party. He served as a Union general in the Civil War and was appointed Secretary of the Interior under President Hayes. In his memoirs, written at the beginning of the twentieth century, he explained the course of events that turned him from a constitutional monarchist into a republican.

Constitutional government became increasingly normative in Central Europe after the Revolution of 1848–49, and even very conservative figures found this form of government acceptable. In an 1853 speech in the parliament of the Kingdom of Prussia, Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–1861), a conservative political theorist and law professor at the University of Berlin, explained why he opposed a motion to abolish the Prussian constitution instituted during the revolution. Stahl, whose ideas had considerable influence on Bismarck, argued in his speech that a constitution would, if anything, increase the power and authority of the Prussian king rather than weaken it, as defenders of authoritarian government in the first half of the nineteenth century had feared. For Stahl, as for Bismarck after him, specific provisions in a constitution were what was necessary to uphold monarchical authority; the existence of a constitution as such need not endanger monarchical institutions.

3. Emancipation of the Jews

Since Jews formed a very small minority of Germany’s population, around 1–1.5 percent overall (rarely exceeding 5 percent, even in regions where they were more densely congregated), it might be surprising that their citizenship rights ranked as a crucial issue alongside national unity and constitutional government during the period in question. The emancipation of the Jews was of major importance, partly because debates on the subject revealed profoundly different opinions about the nature of citizenship and the relationship of citizens to their government, as well as about the place of religion in state and society.

Debates about Jewish emancipation had already emerged intermittently in the preceding decades, and they flared up again at the Congress of Vienna amid the battles over the German constitution, with city-states such as Bremen and Lübeck proposing to expel newly settled Jewish residents and with disagreement prevailing as to whether the constitutional requirement for the equal treatment of religious groups would apply only to the main Christian confessions or to German Jewry as well. Before the French Revolution Jews had faced civil, economic, and political discrimination in all German states. During the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, Jews in areas under French rule were often granted political rights, though temporary restrictions were still placed on their civil and economic rights on the grounds that Christian populations needed protection from the Jews’ allegedly harmful economic practices. Despite the lobbying efforts of the Jewish communities of Bremen, Lübeck, Hamburg, and Frankfurt am Main, the efforts of Romantic author Friedrich Schlegel, and the work of Metternich and the Prussian delegates in Vienna, the German constitution left the Jews in legal limbo. Their status remained unsettled throughout the whole life of the German Confederation; as a result, it could be (and frequently was) interpreted in discriminatory ways in the various individual states. By 1824 almost all the Jewish residents of Bremen and Lübeck had, in fact, been deported.

An 1822 memorandum from the files of the Ministry of State of the Duchy of Nassau, a small state in western Germany, on the question of the Jewish population’s rights to residence and marriage, serves as a useful introduction to the debate about Jewish equality in the Vormärz period. The memorandum’s authors point out that the question itself emerged as a result of the profound political changes that had occurred over the three previous decades. Under the old regime in Germany, the pre-1789 Holy Roman Empire, society and government were corporate in nature; that is to say that different social or religious groups had different obligations and privileges and equality between any one group and any other was of little account. In those circumstances, a religious minority with its own particular way of life and particular burdens was part of the broader scheme of things. Following the upheavals of the French Revolution, however, this model of government and society was replaced by one based on common citizenship, which made the position of the Jews distinctive. The bureaucrats writing this memorandum noted that efforts had been made to reduce the social and economic distinctiveness of the Jewish population, in order to make its occupational structure similar to that of the other inhabitants of the Duchy. They expressed skepticism not just about the success of those efforts but about also their usefulness and legitimacy.

A report by the Prussian District Government of Koblenz, an area just to the northwest of the Duchy of Nassau, from January 1820 and thus about the same time as the previous document, discusses the conditions of the Jews in the district and considers whether the Prussian government’s edict of 1812, offering Jews more civic rights, should be applied to the territories acquired by Prussia in 1815. The report contrasts the legal condition of Jews in the areas on the western and eastern banks of the Rhine River: on the west bank laws created by the French Revolution were in effect; on the east bank the laws still derived largely from the old regime. The author of the report opposed granting Jews expanded civil rights and described the Jewish population of the area in hate-filled and bigoted terms in order to justify this opinion. This very hostile account of the Jews was designed to show that they did not fit the criteria for citizenship, implying that requirements for citizenship included professing a certain religion, following certain customs, and practicing particular occupations.

From the time of the revolutions of 1830 onward, the question of Jewish emancipation was the subject of growing debate. The next two documents make very clear that different and opposing conceptions of the nature of the state and citizenship informed this debate. The first includes excerpts from the pamphlet Jewish National Distinctiveness, published in 1831 by H. E. G. Paulus (1761–1851), Professor of Theology at the University of Heidelberg. A rationalist theologian whose commentary on the Gospels had created an enormous stir by denying the resurrection of Jesus, Paulus was also politically active and frequently commented on public affairs. Opposing a motion before the parliament of the Grand Duchy of Baden to emancipate Baden’s Jews, Paulus asserted that Germany’s Jews, by following their religious laws, made themselves into a distinct and foreign nationality, and set themselves apart from other Germans. As a result, they could only be protected subjects of the state, not equal citizens. The only way they could become equal citizens, according to Paulus, was to change their laws and customs. In addition to moving their religion closer to Christianity, Jews would have to stop operating as commercial middlemen and peddlers, occupations he denounced as harmful to the public good. For Paulus, religion and nationality were intimately connected; Jews would have to demonstrate that they met certain standards—religious, moral, and occupational—set by Christians if they wanted to become citizens of a German state.

In response, Gabriel Riesser (1806–1863) wrote the pamphlet Defense of the Civic Equality of the Jews against the Proposals of Herr Dr. H. E. G. Paulus. Riesser, the most forthright proponent of Jewish emancipation among Germany’s Jews, was a native of Hamburg trained in law who would go on to have a distinguished political career: he was vice president of the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848–49 and in 1859 was named a justice in the Hamburg Court of Appeals, the first Jew in Germany to be appointed as a judge. Riesser’s refutation of Paulus’s arguments was intended less to defend Jewish religious rituals or debate Jewish occupational structure than to argue that these were not the issue. Riesser responded to Paulus’s attacks on Jewish commercial activity by arguing that middlemen were a normal part of commercial life, that peddlers’ activities were beneficial to consumers, and that attacks on Jewish businessmen were largely the work of their competitors who, by limiting competition, would simply hurt consumers. Contrary to Paulus’s contention that Jews, by obeying their religious laws, set themselves outside of the circle of citizenship, Riesser asserted that obeying Jewish religious law was a matter of religious conviction and individual conscience and not a bar to citizenship, the precondition for which was the obligation placed on all citizens to obey the laws laid down by the government. Jews, Riesser pointed out, had fought in the Wars of Liberation against France, serving in the armies of the German states, and thus demonstrating their patriotic attachment to the German nation. By defining nationality, citizenship, and the role of the state differently from Paulus, Riesser arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions about Jewish emancipation.

In 1846 the parliament of the Duchy of Nassau debated a motion calling on the government to grant the Jews the same rights as other citizens of the duchy. Similar debates were held at the time in the parliamentary bodies of other German states, including Baden, Bavaria, and Prussia, and in the German National Assembly during the Revolution of 1848–49, where Riesser again played a prominent role. In the course of the 1846 Nassau debate, excerpted here, both proponents and opponents of Jewish emancipation expressed their views on the nature of citizenship and whether Jews fulfilled the criteria necessary. The Frankfurt Constitution of 1849 granted equal rights to Jews, but the revolution collapsed before these rights could come into effect. It was only with the formation of the North German Confederation in 1867, and the German Empire in 1871, that Jews were granted equal rights.

