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Sked, Alan: Rezension über: Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. I: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493-1648, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, in: Reviews in History, 2012, September, heruntergeladen über recensio.net

First published: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1315

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This article may be downloaded and/or used within the private copying exemption. Any further use without permission of the rights owner shall be subject to legal licences (§§ 44a-63a UrhG / German Copyright Act). Germany and the Holy Roman Empire: Volume I: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493-1648 Joachim Whaley Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN: 9780198731016 ; 752pp.

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire: Volume II: The Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich, 1648-1806 Joachim Whaley Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN: 9780199693078 ; 784pp.

It is a brave man who would take on the job of writing a history of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire between 1493 and 1806. Many historians would maintain that neither Germany nor even German national consciousness (certainly not German nationalism) existed during this period; as for the Holy Roman Empire, there is a long-running dispute over what it actually amounted to. Voltaire quipped famously that it was ‘neither holy, Roman nor an Empire’ while the student Frosch in the Keller scene of Goethe’s Faust could ask, ‘The dear old Holy Roman realm, what holds it still together?’ It was abolished almost immediately after the play was released. In the 19th century, an age of nationalism, the Empire was dismissed as a constitutional anachronism that had possessed little significance during most of its existence, a viewpoint which prevailed for most of the 20th century. Partly this was because it had been defended by Austrian, pro-Habsburg historians such as Onno Klopp (1) and Julius Ficker (2) and later by Kaindl (3), Srbik (4) and Hantsch (5) against the dominant kleindeutsch school of German historians represented by Droysen (6) and Treitschke (7), which saw German history culminating in the rise of the Hohenzollerns and Bismarck’s unification of the country under that dynasty. Insofar as this kleindeutsch school had anything good to say about the medieval empire, it restricted it to the Hohenstaufen, more or less airbrushing the Habsburgs out of German history, accusing them of being selfish foreigners who simply exploited the Reich for their own dynastic benefit. Srbik, it is true, famously endeavoured to reconcile both Austrian and Prussian schools by creating a Gesamtdeutschgeschichte (8), which proved attractive in the interwar and Nazi periods, but after 1945 the Empire became unfashionable in the official circles of the Second Austrian Republic, whose present ambassador to the UK, the historian, Emil Brix, recently confessed after a lecture at the Reform Club that contemporary Austrians find the fascination of foreigners and foreign historians with the Habsburgs rather incomprehensible. Still, there has been something of a revision in historical writing on the subject of the Empire since the 1960s, dating from the work of the German historian von Aretin.(9) This revisionism has to a certain extent been favoured by historical change. With the establishment of a Federal Republic of Germany, the idea has taken shape that federalism, rather than Prussian-style autocratic rule has been the natural form of government for Germany, while the development of a European Union, which enjoys considerable legal and constitutional powers but which lacks a common government and possesses few military or financial resources of its own, has made the Holy Roman Empire seem a more normal phenomenon.(10) In any case, the German historian Georg Schmidt (11) has proposed that the Holy Roman Empire, as an elective monarchy and decentralised ‘composite state’ not unlike other early modern European monarchies, should be viewed as a German nation- state which provided a legal framework for the German nation. There are certain objections to this, not least the fact that the Empire contained several non-German territories and that German princes often allied with foreign powers, particularly France, against the Emperor, even if some authorities will concede that monarchy, federalism, and hierarchy provided the empire with some sort of national state structure. There are also severe doubts as to how similar the Empire was constitutionally to states such as England (Britain), France and Spain. In any case, Schmidt’s whole approach has been rejected by others, among them Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (12), who sees the Empire as ‘strange’, with no political norms, fixed procedures, constitution or regulations to enforce decrees. It did not represent a German nation but merely the princes, dukes, counts and imperial cities represented in its Diet, which itself lacked formal procedures. Instead, according to this interpretation, the Empire depended on face-to-face encounters and interactions, indeed, on ritual, and was thus merely a ‘collectively-shared fiction’ which was about ceremony not politics. I’m not sure one can accept this either. Ceremonials usually have a political purpose. All early modern and medieval states had ceremonials. Courts were all about ceremony. But courts were also about politics and power as all the actors involved were well aware. On the other hand, it is true that the Emperor had to depend on his own lands – his hereditary lands – for troops and finance. His ability to award titles and to settle territorial disputes gave him some extra influence and prestige, but the fact cannot be escaped that, compared to other monarchs, his executive powers scarcely existed. In East Germany after 1945 the view was that the Reformation had reflected a ‘general crisis of society’ and that Luther’s protest had been directed against feudalism as well as against Rome. Be that as it may, the failure of the peasants’ revolt in any case merely reinforced feudalism, whereas the role of the princes led to the Thirty Years’ War and culminated in the establishment of absolutism, yet another form of feudalism. None of this influenced western historiography very much except that it provided a spur to more research by economic historians, whose leading lights became Peter Blickle (13) and Thomas Brady (14). Indeed, as Whaley points out (vol. 1, p. 8), the early modern