15. On Germany

During the breakdown of the Roman world, kingdoms turn up in the space of the dissolving empire and the sites of its former provinces. In Gaul, little by little, but rather early on, the form of the kingdom begins to prevail, as regnum Francorum. Next door lies the complex Germanic space. It is complex because Germany is early on both external and internal to the Roman Empire.⁸³ There, the form of the kingdom does not seem to “take” or assert itself, which is to say, first of all, as far as we can observe, it does not succeed in stabilizing and securing a durable regime. And yet for several centuries, an entity in these lands calls itself the Regnum Teutonicum, later translated as the kingdom of Germany, and strives to shape itself as that. But whereas in neighboring France, the process of kingdom formation, though progressive and passing through various stages, asserts itself irreversibly, the nearby related undertaking does not lead to the lasting construction and constitution of the Germanic area as a kingdom.

In the context of linguistic facts, Benveniste notes a comparable heterogeneity.

When we approach this notion of “king” in its lexical expression, we are struck by the fact that the word represented by rex appears only at the two extremities of the Indo-European world and is missing in the central part. We find on the one side rex in Latin, while Celtic is represented by Irl. ri and Gaulish –rix; at the other extremity we have Sanskrit rāj-(an). There is nothing in between, not in another Italic language, nor in Germanic, Baltic, Slavic or Greek, or even in Hittite. This correlation is extremely important. . . . This fact is bound up with the very structure of the societies in question. It is not a simple accident of history. . . . The essential fact which explains these survivals that are common to the Indo-Iranian and Italo-Celtic societies is the existence of powerful colleges of priests who were the repositories of sacred traditions which they maintained with a formalist rigour. . . . However we should guard against believing that it was only because of the archaism of society that these facts have been preserved in these cases and not elsewhere. The changes made in the very structure of institutions have brought it about that the specific notion of rex was unknown to other peoples. There are certainly both in Greek and in Germanic words which may be translated as “king.” But the Greek basileús has nothing in common with the rāj.⁸⁴

This information has to be handled cautiously, but it seems to allow us to think that a—linguistic and social—structure was available in the Gallo-Roman space that served as a base or recourse in the constitution of royalty as a form, whereas this same (language-related or social) setup may have been absent in the Germanic area.

If royalty does not “take” there, what is the type of constitution that forms on the territory of the former Roman territory of Lesser Germania, giving its singular mode of existence to this piece detached from the empire? I suggest that no specific figure of this constitution presents itself, or, at least, is retained and used to identify what is coming there, to the land of the Germanic kingdom [Germanie], as the constitution of Germany [Allemagne]. There is no alternative model for royalty, that would be facing it as a possible (other) way of becoming, for a fragment of the former empire. In breaking up, the empire gives rise to the formation of kingdoms—or nothing. And since this nothing is evidently impossible, it is the idea of empire itself that presents itself to give figure to the (Germanic) fragment of the empire. As an alternative to royalty, only the idea of empire is available to figure what is coming forth in the “Germanic” space during the dislocation of the empire. What then follows the Roman Empire is the new empire (figurally or “imaginarily,” as it were). For some time, there will be no royal constitution in Germany, only an imperial constitution. Or to put it another way, for quite some time, Germany will only be able to give figure to its formation and constitution as perpetuating, inheriting, and superseding the crushed Roman Empire. Accordingly, the constitution of Germany will in principle be highly charged with universality, connected with the imperial idea as such, and furthermore the idea of universality in the extensive mode (whereas the constitution of France, as we have seen, is associated with statization, that is, intensive universality). This calls to mind the commonplace observation that it took a long time for Germany to become a nation—there was a lack of nationality in Germany.⁸⁵ Germany in this phase is not produced specifically as a nation because the nation is the kingdom turned around and Germany is not produced as a kingdom—because after the breakup of the empire, the Germanic area is not a kingdom (a figure that neither “holds” nor “takes” there), and therefore not the nation overthrowing it, but instead the continuation replaying and superseding the empire itself; therefore the German nation will only be produced later on, in a different way.

