Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (119 page)

Prussia’s victory over France in 1870–71 allowed it to convert the expedient of the North German Confederation into the Second Empire by absorbing the south German states of Baden, Bavaria, Hessen-Darmstadt and Württemberg. The new empire was proclaimed on 18 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in a ceremony staged deliberately not only to demonstrate victory over France, but to echo selected elements of the Holy Roman past in an effort to base the
new state on something broader than military triumph. Otto von Bismarck persuaded Ludwig II of Bavaria to lead the surviving German princes to acclaim Wilhelm I as emperor in an act drawing directly on what was believed to be early medieval practice. The proclamation explicitly referred to the ‘German imperial title dormant for over 60 years’.
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Holy Roman connections continued as Wilhelm sat on the Ottonian Goslar throne rather than his royal Prussian one when he opened the new Reichstag on 21 March. The early modern formulation ‘emperor and empire’ (
Kaiser und Reich  
) was also used to accommodate the fact that the Second Empire consisted of a much-enlarged Prussia (itself still a kingdom), 21 kingdoms and principalities and three free cities.

These actions derived from expediency rather than genuine commitment to the Holy Roman past. The Goslar throne was used because the Habsburgs still held the Aachen treasures and imperial insignia. Bismarck needed to mask the fact that creating the Second Empire had involved severing historic ties to Austria, suppressing six sovereign German states and asserting Prussian dominance over the remainder. A vague association with the earlier imperial title avoided calling Wilhelm I ‘federal president’, which sounded dangerously republican after the experiences of 1848. The interim imperial coat of arms devised for January 1871 used the Prussian eagle with a shield emblazoned with Hohenzollern devices underneath Charlemagne’s crown. The latter appeared on the 1871 commemorative medal and on major historical monuments built between the 1870s and 1890s to evoke a common German past, but it was embarrassing that the real crown was still in the Habsburg treasury.
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New official arms were soon devised combining a fantasy crown with the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. Prussian traditions became clearer when Wilhelm I’s son Frederick numbered himself third at his succession in 1888 following the sequence from Frederick II ‘the Great’ rather than the fifteenth-century Emperor Frederick III. The popular historian Gustav Freytag had already written in 1870 that a new emperor should wear an army officer’s helmet and coat, not an imperial crown and robes, and indeed Anton von Werner’s famous 1885 painting of the January 1871 ceremony shows the assembled German royalty dressed in military uniforms.

After 1871, Holy Roman traditions were discarded in favour of a
romanticized medieval German past that existed in artificial detachment from its actual historical context. The Thuringian poet Friedrich Rückert had popularized the local Kyffhäuser legend that Emperor Barbarossa had been sleeping under a mountain until Germany was reborn. The story attracted growing attention after it appeared in the second part of the Grimm brothers’ folk-tale collection in 1817. This chimed with Romantic ideas of rebirth that were popular in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Meanwhile, Friedrich Raumer began what became a six-volume history of the Staufers under the immediate influence of Francis’s abdication in 1806. Raumer presented the Staufers as a dramatic story of rise and fall, cementing the popular view of them as representing the last age of German greatness. Subsequent governments invoked the Staufers to suggest the birth of a new Germany.
Barbarossa
was the name chosen for the first flagship of the new Federal Navy established by the Frankfurt parliament in 1848.
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The elderly Wilhelm I was already dubbed
Barbablanca
(‘White Beard’) at his acclamation in 1871. Veterans from the wars of 1866 and 1871 petitioned to erect a national monument at Kyffhäuser. As soon as scholars pronounced that the mountain had once been sacred to Wotan, the idea seemed doubly appropriate and the new emperor, Wilhelm II, laid the foundation stone in 1892. The grandiose structure was formally inaugurated on 18 June 1896 with a march-past of 30,000 veterans. It combines an equestrian statue of Wilhelm I with a second showing Barbarossa waking at the foot of the plinth.
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Rückert’s poem remained on the school curriculum into the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, the decaying Goslar imperial palace was restored as a national monument between 1868 and 1897 and decorated with paintings depicting selected aspects of imperial history, including the waking Barbarossa (see
Plate 32
). Otherwise, national monuments were not built at sites associated with the Holy Roman Empire but at ahistorical locations like the junction of the Mosel and Rhine, which was dubbed the ‘German Corner’ (
Deutsches Eck
) and adorned in 1897 with another grandiose monument to Wilhelm I.
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A huge statue of Germania was constructed between 1871 and 1883 outside Rüdesheim on the Rhine to present the Second Empire as cementing German unity. The 500 ‘Bismarck Towers’ built across Germany from 1900 to 1910 celebrating that statesman were modelled on Theodoric’s tomb at Ravenna to claim a common Gothic past. Meanwhile, the Hanseatic League was
reinvented as a purely German enterprise to lend legitimacy to Wilhelmine naval and colonial policy.
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The Empire and the ‘German Problem’