history of the Reich is now experiencing a ‘boom time’. Cultural and intellectual history has also been researched, with the result that, due to the investigation of Pietism for example, the story we have of German intellectual development no longer skips from the Reformation to the Enlightenment and the Goethezeit. The end result though is still that Germany is seen to have experienced no revolution or nation-state. Early modern historians, however, tend not to see this as abnormal or signifying backwardness, unlike Hans-Ulrich Wehler (15) and his school who see this as definitely constituting a Sonderweg in German history, leading to the warping of German political, social and constitutional development and ultimately to the First World War and Nazism. Outside France (16), there has been a resurgence of interest in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire in both Europe and America. In Britain the leading authority has been Peter Wilson (17), whose small book on the subject holds the field. Yet Joachim Whaley has been contributing an enormous number of articles to the specialised literature and now has produced two stout volumes, which should become standard works. How definitive, though, are they likely to prove? How does he see the Holy Roman Empire? How does he interpret Austrian and Prussian history – indeed the history of the other German states – in relation to it? Does he have anything essentially new to say in his one and half thousand pages? If so, does he convince? Volume one sets the scene in 1500 and takes the reader through the Reformation and the Thirty Year’ War to the Peace of Westphalia. It has extremely useful notes on terminology and usage, absolutely indispensable ones on maps and on-line resources, a list of abbreviations and two maps. Its introductory chapter on ‘narratives of early modern German history’ contains a couple of statements which from the very outset give a hint that Whaley has distinct points of view. First, when discussing the reforms attempted by Maximilian I, he writes that these ‘resulted in the emergence of a new kind of polity in the Reich’ (p. 1) and that, even if the emperor’s demands for financial and military support failed, the agreement he secured on a general peace and the creation of a higher court of law to protect it, not to mention the continuing negotiations with the Reichstag, ‘marked a decisive turning point’ (p. 2). Indeed, the Reich ‘was set upon a new course of development that continued through to the end of the eighteenth century’ (p. 2). Still, according to Whaley, the constitutional balance, if similar perhaps to that in Poland-Lithuania, ‘was quite unlike that which characterised the British, French and Spanish monarchies’ (p. 2). In the Empire, the formula Kaiser und Reich (really Emperor and Imperial Estates – the territories constituting the Reich) meant that the constitution of the Empire was a dual one, which developed as feudal relations between the Emperor and his vassals, based on personal relationships, turned increasingly into something approaching a federal system, in which, however, the Emperor’s powers were more severely constrained than in other European monarchies. Whaley concedes that modern research has shown the ‘composite monarchies’ of England, France and Spain had also to pay due respect to mighty subjects, subordinate kingdoms, duchies, principalities and provinces. None the less, German princes ‘retained a far greater degree of autonomy from the monarch’ (p. 2). It was these territorial princes, moreover, who first developed regular systems of finance and conscription, even if they lacked the sovereignty of the Emperor, to whom even their meanest subjects could appeal for legal protection over their heads. There is not much support for Schmidt here. Whaley’s basic thesis is that the early modern history of the Reich should not be seen as one of failure and stagnation and that after 1500 came 300 years of transformations, including the Reformation and the Westphalian settlement, which established a modus vivendi, enabling the Reich to act both as the centre of a European balance of power and stable framework for constitutional development: ‘Indeed, the unity of the early modern period is underlined by the fact that it is characterised by a remarkably persistent sequence of phases of reform at the level of both the Reich and territories. The dates 1517, 1555, 1648, 1700, 1740-50 and finally, 1789, around which sections of this book (sic) are organised, all mark watersheds in this process’ (p. 11). He believes that due to the work of the German historians, Schmidt (18) and Press (19), 1648 can no longer be seen as ‘the great watershed’ (p. 11) as most German historians have assumed. According to Whaley, each reform period, always complicated in itself, was ‘always broadly resolved or at least accommodated, in ways that cannot be adequately described as conservative’ (p. 11). Some periods were indeed progressive, leading to an imperial framework that allowed various Christian denominations to co-exist and ‘preserved an independent existence of even the smallest subsidiary unit against the predatory inclinations and ambitions of the largest ones’ (p.11), not to mention a system of imperial courts through which subjects could appeal to the Emperor against and over the heads of their overlords. Meanwhile the territorial states often offered greater legal and social protection to individual subjects than western monarchies. As in the latter, of course, German absolutist princes were often less absolute than they would have liked. Hence Germans believed that they did enjoy ‘German liberties’ and ‘German freedom’. This led in turn to a certain German patriotism by the late 18th century: ‘Indeed, most German commentators of the late eighteenth century and even those who wrote in 1805 and 1806, insisted that the Reich was a state, a limited monarchy, albeit with individual traditions that distinguished it from its neighbours’ (p. 12). Thus although it had no imperial capital and in 1780 contained 314 territorial units, not to mention over 1000 more not represented in the Diet, although it covered a huge area of Central Europe, and was divided by religion, and although Germans often referred to their own locality as their Vaterland, ‘yet Vaterland did often refer to the Reich and there is ample evidence for a strong sense of identification with the Reich throughout the early modern period’ (p. 13). Did this amount to nationalism? Certainly, according to Whaley, the early modern period saw a growing awareness of the Reich as a German Reich, a process reinforced by the wars