At the very moment one writes the words “imperial constitution of Germany,” one should erase the word “Germany” [Allemagne], for what is thus constituted is not exactly Germany, to be precise. Or to put it differently, by virtue of this imperial constitution, what is constituted is and is not Germany, at the same time. It is simultaneously Germany and what overflows and exceeds it. Conversely, “Germany” (the idea of Germany, as it were) will form itself all at once while referring to this constitution, this imperial undertaking, and against it, as a defect inscribed at the heart of this empire, a lack of Germany at the heart of the Reich—lack of nation [défaut de nation] is the term later used—here, a lack of kingship, in a way. Excess or lack of kingship, imperial excess over a kingdom in default, the constitution of Germany will inscribe itself lastingly into the logic of what one may term (following Jacques Derrida) its supplementary deficiency.

Otto I, known as the Great, who became king of the Regnum Teutonicum [Germanie] in 936, has retrospectively at times seemed the major player in the institution of Germany [Allemagne]. His crowning as emperor took place in Rome in 962, after he had earlier assumed the title of king of Italy (in 951). The Germanic empire, of which Otto I is the first titleholder, thus visibly maintains a very ambiguous relation with Germanity, since for all its being German, the empire in fact comprised the kingdom of Germany and the kingdom of Italy. This has two consequences: on the one hand, the empire is anchored in Germany [Germanie] and simultaneously spills over its borders. Now, this ambiguity, which can be considered constitutive of any imperial project or imperialism, is irreconcilable with the formation of a kingdom. Germany cannot constitute itself at the same time as a kingdom and an empire—since, by essence, the kingdom is a response to the decomposition of imperiality.⁸⁶ Kingdom and empire are incompatible, at least inasmuch as they cannot be constituted together. On the other hand, it obviously makes much sense that the area of the spillover is Italy. Italy is not just any site; it includes Rome—and the imperial design on Rome is decisive: the Germanic entity will never dispense with Rome; it will keep involving Rome in its imperial project and claiming to join the ecclesial legacy with the imperial legacy. From the start, the Holy Roman Empire, too, attempts a unitary overhaul of the theologico-political. It also wants to reunite the church and the empire—and reestablish their imperial unity—like the kingdom, thus, as we saw earlier. But the kingdom acknowledges the decomposition of Romanity at least insofar as it lodges in a territory, in a place. The kingdom tries unity, as a unity of place. As for the Holy Roman Empire, in a way it does not acknowledge anything: it wants to join church and empire, remake Rome for good—undivided Rome, ecclesio-imperial Rome, entirely redone. Now, Rome was not that synthesis, except at the end, apparently, just before the fall, and doubtless for that reason, to ward off or greet the imminent catastrophe, an end-of-the-world anthem to the purely impossible. One cannot reunite church and empire: they are the names of that which divides and constitutes itself through the division. A world can join them mythically, magically—and then collapse, myth in hand. However, the Holy Roman Empire cannot or will not accept that ecclesio-imperial Rome is finished and cannot be remade.

Further, the impossible imperial undertaking closes off the paths to the constitution of a kingdom—blocks the constitution of Germany [Allemagne]. This is a commonplace of historical analysis.

Because of their transalpine politics, the Saxon emperors have often been blamed for compromising the constitution of “a national body of Germany.” A less grandiose, more northern, politics would have led the German people to withdraw into themselves, with a strong central power, whereas their Mediterranean chimeras led them to catastrophe. What is there to say to the detractors of the Ottonian rulers? No one in Germany at that time defended the idea of a “national empire.”⁸⁷