Both Austria-Hungary and the Second Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War as revolutions forced all German monarchs to abdicate. Both empires had been successful in many respects, especially Germany, which had become the world’s fourth largest economy by 1914. Their imperialism was contemporary, a product of the highly competitive environment of the late nineteenth-century world, rather than the pre-1806 imperial past. Neither empire solved the question of belonging. Official policy in Austria-Hungary had continued to place dynastic loyalty above local or national identity, inadvertently creating a situation similar to that in earlier nineteenth-century Germany as nationalism became an ideology of those opposed to the government. Austria-Hungary was broken up in the Versailles Settlement of 1919, which left Austria as a small republic shorn of empire. Even with the Habsburgs gone, it proved difficult to historicize the imperial past. Conservative writers tried to claim it as a civilizing mission, to allow Austria to escape its much-reduced frontiers by suggesting that the country might once again provide order for an otherwise fragmented and chaotic central Europe. Hugo Hantsch emphasized Catholicism as a unifying element, while Heinrich Ritter von Srbik stressed a common
Germantum
, though without racial overtones. Friedrich Heer did both in his romanticized presentation of the Empire as a benign force.
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Imperial Germany’s initial toleration of multilayered identities angered those who felt that the process of unification had not gone far enough in 1871. A variety of groups agitated for a more homogeneous cultural identity and for the incorporation German-speakers still outside the Empire.
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The declaration of German as the state language throughout Prussia proved counter-productive, stirring a Polish nationalist backlash. The targeting of Catholics, Jews and Socialists as unpatriotic was equally divisive. Disagreement over German nationality was one of many factors undermining the Weimar Republic established amidst revolution and civil war in 1919. Article 127 of the Weimar constitution provided communal autonomy and self-regulation within a wider legal framework, drawing directly on historical studies of communal
forms in the Holy Roman Empire and broader German past. However, many rejected republican government as ‘un-German’, regarding the Weimar regime as another ‘interregnum’ like 1250–73. Again, it seemed that a weakened and divided Germany was waiting for its Barbarossa to awake and provide leadership. A new generation of historians, including Ernst Kantorowicz, who – ironically – was Jewish, repeated Raumer’s earlier rehabilitation of the Staufers, who were celebrated as far-sighted empire-builders. Kantorowicz’s biography of Frederick II inspired Heinrich Himmler, while Hermann Goering sent Mussolini a copy. The Hitler Youth staged their flag-dedication ceremony amidst the ruins of Hohenstaufen castle in June 1933.
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Most professional historians were deeply conservative and their studies of the Empire’s elective monarchy lent weight to the popular critique of Weimar democracy as pointless and divisive. The anti-Roman interpretation of the German past was consolidated in the so-called New Constitutional History pursued between the 1930s and 1970s by Theodor Mayer, Otto Brunner, Walter Schlesinger and others, who tried to identify a specifically Germanic medieval socio-political organization, supposedly based on the personal elements of lordship, to define the pre-modern state as an aristocratic association of kings and nobles (
Herrschaftsverband
).
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Although adhering to the professional standards of German scholarship, their studies romanticized warrior nobles and provided ideal material for less scrupulous writers to extrapolate a theory of Germanic leader–follower society.