against Louis XIV and the Turks. Such sentiments, however, were more common among educated groups, but were there as early as the reform movement around 1500 (helped perhaps by the discovery of Tacitus’s Germania). They reflected less modern nationalism than ‘ an awareness of varying levels of interlocking and overlapping ‘fatherlands’, expressed in the contemporary formula of ‘unity in diversity’ (p. 14). Still, the early modern Reich gave rise to ‘a pervasive national patriotic discourse’ (p. 14). At the end of his introduction, Whaley sums up his view of early modern German history as follows: ‘If the history of the German lands in the period is the history of localities and territories, it is also the history of the union of those entities. It is the history of their survival as a legal and cultural community in the face of challenges from the Reformation onwards that might have been expected to destroy any such thing. It is the history of their solidarity in the face of perennial external threats. Not least, it is the history of a central European polity that played a key role in the politics of early modern Europe as a whole. Perhaps inevitably a work such as this might seem to emphasise union if not unity. The discussion of general trends will inevitably appear to ignore many of the exceptions to every rule. Yet variety and, at times, the appearance of incoherence, are fundamental to any understanding of early modern German history. Indeed, the essence of the system was the preservation of individuality and difference’. If Whaley is not quite at one with Schmidt, he is certainly on a different wavelength from Stollberg-Rilinger. He sees the Reich as a continually reforming, diverse but legally ordered polity, rather than some kind of bizarre monstrosity or collective fiction. His two volumes are exceptionally well written and highly nuanced and reflect the latest scholarship. Indeed, they represent a huge personal achievement. However, they are not the last word on the subject and may even come to be seen to represent a sort of sanitised, post-war version of German history reflecting the ethos of the Federal Republic and the European Union. No one will quibble with the idea that the Reich – certainly in theory, although the practice was very slow – represented an intricate sort of legal unity which sought to protect all its subjects. How far this gave rise to a common patriotism can be argued over. (Did Prussians revere the Reich?) However, when Whaley talks about ‘external foes’ and the Reich being at the centre of a European balance of power, one begins to wonder what happened to that much more traditional model of German history, the one in which Emperors of whatever dynasty – and for centuries before 1500 – struggled to maintain their power and dignity in face of the particularism of the German princes. Whaley really does not examine particularism at all in his survey of German historiography, leaving it rather like Hamlet without the prince. His ‘eras of reform’, after all, derive mainly from settlements after wars between these princes. The history of the Reich during the early modern period is in fact one of German civil wars, i.e. the wars of the Reformation followed by the Thirty Years’ War, followed in turn by the wars against Louis XIV (in which Brandenburg, Bavaria and Saxony were at key points on the side of the French against the Emperor), followed by the wars between Austria and Prussia in the 18th century, and, finally, the wars against the French Revolution and Napoleon (in which until 1806 Prussia and the South German states did more to aid the French than the Empire). In the end, the second Confederation of the Rhine brought about the demise of the Reich after which the German states (including Austria!) never wanted to resurrect it. One of the ‘reforms’ of the 1648 settlement had been to make France the guarantor of the new independence of the German princes who looked to her to protect their rights from the Emperor. Soon – from 1683 – the Diet at Regensburg had turned into a permanent congress of delegates dominated by the French ambassador. The German princes, meanwhile, acted independently. They made a separate peace treaty with France after the War of the Spanish Succession and although legally forbidden in 1648 to act against the Empire or the Emperor, ignored this provision. Bavaria backed France in the War of the Spanish Succession. The Empire itself was not involved as a body in the War of the Austrian Succession; Prussia fought the Empire in the Seven Years’ War; while during the Revolutionary Wars she remained neutral. After Leopold I became Emperor, the Archbishop of Mainz, the Chancellor of the Empire, established a Confederation of the Rhine in alliance with France. Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, signed a secret Close Alliance with France in 1679 in return for 100,000 livres a year for ten years. In return, the French were to get free passage through Prussian lands and the use of Prussian forts when required. Prussia was also to support Louis XIV as next Holy Roman Emperor, a claim also backed by Bavaria in 1670 and by Saxony in 1679. The treaty with the Great Elector meant that Brandenburg opposed any German action to prevent Louis’s seizure of Strasbourg in 1681. Clearly there was no spirit of German nationalism at the time and the princes saw themselves as equals of the Emperor whom they treated with contempt by tolerating Louis XIV’s aggressions. In the light of all this, it is perhaps more convincing, therefore, to see the story of the Reich, less as a cumulative process of reform and patriotism than as a cumulative determination of the German princes to betray and undermine it altogether. Whaley does not seem to see this. All disputes are ‘resolved’ or ‘accommodated’ (p. 11). Frederick the Great never translated his challenge to the Reich into reality (p. 6), (Really? If not, he certainly tried hard enough!) while Joseph II ‘arguably challenged the constitution more radically and more openly than Frederick the Great ever did’ (p. 6). (How? Frederick attacked the Habsburg Monarchy without warning or excuse and agreed to split it up with France and other states; Joseph had a mutual agreement with the ruler of Bavaria to peacefully swap the Austrian Netherlands – a richer territory than Bavaria – for Bavaria itself, which was to become part of Austria and so strengthen the Reich.) In the end, therefore, Whaley’s two fine volumes will not put the argument over the Holy Roman Empire to rest. However, they will certainly provide a standard of scholarship against which all future works will be measured.