Let us skip over what seems an inevitable a posteriori reconstitution: the idea of a “German people,” the subject of this adventure, that mistook the path to follow. Prior to this history, no such people existed, in Germany or elsewhere, because the effect of this history was precisely to produce the people as such.⁸⁸ This process and its ambiguity (both royal and imperial, and thus later national and metanational, as we shall see) produced the German people. No nation existed before the sequences described here led to their being constituted. Moreover, the term “national empire” is simultaneously both contradictory and anachronistic: in its own way, this phrase expresses what I have designated as the process of constituting the kingdom; and it is true that German history oscillates between this (royal) constitution and the imperial re-constitution that would mark the will to have a Reich in its successive instances. For the time period that is our focus (the end of the Middle Ages, when kingdoms take shape elsewhere), the name “Germany” [Allemagne] pinpoints this indecision exactly.

.   .   .

The constitution of Germany as a kingdom has failed. The idea of its imperial constitution is essentially untenable: imperial constitution, supposing it is possible, cannot be Germany’s. The empire is a universalist idea, and this universalism is extensive and geographical; this is what makes the essence of its project. Now, the idea of Germany (like that of France or Spain) is a product of the breakdown of this universality, its fragmentation into places, its dislocation. Lesser Germany is a province of the empire, like Gaul or Iberia. With regard to imperial universalism, any Germanism is essentially provincial; and because of this, it is as if a double self-destructive tendency were undermining the idea of a Germanic empire. On the one hand, as a universalism, the (Germanic) empire will always essentially tend to exceed the Germanic area, seizing other lands, particularly Italian territories and Rome, whose name and idea are associated with imperiality as such and with its native solidarity with the church. The empire will thus always fail at constituting Germany, because its project will always exceed Germanism as such. But on the other hand, since the idea of empire is universalist and plurivocal, endowed with local multiplicity by virtue of its very extension, multiprovincial in its concept, it will lead Germany to fragment and its parts to multiply, producing various localities and new “provinces,” its principalities. In other words, as the empire is going through its dislocation, the transfer onto Germany of the schema of the empire embodies a breaking-up and provincial multiplication—fragmentation into hundreds of principalities. In the context of the empire, Germany is thus a double impossibility: externally, because the empire overspills it into Italy and the east; internally, because the empire dismantles it into principalities.

It is to this impossibility of Germany that a new project responds, by undertaking to reshape it, on a new basis, and to re-constitute it where those first (royal and imperial) endeavors failed. This very different attempt bears the name “Reformation.” Predating Martin Luther, the formula “Deutschland bedarf einer Reformation” (Germany needs a reformation) was “the slogan, which was rather vague but well suited to express the imprecise desires and worried aspirations of the German Nation.”⁸⁹ The famous “Open Letter to the Christian Nobility Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate,” which Luther published in 1520 (one of his three “great Reformation writings”), articulates this project with much structured rigor. Its author’s Christian project and his German project—they are inseparable; only our retrospective view sees distinct national and religious intentions in it. For Luther, it is one and the same enterprise: the Reformation is plainly and evenly both Christian and German. The “Open Letter” is addressed to the Christian nobility of the German nation. The ecclesiastical project is to constitute Germany. A concept answers this project: the concept of the “German nation,” which we shall have to question, while avoiding all the assimilations and anticipations that will not fail to crop up. But from the start we can say something that leaves no doubt whatsoever: the German nation is precisely the addressee of Luther’s call for a Reformation. If Germany is constituted as a nation, it will be by the Reformation and thanks to it. Or to put it another way, the Reformation is a (new) undertaking for the constitution of Germany, and this constitution will be ecclesiastical: the nation is a theological idea.⁹⁰

