1 A German Revolution

Revolution in 1848–49 revealed on a new scale and in an incontrovertible fashion what had already become familiar to narrow circles of political notables, publicists and academics before 1848; that the advent of ‘politics’, in the form of party, press and public debate about government and state affairs, was closely tied to the articulation of national aspirations and the founding of national contacts and associations. It is impossible to separate nationalism in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century and the formation of parties, the consolidation of a public sphere, and the emergence of distinct political milieux. In virtually all the German states, liberalism – in a variety of guises – was central to such political milieux.

Most liberal – and many democratic – leaders accepted the primacy of the national question. ‘The first and, at the same time, the most comprehensive thing that the German nation (Volk) desires is unity,’ declared the National-Zeitung at the end of April 1849, after the revolution was said to have ‘failed’.¹ All other reforms, including the constitution of the Reich, which had been promulgated on 28 March, rested on national foundations. Indeed, much of the Frankfurt Parliament’s legislation was inseparable from the idea of national unity, since it served to constitute a German nation-state and to cement the principle of popular participation in government. ‘In order to found a constitutional government in Germany, unity must come from the popular will and be grounded in a constitutional way, as decided by the representatives of the nation,’ continued the same article:

That is what the German people wants from the constitution decided by its representatives: the demand for unity in the service of freedom, material and social well-being; the insight that unity cannot be created by princes, but only by the people itself; the conviction that the constitution does justice to the political demands of the nation (Nation); and an awareness that honour, freedom and peace demand that the constitution should be respected and brought into effect.²

A year earlier, on its first day of publication, the same publication, which had quickly become one of the major liberal newspapers in Germany, had declared ‘what we want’, which consisted above all in the consolidation and elaboration of a German state, since ‘The German too has at last become, what man is by nature, a state-being (Staatswesen); he has entered onto the highest field of human endeavour, politics, with self-conscious freedom.’³ Championing ‘progress from a national point of view’, the paper concluded that Germany was ‘most deeply gripped’ by the national revolution because it had, in this respect, been ‘left behind for longest’.⁴ Germans had long had a ‘feeling of unity’, a ‘feeling of Germanness’, but without power and a political superstructure such unity had collapsed and decayed.⁵ The new polity, recorded the Kölnische Zeitung in May 1848, had rightly been based on the principle of nationality, which was dearer to Germans now because it had been ignored in the past, internally and externally.⁶

From the standpoint of the political leaders who emerged in 1848, the path to German unity appeared natural, from a meeting on 5 March in Heidelberg of 51 deputies from the chambers of the South West, via the ‘Committee of Seven’ appointed in Heidelberg to invite deputies to a ‘Vorparlament’ in Frankfurt on 30 March, to the ‘Committee of Seventeen’ and the ‘Committee of Fifty’ which helped to organise the May elections of the National Assembly. Thus, the fact that the 51 deputies were not even representative of their own Landtage, not to mention those of Germany as a whole, was justified by those involved as an inescapably temporary means to a defensible national end. The 51 deputies, ‘unanimous in the struggle for the freedom, unity, independence and honour of the German nation’, resolved that ‘the establishment and defence of these most valuable goods must be striven for in conjunction with all the German tribes (Volksstämme) and with their governments – so long as salvation (Rettung) is still possible in this way.’⁷ The Committee of Seven, made up of constitutionally minded notables, was then entrusted to establish ‘a more complete assembly of trusted men from all the German peoples’.⁸ Although the Vorparlament which it convened from Germany’s Landtage – by means of newspaper announcements – contained only 2 deputies from Austria, 141 from Prussia, 44 from Bavaria, 26 from Saxony and 9 from Hanover, compared to 84 from Hesse-Darmstadt, 72 from Baden and 52 from Wurttemberg, out of a total of 574, it was hailed, even by the Prussian envoy to the Bundestag August Graf von Dönhoff, as an ‘actual national parliament’.⁹ The regional and other biases of the early institutions of the first all-German political movement were overlooked in the name of a greater national good to be realised in the imminent future. The National Assembly in Frankfurt, which went on to establish a Central Power on its own authority, was seen as the legitimate ‘German’ outcome of necessarily imperfect national antecedents.

Map 1 Participation in the Vorparlament and the Committee of Fifty in 1848–49.

