3

The Changing Context of German Nationhood

Corey Johnson

In a leafy suburb on the southeast side of Leipzig, a hulking, ninety-meter-tall colossus of chiseled granite porphyry rises above the trees. Völki , as the monument is called in local shorthand, commemorates the massive battle fought over three days around Leipzig in October 1813 between Napoleon’s forces and troops from Prussia, Austro-Hungary, Russia, Sweden, and half a dozen other states. The Völkerschlacht (Battle of the Nations), with 600,000 combatants and 92,000 casualties, and Germans fighting on both sides, is commonly viewed as the largest battle in the history of the world prior to World War I. Other battles were likely more important in the eventual final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo two years later, but as a symbolic site of the birth of a nation, the events on fields outside Leipzig became etched in the collective consciousness of Germans. Some eight decades later, Germany was a unified nation-state and a formidable industrial and military power in its own right in the heart of Europe. A group of civic activists and nationalists—when the name had a less provocative connotation in Germany—saw fit to commemorate this decisive battle in the German campaign of the Napoleonic Wars that had done so much to congeal a nascent sense of nationhood among the German-speaking population in Central Europe.

The city of Leipzig donated the land and 20,000 Goldmark, but the vast majority of the construction costs (6 million Goldmark) was raised through a special lottery and donations that poured in from enthusiastic supporters from Leipzig and across the Reich. 1 A Berlin architect by the name of Bruno Schmitz was awarded the contract to design the monument. Perhaps no other Wilhelmine-era architect left more symbols of German nationalism on the landscape than Schmitz, whose designs included other imposing monuments such as the Kaiser Wilhelm I statue at Porta Westfalica in Westphalia, the monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I at the German Corner in Koblenz where the Rhine and Mosel rivers meet, and the eighty-one-meter-tall Kyffhäusser memorial in Thuringia (Pohlsander 2008). The Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations) was dedicated by Kaiser Wilhelm II with pomp and circumstance in 1913, on the eve of World War I and one century after the battle that had played such an important role in fortifying a national mission.

In the twenty-first century, with the benefit of hindsight, German nationalism is practically synonymous with the tragic conflagrations of the twentieth century, which were fueled by the essentialist and zero-sum logic of European nationalisms of which the German brand was the most aggressive. Schmitz’s designs were for time immemorial—carved of materials such as granite, as eternal as the German nation—which in part explains why his monuments remain as awkward anchors near the current territorial edges of Germany, on landscapes that have otherwise been scrubbed of uncomfortable reminders of past German national ambitions.

The material and cartographic legacies of nationalist ideologies make Germany an ideal laboratory for understanding the territorial dimensions of national identities. The sheer volume of material also makes doing the topic of scaling identities a daunting task. This chapter examines the German national question in three registers. The first section considers the tortured and tortuous geographies of national identity construction during the late nineteenth century up to World War II. In particular, it examines the role that regional exclusion and internal othering played as the modern German nation-state was being constructed. The second section of the chapter considers the question of competing nationhoods during the post–World War II era when Germany was divided into East and West. In particular, it looks at the role that institutions such as educational systems, military conscription, and competitive sports played in reifying distinct “nations within nations.” The third section considers a united Germany in the context of a Europeanized continent and how internal German discourses of nation and nationalism are replicated and rescaled as part of the country’s centrality in the European integration project. While some in Germany have posited a post-national era for the Bundesrepublik in Europe, the chapter argues that the histories of nationalism continue to cast long shadows both internally as well as on how the country’s role is perceived by other Europeans.

Though these registers are temporal, the chapter also considers the scalar manifestations of nation and territory. As my past work has argued (Johnson and Coleman 2012), understanding the dialectical relationships between subnational regions and nation-building processes is central to understanding how national scripts are read, understood, and practiced by the populations involved. Along the same lines, the opening anecdote about Leipzig—a city like many others with a strong historic sense of local identity distinct from German nationhood—places the local, more intimate scale of daily lives of its inhabitants into a scalar relationship with the more abstract, mapped territory of the whole nation (Herb, chapter 1 of this volume). Highly localized, material reminders of national projects (such as the Völki monument) are in a sense in conversation with larger-scale national scripts, and how the population navigates these scalar relationships can tell us much about the larger questions of why it is that national identity has been the most persistent, powerful, and destruc tive force in world history. More recently, as Herb and Kaplan point out in their preceding chapters, it is the back-and-forth between national and European or even global identities that provides fodder for thinking through scale and identity. At the geographic center of Europe, and figuratively at the center of the European integration project, as the last section of this chapter argues, any discussion of German national identity requires thinking through the local materiality of national identity, the national territorial outcomes of national construction, and the consequences for more recent efforts of cross-border integration.