To know more about this, we need to read this astonishing text a little more closely.⁹¹ It opens with the famous metaphor of the three walls, and is organized around it: “The Romanists, with great adroitness, have built three walls about them, behind which they have hitherto defended themselves in such wise that no one has been able to reform them; and this has been the cause of terrible corruption throughout all Christendom.”⁹² Indeed, the project is for a Reformation, in which the stakes are the fate of Christianity as a whole. The first wall is the distinction between the layman’s state and the ecclesiastical state. For Luther, this distinction is an “invention” (p. 66), which he sets in opposition to the unique determination of the “Christian estate.” “Yet no one should be frightened by it [this distinction]; and for this reason—viz., that all Christians are truly of the ‘spiritual [or ecclesiastical (Gm., geistlich)—Trans.] estate’” (ibid.). Among Christians there is “no difference at all but that of office” (ibid.); “as Paul says in I Corinthians xii,⁹³ We are all one body, yet every member has its own work” (ibid.). As a result, through “baptism all of us are consecrated to the priesthood, as St. Peter says in I Peter ii,⁹⁴ ‘Ye are a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom’”; and with the Apocalypse, “‘Thou hast made us by Thy blood to be priests and kings’” (ibid.).⁹⁵ The development of his thesis is threefold. First of all, the distinction (between ecclesiastical and lay states) has no object and is misleading because there is only one state—but it is the ecclesiastical state. The primordial unity in question here is that of the church, that is to say, the assembly’s. There is only one assembly in the midst of which differences are functional ones, just as the sensory or motor functions of the parts of the body are distinct. The unity that the bodily metaphor deals with is ecclesial unity, the first founding unity of the assembly of the people. That is why the thesis is known as universal priesthood: everyone who is baptized is a priest; the common state is the ecclesiastical state. It is in no way a secularism that is involved, but on the contrary a general and full ecclesiology, without any reservation. The differences do not oppose an inside and an outside of the assembly but internal functions of the assembly itself. That is why royalty and sovereignty will be thought of as functions of the assembly, internal to the Church as the assembly of the people of God.

In a very logical but nonetheless astonishing way in this context, Luther draws a double conclusion:

Therefore when the bishop consecrates it is the same thing as if he, in the place and stead of the whole congregation [Gm., Versammlung], all of whom have like power, were to take one out of their number [Gm., Haufen] and charge him to use this power for the others; just as though ten brothers, all king’s sons and equal heirs, were to choose one of themselves to rule the inheritance for them all,—they would all be kings and equal in power, though one of them would be charged with the duty of ruling.

To make it still clearer. If a little group [Gm., Häuflein] of pious Christian laymen were taken captive and set down in a wilderness, and had among them no priest consecrated by a bishop, and if there in the wilderness they were to agree in choosing one of themselves, married or unmarried, and were to charge him with the office of baptising, saying mass, absolving and preaching, such a man would be as truly a priest as though all bishops and popes had consecrated him. That is why in cases of necessity any one can baptise and give absolution, which would be impossible unless we were all priests. . . . It was in the manner aforesaid that Christians in olden days chose from their number [aus dem Haufen] bishops and priests. (Luther, “Open Letter,” pp. 67–68)

It is a matter, here, of proposing a theory of consecration. But to do so, Luther rigorously distributes the two comparisons he has developed. The first concerns royalty: royal children elect one in their group to exercise their power. They all remain equal kings but only one of them is charged with royalty; he is the depositary of this function but exercises this power in the name of “the whole congregation [Versammlung], all of whom have like power.” Later on the same will be said about royalty, in appropriate terms: “the temporal power has become a member of the body of Christendom, and is of the ‘spiritual estate,’ though its work is of a temporal nature” (p. 71). What defines royal authority is its task; it has no specificity as a state. The sacrament (the consecration of the coronation, in this instance) consists merely in choosing a king among the crowd, which is the common body of which the one consecrated remains a member. But (and the second comparison develops this) the one performing the consecration is a member of it too; for, instead of kings, the second part of this passage mentions priests—and it is essentially the same thing (this being the thesis here). If a company of “laymen” is in the desert, it will elect from its midst one of its members to carry out all the worship and to bestow all the sacraments. And the designated member will truly be a priest, “as though all bishops and popes had consecrated him.” The sacrament comes from the assembly as such; the one who is consecrating merely speaks and acts in its name. This “would be impossible unless we were all priests”—everyone baptized, everyone a priest. The common, unique state is the ecclesiastical state. In truth, there are no laymen.