Source: Adapted from H. Best, Die Männer von Bildung und Besitz (Düsseldorf, 1990), 250

It would be wrong, of course, to imply that the only concern of revolutionaries was to establish a German nation-state, even though unification was a priority of most liberals and many democrats. The February revolution in France had triggered a series of uprisings in South West Germany, spreading unevenly but rapidly to many other German lands and aiming to replace perceived injustices of the old, existing order. Popular grievances, which sustained the insurrections, differed from state to state in accordance with diverse conditions, but they usually included economic deprivation, a desire to abolish seigneurial dues and privileges, resentment of taxes, criticism of officialdom, an expectation of legality and equality before the law, a call for political rights of free assembly, association, speech and conscience, and the demand for a representative government and assembly. Some cultural questions such as the separation of church and state, as well as economic questions such as the reform of the guilds and corporations, proved more divisive, yet there were many basic ‘liberties’ which were widely supported in 1848 and which revolutionaries worked to achieve on both a local and a national level. Many contemporaries were aware solely of their locality, guided by notables – as in the first round of the joint elections to the Berlin and Frankfurt National Assemblies in one village in Westphalia – to ‘elect thoughtful men who would conscientiously vote for the most worthy candidates’.¹⁰ The vitality and independence of state legislatures, the adoption of long-standing matters of contention in towns and villages, the adaptation of rituals like ‘cat music’ – in which youths had policed sexual and other moral codes – to new political ends, and a general shift in the second wave of the revolution from cities to the countryside – in Baden, Württemberg, the Bavarian Palatinate, the Rhineland and Saxony – all underlined the continuing importance of localities.¹¹

Most revolutionaries would probably have been content with the granting of ‘liberties’ without the creation of a German nation-state. In the event, however, they did not have to choose between the two, for the counter-revolution, which had achieved its first successes with Prince Alfred zu Windischgrätz’s suppression of unrest in Prague in June 1848, was enforced by Austria and, especially, by Prussia in the individual states at the same time as in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, to which the ‘rump’ National Assembly had fled in June 1849. In the context of this general clampdown on revolutionary freedoms, many forty-eighters continued to believe that the state and the nation, politics and culture, citizenship, individual rights and nationality could and – if only for the defence of the revolution – should be combined. They were nevertheless left facing a shifting array of reactionary forces, with which they were obliged to compromise. Austrian troops began to recapture northern Italy after defeating Piedmont at Custozza in July 1848, they put down the uprising in Vienna in late October, and they suppressed the Polish insurrection in Galicia in November, ushering in the counter-revolutionary ministry of Felix zu Schwarzenberg on 21 November and forcing the abdication of the mentally retarded Emperor Ferdinand in favour of an eighteen-year-old Franz Joseph, who was more amenable and predictable, on 2 December. For its part, Prussia had withdrawn from the ‘national’ war against Denmark through the armistice of Malmö in August 1848, without consulting the Provisional Central Power in Frankfurt although with the backing of liberal ministers such as David Hansemann; it had quashed the attempt of radicals to overthrow the Frankfurt National Assembly in September, albeit at the request of the Central Power; and it had witnessed the installation of the reactionary ministry of Friedrich Wilhelm Graf von Brandenburg on 2 November, with counter-revolutionaries making use of the King of Prussia’s power of appointment. A more conservative constitution was subsequently imposed on 5 December.

By this time, it was already clear to national-minded liberals in Frankfurt and the state capitals that the counter-revolution was gaining strength, threatening the achievements of 1848. How far did they alter their policies to take account of such changing realities? To a degree, the willingness of revolutionaries to include at least the German-speaking parts of the Habsburg monarchy previously belonging to the Bund in a new German Reich – or to exclude them from it – was influenced, respectively, by the prospect of the monarchy’s collapse in early and mid-1848 and by the spectre of a successful counter-revolution from late 1848 onwards. Yet it is worth noting that such contingent arguments do not in themselves explain deputies’ shifting conceptions of ‘Germany’ and ‘Austria’: the Frankfurt Parliament’s Constitutional Committee drafted Articles 2 and 3, which would have severed Austria’s ‘German’ lands administratively, legally and even militarily from the rest of the monarchy in a fashion known to be unacceptable to Habsburg political elites, in October 1848, before Schwarzenberg came to power or the radical Frankfurt deputy Robert Blum was executed in early November. The Habsburg monarchy’s exclusion from a German nation-state would not have been accepted so quickly if it had not seemed to make sense in other than power–political terms. Certainly, many proponents of Prussia had not altered their stance as a result of the onset of reaction there from November onwards, and a large number of deputies – initially a majority – had continued to support the Reich constitution, even after it had effectively been rejected by Prussia’s reactionary elites in April 1849, when Friedrich Wilhelm IV had turned down Frankfurt’s offer of becoming ‘Kaiser of the Germans’. Despite the increasing strength of the ‘reaction’, liberals remained remarkably confident and their political deliberations surprisingly constant during 1848–49. Given the growth of democratic constituencies and organisations, however, to what extent can it be said that they were still in control of the ‘revolution’ itself? The next section examines this question.