Constructing a New Nation in Unified Germany: Scale and Territory

The territorial script of German nation building finds its origins in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the movements that culminated in a unified German state in 1871 were largely reactive to broader developments in Europe. Growing territorial jockeying among Europe’s empires, including Russia, Britain, France, Austria, and Turkey, made it clear to German elites that the loose, military-economic associations such as the North German Confederation were potentially disadvantaged if pitted against the political-military might of neighboring powers. A series of power-sharing agreements in German-speaking Central Europe during the middle of the nineteenth century provided only temporary relief from the growing pressures from more organized empires, and following the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, which saw an overwhelming victory for Prussia, the stage was set for the formal declaration of a unified German Empire under the leadership of Prussia and with junior kingdoms such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony signing on as much out of pragmatism as nationalist sentiment. Germany’s 1871 borders did not, however, include all German-speaking peoples in Central Europe; notably not part of the new empire was Austria, and thus the “Lesser Germany” solution ( Kleindeutschland) instead of “Greater Germany” ( Grossdeutschland) would continue to shape the territorial script of German nationhood well into the twentieth century when Hitler annexed Austria in 1939 in the Anschluss (see generally, Blackbourn 2003).

The new Germany now had a shape (see map 3.1), defined by firm boundaries for the first time in the history of German-speaking peoples (Confino 1997). The year 1871 was an important milestone in German national identity construction, but in fact it was closer to a beginning than an endpoint in the construction of a German nation. With the country’s inside and outside defined by a border, the work of the nation turned to building an empire abroad as well as defeating “internal enemies” (Blackbourn 2003, 331) that did not conform to what elites in Prussia viewed as the characteristics of German-ness that would enable the Reich not only to survive but to thrive as an industrial, military, and political heavyweight. 2 Germany’s internal geography played a key role in building up national ideals, and in particular the Catholic regions of Bavaria and the Rhineland were viewed as deadweight on the nation’s progress in the eyes of the heavily Protestant Prussian leadership (Johnson and Coleman 2012). Nationalism and its relationship to progress and modernity is a recurring theme in German history, as will be made clear in subsequent sections.

The “culture of progress” (Blackbourn 2003) that defined rapidly industrializing, urbanizing, and militarizing Germany of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in remarkable feats of technological advancement and virtually unparalleled increases in productivity. Yet the internal enemies, particularly of Orientalized, “static, historyless” Catholics (Borutta 2003), led Otto von Bismarck and his allies to wage a Kulturkampf (usually translated as “culture war”) against Catholics, and this effort was abetted by newspaper editors and intellectuals who not-so-subtly called out the Catholic fringe of the empire (Poland, the Rhineland, Baden, Bavaria) as “a brake on civilization,” a “swamp,” even a “pathology” that needed fixing (Blackbourn 2003, 213; see also Hechter 1975).

Map 3.1. German Territories 1871 to Present Day

Source : Cartography by Robbie Seltzer, Middlebury College.