One is thus clearly dealing with a general ecclesiology here. The one body where all functions are organically integrated is the assembly, and within it there are only mandates, and the allocation and distribution of charges. As mentioned earlier, sacraments are the depositing upon the individual of a sign attesting that the assembly temporarily provides itself with the means of exercising an office. But everything, royalty as well as priesthood, originates from the assembly and is grounded in it.

From all this it follows that there is really no difference between laymen and priests, princes and bishops, “spirituals” and “temporals,” as they call them, except that of office and work, but not of “estate”; for they are all of the same estate,—true priests, bishops and popes,—though they are not all engaged in the same work. (Luther, “Open Letter,” p. 69; emphasis added)

Rigorously, the Reformation proposes a reunification of the theologico-political, but it is a theological unification. We find ourselves in a situation exactly symmetrical with regard to the one described about the kingdom: while the kingdom was a model of the reunion of the sovereign and the assembly, within the regime of sovereignty, the Reformation deals with a reunion, too, but one that unfolds wholly as an ecclesiality; here, the common space of the sovereign and the assembly is—absolutely—the assembly.

That is why these (royal and priestly) functions cannot be the object of any appropriation. There is neither a lay state nor an ecclesiastical state separate from the common state because there is nothing pertaining properly to the layman or the priest. These functions, which are exercised in the singular, are common by essence and only become singular in the modality of their implementation. This office or mandate never negates the common character of the being that expresses itself through it—this is what the sacrament makes plain. “For what is common to all [Gm., der Gemeinde], no one dare take upon himself without the will and the command of the community” (p. 68). No essential appropriation, no legitimate property as the property of a state: any function can be revoked, any mandate rescinded. There is no state—except the Christian state, the state of the assembly, the common state. This common state is given figure by the image of the body, which is more than an image:

This is the teaching of St. Paul in Romans xii⁹⁶ and I Corinthians xii, and of St. Peter in I Peter ii,⁹⁷ as I have said above, viz., that we are all one body of Christ, the Head, all members one of another. Christ has not two different bodies, one “temporal,” the other “spiritual.” He is one Head, and He has one body. (Luther, “Open Letter,” p. 69; emphasis added)

What these pages convey is thus a project to reform Christianity, that is to say, a general reform of the Church, but, since the Church means “all Christians,” in the sense that the Reformation affects the social as a whole. Now, at the same time, this project also sets forth a constitution of Germany. Germans should bring on this undertaking because it is Germany that is touched by its urgency. Now, in the text, the passage from one plane to the other, from Christianity to Germany, is never thematized. The text keeps asserting the unity of the two, but their link—the connection leading from one agency to the other—is never the object of a deductive argumentation. It is the Reformation of Christianity, and equally that of Germany, but nowhere is there an account of how and why Germany thus takes on the destiny of Christianity.

Yet the project itself carried the seeds of this question. If it is a question of remaking the church, precisely to re-constitute it as an assembly, one cannot avoid asking who or what is assembling in this way.⁹⁸ A first answer is ubiquitous in the text: they are the baptized. The limit, or difference, between Christianity and all of humanity is baptism. But which place does this limit trace out? How is the assembly circumscribed? What is the boundary, the space, and the topos of the gathering? What is the locus of that which assembles itself? The answer is: the space of the empire’s authority, namely, the world. The primitive church was constituted as the obverse or other side of the Roman Empire, and this relation reappears here under a new aspect. The empire was universal, and so was the church. Simply, because of the division, since the locus of the assembly (“its kingdom”) was not of this world, the topos of this universality was referred back to the figure of a doubled world. When the empire disintegrated, the question of the place of the (assembling) people became a pressing one: with the empire fragmented into kingdoms, what is the circumscription of the church? Is it the world, Catholic universality? Or the Gallican and Anglican countries? The church is the other of the empire—but which imperiality determines how its circumscription sets itself apart? This question became even acuter on German lands: at this time, there was no circumscription of Germany except that of the empire, which was doubly problematic (the empire was uncertain on its own, and it did not effectively outline Germany). Questions with regard to the place of the people who assemble are inscribed and become acuter in the space that this uncertainty lays out.