A Political Nation

For German liberals, who were also known as ‘constitutionalists’, political freedom and national unity were natural bedfellows in early 1848. Indeed, some, such as the historian and newspaper editor Georg Gottfried Gervinus, specifically emphasised their constitutionalism – rather than the less-inhibited liberty implied by ‘liberalism’ – in order to make their creed fully compatible with the rational and emotional limitation and self-sacrifice required by a Rechtsstaat (law-governed state) and a nation-state.¹² In a memorandum written over Christmas 1848, the historian Johann Gustav Droysen, who had served on the Committee of Seventeen and remained one of the principal liberal publicists of the revolution, looked back to the spring and summer: ‘We began with the idea of national unity.’¹³ Although the fatherland was ‘creaking and shaking’ by May, he assured his readers that they should not fear, for only ‘the old forms are breaking up’, and not at the hands of foreigners, but by ‘the enormous force of the increasingly heartened German people’: ‘From the truth of our German being, from the “primordial spirit” of the united German people, from the sovereignty of the nation, our new Germany is rebuilding itself.’¹⁴ As nationality conflicts began to surface during the course of the year, ‘the principle of democratic freedom seemed to be able to become all the more unifying’.¹⁵ Soon, it became obvious, Droysen continued, that freedom could take on ‘wild forms’, frightening and disgusting even those who had been ‘mad about it’.¹⁶ In truth, many liberals had always harboured reservations about excessive liberties leading to anarchy and extremism. Far fewer had worried about the possible dangers of the national idea, which had seemed, in the historian’s words, ‘so great, simple and convincing’, despite later being unable to conceal its weaknesses.¹⁷ Virtually no one in liberal circles, however, had believed that national unity and freedom, properly conceived, stood in tension with one other. The cautious aims formulated by the Württemberg publicist and liberal deputy Paul Pfizer in his article on ‘liberalism’ in Rotteck and Welcker’s Staatslexikon – equality before the law, constitutional government, political representation, extended but limited franchises, education and property at the expense of the old corporations, emancipation and progress – all appeared to be reinforced by the nation-state.¹⁸ Nationhood, it seemed to liberals like Droysen, had redeemed freedom and safeguarded politics:

Of course, it was revolution that raged from palace to palace in the month of March and that stirred up the otherwise dumb and dull masses. But the magic word of German unity drowned out the wildest roar; where it rang out there was an immediate … joyful confidence, a good conscience resulting from a just desire. In this spirit of unity the constitution-granting Reichstag convened; and its first sign was that it put the most German man [Heinrich von Gagern], the proved statesman of the unity of the fatherland, at its head.¹⁹