The point of most relevance to the scaling of identities is how geography was used to construct a national script. Looking back on the history of German nationalism, with all that was done in its name during the twentieth century, it is easy to forget that the unification of Germany in 1871 brought together a large group of people under the same political-territorial umbrella, but allegiances and identity politics in the new empire were highly parochial and cleavages along regional, class-based, urban-rural, as well as linguistic and religious lines were pervasive. Internal othering, or regional devaluation and national valuation, largely at the behest of a Prussian elite and regional allies who saw great potential in the national cause, was remarkably successful at rescaling the locus of identity at the scale of Germany (Applegate 1999; Johnson and Coleman 2012). All of the monuments and memorials designed by the Berlin architect Bruno Schmitz listed at the start of the chapter, for example, were initiated not by a national government seeking to build allegiance in the provinces, but by regional Vereine (clubs) paying homage to national stories, whether the Battle of the Nations or Kaiser Wilhelm I’s greatness, for a regional audience. These physical monuments sought to remind provincials of a greater cause, the shared history, traditions, culture, and of course territory, of Germany. As Rogers Brubaker has argued, the world is not made up of nations waiting to be discovered; rather, nationhood is “pervasively institutionalized in the practice of states and the workings of the state system” (Brubaker 1996, 21). It is not only states and state systems complicit in building up the nation, however, as the German case shows.

While internal othering played an instrumental role in forging German identity during this period, it is also important to note the activities of the empire in Central Europe and farther flung colonies. The territories in what is today Poland that were incorporated into the German Empire were subject of sustained attention in popular discourse as well as in official policies designed to incorporate them into the Heimat (Conrad 2012). 3 During the 1890s, Ostmarkenromanen (novels about the Eastern marches) popularly depicted Germany’s equivalent of America’s frontier: territories in need of settling and civilizing (Kopp 2012). Emigrants who might have otherwise been lost to the United States were instead targeted in settlement programs, and the results of projects designed to Germanify the East led to 120,000 German speakers relocating to Silesia and East Prussia (Conrad 2012, 156–57).

Concurrently with nation building at home and in Central Europe, Germany was also amassing a sizable set of colonial territories abroad. These included German Southwest Africa (today Namibia), Cameroon, Togo, German East Africa (today Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda), New Guinea, Samoa, and the Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) treaty port and surrounding province in China. The economic dividends reaped by Germany from its empire abroad were modest, partly owing to the relatively short duration of its empire abroad and many of the areas not having particularly fertile soils or useful natural resources (Conrad 2012). However, as a means of fortifying a national mythos and sense of mission, Germany’s colonial experiment was not a lost cause. Colonial societies in Hamburg, Berlin, and elsewhere fostered intellectual curiosity about the geography of distant, exotic(ized) places, while newspaper accounts and popular literature affirmed both a confidence in German virtues (foremost among them industriousness) and a sense of righteousness in the civilizing mission that undergirded the enterprise.

Colonies abroad and European territories gained by Prussia and the German Empire during the nineteenth century in what is today Poland therefore served multiple roles: as a territorial release valve for German demographic growth that would bolster the national mission; as sites of economic development and resource extraction; and as status markers of what a world power should count among its possessions, so that Germany joined the ranks of Great Britain, France, and upstart powers such as Russia, Japan, and the United States. In short, the nationalizing project worked at multiple, mutually reinforcing scales simultaneously. The loss of empire at the end of World War I dealt a serious blow to the national narrative, but of course the undergirding logic of nationalism was still very much alive and well. One need look no further than the approach the victors brought to redrawing borders in Central and Eastern Europe after World War I (including the pivotal role played by American geographer Isaiah Bowman; see Smith 2003) or the failure of the League of Nations to understand how the ideology of nationalism still rested on fertile ground in Europe.

Germany’s defeat in World War I and the demise of the Kaiserreich was followed by a turbulent decade-plus democratic experiment known as the Weimar Republic. That so many millions had died in battle on behalf of the German nation (not to mention the millions who had died fighting under other flags) was not enough to prevent the even larger conflagration that would come at the hands of the most infamous symbol of the toxic potential of nationalist ideology, Adolf Hitler.

In July 1933, half a year after taking power, Hitler was in Leipzig speaking in front of 120,000 followers at a regional meeting of his party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). The backdrop for his speech, as would be a backdrop multiple times over the coming years, was the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. The Third Reich was a regime that knew the power not only of national ideology and symbolism but also the role that territory and cartography could play in furthering its cause (Herb 1997). Indeed, geographers played a central role in the 1920s and 1930s in Leipzig and elsewhere in researching German-speaking populations outside the postwar borders of Germany and promoting “geo-organic” theories of the state: borders should be pliable depending on the strength and size of the nation inhabiting the state’s territory (Herb 1997). 4 Such theories were particularly useful tools for those seeking to instrumentalize the still unresolved German question—namely, by arguing that the largest ethno-linguistic group and largest economy in Europe was circumscribed by artificially imposed borders that left many German speakers outside them. The topic of the expansionist, genocidal war that Hitler would start in 1939 is a topic that merits a separate study on the role of national identity and territory. Suffice it to say: for most observers World War II is viewed as the culmination of the intellectual-cum-political project of nationalism that had been unleashed in Europe more than a century earlier. However, as the remainder of this chapter will show, the energies of national identity were repurposed, but even in Germany, the nation as a locus of identity formation and as an ideological vehicle persisted.