Notes

1. See for example his Der König Friedrich II von Preußen und die Deutsche Nation, (Schaffhausen, 1860).

2. For the dispute over the medieval Kaiserreich between Sybel and Ficker see Friedrich Schneider, Universalstaat oder Nationalstaat, Macht und Ende des ersten deutschen Reiches. Die Streitschriften von Heinrich von Sybel und Juilius Ficker zur deutschen Kaiserpolitik des Mittelalters (Innsbruck, 1942).

3. See Raimund Friedrich Kaindl, Oesterreich, Preußen, Deutschland. Deutsche Geschichte in großdeutscher Beleuchtung (Vienna, 1926).

4. See in particular the four volumes of his Deutsche Einheit. Idee und Wirklichkeit vom Heiligen Reich bis Königgrätz (vols. 1 and 2, Munich 1935, vols. 3 and 4, Munich 1942).

5. See his Die Geschichte Österreichs, (2 vols., Graz, Vienna and Cologne, several editions, 1952/1959).

6. See footnote 2.

7. See his Deutsche Geschichte im 19 Jahrhundert, (5 vols., Berlin 1886).

8. See his ‘Gesamtdeutsche Geschichtsauffassung’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 8 (1930).

9. See Karl Otmar von Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich, 1778–1806, Reichsverfassung und Staatssouveränität (2 vols., Wiesbaden, 1967).

10. See inter alia, German Federalism: Past, Present and Future,ed. Maiken Umbach (Basingstoke, 2002) and Abigail Green, ‘The federal alternative? A new view of modern German history’, The Historical Journal, 46, 1, (March 2003), 187–202.

11. Among many works, see his Geschichte des Alten Reichs. Staat und Nation in der Frühen Neuzeit, 1495-1806, (Munich, 1999).

12. See her Des Kaisers alte Kleider. Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich, 2008).

13. See among many works, his Von der Leibeigenschaft zu den Menschenrechten: Eine Geschichte der Freiheit in Deutschland (Munich, 2003).

14. See among several works, his ‘Turning Swiss. Cities and empire, 1450–1550 (Cambridge, 1985).

15. See his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (5 vols., Munich, 1987– 2008).

16. For the French lack of interest see, Christophe Duhamelle, ‘ Das alte Reich im toten Winkel der französischen Historiographie’, in Imperium Romanum—irregulare corpus—Teutscher Reich-Staat. Das Alte Reich im Verständnis der Zeitgenossen und der Historiographie, ed. Matthias Schnettger (Mainz, 2002), pp. 207–19.