This ambiguity marks Luther’s text. Why does Germany have to take upon itself a Reformation that concerns all of Christianity? Elements of an answer run throughout his “Open Letter”—dispersed and without any apparent connection. It is because of the “distress and oppression which weigh down all the Estates of Christendom, especially of Germany” (“Open Letter,” p. 63)—and elsewhere because the empire (which is a function of Christianity) happens to be in the hands of the Germans;⁹⁹ or further, because “God has given us a noble youth to be our head and thereby has awakened great hopes of good in many hearts” (ibid.). The young man was Charles V, who as we know had a Burgundian father and a Spanish mother, whose mother tongue was French, and whose Germanity at this time merely consisted in his election to the head of the empire.¹⁰⁰

That is why the connection between the fate of Christianity and the task of the Germans, while continuously reasserted, is not the object of any specific thematization. The destiny of the church is played out in Germany—this is the way it is. Accordingly, the fate of this general ecclesiology and its rigorous construction, which I have located in Luther’s venture, itself becomes an object of questioning; for this project is in fact universalist in its principle and its expression: it concerns all who are baptized, posited as priests in the regime of a universal priesthood that affects the becoming of the Revelation, the general history of salvation. And yet this church to be reformed and re-constituted is in fact the church of Germany, or rather it is all Germans, baptized, assembled as a church, which is to say, Germany as a church—or, one could say (to bring out the tension that this thesis contains), the paradox of Germany as a kind of universal church. It is not as though Luther would want the abolition of France or Bohemia, but the conceptual setup he puts in place, by way of a strange connection, joins the thematics of the Reformation of the universal church with the project of the Reformation as the constitution of Germany.

This ambiguity expresses itself in Luther’s use (typical for the times) of the term “nation.” Let us note that this word is latinate: while Luther germanizes an important part of his linguistic usage, especially in his translations, he does not hesitate to romanize the designation of structurally important aspects of his venture, such as the terms reformation and nation. A complete germanization of the language is not on the agenda (yet).¹⁰¹

Three additional remarks about the use of the term “nation”:

(1) Within a first set of meanings, widespread throughout the text, the “administrative” use of “nation” persists (as in the use, cited earlier, of the “nation of Picardy at the University of Paris” to designate a group of students). In Luther’s text, “nation” is extensively used to designate the group of German delegates who form one of the subdivisions of the imperial diet, an administrative category.

At each meeting of the diet from 1486 onward, the grievances of the German nation were written down, collected, and sometimes published under the title Gravamina germanicae nationis, or Beschwerden der deutschen Nation . . . and Luther doubtless read the last collection emerging from the 1518 deliberations. . . . For some time, editors and publishers have been able to point to direct recollections of the grievances laid out by the diet against the abuses and exactions of Rome in the “Open Letter to the Christian Nobility.”¹⁰²

Among numerous examples, we read: “Now, in this matter the German nation, bishops and princes, should consider that they too are Christians, and should protect the people, whom they are set to rule and guard in things temporal and spiritual” (“Open Letter,” pp. 85–86). Here, clearly, the nation is not the people (since its duty is to protect the people), but the equivalent of “bishops and princes,” bodies that are present or represented at the diet. And further, “by a law of the emperor or of the whole nation, they should either keep the annates [a form of ecclesiastical tribute to the pope]¹⁰³ at home or else abolish them again” (p. 125). Luther could not urge “the nation” in our current sense of the term to sign a law, so that the word appearing in the title, the “Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” is first of all the nobility that is present at the diet and in the institutions of the empire, able to become involved and support a Reformation.