In the opinion of prominent liberals, democrats often favoured liberty at the expense of the nation. ‘For at least a year, the liberals of Germany, the liberals of education and national sentiment (Vaterlandsliebe), had been not only internally but also externally split from the radicals, for whom … an abstract concept – democracy, republic or whatever else – was the main thing,’ wrote Heinrich Laube in his history of the ‘first German parliament’ in 1849.²⁰ Yet democrats themselves were much less willing to forfeit the national idea than their critics claimed, even if the Neue Rheinische Zeitung – the largest radical paper, with a circulation of 6,000 – and a minority of literary and philosophical revolutionaries or workers’ representatives – including a more or less indifferent Karl Marx – were more stridently international in outlook.²¹ Recalling the early days of the revolution, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch pleaded for a return to unambiguous national feeling in a National Assembly speech in July 1848: ‘In this respect, the call for German unity was the first and leading idea, the password (Losungswort), as the great movement of peoples came to us. The movement will only be complete when it returns to this, its starting point.’²² Not only were unity and freedom linked rhetorically, with deputies such as Johann Jacoby declaring in 1848 that ‘Germany should from now on be a free and united Reich’, but they were also connected historically, since weak and divided German states, under a system of external relations and internal repression characterised by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the Congress of Vienna (1815), seemed to have been unable to foster and defend constitutional liberties.²³ ‘Germany’s fragmentation piled shame and poverty on us for centuries’, wrote Jacoby: ‘Only unity can bring us salvation.’²⁴ The whole generation which had grown up with the Vienna Congress saw in the name ‘German Confederation’, and the divided territories and states of which it was made up, ‘the by-word for all political baseness and wretchedness’, remembered Ludwig Bamberger.²⁵

The unassailable power of national unity would protect liberty. Although there were manifest dangers in pairing unity and freedom, which radical critics like the Hegelian Arnold Ruge continued to point out, there seemed for most democrats to be little alternative. Ruge had stated in his study of Der Patriotismus in 1847 that ‘Freedom is not national’, for nationality itself merely implied particularity, yet he continued to combine the two concepts throughout 1848, believing that the former would remove the feelings of superiority and mysticism commonly attached to the latter.²⁶ For this reason, he went on supporting Prussia as the guarantor of the revolution: ‘Prussia will be free of Russia if it wins Germany; and the Prussian government necessarily remains democratic – to remain powerful.’²⁷ There seemed to be a dialectical logic to events in Germany in 1848, resulting from the insight that states required popular participation in order to be powerful and that participation and rights could only be safeguarded by a strong state. It was widely assumed by democrats that the ‘unity of peoples’ was possible and that, in Robert Blum’s words, all peoples would live ‘with one another’.²⁸

Before the revolution, the boundary between nationalists, liberals and democrats such as Blum was blurred, with a single and indistinct ‘opposition’ – or ‘representatives of a brave German people’, in Welcker’s words – characterising politics in most German states.²⁹ Blum himself had been active in the Leipzig Schiller Association in the 1830s, had founded the ‘constitutional’ journal Der Verfassungsfreund in 1840, and had worked for the Sächsische Vaterlandsblätter during the 1840s.³⁰ In 1846, he was one of the ‘politically effective men from different German states’ who made the pilgrimage to Baden in order to meet national-minded liberals such as Johann Adam von Itzstein.³¹ Although distinguishing themselves to an extent semantically and ideologically by the 1840s, democrats or radicals remained close to liberal organisations and milieux.³² To the Staatswissenschaftler and prominent liberal Robert von Mohl, ‘the poorest’, along with their political representatives, ‘had to rely on the German liberal party’ until 1848, even if they subsequently turned against it during the revolution itself.³³ According to Mohl in 1855, examining liberal mistakes during and after the revolution, democrats and radicals had only managed to detach themselves in 1848–49, renaming themselves ‘die Volkspartei’. Until then, they had still had to cope with the enduring influence of the dichotomy between ‘liberal’ and ‘servile’ parties first established in the 1820s.³⁴ ‘Who would not have been “liberal”, who would have wanted it to be said or even to have wanted to admit to oneself that one was servile?’ Mohl asked rhetorically.³⁵ Before 1848, liberals were generally confident that they were representatives of the German nation, not a sectional ‘opposition’ in the English sense of the word.³⁶ If the ancient historian and later Progressive Theodor Mommsen were to be believed, the main political shift in the pre-revolutionary period was from ‘abstract’ to ‘concrete’ liberalism, as self-ordained representatives of the people began to organise informal networks and associations, to contribute to a German public sphere, and to formulate and influence policy.³⁷ Despite often owing their reputation to their position as notables – or publicists – in their own city or state, their aims – and their organisations – usually included a significant national element.