Having seized power, the Nazis abolished the separate identities of Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg and other regions, replacing these on 5 February 1934 with a unitary nationality derived from racist criteria. The old political units, which often still used boundaries deriving from imperial fiefs, were replaced by new subdivisions called
Gaue
, a name associated with Germanic tribal homelands. Many Nazis found the Holy Roman past unusable. Joseph Goebbels planned an exhibition in Münster to demonstrate how the Peace of Westphalia had supposedly divided Germany, but abandoned this after the fall of France in 1940 eradicated the Nazis’ sense of shame at their country’s ‘weak’ past. Hitler repeatedly used the Holy Roman Empire as a rhetorical counterpoint to his united Germany, parroting decades of conservative historical critique by, for instance, claiming that ‘if the German feudal princes had been loyal to the German emperors, the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation would have become a mega-empire’.
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The Second Empire was commended for having briefly achieved national unity, but was otherwise condemned as a missed opportunity. A circular was sent to all Nazi Party organizations on 13 June 1939 banning further use of the adjective ‘third’ in reference to the Reich, since Hitler wished to avoid any comparisons with the two previous empires.
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The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was outspokenly hostile, dismissing the Holy Roman Empire as a tool of the papacy and trying to claim that the 4,500 Saxons executed by Charlemagne for refusing to convert to Christianity were precursors to Nazi fighters; for this he was reprimanded by Hitler, who had a more heroic image of the Frankish king (who was, of course, a
German
).
⁶⁴

Hitler’s intervention indicated the difficulties of ignoring the Holy Roman Empire altogether, if for no other reason than it encompassed so much of Germany’s past. After the
Anschluss
with Austria in 1938, an SS honour guard was sent to fetch the imperial insignia from Vienna and escort them to Nuremberg, which had both been their location during early modernity and was now home to the Nazi Party headquarters. Although staged to symbolize the return of Austria (now dubbed the
Ostmark
) to Germany, the enterprise was problematic since Charlemagne’s crown was decorated with images of the Jewish kings David, Solomon and Hezekiah.
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Himmler was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the senior leadership in appropriating the medieval Empire to legitimate the ‘new order’. He chose July 1936, the thousandth anniversary of the death of his Ottonian namesake Henry I, to inaugurate an annual
Heinrichsfeier
at Quedlinburg castle for the SS (see
Plate 33
). Like many of his contemporaries, Himmler was influenced by the nineteenth-century misinterpretation of Henry as ‘founder’ of a ‘German empire’. An SS division was named ‘Hohenstaufen’, while French SS volunteers formed another called ‘Charlemagne’ in 1944.

Karl Richard Ganzer, the head of the Nazified national historical institute, celebrated a continuous Germanic imperial mission from Charlemagne to the present in a book that sold 850,000 copies soon after its appearance at the height of the German
Blitzkrieg
. Ganzer’s work appealed because it was simply a cruder version of what many Austrian historians and others like Fredrich Wilhelm Foerster had claimed since the 1920s, that the Empire had provided order for Europe.
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The misuse and misunderstanding of history are perhaps best exemplified
in the naming of the invasion of Russia. The general staff intended the banal code name ‘Fritz’ or ‘Otto’, but Hitler insisted on calling it Operation Barbarossa, probably because he regarded the emperor’s crusading credentials as suitable for a mission to eradicate Bolshevism.
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Later Twentieth-Century Perspectives

Nazi distortions had relatively little impact on the historical understanding of most Germans, who remained wedded to the conservative interpretations deriving from Ranke and later nineteenth-century scholarship. They continued to believe a medieval Empire had existed until 1250 or possibly the reign of Charles V, and thought this had been a stabilizing Christian order, whereas the early modern Empire was condemned as weak and responsible for delaying national greatness.
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These now traditional views survived Germany’s total defeat in 1945, because they were shared by the victorious Allied powers. British, American and French scholarship drew on the same detailed studies by nineteenth-century German historians for their interpretative framework, not least because this had been transplanted by the numerous intellectuals fleeing Germany in the 1930s who now held influential teaching posts in US universities.