Postwar Germanies: 1945–1989

Stunde Null (Zero Hour), May 1945, capitulation to the Allied forces, subsequent occupation by Soviet, American, British, and French troops. The Nazis’ megalomania, their murderous campaigns against nearly any group that did not comport to their vision of the German nation, and the fanaticism that they were able to cultivate among ordinary people were all left in rubble; all that remained for most Germans was deprivation. American soldiers had been the first to reach Leipzig, and one of the last strongholds to fall in the city was the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, where over one hundred SS troops had been ordered to use the granite structure as a holdout against the advancing enemy—and they did until it was targeted with enough mortar shells to force their surrender. The occupying powers were left to settle the territorial questions that German nationalists—from the Hohenzollerns to the Nazis—had sought to settle by a mix of unification and expansionism since the early nineteenth century. The map of Germany would change rather dramatically in the wake of World War II. The Soviet Union claimed the lands around the port city of Königsberg in East Prussia (now the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad; see Diener and Hagen 2011), and accepted Poland’s new territorial outline with Silesia and other territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers entirely under Polish jurisdiction. The Potsdam Conference further decided that ethnic Germans living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other areas of Eastern Europe should be removed to Germany, and the forcible expulsion of Germans continues to be a delicate issue, especially between Poland and Germany. Occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria had their prewar borders restored, while in the west, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France.

Four years after the end of the war, the occupying powers permitted new German states to be formed: in May 1949, in the territories occupied by U.S., British, and French forces, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was created, and four months later in the Soviet occupation zone, including the eastern part of Berlin, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) came into existence. And so it was for the next forty years: two Germanies, two different political systems, and a cold war between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, playing out largely in and around Germany. During these four decades, even though neither the FRG nor GDR was technically fully sovereign, each state developed along separate paths with distinct bureaucracies, educational systems, militaries, and economies. It would be decades until either country officially acknowledged the right of the other to exist under the name “Germany.”

In many ways, this period of two Germanies is the most instructive in terms of questions of national identity. The prior script, of a nation-state for all ethnic Germans in Central Europe, had to be adapted and parts of it abandoned in the wake of the violently exclusionary politics leading to the Holocaust. New narratives, some overlapping, some completely divergent, were devised and communicated (Herb 2004). The entire premise of nationhood, “bounded communities of exclusion” (Herb 2004, 142), is complicated when one set of boundaries (of the community, distinguishing an ethnic German from an ethnic French or Pole) is bisected by another type of border, an imposed territorial line separating two polities. A nation divided did not, however, prevent new forms of national identity formation. Just as a unified educational system during the nineteenth century had been used to teach a standard German language and a shared literature (such as the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales—arguably no other individuals did more to shape the shared meanings of the German nation; see Snyder 1951), so too did the two Germanies’ educational apparatus communicate the new territorialities of two states with one nation. School geography textbooks, for example, portrayed maps that reflected the official positions of the two German states about the location of borders, whether East and West Germany were indeed distinct political geographic entities, and what sorts of landscape features the states contained (Herb 2004). For some observers, including the intellectual Günther Grass, the existence of two German states and one German culture ( Zweistaatlichkeit) was necessary to prevent the reemergence of a powerful single state that might be in a position to visit more horror on Europe and the world (Graham 2000).