As images of Jewish synagogues built during this period illustrate, debates about emancipation could also manifest themselves in life outside the political area, in areas such as architecture. As Jewish communities in many places were increasingly allowed to show a more public face, questions relating to the form and aesthetics of their houses of worship became more pressing. Designed by German-Jewish architect Albrecht Rosengarten (1809–1893), the new synagogue in Kassel featured a Romanesque style borrowed from Christian church architecture, whereas the Dresden synagogue by noted architect Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) drew on Byzantine and Moorish elements stylized as “Oriental” in allusion to Jews’ Near Eastern origins. The Return of the Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to His Family Still Living in Accordance with Old Customs (1833–34), a painting by German-Jewish artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882), likewise lent support to claims for Jewish emancipation and patriotic citizenship. The painting celebrated Jewish religious traditions yet pointed to possible tensions between Jews’ old ways and new status.

4. Parties and Organizations

In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century Germans increasingly recognized the existence of emerging political parties but expressed mixed feelings about them. The first document in this section, an excerpt from the entry “Parties (political)” in the Staats-Lexikon, attests to this ambivalence. The author begins by noting that his contemporaries in the 1840s divided parties on a left-to-right political spectrum, distinguishing radicals, liberals, moderates, and conservatives. However, the author ultimately condemns this way of thinking, preferring to describe politics in terms of special, particular interests and the general or public interest. The only legitimate parties, he asserts, were those that represented the public interest; those representing special, particular interests, were illegitimate. The author of this excerpt had left-wing political sympathies, but the suspicion of political parties as representing illegitimate, special interests rather than the general public interest was widespread among Germans of all political views.

Turning to individual parties, or perhaps more precisely in an age that still lacked much party infrastructure, to political tendencies, we start on the right with the conservatives. The speech “What is the Revolution?,” given in 1852 by the conservative political theorist Friedrich Julius Stahl, explains what conservatives opposed and, from this opposition, what they espoused. In this speech we can see the important role that opposition to the ideas and demands of the French Revolution of 1789 played for German conservatives, and too the great importance of revealed Christian religion in defining conservative principles. Stahl’s sharp denunciation of nationalism as a form of godless idolatry is also of interest. Given that in the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries nationalism has often been closely linked with conservative politics, it may come as a shock to find that German (and other European) conservatives during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century were so strongly opposed to nationalism, which was associated at the time with liberalism. When, in 1866, the eminently conservative Otto von Bismarck proceeded to take up part of the nationalist political program, conservatives across Germany were horrified by his actions and saw them as a betrayal of their political principles.

At the beginning of October 1847, liberal parliamentary deputies and politicians from several states in southern Germany met in the town of Heppenheim to hammer out a common political program. Their declaration, the Heppenheim Program of October 10, 1847, offers a good summary of liberal political thought on the eve of the Revolution of 1848–49. The creation of a united German nation-state was the central objective for these liberals, but they also desired the expansion of basic civil liberties and the rule of law and an end to feudalism and seigneurialism. As the newspaper account of their meeting suggests, they were aware of economic issues affecting the lower classes, such as the burden of taxation and declining standards of living but could not agree on what to do about them.

The program of the German Progressive Party, founded in 1861 as the liberal party in the Kingdom of Prussia, demonstrates the demands of liberal political parties toward the end of this period. Nationalism and German national unity remained a central issue; the preservation of the rule of law and the creation of a strong and independent judiciary had become increasingly important themes too. Another major item was expanding the powers of the elected House of Deputies of the Prussian parliament against the executive branch of the Prussian government and the House of Lords. The burdens of taxation and questions of economic policy were also addressed, but, as in the Heppenheim program, only vaguely.

The democrats, as the more radical elements in German politics of the time were often known, were at their most active and effective during the Revolution of 1848–49. Gustav von Struve (1805–1870) was a prominent democratic political activist in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Invited to participate in the so-called Pre-Parliament of March–April 1848, meetings of liberal and democratic activists that would prepare the calling of a German Constituent National Assembly to draft a German constitution, he put forward a motion encapsulating the democratic political program. Some aspects of Struve’s motion reveal similarities with liberal ideas—national unity, civil liberties and the rule of law, separation of church and state, an end to seigneurialism—but they were expressed in more vigorous and forceful language. Other aspects characteristic of the democrats included vehement hostility to the nobility and the advocacy of a republican form of government on the basis of a wider electoral franchise than many moderate liberals were able to support. The program also called for social reform and measures to combat poverty, issues the liberals were again more reluctant to touch. One should also note that this democratic and radical political program was hostile to government bureaucracy and called for the reduction of taxes, ideas that in more recent times have generally been associated with conservatives.

It was only from the 1840s onward that a specifically socialist political tendency developed out of the broader radical and democratic movement. If there is any one individual who could be called the founder of a socialist or social democratic party in Germany, it would be the author and political agitator Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864). In his famous “Open Letter” of 1863, he called for the creation of a socialist labor party. Such a party would not be simply socialist, it would also take up the liberal demand for constitutional and parliamentary government and the radical demand for a democratic suffrage because, in Lassalle’s opinion, the existing liberal and democratic parties had failed to follow through on these issues. The labor party would thus become, in effect, the heir to their aspirations. Such a position also distinguished the Lassalleans from the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Only after German unification would these movements fuse to form the German Social Democratic Party.

One of the distinctive aspects of the German political system between 1871 and 1933 was the existence of a specifically Roman Catholic political party in addition to socialist, radical, liberal, and conservative parties. This party enjoyed the strong support of Germany’s Catholic population. Before 1866, though, it was unclear whether such a party would come into existence. There were certainly devout church-going Catholics who were involved in politics and there were Catholic associations and societies active in public life, but the question of whether these societies should be the basis of a Catholic political party, and whether devout Catholics should be politically active in it, remained unresolved. During the Revolution of 1848–49, Germany’s Catholics formed Pius Associations (named after Pope Pius IX); the general assembly of the Pius Associations of the Rhineland and Westphalia, held in Cologne from April 17–20, 1849, included a revealing debate about whether these associations should only deal with religious questions or should make their opinions known on all political issues—in effect becoming a Catholic political party. The chief participants in the debate, Franz Xaver Dieringer (1811–1876), Professor of Theology at the University of Bonn, the Cologne attorney Hermann von Fürth (1815–1888), Franz Joseph Buß (1803–1878), Professor of Law at the University of Freiburg, and Ignaz Döllinger (1799–1890), Professor of Theology at the University of Munich, were all prominent Catholic political activists. Their arguments centered on the question of whether a Catholic political party would be good for the Church, but also whether Catholics could best make their influence felt in public life by forming their own party or by working through other, existing political parties.

5. The Military and War

Compared to the preceding revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, which were marked by deadly and disruptive warfare, the years between 1815 and 1866 were relatively peaceful in Europe. Developments in military strategy and technology, and the continued growth of large citizen armies, however, meant that the military still played a prominent role in German life during the period. Material culture in the years after 1814 attests to the importance of memories of the wars against Napoleon and the subsequent victory celebrations; examples include the glass tumbler (c. 1815) featuring a portrait of Allied commander Karl Philipp Prince Schwarzenberg or the ornamental porcelain cup (1824) showing a monument to the Allied victory near Berlin.

