Germany’s Identity Problems as Reflected in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Hans-Joachim Hahn

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (2007), pp. 30-48, doi:10.59860/wph.a69a5a1

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A contribution to: Working Papers in the Humanities 2

Edited by Louise Crowther, Astrid Ensslin and Jennifer Shepherd

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 2

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  This article asseses the reception of western concepts of nation as portrayed during the French Revolution of 1789, both in the literature of Schubart, Bürger, Klopstock and Wieland and in the philosophy of Herder and Fichte. The development of this concept of nationality during the wars against Napoleon and the policies of the Vormärz, up to the 1848 Revolutions is examined with special reference to the more collective, exclusive and authoritarian tendencies after 1848 and during a period of Realpolitik. Part two of the paper examines how literature and in particular popular histories of literature have reflected on these developments. The paper concludes that major elements of existing western concepts of national identity were not met by the establishment of the German nation state in 1871 and that these concepts were fulfilled only after Germany’ s ‘second unification’ in 1990.

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