Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (118 page)

In these circumstances, the Empire appeared either irrelevant to ‘true’ Italian history or as a symbol of ‘German oppression’. Giuseppe Verdi’s opera
La battaglia di Legnano
premiered in Rome on 27 January
1849, two months after Pope Pius IX had fled a liberal-nationalist revolution. Its theme of the victory of the Lombard League over Emperor Barbarossa and his ‘German’ knights in 1176 was a clear inspiration to the revolutionaries battling to eject the Austrians from Italy. Although the opera was suppressed by Austrian censors following the defeat of Piedmont and the Roman Republic that summer, a reference to Legnano was inserted into the Italian national anthem after unification and independence had been achieved in the 1860s. The Empire has remained associated with hegemony, with, for example, Umberto Bossi’s
Lega Nord
also claiming the Lombard League’s legacy in its campaign against the national government in Rome during the 1990s.
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Other than claiming Charlemagne exclusively for themselves, French observers broadly agreed with the generally negative view of the Empire propagated by Leopold von Ranke and his fellow German historians. The Empire, it was believed, belonged only to the medieval past, when ‘the weight of Christian universalism’ crushed any potential for a viable nation state. Having apparently disappeared completely in the 840s, its revival under Otto I merely created a ‘true colossus with feet of clay’.
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This weakness was a constant source of anxiety, since French statesmen and historians believed that any attempt to forge a truly national German state would involve aggressive expansion at the expense of Germany’s current neighbours – a view amply reinforced by the experience of 1870–71, 1914–18 and 1938–45.
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Non-Germans still within the Confederation’s frontiers were less hostile, because the post-1815 political and legal arrangements preserved something of their old autonomy. This acquired political significance during the 1848–9 revolutions, which forced the Confederation to confront the discrepancy between its political framework and the new, more militant and essentialist nationalist ideas. By 1851, the option of incorporating all Habsburg and Hohenzollern land within the Confederation was off the table due to opposition from other powers, who feared it would create a central European superstate. Discussions, therefore, increasingly narrowed to a Greater German solution incorporating German-speakers beyond existing frontiers, or a Lesser German variant excluding Austria if it did not want to detach itself from the other Habsburg lands.

The controversy greatly accelerated ethnic nationalism within non-German parts of the Habsburg monarchy. The Czechs were
particularly anxious to avoid marginalization if incorporated within a unified Germany. Czech liberals rejected an offer to participate in the Frankfurt Parliament during 1848–9, preferring to remain within the multilingual Habsburg monarchy. Czech historians grew more interested in the Empire, which they presented positively, as it had not threatened Bohemian autonomy. Views only became more hostile in the later nineteenth century when nationalists struggled to assert a more distinct identity, sucking historical interpretations of the Empire into general anti-German sentiment. German historians conveniently supplied ammunition with their studies detailing the Empire’s numerous failings.
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German Perspectives

Many Germans were initially more sympathetic to the Empire. The new liberal-nationalist ideals attracted limited popular support. Only 468 students participated in the famous Wartburg Festival on 18 October 1817, held on the fourth anniversary of the allied victory over Napoleon at Leipzig in a location also befitting the tercentenary just two weeks later of Luther’s
Ninety-Five Theses
that sparked the Reformation. Even the Hambach Festival in 1832 drew fewer than 30,000 liberals, compared to the 1.1 million pilgrims visiting Trier in 1844 to see what was believed to be Christ’s Holy Robe.
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For most, identity remained multilayered. Wilhelm von Humboldt, writing in 1813, argued that living in a particular land within a wider community was what defined the German character.
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Incremental identification from community through state to nation was in tune with the Confederation’s political structure and has been labelled ‘federal nationalism’.
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It contrasted with the situation in Italy after 1815 where there was no federal political structure and where fragmentation was associated with foreign (Habsburg) oppression.