In West Germany, the economic miracle ( Wirtschaftswunder) of the 1950s and 1960s entailed a refocusing of productive energies and economic potential on making stuff instead of war. The slogan “Made in West Germany” was a geographic maker’s mark symbolizing a new form of German national pride rooted in supposed German virtues, including hard work, persistence, efficiency, intelligence, and engineering skill. Civic nationalism, including the use of symbols of the state as anchors of identity, was embraced with at least as much vigor as ethno-nationalism was rejected or discouraged. The remarkable story of economic growth, a stable representative democracy and rights guaranteed by a liberal Basic Law, and a stable currency that was the envy of many other European countries, spawned intellectual concepts such as “constitutional patriotism” (Sternberger 1979) and “D-Mark nationalism” (Habermas 1990) to conceptualize “acceptable” forms of national identity during the postwar era (Graham 2000). Of course, such feelings were not simply of and by the people but, rather, were actively cultivated at home and abroad by private and state institutions alike. This is not to suggest that pride was uncontroversial; as the Historikerstreik of the 1980s showed, in the FRG there was considerable debate over whether a history such as Germany’s, especially in the shadow of the Holocaust, allowed any room for positive associations with the nation.

The more precarious position of the GDR among its own population made the regime in East Berlin even more invested in cultivating a distinct sense of nationhood, one that was rooted in a socialist state that provided a viable—and distinctively German—alternative to Anglo-American capitalism (Palmowski 2009). Much more of the pre-1945 German national script was rejected in East Germany than in West, and thanks in part to an information-obsessed, narrative-controlling regime, history could more easily be rewritten in the GDR. This included placing the blame for the rise of Nazism on capitalist ideology and valorizing the role that the new communist elite had played in resisting the Nazis.

Territory and Heimat played important roles in creating new national myths. East German natural landscapes, such as the Baltic Coast, the Ore Mountains ( Erzgebirge), and Saxon Switzerland ( Sächsische Schweiz), were depicted in state-sponsored art exhibitions, while West German landscapes were omitted (Palmowski 2009). Even arguably visually unappealing places were celebrated as constitutive parts of the national territory, including brown coal mines, oil refineries, and chemical plants (Palmowski 2009). Celebrations of the (East) German Heimat glossed over other distinctly East German landscapes, such as the Berlin Wall and the infrastructure cutting the GDR off from West Germany, but also the picturesque half-timbered villages that were crumbling due to a lack of upkeep (e.g., Quedlinburg in the Ore Mountains). And as in West Germany, it was considered taboo to include depictions of lost territories in Poland and elsewhere in books and visual arts. It is difficult to measure how effective such elite-driven strategies were in engendering a new sense of German identity in East Germany, or for that matter if the ethno-national script could possibly be matched in terms of forging identity and allegiance as the more civic-minded nationalism that was emerging in East and West Germany.

As a result of the Potsdam Conference, the city of Leipzig was part of the Soviet occupation zone and then the GDR from the very beginning. The Monument to the Battle of the Nations initially posed East German authorities with a conundrum: a massive, not easily destroyed structure that was virtually synonymous with the militarism and nationalism of Germany’s past. There was a way out, though, that would actually contribute to the national myth making of the worker and farmer state: Russian troops had fought on the side of Germans against the oppression of Napoleon. The monument was trumped up by the East German regime as a symbol of the friendship between the two communist states that were joined in a new struggle, this time a class struggle against the capitalist West. Conveniently, the same week of the dedication of the monument in 1913 and just down the street, a Russian Orthodox church was dedicated to the memory of the 22,000 Russian troops who had lost their lives at the Battle of the Nations.

(Re)Unification and Reconciling National Scripts

The two Germanies were reunified in 1990. This was not a merger of equals. The GDR’s institutions and symbols were dissolved, and its political culture and economic and educational structures were systematically eliminated. All that was associated with the GDR—from state-owned enterprises to the Stasi (secret police)—was dismantled. The Basic Law ( Grundgesetz) of the FRG became the law of the entire land, and as a condition of reunification, the borders of Germany were officially settled and recognized by the FRG and postwar occupying powers. While the fall of the Berlin Wall was an occasion of celebration for the vast majority of Germans, the following years showed that the process of unifying two states—each of which had developed over the forty years distinct sets of shared meanings—was the source of recriminations on both sides. One could read the stereotypes in the media, but also hear them repeatedly in clichéd, almost scripted, conversations about bossy, arrogant Besserwessis (“know-it-all West Germans”) and ungrateful, lazy Jammerossis (whiner East Germans). Twenty-five years after reunification the project of bringing together two distinct economies and national cultures is not complete. It became fairly clear early in the process that this would not be a seamless, painless transition. Hama summarizes:

Reunification was a major transplant operation which would have brought on complications even if a meticulous matching of the relevant organs had been conducted prior to surgery. No such compatibility existed between the two Germanies and yet they were sewn together as though they were a perfect match, as if sharing a common currency and common wage levels would suit both sides admirably. [. . .] now it will take time for the stitch marks to disappear completely. (Hama 1996, 23)

A wholesale reactivation of the pre-division sense of German-ness was not possible given how World War II and the Holocaust had tainted national associations—not to mention how re-education campaigns in both West and East Germany had largely discredited much of prewar history. 5 It was largely the difficult process of reunification that helped shape the discourse of the new Germany’s national narrative. West Germany had a larger population, its media were the only ones left in the unified country, its taxpayers were funding the 1.5 trillion euro transfer of wealth to the East through a hefty “solidarity tax” (still being assessed after twenty-five years), and in the wake of the Cold War, the communists were widely viewed in Germany and beyond as the losers. Amid widespread dissatisfaction with the progress of integrating eastern Germany into the economic structures of the West and “blooming landscapes” with jobs as Helmut Kohl had promised, national narratives again were deployed as explanation. The GDR had created a populace of chronically state-dependent people who did not share the same values of hard work, industry, save-and-invest capitalism as the FRG had (Johnson 2011). In fact, according to a commonly heard narrative, the incorporation of the GDR was dragging down the economic powerhouse FRG in a situation similar to what Italy had with its Mezzogiorno (the chronic economic laggard region south of Rome that had allegedly impeded unified Italy from prospering as it might have otherwise done). This comparison, which was widespread for at least a decade in the 1990s and early 2000s, resonated with the western German middle class’s sense of bootstrap economic miracle (Johnson 2011). In other words, either fix the East and easterners’ qualitative shortcomings, or we become like Italy. One territorial piece of unified Germany, the former East Germany, was a chronic economic laggard, and without fixing the East, a major preoccupation of the German state over the past twenty-five years, all that had been accomplished in the post-1945 era, from the economic miracle to a widely respected social democracy, was at risk. As the Wilhelmine and post-1989 eras show, internal othering has been central to (re)building the national brand in Germany.

Germany in Europe

After an intense period of inward focus after 1989, the past decade has seen a Germany that has taken a more assertive role in Europe and globally. Germany’s history with nationalism is never too far in the background, whether concerning questions of participating in peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan or the undisputed economic and political leadership role Germany has taken in the European Union. Much of the preceding text has been about stability: of a fledgling new state at the center of Europe in the nineteenth century seeking to match the Great Power dynamics that defined the corners of the continent; of the rise of Hitler in the 1920s with bold promises to settle unresolved territorial questions along intensely nationalistic terms; and of postwar Germanies both in their own way seeking alternate models to the hubristic nationalism of previous eras. The rescaling of German identity in an era of Europeanization continues the theme of stability, but instead of confronting internal enemies in the pursuit of development goals, the EU has become the venue for debating shared values, democracy, and the role of national identity in an essentially cosmopolitan project.

The project of European integration has historically been one led by France and Germany (see Murphy, chapter 6 of this volume), but it is increasingly clear that the EU only works with German leadership and financing. The financial crisis and subsequent bailouts of member states such as Greece and Ireland in some ways call into question analyzing Europe through the lenses of the nation-state and the sovereign state system. The prominent German sociologist Ulrich Beck has diagnosed the relationship between nationalism and Germany’s role in shared European space by arguing that Germans are intent on shaking the yoke of constant penitents, constantly having to apologize for the country’s “racist” and “warmongering” past, by becoming the “schoolmaster and moral enlighteners of Europe” (Beck 2013, 63). Certainly the perception among many Greeks who feel put upon by austerity, and who respond by marching in the streets carrying images of German chancellor Angela Merkel in Hitler garb, would seem to support Beck’s thesis.