The most prominent military thinker of early nineteenth-century Germany was the Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). His treatise On War, which drew on his own experiences in the Napoleonic Wars as well as his detailed study of military history, was composed during the 1820s and is still cited by military strategists today. Many people are familiar with its most celebrated proposition: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” The selections here, however, emphasize the nature of warfare as it was understood in the early nineteenth century. Clausewitz noted the increasing domination of infantry over the other branches of the armed forces, and he also described the difficulties that commanders faced in making effective use of it: lengthy marches left an army fatigued and disorganized; defensive operations were more likely to be successful than offensive ones. At the same time, he suggested that, since the late seventeenth century, warfare had become ever larger in scale and ever more focused on broader objectives and total victory. Strategy thus called for aggressive operations to bring about total victory, but military tactics suggested such operations would be less likely to succeed.

A resolution of this dilemma would come from Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891), chief of the Prussian General Staff from 1857. In his memorandum of 1861, Moltke noted that improvements in military technology—particularly the rifling of gun barrels and artillery pieces and the introduction of faster breech-loading rifles—would greatly increase armies’ firepower. In these circumstances, firepower would dominate the battlefield, making frontal attacks, Napoleonic-era-style bayonet charges, on flat terrain impossible. After withering infantry and artillery fire had weakened the adversary, deep formations, with extensive reserves, would launch decisive flanking and encircling attacks, taking advantage of topographical features in their advance.

How were the troops to get to the battlefield in the first place, avoiding the difficulties of the lengthy marches that Clausewitz had pointed out? Moltke’s answer was that they would reach the theater of operations by rail. In his memorandum of April 1866 on the possibility of a war between Prussia and Austria, Moltke noted that, although Prussia was heavily outnumbered by Austria and its allies among the German states, by making effective use of the railroads the Prussian army could bring more men to the front in Saxony and Bohemia than the Austrians could, which is exactly what happened when war broke out two months later.

Moltke’s new tactics proved successful because Prussia alone adopted them. The Austrian Empire, Prussia’s main diplomatic and military rival among the states of the German Confederation, kept using Napoleonic-era bayonet charges, mobilized its troops slowly and cautiously, moved them mostly on foot, and relied more on fortresses than on railroads. Such deficiencies in the Austrian military were emphasized by the Prussian officer Prince Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1827–1892) in his posthumously published memoirs.

6. Economy and Labor

The years 1815 to 1866 witnessed the early stages of industrialization in the German lands, with growth in older types of manufacturing and artisanal labor as well as the emergence of new technologies and industries such as steam engines and railways. These developments were eye-catching and compelled the attention of people at the time, as seen in the image here of the Borsig works near Berlin or in the medallions struck to commemorate the opening of the railroad lines between Leipzig and Dresden and Vienna and Brno in 1839. The new technologies even featured at the popular level in material culture, as in the case of an elegant linen tablecloth adorned with images of railway locomotives and other examples of steam-powered machinery.

The period also saw the growing implementation of a free-market economy in the German states and the abolition of barriers to market freedom, such as seigneurial rights in agriculture, the guild system in crafts, and protective tariffs in international trade. These changes, however, did not come about easily, with opponents of different aspects of the free-market economy fighting hard against economic liberalization.

Great Britain was the great model for nineteenth-century advocates of the free-market economy, and the leading spokesman for free trade in Germany in this era was an Englishman, John Prince-Smith (1809–1874), who moved to the Prussian town of Elbing in 1831 to teach English and eventually became a Prussian subject. Prince-Smith was one of the founders of the Congress of German Economists, a debating and lobbying group that promoted free trade. Excerpted here are essays by Prince-Smith from 1843 and 1845 on free trade and protectionism, in which he propounded the virtues of free trade and the importance of government non-interference in the economy. Prince-Smith was careful to connect his endorsement of the free market both to the heroes of Prussia’s early nineteenth-century reform era, with their own moves towards a free market, and to the first building of railroads and development of factory industry in Central Europe in the 1830s.

The introduction of a free-market economy in nineteenth-century Germany involved two distinct kinds of freedom, and advocates of the one were not always supporters of the other. One was freedom of trade and commerce [Handelsfreiheit], which involved ending tariffs, import prohibitions, and other limitations on goods flowing from one state to another. The other was freedom of occupation [Gewerbefreiheit], the freedom to practice any trade or craft and, closely connected with it, the freedom to take up residence wherever one wished. The chief enemies of freedom of occupation were the guilds, whose members were determined to restrict the number of people who could practice particular crafts and to regulate very closely how those crafts were practiced. Germany’s city-states, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, were guild strongholds. Their economies were largely dependent on international trade, and their governments were strong proponents of freedom of commerce, but they were generally opposed to freedom of occupation. Karl Victor Böhmert (1829–1918), an economist and business journalist in Bremen, was also active in the Congress of German Economists. In his book on freedom of occupation, published in 1858, excerpts from which are reproduced here, he confronted Bremen’s supporters of the guild system. Quoting guild proponents who asserted that guilds reinforced the middle class, prevented the growth of an impoverished proletariat, and improved the moral qualities of life among craftsmen and workers, Böhmert argued that exactly the opposite was the case, that freedom of occupation would encourage these worthwhile conditions, while the regulations of the guild system prevented them.

Particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, repeated economic crises and evidence of the growing impoverishment of large portions of the population made ideas of economic deregulation unpopular. Even supporters of the free market had their doubts. An excerpt on freedom of occupation from Rotteck and Welcker’s liberal Staats-Lexikon strongly denounced guilds and called for the establishment of freedom of occupation. Yet the author could not help noting that a free market in labor seemed to lead to the domination of large capitalists over small businesses. Rejecting any form of government intervention, he felt that the solution to this problem was to be found in voluntary associations, cooperatives, and educational efforts—ideas that were widely popular among German supporters of a free-market economy, as in Böhmert’s essay on freedom of occupation noted above.

One of the most prominent critics of free trade was the journalist and economist Friedrich List (1789–1846). In his most famous work, The National System of Political Economy (1841), excerpted here, List criticized Adam Smith and his successors. Drawing on his experiences in the United States and on the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, List argued that free trade between nations favored economically and industrially more advanced countries such as Great Britain and was harmful to industrially less advanced countries such as Germany. These countries should introduce protective tariffs on manufactured goods to help nurture their manufacturing capability. More broadly, List argued for a specifically national view of economic development and for the importance of policies aimed at improving the skills of the labor force as a means of economic development. His ideas were very influential in nineteenth-century Germany; later in the century, his works were read with interest in East Asia, as they still are today.

While supporting protectionism in international trade, List believed in free trade among the German states and freedom of occupation and residence within them. However, in this period there were many critics of the two latter freedoms and many supporters of the guilds. One of their major arguments was that the introduction of such freedoms was really an act of bureaucratic oppression, imposed on an unwilling population by authoritarian government officials. The folklorist and conservative journalist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–1897) articulated this idea with verve and clarity in his influential book Civil Society (1851).

The emergent socialist movement, as one might expect, was no friend of the free market. In an excerpt from Ferdinand Lassalle’s 1863 “Open Letter,” we see how the socialist leader draws upon British liberal political economy to explain his “iron law of wages,” according to which the workings of the free labor market invariably and irresistibly reduced workers’ wages to a subsistence minimum.

The period 1815 to 1866 also saw the development of a specifically Roman Catholic social and economic doctrine in Germany. More than any other, the man who articulated this doctrine was the Bishop of Mainz, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811–1877). Ketteler took up both the conservative criticism of freedom of occupation and Lassalle’s “iron law of wages,” forcefully condemning the free-market economy and the political liberals who endorsed it. Yet, unlike many other Catholic or conservative critics of the free market, he had his doubts about the guild system, noting the benefits to consumers from economic competition, and rejected the idea of government economic intervention. Ketteler felt that the Catholic Church could best help solve the social question by offering charity, getting workers to lead moral and religious lives, and encouraging wealthy and devout Catholics to fund the establishment of producers’ cooperatives.