17. Peter Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 1494–1806 (London, 1999).

18. See footnote 11.

19. See Volker Press, Kriege und Krisen: Deutschland 1600–1715 (Munich, 1991).

Author's Response Joachim Whaley I am most grateful to Professor Sked for his generous appreciation of my work. His review raises a number of important and interesting issues and poses questions which invite a response. Can any book really claim to be wholly definitive and to provide the last word on its subject? I doubt it! My aim in writing a history of the Holy Roman Empire and its territories during the last three centuries of its existence was to give my understanding of the development of the German lands in the early modern period and to introduce readers to the substantial German scholarship that has been devoted to that subject over the last few decades. It was once conventional to view the Holy Roman Empire as a worthless institution and early modern German history as a story of conflict and division, characterised by the emergence of authoritarian governments, notably that of Brandenburg-Prussia. My own preoccupation has been with the factors which unified the German territories and which gave many of their inhabitants a sense of identification with the Reich. I developed my theme at three levels: the development of the Holy Roman Empire in the European system; the evolution of the Holy Roman Empire and its institutions as a German polity; the development within that polity of the German territories and the social, economic, religious, and cultural oly HHfactors that shaped the evolution of German society. Professor Sked wonders whether my work might ‘come to be seen to represent a sort of sanitised, post-war version of German history reflecting the ethos of the Federal Republic and the European Union.’ I hold no particular brief for either the Federal Republic or the European Union. To be sceptical about teleological views that emphasise the inevitability of the emergence of the nation state or that view all German history as leading to Hitler, does not commit one to a new teleological view of German history which culminates in the Berlin Republic. Nor do I regard the Holy Roman Empire as any kind of precursor to the EU, even though it is undoubtedly part of the EU’s past. The idea of Germany as a ‘federative nation’ long predated the Federal Republic: it was a view that most educated Germans in the 18th and early 19th centuries took for granted, and which remained strong even after the unification of Germany in 1871.(1) Federalism was not invented in the Federal Republic. The awareness of the natural and historical diversity of the Germans went hand in hand with an equally strong sense of their fundamental unity. Throughout my work I underline the development of patriotism and a sense of common identity. This was anchored on the Reich and its institutions and was reinforced by the sense of a common cause in the face of common enemies. For much of the 16th and 17th centuries France and the Ottomans periodically posed a serious threat. The German estates repeatedly united in the face of these threats and a vast contemporary literature testifies to the feeling of a common German cause in the face of external aggression. Equally, domestic developments such as the Reformation, the various religious compromises, the constant negotiations between emperor and estates generated discussion of key concepts such as ‘German liberty’ which also fostered a sense of common cause and of unity. This is not to deny that there were civil wars in German history – the most notable was of course the Thirty Years War – but what is striking is that, again and again, these confrontations ended in compromise, with a restatement of the fundamental principles of the German polity that had been established in the reign of Maximilian I. Would it really be ‘more convincing … to see the story of the Reich … as a cumulative determination of the German princes to betray and undermine it…’? Was there any early modern polity which some group or other did not seek to undermine or betray? Was the early modern history of the Reich really more violent than that of France, Spain or Italy? The views expressed by the Berlin theologian Daniel Jenisch were typical of those articulated by many commentators of the late 18th century. Jenisch praised the variety of territories in the Reich which fostered the development of a rich and varied culture, unlike the ‘French uniformity’. He contrasted the disasters of English, French, Spanish and Swiss history of recent centuries with the ‘peaceful development of our constitution free of bloodshed’.(2) If Jenisch was guilty of hyperbole, it still surely remains true that almost all early modern polities experienced civil war and revolution. The German Reich was not exceptional in that. One area in which it was exceptional, however, was in the formulation of a series of ground-breaking religious constitutional compromises from the 1530s which collectively contributed to what commentators in the mid 18th century referred to as a catalogue of fundamental rights and liberties enjoyed by all Germans. At the same time, an imperial judicial system emerged to which Germans could appeal if their rights were infringed. The ability of German subjects to appeal against the actions of their rulers was rightly viewed as one of the most important features of the legal system of the Reich. Many have questioned whether early modern patriotism even existed at all. This has long been a controversial question and it is likely to remain so. Pre-modern patriotism was clearly not identical to the kind of nationalism that emerged in the 19th century. Yet the notions of nationhood that were developed in the Middle Ages undoubtedly developed new meanings in the early modern period and began to have both a wider social reach and a more complex political and constitutional meaning. In a book published too late for me to include in my own work, Caspar Hirschi has forcefully restated the case for locating the origins of nationalism in the Middles Ages and its development in the early modern period.