Table 1.1 Breakdown of the Frankfurt National Assembly by profession

Senior civil servants, Landräte	115
Middle-ranking civil servants	37
Mayors, local government officers	21
Judges, public prosecutors	110
Officers	18
Diplomats	11
University teachers (49), Gymnasium teachers	94
Other teachers	30
Total civil servants		436
Lawyers, advocates	106
Doctors	23
Writers and journalists	20
Total freelance professions		149
Large merchants, merchants	35
Manufacturers	14
Publishers and booksellers	7
Total commercial middle class		56
Large landowners, farmers (3)		46
Craftsmen		4
Members with a doctorate, no profession given		35
Other professions		3
No details known		44
Total		812

Source: Siemann, The German Revolution of 1848–49, (London, 1998), 122.

Together, national-minded democrats and liberals constituted the principal representatives of a rapidly expanding political public in 1848–49. Over 75 per cent of adult male Germans were allowed to vote in the elections to the Frankfurt National Assembly in April 1848, with a turnout of between 40 (Saxony and Holstein) and 75 per cent (Württemberg).³⁸ They voted overwhelmingly – as can be seen in Table 1.1 – for educated, middle-class notables with national aspirations. Of the 812 deputies who were elected to the National Assembly in Frankfurt between May 1848 and June 1849, at least 718 were civil servants (436), lawyers (106), clergymen (39), doctors (23), writers and journalists (20) and merchants (35). Details of another 44 are not known. The figures for the Prussian National Assembly, with 74.7 per cent of deputies belonging to middle-class professions, and the Prussian second chamber, with 81.3 per cent, are similar, as are those for other German Landtage such as those of Baden, with 71.8 per cent, and Bavaria, with 58.8 per cent.³⁹ Given the inchoate nature of political parties in 1848–49, it is difficult to determine the political views of such deputies with certainty. One of the best estimates for the Frankfurt Parliament, based on the hotels and taverns where deputies met, assigns 6 per cent of seats to the right (Café Milani), 34 per cent to the centre right (Casino, Landsberg, Augsburger Hof), 13 per cent to the centre left (Württemberger Hof, Westendhalle, Deutscher Hof), 15 per cent to the left (Deutscher Hof, Donnersberg), and 32 per cent to no faction (see Table 1.2).⁴⁰ Beyond the various assemblies, most of the leaders of Germany’s estimated 1 to 1.5 million members of associations in 1848–49 were bourgeois, with a larger number of underemployed journalists, academics and students among the leadership of democratic clubs.⁴¹ According to a conservative calculation, 300 of Prussia’s 700 political associations in October 1848 were constitutionalist, 250 democratic, 50 conservative, 12 working-class and 6 Catholic.⁴² Although relatively little is known in detail of the political opinions of such mass memberships, with up to 10 per cent of men organised in associations and more than half voting in national and state elections, the personal testimonies and speeches of their leaders suggest that only a small minority actively opposed the idea of a German nation-state. Most were strongly in favour.

The national political elites which emerged in 1848 owed their prominence to a number of overlapping milieux. First, the majority had originated from the Bürgertum of the principal cities of Germany, which still only constituted less than 5 per cent of the population as a whole. They enjoyed both the respectability and security of their localities and the broader, more exciting prospects and benefits of a shared German culture. Second, many had been to university, frequently studying outside their state, forming life-long circles of friends from other cities, and involving themselves in the national politics of the Burschenschaften. Third, they formed part of the German public sphere, subscribing and contributing to a small but critical array of newspapers and journals, through which they could communicate with their counterparts in other German lands and imagine themselves participating in broader national causes. The circulation of publications like the Kölnische Zeitung, which was Germany’s largest newspaper with 17,000 subscribers, and the newly founded Deutsche Zeitung, with up to 4,000 subscribers, hinted at how narrow the new political elites were. Their number and scope mushroomed – as is shown in Table 1.3 – during the revolutionary era, with Prussia counting 404 newspapers, Intelligenzblätter and Volksblätter in 1847 and 622 in 1849, and Austria 79 in 1847 and 215 in 1849. Fourth, notables were usually active in a wide range of associations, from local self-help organisations to national occupational, cultural, gymnastics, shooting and choral societies. The burgeoning of political associations after 1848, with the Zentralmärzverein boasting more than five hundred thousand members, was based on the practices and networks of these clubs. Fifth, the elites were founded on participation in – and reportage of – existing Landtage, particularly those of the South and West, where politicians and incipient parties debated policies and affected legislation. Thus, a figure such as Heinrich von Gagern was already ‘well-known and popular’ ‘in the widest circles’ for his legislative activity and ministerial programme in Darmstadt.⁴³ Likewise, assemblies such as that of Baden had already established a national reputation in the 1840s: ‘many came as far as Karlsruhe in order to be present at the sessions of our chamber,’ recorded the Badenese liberal Daniel Bassermann, ‘which at that time was perceived and visited as the prototype of political activity and the university of practical state wisdom in the whole of Germany’.⁴⁴ Political elites were being formed whose outlook and ambitions were national.