7. Nature, Environment, and Region

It would not be unfair to say that environmentalism in the modern sense—the conviction that industrial and technological developments were threatening the natural world—did not exist in Germany between 1815 and 1866. Industrialization and urbanization were just getting started in these years, and the emphasis lay more on the possibilities for controlling nature presented by modern technological developments than on the potential dangers. There were certainly instances of gaseous or liquid discharges from early factories causing damage in their respective vicinities and angering or annoying their neighbors. Early governmental regulations on industrial emissions were largely ineffective and legal doctrines tended to treat them more as a nuisance than an environmental and health hazard. As the documents here illustrate, contemporaries were quite unsure what to make of—and do about—this new occurrence.

In 1816, for example, a chemical factory was founded in the Westphalian city of Iserlohn. Complaints from neighbors and government measures against the factory began as early as 1830, but nothing ever seemed to be done about it. The factory was finally closed down in 1853.

In 1862 a group of Ulm residents presented a petition to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior complaining about pollution stemming from the increased use of coal fuel in larger production facilities. When asked to comment, the Bavarian government’s Central Office for Industry and Commerce admitted that the petitioners’ complaints were legitimate but was unable to suggest any effective way to deal with the situation, rather implying that the citizens of Ulm would just have to get used to it. Potential problems from global warming brought about by burning carbon-based fuels would not enter popular or governmental consciousness for another century or so.

At this time, nevertheless, Germany’s physicians were just beginning to become aware of the potential health hazards of industrial pollution. An excerpt from a clinical report and autopsy published in the medical journal Deutsche Klinik in 1860 by Professor Ludwig Traube (1818–1876), a physician at Charité, the hospital associated with the University of Berlin, shows German medical science starting to develop an understanding of black lung as a disease specifically associated with the inhalation of coal dust, and as different from the many other diseases of the respiratory system (influenza, pneumonia, bronchitis, tuberculosis) common at the time.

While modern-style environmentalism may not have existed yet, Romantic idealization of organic nature and of landscapes construed as natural flourished and helped to nurture the growth of early ecological thinking, as exemplified in the emphasis on the interaction of various components of climate, geography, and the biosphere in the thought of the Prussian explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt or in the blossoming of Romantic landscape art in this era. The discourse of German forestry in this period was also significant in its pursuit of sustainable management of natural resources in the face of the threat of agricultural and industrial deforestation. Such ideas were also influential in the colonial sphere, not merely later on after a united Germany acquired its own colonies but also in the colonial possessions of other European states, as here in an excerpt from the report of the German-born forestry official Dietrich Brandis (1824–1907) on the teak forests of Myanmar, where he worked in the service of the British Empire. The memorandum of Johann Gottfried Tulla (1770–1828) on the project to engineer the Rhine River as a flood control measure, excerpted here, reveals in its own way the balance between a Promethean faith in the power of science and technology to master nature and an ecological emphasis on the harmony of natural forces and the role of productive human activity in disrupting natural equilibria in the first place.

Much of the discourse and politics surrounding landscapes and the effects of industrialization had to do with tensions between urban and rural life. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was a keen, if at times tendentious, observer of Germany’s regions and its rural and urban areas. In this selection from Land and People (1854), he argues that Germany could be divided into three regions, each characterized by a distinctive relationship between city and country. The reader should be aware that Riehl’s very acute observations were laden with politically fraught value judgments, above all his assumption that people who live in the city and in the country should be very different.

A second excerpt from Riehl’s Civil Society (1851) addresses the continuing presence, among Germany’s rural population in the middle of the nineteenth century, of regional identities dating back to Germany’s old regime, before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras and the Congress of Vienna had drastically transformed the territories of the German states. One of the defining features of German history in this period and generally was the diversity of political entities and regions that composed it, going well beyond an urban–rural divide. This diversity found echoes and commentary in both texts and images.

When Germans think of a region as being provincial, they often think of the Palatinate [Pfalz], in the extreme southwestern corner of Central Europe on the west bank of the Rhine River. In 1857 the novelist and journalist August Becker (1826–1891) wrote a celebrated traveler's guide to the Palatinate, which began with a general description of the region and its inhabitants. Becker’s version of what makes a region includes natural features, such as climate and topography, historical experiences, folkloric customs, and social practices. He also noted the importance of the relationship of the region to its ruling state (the Kingdom of Bavaria, in this case) and to the idea of a German nation-state. Becker’s political sympathies lay with the liberals, and students might compare his ideas about what makes a region with those of his conservative contemporary Riehl.

The years 1815 to 1866 were not a period of rapid urbanization in Germany; it was only after c. 1850 that the population of cities and towns began to grow at a faster rate than the population as a whole. There was no one dominant urban center in the German states, of the sort that Paris, London, Lisbon, or Copenhagen constituted in other European countries. The most rapidly growing of Germany’s large cities was the Prussian capital Berlin. The writer and socialist Ernst Dronke (1822–1891) published a book in 1846 about the capital city that created a sensation and led to his arrest by the Prussian authorities. The excerpts presented here paint a picture of life in the metropolis: fast-paced, immoral, diverse, and anonymous. As a socialist, Dronke also describes Berlin as a city of expanding capitalism and working-class misery. A closer look at his description of the workers, however, reveals that it contains a long list of pre-industrial crafts and master artisans dependent on merchant capitalists, but very few factory workers. The Berlin Dronke describes here seems closer to a pre-industrial eighteenth-century European city than to later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial centers of the sort that Berlin itself would become.

8. Gender and Family

Dominant and widely accepted ideas about family and gender in this period were set down in two entries in the Staats-Lexikon. In the first, “Family, Family Law,” the encyclopedia’s editor Carl von Rotteck asserted that marriage was the moral and legal basis of the family. Marriages were a union of two people, based on their mutual love and affection, in one united personality under the control of the husband. Marriage was also a property relationship, where, once again, the husband was in charge of the family property, but the wife retained certain rights to her own property. Finally, families were hierarchies in which parents had authority over their minor children and the head of household had authority over servants, who were perceived as members of the family.

The second article, “Relations between the Sexes,” deals with purported differences between men and women and the political consequences of these differences. Taking up a common contemporary theme, the author, the Staats-Lexikon’s other editor, Carl Welcker, asserted that men and women were different by nature. The former were active, vigorous, and rational, their lives oriented primarily outward; the latter were passive, accepting, and emotional, their lives oriented inward toward the family and the household. As a result, Welcker maintained, only men should have the right to participate actively in politics. He rejected the ideas of conservatives, who believed that poor men should have no more rights than women, as well as the ideas of feminists, who argued that women should have equal political rights with men. At the same time, Welcker felt that women could participate in public life to a certain extent, using their female qualities of empathy and caring to form associations, petition the government, and be spectators at meetings of parliamentary bodies.

One might wonder about the extent to which these ideas about family and gender corresponded to actual circumstances. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl had his doubts, noting that the ideal of separate spheres—men at work in public, women at home with the family—was seen primarily in the life of the upper classes, while among the common people men’s and women’s activities intersected to a far greater extent. Then, as today, big cities included groups of residents whose private lives differed strongly from the dominant ideals. In his 1846 book Berlin, Ernst Dronke described two examples of urban phenomena. One was the commercialization of marriage in the form of marriage brokers, who brought together individuals primarily on the basis of their property, thus making a mockery of the idea of marriage as a union of two people based on mutual love and affection. The other was the lives of Bohemian intellectuals, who supported the emancipation of women, lived together without being married, and generally rejected the assertion that marriage was the moral and religious basis of family life.