However, it still left many dissatisfied. Only Austria and Prussia were still decentralized, with strong provincial as well as communal and state identities. Military necessity had produced more strongly centralized political systems in the other German states, whose rulers had no desire to foster separate identities for the areas they had mediatized between 1803 and 1815.
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Meanwhile, the process of mediatization raised false hopes amongst intellectuals for more progressive socio-economic
and political change, whereas actual reforms were primarily limited to improving fiscal-military efficiency. Many of the post-1815 states failed to introduce more democratic representation. Increasingly, progressive intellectuals saw the Third Germany of smaller principalities as a reactionary holdover from what was now understood as the pre-revolutionary ‘old regime’.
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The experience of 1792–1815 transformed the understanding of ‘the people’, with many calling for the segregated society of Estates to be replaced by a more equal relationship amongst inhabitants, and between them and the state. The ‘nation’ was increasingly viewed as composed of ‘the people’, rather than defined by legal and constitutional arrangements. Nationalism became an oppositional strategy for those critical of the established order, rather than an endorsement of existing structures.
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Encouraged by the spread of Romanticism, nationalists looked to the past for inspiration to shape Germany’s future. The Empire’s more recent history appeared only a tale of decline towards inglorious demise. While many liberals remained uncomfortable with earlier emperors’ close associations with the papacy, the medieval Empire appeared more promising. The Middle Ages were sufficiently distant to be romanticized as a lost harmonious society. Conveniently, liberal and conservative agendas chimed with the prevailing historical scholarship, which distinguished a powerful German national monarchy until 1250 from a supposedly long period of terminal decline. This interpretation was popularized by the spread of local-history societies after 1819. Some served the agendas of small-state patriotism by focusing on the local dynasty, perhaps most successfully in Bavaria, where the reign of Louis IV ‘the Bavarian’ was used to underpin the new Wittelsbach kingdom.
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However, others took a broader view, notably the
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
, dedicated to publishing documents on the medieval German church.

Artists and writers attractively packaged the Middle Ages for a wider audience. Johann Jakob Bodmer’s rediscovery of the
Nibelungenlied
in 1757 was popularized from the early nineteenth century through new collections of German literature and folk tales. Another influential example was Goethe’s play about Götz von Berlichingen, the sixteenth-century ‘robber baron’, which he published in 1773. Casting 62 characters in addition to supporting masses, it is almost impossible to perform, and often departs from history: Götz dies at the end of the
Peasants War in 1525, rather than in reality from old age in 1562. However, Goethe’s Götz is a powerful symbol of martial ‘German freedom’ who deals directly with the emperor, rather than through a lordly hierarchy.
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The idea was taken up by many others in an attempt to reconnect with a supposedly more authentic and less corrupt age. For instance, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s story
Die Zauberring
(1812) is a courtly romance of knights, damsels and swordplay set in a landscape of dark forests and castles on rocky crags.

The past was also physically invoked. Cologne Cathedral had been begun in 1248 but was still unfinished when work was abandoned in 1560. A local initiative in 1808 to restart it won the support of Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William, who laid the foundation stone for the new work in 1842, explicitly linking construction to the task of building national unity.
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Max von Schenkendorf’s poem
The German Cities
stimulated interest in Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs, and offered a way to reclaim some of the early modern past without engaging with Reformation history and its still-difficult legacy for nineteenth-century Germany, where religious divisions assumed new political significance.
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The first monuments to Dürer and Sachs were unveiled in the early 1840s, while Sachs was celebrated at the Pan-German Song Festival in 1861, in turn inspiring Richard Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
. Hans von Aufseß’s collection of medieval German art became the basis of the German National Museum, which opened in Nuremberg in 1852 and was adopted the following year as a ‘national undertaking’ by the German Confederation.