(2) Nevertheless, it is evident that the sense of the word in this text cannot be reduced to this administrative usage; it goes beyond it, for example, when Luther announces that he is “forced . . . to cry aloud that God may inspire some one with His Spirit to lend this suffering nation a helping hand” (p. 63), a phrase that is clearly related to the later one, “the misery and distress of suffering Christendom” (p. 64). The meaning of “nation” therefore goes beyond its corporate usage, toward something more abstract and general, which tends toward the “national” reality of our language today.

(3) Nevertheless, it would be anachronistic and thus erroneous to read the word in the sense that is familiar to us today. We have seen that the word “nation” did not begin to acquire its current meaning in French until the late eighteenth century, and more so during the nineteenth. At no time can the term strictly be taken in this modern sense in Luther’s text, and this can be linked, it seems, to the fact that the term “Germany” [Allemagne] is never taken as a historical subject either. Quite often we find in the text a call to “Germans,” urging them ceaselessly to perform their task vis-à-vis Rome or the empire. One also finds “German lands” suffering from the exactions of the papacy, which have the means to make them stop. “Germany” crops up, in the geographical sense, but never (unless I have overlooked it) Germany-as-subject, Germany-the-nation. Never is “Germany” summoned to face its destiny, its confrontation with Rome, and so on—“Germans” are. For the modern idea of nation is being shaped but is not fully formed yet. This “cultural,” “linguistic,” and “historical” reality, which is pre-sup-posed by the reality of the state or politics and is distinct from it, as the subject supposed to be behind its actions, the nation that can be denied or unheeded by the state, the nation that nonetheless forms the state’s support, the base of the building, is the nation that Luther’s text does not name or conceptualize expressly, even if many of its traits are foreshadowed. Luther’s “nation” is an intermediate and transitory notion, between an imperial administrative category and modern political subjectivity or subjectity.

The Reformation of Christianity is born as a project to constitute Germany: this is the paradoxical idea toward which this examination has led us. Now, the Reformation fails as far as constituting Germany is concerned. The movement does not fashion any unity of the Germanic world; on the contrary, it leads to the fixation of its division, a religious, then a geographical, spatial, and political division. Henceforth the new (dual) fracture between Catholicism and Protestantism overlays the dispersion of a multitude of principalities, without reducing it in any way. This division will undergo a very different treatment from the one it can expect in France—a state venture to eradicate one of the opposing creeds, evidently impossible in Germany since there is no German state sufficiently constituted to pursue it. Charles V the Catholic attempts this, but he exhibits the impotence of the empire as such to play this role—the (already mentioned) reason being that the empire is unable to reproduce the Roman (worldwide, universal) imperial idea, or to give shape to Germany in its difference and place. The Holy Roman Empire is an ambivalent structure, essentially unstable, caught between its (passéist but utopian) imperial dream and the desire for a Germany. It is this ambivalence and this instability that become fixated as the religious division of Germany: each region adopts the religion of its prince (cujus regio, ejus religio). Germany splits up following a line roughly running from east to west, separating a north and a south henceforth cohabiting religiously and facing each other—just as Catholicism and Protestantism cohabit and face each other in Europe, too. The division of Germany is the religious division of Europe. The question of German unity will henceforth come up, in many ways, as the question of European unity.

But the paradoxical fate of Germany is that it divides (or splits, or breaks in two) without ever having been unified. Something like a desired and projected Germany breaks up before its formation—or forms itself broken. The idea of Germany may be contemporary (or, more strictly, solidary) with the tracing of its own breakup. The constitution of Germany is cracked, like a shape emerging from its mold. It appears at least that among different attempts to form a Germany, none succeeds, all their processes being impeded: the kingdom does not “take”; the empire (as a German one) is impossible; the Reformation splits and fractures. At the heart of modernity, to put it in Hegel’s terms, Germany is not a state.¹⁰⁴