Early German feminists also criticized dominant ideals of marriage to some extent. In the Women’s Newspaper (of which she was editor), the author and political activist Louise Otto (1819–1895) denounced the way that marriage in rural areas was based entirely on property with no attention given to mutual love and affection (which the authors of the Staats-Lexikon, as one might remember, saw as necessary to marriage).

Women’s political activism in Central Europe was most visible during the Revolution of 1848–49. As the examples here show, their activism was typically more in conformity with the gender ideals expressed in the Staats-Lexikon than in opposition to them. Women could, in this way, take the acceptance of gender difference as a basis from which to argue for improvements in their rights status and for greater public or political roles. In the appeal of the married women and maidens of Württemberg to Germany’s soldiers, for instance, women used their place in the home and family and their status as primarily loving and emotional creatures to encourage men to take political action. Louise Otto’s statement of principles, published in the first issue of her Women’s Newspaper (April 21, 1849), similarly shows the careful distance she maintained between her own position and that of “emancipated” feminists who denied any differences between men and women. The documents of the Democratic Women’s Association in Vienna, where women were particularly active during the revolution, presented more of a challenge to liberal ideas about gender, and the organization itself was in fact founded after the violent police repression of a protest by women workers in Vienna’s Prater park. It should also be noted in this context that some women were among those who fought and died on the barricades in Berlin and Vienna in March 1848. Even the activities of the Democratic Women’s Association, though, generally followed the lines laid down as appropriate for women.

Women’s political activism in Germany was suppressed after the failure of the 1848 revolution and only revived in the 1860s. 1865 saw the founding of the first national women’s group, the General German Women’s Association. Its statutes and the 1869 report of its presiding officer, Louise Otto, show that the group’s efforts were primarily directed toward improving women’s education and their chances of employment. The idea of women in the workplace, particularly women from the educated middle class, still represented a challenge to the gender ideals expressed in the Staats-Lexikon, which placed women’s activities in the home and family. Similarly, the Association for the Promotion of Employment Qualifications among Members of the Female Sex, founded in Berlin in 1866 by a man, Professor Wilhelm Adolph Lette, aimed to provide education and job-training to young middle-class women and enable them to support themselves without having to be married.

All of these forms of women’s activity were far from finding universal support and endorsement. Political conservatives, in particular, were quite opposed to the idea of women having any role in public life. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, in another excerpt, takes up the dominant ideas of the differences between men and women and uses them to attack not just “emancipated” women, such as the author Louise Aston, but all forms of women’s activity outside the home.

The reach of the ideology of gender difference can also be seen in arts and design, as in the painting Before the Mirror (1827) by Georg Friedrich Kersting, or in the domestic image decorating the Biedermeier reading desk. A painting such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Caroline at the Window (1822) may, for its part, capture some of the tensions involved in women’s restriction to a private domestic realm and their exclusion from the wider public world visible outside.

9. Religion

The first two-thirds of the nineteenth century witnessed growing secularization in Germany, particularly among the educated Protestant middle class. In contrast to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, this secularization did not take the form of opposition to revealed Christian religion, rather it emerged from within Christianity itself. A prime document of this development is the 1835 book The Life of Jesus by the Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874). Applying the methods of the “higher criticism” devised by German Protestant theologians to develop a better understanding of the Bible, Strauss concluded that Gospel accounts of the miracles and of the death and resurrection of Jesus were later, mythical interpolations into the life-story of a mortal figure. Even more, he asserted that the ideals of Jesus’s teaching would be more appropriately expressed in a secular humanism than in Protestant doctrine. The book cost Strauss his position at the University of Tübingen, and his appointment as Professor of Protestant Theology at the University of Zurich in 1839 was thwarted by a mob of angry devout Protestants, but the ideas he expressed continued to exert an influence throughout the nineteenth century.

If the years 1815 to 1866 were a time of growing secularization, they were also, paradoxically, a period of religious revival. Among the Roman Catholics of Central Europe, there developed a growing belief in the validity of religious practices and beliefs that had been rejected by the Enlightened eighteenth century: veneration of the Virgin Mary, saying the rosary, pilgrimages and processions, and divine intervention in human affairs in the form of miracles. The great pilgrimage to the Holy Robe of Trier in 1844 was an early example of this form of piety. Perhaps a half million pilgrims went to Trier cathedral that year to see the tunic (the seamless garment worn by Christ before his crucifixion, in the Gospel according to St. John) publicly exhibited. Jacob Marx (1803–1876), Professor at the Trier Theological Seminary, described the pilgrimage in terms of a revival of Catholic piety.

Many of Germany’s Protestants were also experiencing a religious revival at this time, which contemporaries called the Awakening. The Awakened, who strongly rejected the rationalist ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as well as their nineteenth-century continuation in the doctrines of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and his followers (such as David Strauss), were born-again Christians who experienced a personal relationship with Jesus and placed Biblical revelation above human reason. As a group, they were very active in founding organizations and societies for charitable and pious purposes. Missionary societies to bring the Gospel to “heathens” and Jews were a favorite project of Awakened German Protestants. The account of the founding of missionary societies in Elberfeld and Barmen—two industrial cities in western Germany where the Awakening was very influential—shows both the theological and intellectual context of the Awakening. Its first adherents, often few in number and gathering in conventicles, saw themselves as part of an international Protestant movement of religious revival and rejected both eighteenth-century Protestant rationalism and the ideas of the French Revolution.

One of the leading Awakened theologians in Germany was Friedrich August Tholuck (1799–1877), Professor of Theology at the University of Halle from 1825 until his death. A prolific scholar and an active preacher, Tholuck fought for an Awakened Protestantism and battled religious rationalists from the pulpit, at faculty meetings, in the lecture hall, and in both scholarly studies and polemical essays. Excerpted here are two sermons he delivered at the university chapel in Halle to students of Protestant theology. The first, “What is Human Reason Worth?,” is from the early 1840s and opposes the efforts of rationalists like David Friedrich Strauss to criticize Biblical texts by asserting that human reason is only valuable if it is exercised under the guidance of divine inspiration as laid down in revelation. The second—“When is Greater Civic Freedom Fortunate for a People?”—given during the Revolution of 1848, is sharply critical of the revolution and of calls for freedom, democracy, and civic rights. It shows the strongly conservative political orientation of most devout German Protestants of the era.

Contestation between rationalist and more orthodox tendencies also took place within many of Germany’s Jewish communities, disagreements that were related to, and paralleled by, differing positions on the degree of emancipation and acculturation thought to be desirable. The decades between 1815 and 1870 saw the debates that led to the development of many of the different Jewish denominations that exist today, with Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox communities forming in Germany. One such influential moment in the emergence of disparate Jewish denominations was the battle over a new prayer book in the recently founded Hamburg Temple Association, itself a result of fragmentation within the Jewish community of Hamburg (at c. 10,000 members in 1815 the largest in northern Germany). The dispute had already been through a first stage in 1817–18 soon after the Association’s founding; renewed conflict broke out in the early 1840s, in which leading representatives of each of the main strands of Jewish theology and practice made their voices heard. The account of the ensuing pamphlet war given here is taken from the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums edited by Ludwig Philippson (1811–1889), which was one of the most influential organs of the Jewish press and generally adopted a middle position between the rationalist and Orthodox tendencies.

