CHAPTER ONE FROM GRANDE VILLE TO HAUPTSTADT On the morning of 28 September 1870, after a devastating siege of fi fty days, the French troops guarding Strasbourg capitulated to the opposing German forces. The heavy bombardment damaged the town’s fabled fortifi cations and many neighborhoods so badly that further resistance was pointless. In terms of military strategy, this victory was not signifi - cant. The German army had already established its mastery of eastern France after beating Napoleon III at Sedan earlier in the month and the real focus of the Franco-Prussian war was shifting towards Paris.1 Symbolically, however, Strasbourg’s capture was critical. It fulfi lled the dream of nineteenth-century German nationalists, including the histo- rian Heinrich von Treitschke who argued that a new Germany would be incomplete as long as Strasbourg, the wondrously fair city and pride of the old German empire, remained in French hands.2 To underscore this shift in geopolitical fortunes, the German leaders in Strasbourg celebrated their victory in a particularly evocative fashion. 1 The French Republic was proclaimed on 3 September, one day after Napoleon III surrendered at Sedan; because of the siege, however, Strasbourg’s citizens only heard this news on 11 September. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 452 – 62; Livet and Rapp, Histoire de Strasbourg, 4:178–79; and on the war itself, Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870 –1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially 225 – 60. 2 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the eighteenth-century folksong “O Straßburg, Du wunderschöne Stadt” became quite popular across Germany like the “Deutschlandlied” and the “Wacht am Rhein” as infl uential promoters of German cultural nationalism. On the history of “O Straßburg,” see Ludwig Erk and Frank M. Böhme, ed., Deutscher Liederhort. Auswahl der vorzüglicheren deutschen Volkslieder, nach Wort und Weise aus der Vorzeit und Gegenwart, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Georg Olms, 1893), 3:259 – 60. Regarding the folksong’s contribution to German nationalist sentiment, see George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), 138–40; and Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 110 –11. Treitschke’s famous demand of Strasbourg (and Alsace) as the fruits of Germany’s victory over France appeared in “Was fordern wir von Frankreich,” Preussische Jahrbücher 26 (1870): 367– 409, republished as “What We Demand From France,” in Germany, France, Russia, and Islam (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 96 –79. 24 chapter one They held a special worship service for the troops on 30 September, the very day on which the free German city of Strasbourg surrendered to Louis XIV’s French troops back in 1681. By itself, this act serves as a useful reminder of the ways in which religion and ideas of national identity were linked in nineteenth-century German Europe. Hartmut Lehmann has emphasized that narratives of Germanness during this high season of nation building drew heavily on the notion that God was with the Germans, that they benefi ted from His special aid and protection, which made it all the more essential that momentous vic- tories were marked with religious celebrations of thanksgiving.3 The specifi c choice of venue for this service was equally telling. For rather than holding this liturgy at the Cathedral, that icon of Strasbourg’s medieval German past, the Germans gathered at the Lutheran parish of St. Thomas. It was this Protestant setting that served as a legacy of Strasbourg’s Reformation past and an emblem of its multiconfessional present, where fi eld chaplain Emil Frommel offered thanks and rejoiced that Strasbourg’s future lies with the “Protestant German Empire of the German Nation.”4 Strasbourg’s return to Germany certainly marked the beginning of a new era in the city’s history. After 1871, the major French city ( grande ville) and departmental seat became the capital (Hauptstadt) of the German imperial territory (Reichsland ) of Alsace-Lorraine. This change in status along with the reconstruction work set in motion forces that turned Strasbourg into a big city, a Großstadt. Critical as these developments were, so too were the continuities between the French and German periods. The foundations for Strasbourg’s prominence as an administrative, commercial, transportation and intellectual center were all established well before 1870. So too were the basic elements of its religious culture. The city counted large numbers of Catholics, Protestants and Jews among its residents. It was also a major ecclesiasti- cal center: the seat of a large Catholic diocese, both a Calvinist and a 3 Lehmann, “ ‘God Our Old Ally’.” 4 Emil Frommel, O Straßburg, du wunderschöne Stadt! Alte und neue, freudvolle und leidvolle, fremd und eigene Erinnerungen eines Feldpredigers vor Straßburg im Jahre 1870 (Stuttgart: J. F. Steinkopf, 1911). This reworking of the old Holy Roman Empire’s formal name came from another military chaplain, Adolf Stoecker; Kurt Nowak, Geschichte des Christen- tums, 158. On the specifi cally Protestant dimension of German national sentiment, see above all Smith, German Nationalism, esp. 17– 50; and, more recently, Gross, War Against Catholicism..