Romanticism’s ‘back to the future’ vision was open to both conservative and liberal interpretations. Many celebrated medieval society as an organic, harmonious social order, and claimed that corporatism would render formal constitutions unnecessary. This was a politicized version of Richard Wagner’s ideal of a complete synthesis of the arts (
Gesamtkunstwerk
), fusing all elements into a common whole. The appeal through metaphors, stories and images often found greater popular resonance than abstract arguments and political programmes. Above all, it suggested a distinctly Germanic solution to the problems of modernity superior to what many perceived as the excesses of British liberalism or mechanistic French Revolutionary ideology. Francophobia was a convenient way to gloss over current tensions within Germany, and the official commemoration of the ‘Wars of Liberation’ (1813–15)
ignored the fact that German troops had fought on both sides in 1806, 1809 and 1813.
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The search for a more authentically ‘German’ past involved a rejection of ancient Rome, not least because liberal nationalists increasingly pinned their hopes on Protestant Prussia in opposition to Catholic Austria. The earlier celebration of imperial translation was reversed in favour of interpreting Roman culture as passing through Charlemagne to France, bypassing Germany almost entirely. Ancient Greece supplanted Rome as the classical model, boosted by German involvement in Greek independence in 1829. Ludwig I of Bavaria, father of modern Greece’s first king, built Valhalla (1830–42) overlooking the Danube near Regensburg as a pantheon fusing Greek and Germanic influences.
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The eaves of one side were decorated with personifications of the German states and Germania, while Arminius – now Germanified as ‘Hermann’ – looked out from the other, typifying the broader trend to celebrate the ancient Germans’ resistance to the Romans. The emergence of archaeology as a specialist discipline in Germany from the 1780s saw virtually any non-Roman object labelled as ‘Germanic’ in a bid to demonstrate the superiority of
Kultur
over Western, Frenchified ‘civilization’. Fund-raising for the Hermann Memorial in the Teutoüberg forest began in 1841, attracting sponsorship from the British, Austrian and Dutch royal families – demonstrating the portability of the story, which was also construed as a victory for freedom over (Napoleonic-French) oppression. Things had changed somewhat by the time the monument was actually built in 1871–5, with Hermann now overtly linked to Kaiser Wilhelm I in an attempt to root the new Second Empire in the ancient past.
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The 1848 Revolution exposed the difficulties of combining these disparate elements within the desired harmony. The revolutionary parliament convened in Frankfurt, partly as the location of the Federal Diet, but also thanks to its earlier imperial associations. Unable to meet in the unfinished
Kaisersaal
in the town hall, the envoys convened in the nearby Paulskirche. The parliament adopted black, red and gold as the new national colours in an attempt to forge a further connection with the Middle Ages. Although all three colours were associated with the medieval Empire, they were only combined as a tricolour by the Lützow rifle corps during the Napoleonic Wars and were used subsequently by liberals from 1817. The parliament added a black double
eagle on a gold shield, though without the halos, and this remained the Confederation’s symbol until 1866.
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Prussia was obliged to find a different set of colours once it defeated Austria and formed its own North German Confederation in 1867. Hanseatic red and white were combined with the black of Prussia’s royal eagle and became the official colours from 1871, appearing as a new tricolour belatedly adopted as a national flag in 1892. Although both were intended to root new states in the past, the two sets of colours had acquired distinct ideological associations by 1919 that had nothing to do with the pre-1806 Empire. The Weimar Republic compromised by using democratic black, red and gold as the national flag, and conservative black, white and red for the mercantile marine.

The Second Empire

Italian and German unification between 1859 and 1871 was a disaster for Europe’s small states, 12 of which lost their independence.
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The Habsburgs were compelled to grant Hungary equal political status, creating the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. This failed to resolve whether this was still an empire or a personal union, with the Habsburgs continuing the early modern fudge already characteristic in their adoption of a hereditary imperial title in 1804.
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It proved difficult to decide when Austrian history began. Actual separation from Germany sprang from the defeat of 1866, which hardly offered a suitably patriotic starting point. Consequently, Austrian history only became a compulsory subject at the country’s universities in 1893 when it adopted the wider scholarly convention of tracing the country’s development as part of wider ‘imperial history’ (
Reichsgeschichte
), until the reign of Charles V, when Habsburg emperors subtly morphed into good Austrians who dealt with the Empire almost as if it was a separate, fairly minor country.