Between the growth of secular humanism, on the one hand, and religious revivalism on the other, it became more difficult in the years 1815 to 1866 to find a religious middle ground where thinkers could seek to reconcile revealed religion with developments in science and critical humanistic scholarship. Adherents of all religions in Germany tried to do so, although efforts in this direction were less common among Catholics than among Jews and Protestants. One prominent example of such an attempt was the founding of the Protestant Association [Protestantenverein] at a conference in the Thuringian city of Eisenach in 1865. Daniel Schenkel (1813–1885), Professor of Theology at the University of Heidelberg, a center of religious rationalism in Germany, was one of the co-founders of the group. Excerpts from a pamphlet he wrote to justify the organization’s existence outline some of the major arguments used to carve out a place between rationalist humanism and religious revivalism. Schenkel’s distinction between religion and church, and his definition of Protestantism in terms of freedom of conscience and individual spiritual inquiry, produced a very different picture of religion from Tholuck’s, which was based on Biblical revelation. Schenkel’s linking of Protestantism to the German nation and to demands for critical thinking on the part of the educated German middle class suggested a religion aligned with liberalism and nationalism, in contrast once again to Tholuck’s views on religion and politics. The slogan of the Protestant Association, its call for the renewal of the Protestant Church in “the spirit of Evangelical freedom” and “in harmony with the overall cultural development of our time,” would suggest efforts to reconcile Protestant religion with the new trends in science and scholarship, while retaining the ideals of the Reformation.

10. Culture, Literature, Art, and Music

During the first half of the nineteenth century, two cultural styles prevailed in Central Europe: Classicism and Romanticism. The former emphasized finished craftsmanship, elegance, and proportion in art; its adherents were cosmopolitan and looked to classical antiquity, particularly ancient Greece, for their cultural models. The latter emphasized passion, longing, the unfinished and incomplete, and Christian spirituality; its supporters tended to be nationalists (though also cosmopolitan in their own way), and they found their cultural models, above all, in the Gothic and Italian art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The leading advocate and representative of the classical style in early nineteenth-century Germany was the poet, playwright, and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). During the final years of his life, Goethe engaged in a series of thoughtful discussions with Johann Peter Eckermann, a young protégé. Eckermann recorded their conversations and published them after Goethe’s death. In the selection here, Goethe reasserts the validity of his own aesthetic ideas and denounces the competing ideas of the Romantics.

It was the author and literary critic Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) who most clearly articulated the ideals of Romanticism. Included here are excerpts from three of his works. First come passages from Athenaeum Fragments (1798) in which Schlegel introduced the term Romantic poetry and described it as being characterized by incompleteness and a longing for the infinite. Then come excerpts from Fundamentals of Gothic Architecture and Appeal to Painters of the Present Day (both from 1803–04). In these texts, Schlegel points to two key sources of the Romantic longing for the undefined and the infinite: Gothic art and wild, unspoiled nature.

The differences between classical and Romantic trends can also be seen in the period’s visual arts—for example, in Romantic paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) such as Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (c. 1818) or Chalk Cliffs of Rügen (1818–19), or in Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley (c. 1820) by Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869). Some figures, such as the architect and painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), could celebrate both classical and Romantic styles, as in his Old Museum in Berlin (1823–30) or his painting of an imagined Gothic cathedral (1811).

It is important to note that Romanticism and Classicism were broad cultural movements whose impact on people’s lives extended well beyond the narrowly artistic, as illustrated here in a two-part document: first comes a letter of condolence from Austrian chancellor Prince Clemens von Metternich to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia upon the death of the latter’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm III, followed by Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s reply. Whereas the older Metternich was more classical in style, Friedrich Wilhelm IV leaned heavily toward the Romantic in his language; the contrast between their prose styles—the one restrained, the other more effusive—is telling.

In the 1830s, a new group of Central European authors started to criticize the Romantic cultural style. They accused its adherents of using aesthetic theories to mask and apologize for political, social, and economic oppression, as seen here in the literary manifesto Aesthetic Campaigns (1834) by Ludolf Wienbarg. In 1835 authorities in the German Confederation formally banned the writings of these authors, known collectively as “Young Germany.” The group’s most famous representative, the poet and literary critic Heinrich Heine (1796–1856), was already living in exile in Paris at the time. In The Romantic School, which was published the following year, Heine told his French audience why “Young Germany” was critical of the Romantics, though he also praised Romantic aspirations.

Implicit in the writings of “Young Germany” was the call for a more realistic art—an art that strove to portray life as it actually was, not as it should be according to various ideals. Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882) and Gustav Freytag (1816–1895) were two of the leading realist novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Responding to an early review of Village Tales (1844), his now famous collection of short stories, the German-Jewish Auerbach wrote that his intention was to pen a realistic, not idealized, account of peasant life in southwest Germany. In 1853 Freytag published a review of various novels in his liberal literary journal Die Grenzboten, using the opportunity to present a program for a realist literature. In Civil Society (1851), on the other hand, the conservative Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl expressed his doubts as to whether educated, middle-class authors knew enough about peasant life and culture to write realistic fiction about it.

The liberal and Romantic brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) were linguists and folklorists who devoted their lives to the collection and preservation of popular culture. Among their works, written individually and jointly, were collections of proverbs, mythology, and an enormous multi-volume dictionary of the German language, which was started by them but completed decades later by other scholars. The brothers Grimm are, of course, best known for their collection of fairy tales. In the preface to the second edition of their collection in 1819, the Grimms describe the characteristics of popular culture, sharply distinguishing it from the elite, literary, and scholarly variety. Popular culture was traditional, largely unchanged across the ages, and was, indeed, a key to the original character of a nation. It was orally transmitted by the common people, especially peasants who were simple, almost childlike, by nature. With the progress of education, urban life, and high culture—written, complex, changing, and a product of the educated classes—popular culture was in danger of being forgotten. The job of scholarly critics such as the Grimm brothers themselves was not to criticize popular culture or even to investigate it more carefully—some of the stories they described as authentic German folk tales actually derived from seventeenth-century French writers—but to gather it, keep it from being forgotten, and celebrate it, in a spirit similar to the Romantics’ enthusiasm for nature and the Middle Ages. As the correspondence between Jacob Grimm and the Slovene cultural nationalist Jernej Kopitar illustrates, the desire to preserve and disseminate vernacular culture showed a cosmopolitan dimension that transcended national boundaries.

11. Science and Education

In the first half of the nineteenth century there were strong elements in German intellectual life, stemming from the traditions of Classicism in art and idealism in philosophy, arguing in favor of the unity of all systematic knowledge. Probably the most prominent proponent of such ideas was the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). His 1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, an excerpt from which is provided here, was a sort of brief account of the unity of such knowledge. Hegel’s convoluted prose is notoriously difficult to understand, but the main thing to note is Hegel’s argument that philosophy—because it addresses the creation and definition of concepts—is the master branch of knowledge. Hegel developed basic ideas of physics and biology from philosophical concepts and was not afraid to criticize Isaac Newton’s theories of physics on the basis of his philosophy.

Hegel included what we would now call the humanities and social sciences in his unity of all knowledge. In an excerpt from his lectures on the philosophy of world history, delivered during the 1820s when he was a professor at the University of Berlin, Hegel explains that the meaning of human history is the progress of the philosophical concept of freedom.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1858) was a naturalist and explorer, whose celebrated expedition to South America from 1799 to 1804 generated a lifetime of scholarly studies of botany and natural history. Toward the end of his life, between 1845 and 1858, Humboldt wrote the multi-volume work Cosmos, in which he attempted to articulate the unity of all scientific and scholarly knowledge, demonstrating its links to human passions and desires, and to practical engineering and economics as well.

Humboldt’s attempt to articulate the unity of knowledge was one of the last examples of such a classical and idealist effort. As early as the 1820s a quite different attitude was appearing—one that would become dominant among German scholars and scientists after the middle of the nineteenth century. In an 1862 speech given upon his appointment as pro-rector at the University of Heidelberg, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), formulator of the law of the conservation of energy, explicitly rejected Hegel’s ideal of a philosophical unity of knowledge. Rather, he drew clear conceptual and epistemological distinctions between the natural and physical sciences on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other.

