German nationalism

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  German nationalism carried within it, from its earliest stirrings, a fundamental question that Europe is still reckoning with: who counts as German, and what does Germany owe the world?

  The idea took shape not from a single founding moment but from centuries of contested identity. By the 13th century a stronger sense of German belonging had already formed, woven into law books like the Sachsenspiegel, which referenced German language, German lands, German ancestry, and a shared German history as the pillars of a collective self. Yet for most of the medieval period, those pillars supported no unified state. Germans lived in a patchwork of principalities, duchies, and free cities, nominally tied together under a Holy Roman Empire that was, as the joke went, neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

  It was only around 1770 that philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder gave the scattered feeling a name and a theory. From that point forward, German nationalism became a program. It demanded a state. It drew borders around language and blood. It generated music, poetry, and myth. It fought wars. It built an empire. Then it bent toward catastrophe, and the catastrophe it produced was so total that the word "nationalism" became, for millions of Germans, something close to forbidden.

  How did a movement born in Romantic poetry end up writing the Nuremberg Laws? What choices, rivalries, and ideas turned a demand for self-determination into a machinery of extermination? And what has Germany done with its national identity in the decades since, when even waving a flag felt like a provocation?

• 2. Medieval Roots

  ›

  The Sachsenspiegel, the early 13th-century German law book, did something that few legal texts of its era attempted: it named a people. More than ten of its passages referred explicitly to the German language, German lands, the history of the Germans, and German descent. Scholars regard those four categories as the first appearance, within a vernacular legal text of the Middle Ages, of what would later be called national consciousness.

  The law book was particular about who belonged. Seven members of the Electoral College of the Holy Roman Empire held the privileged right to choose the Emperor. The King of Bohemia was excluded from that inner circle on the grounds that he was not considered German. A later compilation, the Schwabenspiegel of around 1275, softened the rule by requiring only partial German ancestry, a modification that reflected the political realities of the 1273 royal election.

  Later German law books continued to weave ethnicity into constitutional logic. The Deutschenspiegel and the Meissner Rechtsbuch repeated all four markers of collective identity: language, territory, ancestry, and shared history. The Schwabenspiegel and the Freisinger Rechtsbuch of 1328 stressed three of those four, dropping language. The pattern across these texts was consistent: Germanness was a legal category before it was a political movement.

  By the 15th century German humanists were celebrating what they called distinctly German achievements, including Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. The humanist Jakob Wimpfeling wrote in 1502 of the happiness of being German and living in what he called the blessed German land. But the Reformation that began in the early 16th century split those German lands between Catholics and Lutherans and made unity a distant aspiration rather than an approaching fact.

• 3. Herder, Fichte, and the Romantic Turn

  ›

  Friedrich Karl von Moser, writing in the mid-18th century, observed that most Germans, compared with the British, Swiss, Dutch, and Swedes, lacked what he called a national way of thinking. The diagnosis was sharp. The cure would arrive from philosophy.

  Johann Gottfried Herder developed the concept of nationalism itself around 1770, and German nationalism began with him, though historians note that early forms had already appeared around 1500. Herder's version was Romantic in character. It rested on collective self-determination, territorial unification, and cultural identity as interlocking goals. It drew from Enlightenment-era thinkers: Jean Jacques Rousseau's naturalism and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes' argument that legitimate nations must be conceived in a state of nature.

  The French occupation of German territories gave that philosophy an urgent target. Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivered his Addresses to the German Nation in 1808, during the French occupation, invoking German distinctiveness in language, tradition, and literature as the basis of a shared identity. He described a divide between Germans who had left their ancestral lands during the Migration Period, becoming assimilated into Roman language and custom, and those who stayed, preserving an unbroken native culture. Fichte is regarded as a founding father of German nationalism.

  Ernst Moritz Arndt's war poetry during the German campaign of 1813, and Heinrich von Kleist's patriotic stage dramas before his death, pushed German nationalism toward what scholars describe as a racialized ethnic rather than civic direction. Johann Ludwig Jahn joined Fichte and Arndt as an advocate of Pan-Germanism, the vision that all German speakers should form a single nation. Romanticism added mythology to politics, spreading stories like the Kyffhauser myth, in which the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa sleeps inside a mountain and waits to rise and save Germany, and the legend of the Lorelei.

• 4. The German Question

  ›

  Napoleon's defeat at the hands of a coalition at the Congress of Vienna did not deliver a German nation-state. What it produced instead was the German Confederation, a loose collection of independent states that lacked strong federal institutions. The nationalists who had dreamed of something more came away disappointed.

  Economic integration arrived before political unity. Prussia spearheaded the Zollverein, the Customs Union of Germany, which was created in 1834 and continued until 1866. The union functioned under Prussian dominance and generated friction with Austria, the other great power competing to lead the German world.

  The Revolutions of 1848 briefly seemed to change everything. Nationalists seized control in a number of German states and assembled an all-German parliament in Frankfurt in May 1848. That parliament debated a national constitution and settled on a monarchical nation-state without the multi-ethnic Austrian Habsburg lands, a solution called Lesser Germany. They offered the imperial crown to the King of Prussia. He refused, and the liberal constitutional project collapsed.