Table 1.2 The factions of the Frankfurt National Assembly

Source: W. Siemann, The German Revolution of 1848–49 (Basingstoke, 1998), 124

Through the course of 1848 and 1849 the narrow and loosely connected milieux of an incipient German political culture were extended and transformed. This had a direct impact on the scope, content and impact of nationalism. Millions of politically active citizens, wrote the Kölnische Zeitung in April 1848, had been united within a new German nation-state.⁴⁵ The question was: what was the basis of the nation and how were its institutions to be invested with moral legitimacy?⁴⁶ ‘Public life was a new thing for us’, Elben remembered, ‘now it was a question of reporting meetings and popular movements daily.’⁴⁷ Whereas ‘until now, the old liberals, who formed the March Ministries, were almost alone decisive’, he went on, they were quickly subsumed by a broader mass, the aims of which were generally unifying, but also more diverse and less predictable.⁴⁸ It was in such circumstances that the first parties began to crystallise, the programmes of which, to a significant but far from exclusive degree, rested on competing conceptions of a German nation-state.⁴⁹ ‘Parties’, of course, had been identified in the period before 1848, often by their critics, but laws of association under the Congress system – most notably the Federal Decree of 5 July 1832 – had formally prevented their existence, prohibiting membership and meetings of political organisations.

Table 1.3 Numbers of newspapers, Intelligenzblätter and Volksblätter in individual German states in 1847 and 1849

	1847	1849
Prussia	404	622
Austria	79	215
Saxony	153	183
Bavaria	110	127
Württemberg	60	67
Baden	63	55
Hesse-Darmstadt	22	34
Hanover	23	34
Hamburg	18	24
Frankfurt a. M.	10	17

Source: Siemann, The German Revolution of 1848–49, 113.

The replacement of these provisions during the revolution by much more liberal legislation concerning the press, public meetings, associations and elections gave an unprecedented fillip to party organisation, which was acknowledged across the political spectrum.⁵⁰ Even Heinrich von Gagern, the President of the Frankfurt National Assembly, came to realise that it was difficult, if not impossible, to pass and implement policies without the backing of a party: ‘An isolated position is always a weak one; one can only have or attain political influence at the head of a political party.’⁵¹ Similarly, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, the de facto leader of the Prussian reactionaries, was forced to accept by mid-1848 that conservatives would only be effective ‘as a party (Parthey)’: ‘party elections are alone practicable’.⁵² Political associations were established which assumed the features of modern parties – a constitution, an elected committee, regular meetings for a fixed membership, a political programme, a national umbrella organisation – but they did not coincide precisely with either the early groupings in the Frankfurt National Assembly, named after their meeting places, or the broader constellations of constitutionalists, democrats, conservatives and, to a more limited extent, Catholics and workers, which emerged later in 1848 and early in 1849. Such a patchwork of organisations – with some regional, such as the moderate liberal Deutscher Verein and the radical Vaterlandsverein in Saxony, and others national, such as the largely democratic Zentralmärzverein and the Catholic Pius Associations – extended and mobilised a German political public, with members of the Mittelstand and lower orders constituting up to 40 per cent of conservative and constitutional or liberal associations and more than 60 per cent of democratic and Catholic ones.⁵³ The patchwork failed to create clarity over important questions of policy, however. Inexperienced deputies formed parties from issue to issue, reported Biedermann, with many failed coalitions and false unions.⁵⁴ This was especially true of the national question. All parties were in favour of a united German fatherland, reported one deputy to the rump National Assembly in May 1849, but disagreed over the means to achieve it.⁵⁵