It was not just German scientists who criticized the idealist conception of the unity of knowledge, scholars in the humanities did so as well. The historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) emphatically rejected Hegel’s approach to human history as demonstrating the progress of philosophical concepts. Rather, as can be seen from the excerpts reproduced here—the introduction to his 1825 book The History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, his notes from the 1830s on history and philosophy, and his 1854 lectures on world history,—Ranke stressed the importance of precisely understanding historical events on the basis of an intensive and critical study of published and unpublished primary sources. Ranke did not deny that there were general themes that could become apparent from the study of history, but he believed that such themes emerged from the historian’s empirical analysis rather than from philosophical presuppositions. Ranke was also skeptical of notions that history was the story of any form of continual progress, conceptual or otherwise.

While scholars argued about the meaning of advanced forms of knowledge, a quite different controversy was in progress concerning elementary education. One tendency in this controversy was represented by Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz (1777–1837), an aristocratic landowner in the province of Brandenburg in the Kingdom of Prussia, who was the model of a nineteenth-century reactionary. When, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Prussian government set about freeing the serfs, Marwitz opposed this so vigorously that the frustrated Prussian Chancellor von Hardenberg had him imprisoned. Marwitz also opposed the concurrent educational reforms that were beginning to spread elementary education and basic literacy to all social strata. In his 1836 memorandum on crime and moral decay, Marwitz set out, in a slightly exaggerated form, the belief held by many nineteenth-century conservatives that elementary public education for the lower classes should consist primarily of teaching their children the basics of religion and morality. Further instruction, either in the three R’s or more advanced subjects, would just ruin the common people morally and economically.

Friedrich Adolph Diesterweg (1790–1866) was a secondary school teacher and prominent proponent of a progressive pedagogy in which pupils would learn a wide variety of topics by independent investigation. A prolific author, the hero of many German schoolteachers (and still widely esteemed today), Diesterweg served as director of the teachers’ college in Berlin from 1832 until 1847, at which point he was dismissed as a result of conservative political pressure. His 1856 essay “An Educator’s Little Book of Crabs,” gets its comic-sounding title from his use of crabs, which scuttle backwards, as symbols of reactionaries, that is, people who want to move society and politics back into the past. In this essay, Diesterweg denounces the enemies of progressive pedagogy: supporters of rote learning and memorization, proponents of religion as the primary subject of instruction in the public schools, adherents of the subordination of schoolteachers to the clergy and, more generally, those who wish to restrict schoolteachers to a low social status.

12. Germans Beyond Borders

The nineteenth-century “transformation of the world” (Jürgen Osterhammel) involved, among other things, another step in the process of globalization and one or more revolutions in transport and communication. In this transformation, the residents of the German lands were as likely as those of other European countries (and perhaps even more likely) to be found traveling and living in other parts of Europe or the world. The German Confederation and its constituent members did not, as is well known, have colonies or overseas empires as did the British, the French, and even the Danes and the Dutch. Germans, however, still found many ways to establish connections around Europe and the world in the first seven decades of the nineteenth century. As merchants and missionaries, as emigrants and exiles, and as travel writers and scientific explorers, German speakers from Central Europe made their careers and new lives for themselves around the globe, often in the service of other nations’ empires. The previously noted case of the forestry official Dietrich Brandis who labored in British South Asia to bring the benefits of German forest science to the British colonial empire was not at all exceptional. Eighteenth-century figures such as the traveler Carsten Niebuhr in the Middle East, Georg and Johann Reinhold Forster in the Pacific with Captain Cook, and the thousands of religious migrants and Hessian soldiers in North America attest to the fact that these trends and career paths were not new, but the nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion in the numbers of Germans who made their way abroad. German speakers in their millions sought opportunities elsewhere in Europe and above all overseas.

Scientific travelers, merchants, and missionaries typically had to work through other nations’ empires in order to pursue their activities abroad. Someone like Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to finance his own travels through Spanish America, was unusual, and even he was reliant on connections with officials and influential subjects in Spain and the Spanish Empire to provide the permits and support he required to enable him to travel through so many provinces, visit so many places, and receive information and assistance from so many individuals there. Later in life the by-then world famous Humboldt was granted permission to investigate the Eurasian borderlands of the Russian Empire at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas I and thanks to the mediation of the German-born Russian Finance Minister Count Georg von Cancrin. Even his fame, however, as the document shows, did not prevent him from encountering restrictions on what he was able to see or write about, and the knowledge gained was intended as much for the benefit of the Russian Empire as for that of the scientific community or the careers of Humboldt and his fellow travelers.

The Russian Empire also became the vehicle for the scientific journey undertaken by the French émigré, Prussian botanist, and Romantic author Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), who joined the Russian naval captain Otto von Kotzebue on an expedition to circumnavigate the globe focusing particularly on imperial exploration of the South and North Pacific. Chamisso served as naturalist on the voyage and was able to amass a vast collection of plants and other objects of natural historical interest that could further his career back in Europe. He thereby also participated in cataloguing the resources of newly accessed lands and in first encounters with the inhabitants of several Pacific islands. In the subsequent account of the voyage excerpted here, Chamisso acknowledges the importance of indigenous informants and mediators for his travels and research, as exemplified by Kadu from the Radak Islands, who joined the expedition for several months and also became a friend. The tensions between imperialist exploitation of other lands and cosmopolitan openness to new peoples and lifeways emerge clearly in Chamisso’s account, tensions that form a thread through many of the writings of Germans active around the world in this period.

Wealth, class, and even gender did not necessarily prevent someone from pursuing scientific and career opportunities abroad. The middle-class Viennese Ida Pfeiffer (1797–1858) was certainly untypical in being a woman travel writer and naturalist in this period, but she was not unique. Whereas her earlier travels primarily aimed to glean material for travel writing and to satisfy her desire to see new places, including Brazil, as in the excerpt presented here from her account of her first trip around the world, by the time of her second circumnavigation Pfeiffer was carrying out the role of a scientific naturalist and explorer, particularly when penetrating the jungles of Borneo. The Austrian painter Thomas Ender (1793–1875), though of humbler origins, was also able to promote his career by depicting the exotic people and landscapes of Brazil. He had an easier time getting there, however, as he traveled as the protégé of Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich in the entourage of the Archduchess Leopoldine at the time of her marriage to the Crown Prince of Portugal and Brazil in Rio de Janeiro in 1817. The Austrians seized the opportunity to include a team of explorers, naturalists, and artists in the wedding party bound for Brazil.

A larger and even more influential category of Germans seeking foreign shores during the Vormärz were the missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant. They too had to undertake their work in the territories of other powers, and to make the connections necessary to permit and support their activities. Several new German missionary societies competed for influence in the early decades of the nineteenth century: for example, the Rhenish Missionary Society, the North German Missionary Society, and what came to be known as the Berlin Missionary Society. The Basel Mission Society in Switzerland and the British missionary societies associated with the Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, and other denominations also worked in the same areas. The German groups sometimes competed and sometimes cooperated with these other organizations, and at times German missionaries even worked directly for foreign societies, as in the case of Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann in East Africa. Both born in Württemberg, they began their education in Basel and then went to work for the Anglican Church Missionary Society. Krapf and Rebmann also show the extent to which missionary activity could overlap with geographic, ethnographic, and linguistic exploration: they gained fame as the first Europeans to penetrate the interior of East Africa and see the snow-capped equatorial peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya in 1848–49 and published studies of African languages as well.

