Review of Helmut Walser Smith’s book “Germany” – Culture

This is a book that is easy and beautiful to read, but not easy to learn from. It is full of vivid descriptions and delightful details, but one can wonder for a long time what exactly they are there for and what they are supposed to show. It is, it cannot be summarized more precisely, about perceptions of Germany since the early modern era. One could put the main title in quotation marks, then it would be clear that we are not dealing with a historical collective subject with a continuous history, thus also not with “German history” since 1500.

Because that is what the subtitle “History of a Nation” suggests. In the American original – the author Helmut Walser Smith is a professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee – it reads more precisely: “A Nation in its Time: Before, During and After Nationalism”. The nation is thus separated from the ideology by which it is actually formed, nationalism. There was a before and after. So it is not just about “nation” as a political community of will, which is culturally, linguistically, ethnically or civically justified and is realized in a state with constitution, law and fixed borders.

Germany lived in nationalistic times without its society being broadly nationalistic

However, there has long been consensus that no national history is absorbed in this understanding of the nation. The concept of the people has also been comprehensively relativized: “People” as a political actor only becomes tangible in a state, it does not precede it. In Germany the case is particularly complicated because the nation-state, which was founded late, did not inherit a central monarchy or a parliament as in France or England. The German nation-state of 1870, in the succession of which the Federal Republic still exists, was a complex product of Prussia’s hegemony over smaller states (the federal states such as Bavaria or Saxony) and a bourgeois national movement whose beginnings go back to the 18th century. This had a cultural background, was aggravated and politicized by the Revolutionary Wars from 1792 to 1815, failed in 1848 and then allied with the great power of Prussia.

But Germany already existed long before that: as a geographical area, as a linguistic area and as a “empire” with historical theological links to antiquity. All of this belongs in a German history, which is initially a space in which many changing actors appeared in variable structures, with different forms of affiliation, in a European environment that showed modern state formation almost at the same time, sometimes in large, sometimes in small rooms . In Germany initially in smaller, more local units than in France, for example.

If you put Walser Smith’s book into this conceptual grid, you better understand what it should and don’t want. It is only a small part of a political story – delete this dimension of the term “nation” for the first 200 pages. It’s about seeing, experiencing, perceiving. For example, very much about maps. Since the early modern times, they replaced the medieval itineraries (directions), which were fixed on routes and names, and showed an “area” from above. “Germany” becomes vivid, imaginable as a space, populated by countless cities, each of which is drawn and engraved in beautiful topographical volumes. But “Bavaria” is also such a vivid space, in Philipp Apian’s wonderful, wonderfully precise “Bavarian country tables” (nowadays easy to view on the internet). This “Germany” is very much a product of letterpress and printmaking.

Travelers describe such spaces and compare them with others. The concept of nation, which in the Middle Ages mainly meant “origin”, “descent”, “regional community”, becomes part of a larger perception, already a faint glimpse of those “imagined communities” that later constitute the political nations. And not only Germans travel to Germany, but also many clever strangers like Madame de Staël.

Walser Smith extends this geographical strand by including military spatial coverage – in the age of denominational wars – and later industrial or administrative spatial penetration in infrastructures, especially railways or statistics. At the same time, a romantic vision of inspired landscapes develops, which are enlivened by an idealized “people”, including natural customs, their own language and poetry. The Caspar David Friedrich view also shaped the image of Germany.

The politicization, what is actually national, is the result of war, especially during the Napoleonic period. But Walser Smith insists that for a long time Germany was not an area of ​​pronounced national sentiments. It was external observers such as Madame de Staël and intellectuals such as Herder or Fichte who sophisticatedly translated German national understandings into philosophical-political terms. Germany lived in nationalistic times without its society being broadly nationalistic. After all, in the late 19th century the land area was furnished with historical signs and major monuments, almost like the living rooms of patriotic cultural citizens.

Last but not least, feelings of humiliation after the defeat of 1918 play a central role in Walser Smith’s story

Political patriotism, however, had already developed in the form of loyalty to the sovereigns at the local level; it only gradually passed over to the national whole. Then, again as a result of the war, from 1914 Germany became really nationalistic. Only at this point does Walser Smith’s story become a political story in which feelings of humiliation after the defeat of 1918 play a central role. This national history culminates in disturbing accounts of the excesses of violence of World War II and the Holocaust. The long duration of hostility towards Jews was a leitmotif of the presentation even before that.

The effects of the war of extermination and genocide on the German self-image since then are undoubted, but one can ask whether the racist background ideology of these excesses had not left the space of “national” terms – it was about a fantasy planetary race biology, the traditional spaces of history to living space redefined. The desire for sacrifice in this race war followed the pseudo Darwinian logic of the struggle of the strong against the weak. This is different from the sacrifice in “Death for the Fatherland”, which was re-idealized in the 18th century as an ancient, republican ideal.

Walser Smith’s itinerary therefore goes from space to people and landscape to the state and ultimately murderous nation. In the end it leads to the denationalization of the time since 1945, when the nation renewed as a community of compassion. Here Walser Smith finds good words for dealing with the past, for the transformation into a country of immigration and, most recently, for the friendliness towards refugees in 2015.

The book has two symptomatic weaknesses that make it difficult to understand

The book has two weaknesses that make it difficult to understand. One is conceptual fuzziness, presumably on purpose. Walser Smith wants to show the change in ideas and understandings of Germany, but he speaks throughout of “nation” without explicitly explaining the term and its change. This creates a source of considerable confusion. To paraphrase Carl Schmitt: Everything flows, says Heraclitus, but the term does not flow with it.

The second weakness is in terms of content. The old empire is missing. It was only mentioned very late in the “imperial patriotism” of the 18th century. Its high medieval tradition, which points back to late antiquity, and its continuity up to 1806, however, is not properly considered. Emperor and Reich, electors, sovereigns, imperial cities, imperial knights, imperial diet and imperial court were of course places and forms of German self-understanding that combined duration and radical change. Even in the early modern era, Germany was much more than a space or a map and area. It had living traditions that were constantly negotiated, for example anew each time a king was elected.

It was only with the German Confederation of 1815 that Walser Smith brought up the subject of federalism, which was so important for Germany, in somewhat greater detail. What is missing here could be shown by a look at the most profound new discussion of German history, Dieter Langewiesche’s narrow, weighty book “From the multistate realm to the federal state” (Kröner Verlag, 2020). The federal term “Bund” is the real bridge between premodern and present-day Germany.

Why does Walser Smith talk about it so little? Presumably because, following a solid historiographical tradition, it separates “Reich” and “Nation” in Germany. Secretly, the old Adam of the Little German history à la Heinrich von Treitschke creeps into his otherwise fluid understanding of the nation. Because of course: The Old Reich was not a modern nation, not even its forerunner. And so the actually meritorious and on many sides innovative, often entertaining historicization of the ideas of Germany remains rather unclear. The book is still fun.