German Historical Institute London BULLETIN ISSN 0269-8552 Stefan Ehrenpreis: New Perspectives on an Old Story: The Early Modern Holy Roman Empire Revisited Review Article German Historical Institute London Bulletin, Vol 35, No. 1 (May 2013), pp39-54 Copyright © 2013 German Historical Institute London. All rights reserved. REVIEW ARTICLE NEW PERSPECTIVES ON AN OLD STORY: THE EARLY MODERN HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE REVISITED STEFAN EHRENPREIS JASON PHILIP COY, BENJAMIN MARSCHKE, and DAVID WARREN SABEAN (eds.), The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered, Spek trum: Publications of the German Studies Association, 1 (New York: Berg hahn Books, 2010), xvii + 328 pp. ISBN 978 1 84545 759 4 (hardback) US$120.00. £70.00 PETER H. WILSON, The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806 (2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), xvi + 156 pp. ISBN 978 0 230 23978 4 (paperback) £16.50 JOACHIM WHALEY, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, vol. i: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia 1493–1648, Oxford History of Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxii + 722 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 873101 6. £85.00; vol. ii The Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich 1648–1806, Oxford History of Early Mo - dern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxiv + 747 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 969307 8. £85.00 Ten years after German reunification, the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation became a focus of European policy. Referring to the federal tradition of German history, French Minister of Defence Jean-Pierre Chevennement accused the German govern- ment of holding up the Holy Roman Empire’s political system as a model for European constitutional structures in order to use a weak- ening of national powers to favour German interests. In reply, Ger - man Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer delivered a speech at the Humboldt University in Berlin on 12 May 2000 in which, in the con- text of the EU enlargement process, he called for a transition from an association of states to a European federation. In the European 39 Review Article Parliament, people as different as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Otto von Habsburg came together in defence of Fischer’s idea. This political debate reflects the scholarly consensus on the Holy Roman Empire achieved in the 1980s. Historians such as Heinrich Lutz, Karl Otmar von Aretin, Volker Press, Winfried Schulze, Heinz Duchhardt, Heinz Schilling, Johannes Burkhardt, and Alfred Kohler had created an image of the Holy Roman Empire that, in the context of the French Revolution’s Bicentennaire in 1989, emphasized a his- torical contrast with revolutionary France. While Western Europe underwent a revolution, Central Europe was dominated by federal structures, the participation of the Estates, the granting of legal rights (including to subjects), and corporate self-administration, even if the monarchical principle and the privileges of the aristocracy remained untouched. A research programme drawn up by Peter Moraw and Volker Press in 1974, which aimed to link the social and constitu- tional histories of the Holy Roman Empire, provided the foundation for research on the early modern period in Germany for more than twenty years. The findings of this middle generation of historians of the Empire were both pragmatic and abstract. The Empire was defined, as it already had been by the eighteenth-century German imperial constitutional law, as a constitutional structure sui generis that could not be compared with any other early modern polity in Europe. This interpretation in German historiography was resolutely ig - nored by international scholars, largely because of two factors. First, German historians did not really succeed in embedding their image of the Holy Roman Empire in a European research context. And sec- ondly, English- and French-language research hardly considered the Holy Roman Empire as a political organism. Instead, scholars in Britain and the USA studied the Reformation and confessionalization in ‘Germany’, that is, the social and religious history problems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were investigated taking the German territories as examples. With some delay, however, changes have become apparent in German research since the start of the twenty-first century. These have sought to adapt views of the Holy Roman Empire to a changed perspective on German and European history. The interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire as the antithesis of French absolutism has declined since the late 1980s, as the concept of absolutism itself has 40 The Holy Roman Empire Revisited come under scrutiny. The special emphasis on social disciplining as a basic feature of early modern societies also disappeared, making way for views of other social and cultural practices. And the idea of seeing early modern rule as a process of negotiation and interaction between princes and subjects laid to rest widely held views of the developmental stages of state power. Instead of this, a group of younger historians of the Empire, including, among others, Georg Schmidt, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, and Horst Carl, has put forward two new interpretations. First, the Jena School sees the Holy Roman Empire as a complementary Reichs- Staat. It argues that this was the state form typical of Germany in the early modern period, one in which statehood was divided between the Empire and the territories. The imperial state represented the fed- erally constituted nation of the Germans, whose national awareness was no different from that of other European nations. In the discus- sion of these arguments, Schmidt’s critics returned to the older con- cept of the imperial system, and pointed out that the Empire can only be described as a partially modernized, pre-national semi-state. Over the last ten years a second movement has emerged around Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and her research group at the University of Münster. They pursue a cultural interpretation of political rule in the Holy Roman Empire, in which symbolic acts and rituals are seen as giving rise to political community and producing a hierarchical order. This interpretation is less interested in institutions and the resources of rule than in forms of political communication among the Empire’s elites. It argues that what unified the Empire was not so much politi- cal strategies as the representations, rituals, and ceremonies that cele- brated solidarity between the Emperor and the imperial Estates. While the Jena School’s argument, built on the complementary impe- rial state, aimed to bring the history of the Empire closer to what was seen as the ‘normal case’ of a Europe of nation-states, the second movement places greater emphasis on the unique features of the Empire’s constitutional structure which, it suggests, was not compa- rable to any other early modern state form and was typically pre- modern. Both interpretations stress that long after the Holy Roman Empire came to an end in 1806, the idea of the Empire exerted a pow- erful influence on intellectual history as a political programme. The three volumes under review here show that the recent debates and the newly awakened interest in the history of the Empire have 41 Review Article also found an echo among British and American scholars. In many places they pick up on and explain current research controversies, and take their own position, or suggest solutions for methodological prob- lems. This welcome international response can be traced back first to a crisis in the traditional model which pitted Atlantic Europe against Central and Eastern Europe; today we tend to look more for structur- al comparisons. And secondly, it can be attributed to a new interest among British and American researchers in the different forms of state and society in early modern Europe, the impact of ideas such as ‘law’ and ‘nation’, and the practices of rule and cultural forms of commu- nication. Neither old patterns of explanation nor isolated approaches built on the modern nation-state are any longer convincing. The com- mon position of the authors of the books under review here is that the Holy Roman Empire was not static and had not become ossified in unreformable rituals; rather, it created a dynamic political framework (Coy, Introduction, pp. 2–3). All the volumes are based on a thorough knowledge of the German and international research literature, and take account of historiographical models explaining the typology and development of the Holy Roman Empire. The authors of the three works under discussion, however, approach the problems of interpretation in different ways, have dif- ferent aims, and address different readerships. Peter Wilson’s text- book, published in the series Studies in European History, is a heav- ily revised new edition of a work originally published in 1999. In it, Wilson dispenses entirely with the history of events, concentrating instead on political structures and how they changed. To start with he provides a historiographical survey of the research discussion on the character and development of the Holy Roman Empire. In four sections in chapter two, Wilson presents the years 1495 to 1521, 1555 to 1590, 1648 to 1653, and 1740 to 1806 as periods of change in the early modern constitutional discussion. Two further chapters de - scribe the responsibilities and functions of imperial institutions and interpret fundamental concepts such as absolutism, patriotism, com- munications revolution, political symbolism, and issues in the cul- ture of remembrance. The essays collected in the volume edited by Coy, Marschke, and Sabean were written for a conference organized by the German Studies Association in San Diego, and present the basic arguments and research practices of an approach that sees the Empire as a sys- 42 The Holy Roman Empire Revisited tem of communication. The contributions are divided into three sec- tions: the first looks at ‘physical presence, political performance and written communication’ (Coy, Introduction, p.