Just as it would be difficult to imagine a workable project of European integration without the country with the largest population and economy central to it, it would be difficult to imagine a European project as it has evolved over seven decades without the horrors of German nationalism as a historical backdrop and motivating force. The origins of European integration were to a large degree about reconciliation between historical rivals France and Germany toward the end of preventing future wars on European soil. Rather than being a topic that is assiduously avoided as embarrassing or uncomfortable, the perils of nationalism play an important role in the “invention” of traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) for European institutions, from the official motto (“united in diversity”) to Europe Day (May 9, the anniversary of French foreign minister Robert Schuman’s famous 1950 declaration calling for a unified Europe, and a day after the anniversary of the capitulation of Germany to the Allies in 1945) (Fornäs 2012).

Conclusion

Völki , the Monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, makes the news every few years as a site of remembrance as well as for the occasional concert and party. In 2013, on the 200th anniversary of the battle and 100th of the dedication of the monument, the city of Leipzig put on a months-long party on the park grounds surrounding the massive structure that is still by some measures the largest monument in Europe (Reichel 2013). Instead of celebrating the German nation, the festivities were for European unity, and the monument itself was curiously repurposed as a symbol of European peace. This chapter examined the scaling of German national identity during critical periods of the country’s history by looking at the role that place, territory, and othering played in constructing a German nation. However, it is important to point out that the passage of time and changing geographies of the German nation-state do not necessarily mean clean transitions in the role of nationalism and symbolism. There are always echoes and spillovers of the past, and perhaps no other place illustrates the difficulties in shaking off nationalism’s worst associations than Leipzig’s massive monument. For neo-Nazis and other far-right groups, the monument is a symbol of Germany’s past greatness and the possibilities for a renewed vision of exclusionary national hubris. Every few years, the monument is the site of a planned march or demonstration by either far-right groups or those opposing them.

By way of conclusion, let me offer two observations that link past to present in the political and geographical contexts explored in this chapter. First, for all the emphasis on German nationalism in this chapter, it is important to keep in mind that no other place exhibits a higher awareness today of the questions grappled with in this book than Germany. This is the result of the humiliations of wars fought and lost and the deep collective and highly individual introspection the country’s history has occasioned. Whether in polite conversation, in the pages of newspapers, or in political discourse at all levels of government, historical and geographical legacies of German nationalism are never far from the surface and rarely are silenced. Methodologically, then, if we want to grapple with the workings of national identity through time and place, the case of Germany continues to be highly instructive. Second, and related, it is impossible to understand both the remarkable successes of European integration and the ongoing challenges of forging a more cosmopolitan, post-national Europe without appreciating the shadows of Germany’s role at the center of Europe. In part what this chapter has illustrated is that this is not just because people continue to self-identify, for example, as Germans, French, or Hungarians rather than as Europeans, but also because the vocabularies, landscapes, and cartographies that inform daily lives are still so thoroughly imbued with nationalism’s past.

Notes

1. http://www.stadtgeschichtliches-museum-leipzig.de/site_deutsch/voelkerschlachtdenkmal/geschichte.php . Somewhat inconveniently for the national mythos, the Kingdom of Saxony, where Leipzig is located, was allied with Napoleon, and Saxon troops fought alongside Napoleon’s; however, this seemed to be forgotten in the push to commemorate the battle a century later. ( http://www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/sonntag/voelkerschlachtdenkmal-der-klotz-der-nation/8954758.html).

2. The biological metaphors of surviving, thriving, and such, have long been a part of the national narrative in Germany and elsewhere; it is no coincidence that at around the same time as the German nation-state was forming, geographers such as Ritter and Ratzel became inspired by Darwin’s writings and compared nations to living, organic entities that could either grow or shrink and die depending on the vitality of their populations (Cresswell 2013).

3. For further exploration of the concept of Heimat, see Herb 2004.

4. During the late 1800s, the University of Leipzig was home to geography professor Friedrich Ratzel, who developed the ideas of Lebensraum and the “organic state” that would be put into practice decades later by the Nazis.

5. Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, and others were part of the shared cultural inheritance that both sides could call upon, but it seems culture alone is not enough for a shared national history.

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