  The failure sharpened a rivalry that would define the next two decades. Otto von Bismarck became Minister President of Prussia in 1862 and blocked every Austrian attempt to join the Zollverein. The argument over whether Germany should include Austria, the Greater Germany position, or exclude it, the Lesser Germany position, became the central fault line in German nationalist politics. Bismarck resolved it through war: the Second Schleswig War in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. A German nation-state called the German Empire was founded in 1871. The King of Prussia took the throne as German Emperor, and Bismarck became Chancellor.

• 5. Empire, Colonies, and Social Darwinism

  ›

  The German nationalism that served the German Empire after 1871 bore little resemblance to the liberal vision of 1848. It was Prussian in character, authoritarian, anti-Catholic, anti-liberal, and anti-socialist. It centered on a German identity claimed to descend from the historical Teutonic Order and on Bismarck's ideals of willpower, loyalty, honesty, and perseverance.

  Bismarck's Kulturkampf policy in Prussia, which sought to dismantle Catholic culture, provoked outrage among German Catholics and led to the rise of the pro-Catholic Centre Party and the Bavarian People's Party. Bavarian nationalists separately argued that the terms under which Bavaria entered Germany in 1871 were controversial, and that the German government had long intruded into Bavarian domestic affairs.

  Germany's colonial enterprise in Africa, running from 1884 to 1914, expressed this nationalism outward. Historian Michael Schubert has written that colonial rule was characterized by repressive violence carried out in the name of culture and civilization. Germany's cultural-missionary project claimed its colonial programs were humanitarian and educational. The widespread acceptance of social Darwinism among German intellectuals justified territorial acquisition as a matter of what they called survival of the fittest. Before the First World War, Germany's colonial empire had grown to become the third-largest in the world, after Britain and France.

  Social Darwinism, messianism, and racialism became themes in German nationalist thought after 1871, organized around the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, the people's community. The Correlates of War project records that German patriotism before the First World War ranked at or near the top among nations.

• 6. Weimar, the Nazis, and Genocide

  ›

  The Weimar Republic, established after the First World War, built its nationality law on pre-unification ideas of the German volk as an ethno-racial group defined by heredity rather than residence. The laws were designed to include Germans living abroad and to exclude immigrant groups. They remained the basis of German citizenship law until after reunification.

  The republic collapsed under the weight of war reparations and territorial losses imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and the political maneuvering of German officials. The Nazi Party, led by Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, came to power in 1933 carrying an extreme form of German nationalism fused with racial ideology. The first point of the Nazi 25-point programme, written in 1920, demanded the unification of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the people's right to self-determination.

  Hitler had been shaped in Austria-Hungary by pan-German nationalists, notably Georg Ritter von Schonerer and Karl Lueger. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 attempted to define by statute and genetics who was to be considered German. Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss and absorbed the Sudetenland, briefly realizing the Greater German Reich that Austrian pan-Germans had long demanded. The Generalplan Ost called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization, or enslavement of most or all Czechs, Poles, Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians to provide living space for Germans.

  Nazi chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote that German Romanticism had been as welcome as rain after a long drought but needed to be followed to its racial core. Joseph Goebbels told theatre directors on the 8th of May 1933, two days before the Nazi book burnings in Berlin, that German art would be heroic, like steel, Romantic, and national, or it would be nothing. Scholars including Fritz Strich, Thomas Mann, and Victor Klemperer, who had been supporters of Romanticism before the war, reconsidered their positions in its aftermath.

• 7. Division, Reunion, and Taboo

  ›

  After the Second World War, the German nation was divided into West Germany and East Germany, and former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line were transferred to Poland and Russia. Saarland was separated by France to become its protectorate in 1946 before joining West Germany in early 1957.

  The Basic Law of West Germany was written as a provisional document, with reunification explicitly in mind. East Germany's Socialist Unity Party also proclaimed reunification a goal, though in the context of a Marxist vision in which the West German government would eventually be swept away. West Germans continued through the 1960s to advocate recovering the territories transferred to Poland and Russia; East Germany confirmed its border with Poland in 1950, while West Germany finally accepted that border, with reservations, only in 1970.

  Die Wende arrived in the late 1980s, driven by the East German people, and led to the 1990 elections and the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. Reunification alarmed figures including Margaret Thatcher, Juergen Habermas, and Gunter Grass, who feared a united Germany might resume aggression toward other countries. The Historikerstreit, the national debate in West Germany over how to regard the Nazi past, had already divided public opinion over whether Nazism grew from German identity specifically or was a broader phenomenon. Riots in Hoyerswerda in 1991 and the rise of neo-Nazi skinhead groups in the former East Germany deepened those anxieties.

  Four neo-Nazi and far-right parties, the Nationalist Front, National Offensive, German Alternative, and Kamaradenbund, were banned by Germany's Federal Constitutional Court after committing or inciting violence. The nationality law question was settled around 2000 when a coalition led by the Social Democratic Party changed the basis of citizenship from jus sanguinis, descent, to jus soli, place of birth. Germany's need to receive around 300,000 immigrants per year to maintain its workforce made the old hereditary definition unworkable. The 2006 FIFA World Cup, held in Germany, produced widespread displays of national pride that seemed to surprise the Germans themselves. A 2011 article from the University of Pennsylvania observed that patriotism had been a taboo topic in Germany since the time of Adolf Hitler. The Alternative for Germany party, founded in 2013 as a backlash against European integration and bailouts during the debt crisis, took on explicitly nationalist and populist stances, rejecting German guilt over the Nazi era and calling on Germans to take pride in their history.