(3) Even more recently, Hirschi’s findings have been reinforced by Len Scales’s work on the shaping of German identity in the 13th and 13th centuries.(4) The ‘modernist’ historians may still insist that what emerged in the 19th century was crucially different, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to argue that ‘modern’ nationalism had no antecedents. It is undeniable that the sense of identification with the Reich varied over time and between regions. Whether Prussians revered the Reich is surely less significant than whether the inhabitants of the various Hohenzollern lands had a sense of being subjects of the Reich as well as of the Elector of Brandenburg or, after 1701, King of Prussia. Much surely depends on whether one is talking about the inhabitants of the Lower Rhineland, of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, or of Brandenburg (Prussia, of course, lay outside the Reich anyway). It is certainly interesting to note that in the early 18th century the Berlin authorities were much exercised by the inclination of their master’s subjects to appeal to the higher courts of the Reich. Frederick the Great undoubtedly tried to challenge the position of the Habsburgs, but ultimately he failed. He held on to Silesia but the effort of doing so nearly destroyed him. Later he was unable to take control of the opposition to Joseph II’s attempts to acquire Bavaria. Professor Sked suggests that Joseph II’s plans were perfectly reasonable and that Joseph had a ‘mutual agreement with the ruler of Bavaria to peacefully swap the Austrian Netherlands … for Bavaria …, which was to become part of Austria and so strengthen the Reich’. That wasn’t the view taken by the Bavarian estates in Munich. Moreover pretty well all German rulers believed that the emperor’s plan was wholly unacceptable, if not actually illegal, and that its execution would upset the constitutional balance and seriously threaten the very existence of the Reich. Finally, Professor Sked notes that there was no explicit discussion of particularism in my introduction. This was not an oversight, but rather reflects the extent to which this issue is implicit in my discussion of the traditional ‘Prussian-German’ view of the history of the early modern Reich, with which I have engaged throughout my work. It should be clear that I do not have much sympathy for the idea that the Reich was perpetually paralysed by internal conflicts, or the view that after the Reformation the Reich descended into Kleinstaaterei, fell victim to French subjugation and succumbed to political backwardness and repression. Yet the members of the Reich, its several thousand constituent parts, are integral to my account of early modern German history. Their conflicts and compromises are a key theme in my work. Furthermore, roughly one third of the whole text is devoted to the internal development of the various territories: not just the well-known few, such as Brandenburg, Bavaria, Hanover or the Palatinate, but also the minor principalities, counties, abbeys, cities and the lands of the Imperial Knights. Here again, however, it is striking how many similarities there were between the territories, how they developed in parallel ways within the same overall framework of the Reich and its legal and legislative framework. As I argue in my two volumes, recent research has rendered the traditional view of the early Holy Roman Empire untenable. Work on national identity and patriotism, into the workings of the imperial constitution and the institutions of the Reich, and into virtually every aspect of the development of the German territories has generated insights into topics that were all but ignored by the nationalist historians of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Collectively, these insights point to the cohesiveness of the German lands and to aspects of their experience that were rightly eulogised by commentators in the late 18th century. While in 1815 there was no enthusiasm for reviving the Reich, much of the legal and political culture endured, as did the insistence on the virtues of diversity and a perennial resistance to the notion of a centralised state.

Notes

1. Joachim Whaley, ‘Kulturelle Toleranz – die deutsche Nation im europäischen Vergleich’, in Die deutsche Nation im frühneuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Georg Schmidt (Munich, 2010), pp. 201–23; Dieter Langewiesche, ‘Föderativer Nationalismus als Erbe der deutschen Reichsnation. Über Föderalismus und Zentralismus in der deutschen Nationalgeschichte’, in idem, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (Munich 2000), pp. 55–79. See also essays in Föderative Nation: Deutschlandkonzepte von der Reformation bis zu Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Dieter Langewiesche and Georg Schmidt (Munich, 2000).

2. Daniel Jenisch, Geist und Charakter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, politisch, moralisch, ästhetisch und wissenschaftlich betrachtet (3 vols, Berlin, 1800–1), pp. ii, 50.

3. Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2012).

4. Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (Cambridge, 2012).