As the documents here show, many of the broader historical debates about missionary influence in the world also apply to the German case, even before the acquisition of colonies by the unified German Empire in the 1880s and after. How far, for example, did the efforts of the missionaries to spread Christianity and “civilization” to non-Europeans contribute to European imperialism and colonialism overseas? The account here of the activities of the Rhenish Missionary Society in the lands of the Herero and Nama, for instance, first of all illustrates the ways in which the German missionaries had to work through British officials and Dutch and British settlers in southwestern Africa, as well as through local Herero and Nama leaders. It is, however, no coincidence that it would be in this same region that German traders began the process of informal and then formal colonization after unification. The efforts of the Rhenish Missionary Society and the North German Missionary Society to find niches for missions in, respectively, the Dutch East Indies possession of Borneo and in South Asia and New Zealand within the British Empire, did not lead to later colonization but similarly illuminate the importance of working with local leaders as well as with officials of foreign empires. All these cases also shine a spotlight on a basic tension between the claims of Christian and Western universalism and the desire to recognize the value of pluralism and indigenous sovereignty in today’s multicultural society. Missionaries’ recognition of a common humanity with foreign peoples and their desire at times to extend education and humanitarian aid can make them seem quite progressive in comparison with defenders of the slave trade or those only out to conquer and exploit new possessions in other parts of the world. At the same time, however, in their efforts to spread Christianity, missionaries could attempt to eradicate rather than respect or preserve indigenous cultures and could express racist views and stereotypes. Missionaries, as noted above, sometimes aimed to discover and preserve ethnographic knowledge of other peoples, but often only to save that knowledge for Western posterity once Christian and Western culture had taken over and the indigenous culture had been suppressed. Missionary use of early photography to preserve knowledge of folkways and to establish affective ties and a sense of humanitarian hierarchy between the Africans they worked with and supporters back in Europe points to similar questions and contradictions.

Although they did not enjoy the advantages of overseas territories or sizeable fleets to support their commerce, merchants and traders from the German lands also sought opportunities for profit around Europe and the globe. Even for the missionaries, one of the attractions of New Zealand as a location for a mission station was the preexisting connections with the area formed through whaling vessels from Bremen that hunted in the South Pacific waters around New Zealand. German and other merchants also gave support to naturalists and travelers who set out to traverse distant lands. Economic ties thus formed part of the framework for Germans’ presence abroad more generally.

The lack of a fleet could be a significant problem at times, as in the years after 1815 when relations with the North African Regencies or so-called Barbary corsairs from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli once again became difficult. The number of European ships captured and persons held in captivity for ransom and/or forced labor was not nearly as large as in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but the problem worsened rather than improved with the return of peace in 1814. Most of the attacks on Italian and German ships and subjects occurred in the Mediterranean, but in 1817 corsair raids into the North Sea spread fear throughout the German Confederation. The delegates of the North German commercial city-states of Lübeck and Bremen lobbied the maritime and other powers for action against the corsairs at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, directly and through the press, as in the book written by the Lübeck Gymnasium teacher and publicist Friedrich Herrmann (1775–1819). Calls for attacks on the Regencies mingle with anti-Islamic stereotypes of Oriental despotism and barbarism, though without completely effacing the openness to foreign lands and peoples that still characterized Germans at that time. While the lobbying in Vienna remained unsuccessful, continued pressure —and continued raids—eventually helped spur Britain and other powers to respond with diplomatic pressure and ultimately with violence, as with the Anglo-Dutch bombardment of Algiers in August 1816. Even that, however, did not end the problem, as the renewed raids—and renewed anti-corsair lobbying—in 1817 attest.

Merchants and political figures from Bremen were also involved in the 1840s in attempting to secure the European end of a new postal steamship route from the United States of America to be subsidized by the United States government, as both sides were eager to compete with the British companies who until then had controlled the trade. The political economist in New York and Breslau/Wrocław Johann Ludwig Tellkampf (1808–1876) recounts how he and figures from Bremen and among the German-American merchant community lobbied United States officials to award the contract to the newly built port of Bremerhaven, in the end successfully. Tellkampf’s account also makes clear how deeply contemporary ideas of progress were linked with the globalization of communication and trade.

Helping to swell the cargoes of letters and goods in a globalizing world were the increasing numbers of German emigrants packed into the steamers and sailing ships crossing the Atlantic in the decades after 1815. Above all they went to the United States of America, but others sought opportunities in South America and the Caribbean, or in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Emigration began to expand from 1830, but it was above all from the mid-1840s that numbers really started to climb, with a massive spike following the Revolution of 1848–49. In those years more than sixty thousand and up to over two hundred thousand emigrants left Germany every year, reaching a total of 1.3 million between 1845 and 1858—again most of them heading for the United States. Another enormous wave of emigrants left Germany during the decade beginning in 1864, at the end of our period, to be followed by yet another in the 1880s. By 1914 more than four million Germans had made the decision to leave their homeland and seek a new life elsewhere.

The selection of letters here from emigrants to their families back home is designed to give a sense of the experiences of German immigrants in urban areas such as New York City and in rural areas in the midwestern United States. The letters also reveal the different challenges and experiences faced by male and female migrants during the disruptive transition. Unlike some migrants, such as those from Italy in the later nineteenth century, who left with the intention of staying abroad for some years to accumulate savings and then returning to the mother country, most of the Germans who left expected to resettle overseas permanently. The letters also highlight the phenomenon of chain migration, as individuals who first made the transition then passed on information or even funds to enable family members or neighbors to make the leap afterwards with somewhat greater security and often to settle in the same areas.

The scale and experience of German emigration made as strong an impression on the minds of contemporaries who remained in Germany as it did of those who departed. The emotions of those who made the decision to begin a new life overseas were poignantly captured by the Prussian painter Antonie Volkmar (1827–1903) in her depiction of a multigenerational family being rowed out to the ship that is to take them to the New World. Debates about the conditions of the emigrants and about whether emigration was a net gain or loss for the German nation featured, for example, at the Frankfurt Parliament during the Revolution of 1848–49. Some thought that an increased German presence overseas could redound to Germany’s benefit; others argued that it would be better to encourage emigration to Eastern Europe, to the Habsburg lands or other regions—that is, if emigration had to take place at all—as this would strengthen the position of the German-speaking peoples in Europe.

Accounts of the experience of German exiles during the period from 1815 to 1866 bring the discussion of politics and of Germans beyond the borders full circle. Then as now, the categories of economic migrant and political exile or refugee overlapped at times, but many inhabitants of German states were either forced or elected to leave their home states simply on grounds of their radical or opposition politics. Sometimes moving to another German state could be enough to avoid punishment and start over (as with some of the seven professors from the University of Göttingen, including the brothers Grimm and Friedrich Dahlmann, who lost their positions after they protested the nullification of Hanover’s constitution in 1837 and ultimately received posts in Prussia), but for many it meant seeking asylum in foreign countries such as France and Britain or even beyond Europe in countries such as the United States. Paris and London, for instance, would host the communist Karl Marx at various stages of his life. The radical journalist Ludwig Börne (1786–1837) chose Paris after the revolutions of 1830 as a base from which to observe revolutionary politics as well as to launch savage satires and critique of political and social conditions in the German states. Similarly, following the failure of the revolutions of 1848–49, the writer and former Frankfurt parliamentarian and barricade fighter Julius Fröbel (1805–1893) was forced to flee to the United States. As Fröbel’s letters show, while there he circulated among the German-American community, attempted to start businesses, with mixed success, and speculated about the possibilities of returning to Central Europe. Many others among the so-called German Forty-Eighters would remain permanently in the United States, like the future politician Carl Schurz. The lives of political exiles, like those of immigrants, could be very hard, but they were also often able to exploit opportunities within a globalizing world to develop their careers, in their new countries or back in Germany, or at least to escape retribution.

Jonathan Sperber and Brian Vick