‘Something Magical in the Name of Prussia…’ British Perceptions of German Nation Building in the 1860s

Abstract

In 1816, the Göttingen historian Arnold Heeren described the new German Confederation as the most peaceable territorial unit in Europe. He wrote: ‘He who knows history cannot doubt that the rise of a single, unconstrained monarchy in Germany would soon prove to be the grave of liberty in Europe. ‘1 In 1859, at the dawn of Germany’s unification era, a newspaper published not far from Gottingen gave voice to much the same particularist sentiment. It declared that the typical German

wants his own customs at home, his own traditions in his towns, and his own law in his own country. These customs, these traditions, and this law have become deeply rooted over many centuries in the soil of the individual tribes [Stämme]; they have reached their zenith in the dynasties and constitutions [that exist today]. History, in its bloody course, has erected boundary walls whose levelling could be accomplished only through a kind of biblical flood, a destruction of everything that exists, in which the rights of the German tribes would be trampled as quickly as would the rights of the princes.²

As Abigail Green has recently argued in her important book, Fatherlands,3 an awareness of cultural difference and respect for local distinctiveness within Germany were important and hitherto neglected aspects of small-state patriotism in the mid-19th century.