Constituting Germany

The main disputes about the means of realising a German nation-state were political. Notoriously, the Central Power and the National Assembly in Frankfurt were preoccupied with the minutiae of the constitution, including its prefatory declaration of basic rights, but they were, in effect, debating the form which the new Nationalstaat – the term was used in 1848, though rarely – should take.⁵⁶ These debates, in turn, affected – and were affected by – the borders, territory, regional and confessional composition, national ‘character’ and international position of the German Reich envisaged and partially enacted by the Frankfurt authorities. Between March 1848 and April 1849, such authorities enjoyed national legitimacy, backed by a large majority of Landtag deputies and their electors, with the exception of the members of the Austrian Reichstag, which had been convened in July 1848 and was dissolved permanently in March 1849. Although their agreement was tentative, with many questions unanswered and most radicals still opposed, a majority of deputies eventually came to support the political and national principles and compromises embodied in the Reichsverfassung of 1849.

The constitutional and political solution of March 1849 was made easier – even, perhaps, rendered possible – by the legitimating force of national unity. The creation of a nation-state, it was widely believed, required the erection of a suitable political superstructure to suit a pre-existing national culture. A state was needed to harness the creativity, energy and power of the nation, permitting a more harmonious and productive coexistence at home and necessary protection from enemies abroad. Most contemporaries accepted that the ‘German question’ was a political one. Few were ‘unpolitical’, pitting the law, state or nation against the corrupting sectionalism of ‘politics’, as some Germans were wont to do in the years after unification.⁵⁷ The revolution itself, following a long period of liberal ‘opposition’, had ensured that the nation had become integral to politics, constituting a new source of legitimacy for the Frankfurt Parliament beyond the law, history or religion. To liberals, as the National-Zeitung spelled out in January 1849, ‘the trust of the nation’ legitimised the actions of the Vorparlament and the various committees which had led to the National Assembly in the first half of 1848, pushing the Bundestag and the princes to refashion the constitution of the Bund, which in turn ensured the legality of the transfer of power from the institutions of the German Confederation to the Frankfurt Parliament.⁵⁸ The movement of history towards unification seemed inevitable and natural. Since the February revolution, ‘another feeling had dominated the German people which made itself felt as strongly as the urge for freedom,’ the newspaper continued: ‘The nation believed the time had come when they could make real an idea which had captivated the most noble minds since the wars of freedom of 1813–15, then was taken up by the academic youth and, fostered more and more, was carried forth into the most recent times. This idea was – the unity of Germany.’⁵⁹

Many conservatives challenged such an interpretation, denouncing the Frankfurt Assembly for leaving the ‘ground of given legal relations’ and drawing ‘a thick line through our history’ by failing to reform the existing national structure of the German Confederation from within.⁶⁰ At the same time, however, they usually acknowledged the legitimising, if not pre-eminent, force of the nation, sometimes placed within a national understanding of recent history, as the Kreuzzeitung revealed in a retrospective article on ‘The German Question and the Frankfurt Decisions’ in March 1849: ‘There is no question that Germany’s peoples demanded unity … The tributaries of German life had frozen over under Metternich’s biting diplomatic cold.’⁶¹ In another article in the same newspaper, Stahl similarly opposed the inundations of the revolution and the decision of the National Assembly to rely on revolutionary methods, yet he, too, as he explained elsewhere, believed that ‘the idea of German unity is a true and exalted one’, before adding: ‘we are not sorry about the German business, just the revolutionary one’.⁶² In his opinion,

the Frankfurt Assembly was convened to bring the constitution of Germany into being through the governments and the nation (Volk), and that is obviously the task of a mediating activity … True, the expression ‘constituent assembly’ appeared in later decisions of the Bund, but nothing follows from this alone … the National Assembly in Frankfurt has up until now stuck to its claim, irrespective of the contradictions of prominent members, that it has the sovereign decision over the constitution … This principle of popular sovereignty, however, is not only an infringement of the legal ground, but an infringement of the deepest moral foundations of the states.⁶³

The National Assembly, in Stahl’s opinion, had a political role as the representative of the nation, but had overstepped its legitimate and legal function in the name of a one-sided principle of national sovereignty. All the same, even to conservative sceptics, the nation had become an important part of politics.

The public in Germany was ‘more politically mature’, remarked the Kölnische Zeitung in May 1848, ‘than is believed in certain circles’.⁶⁴ Although parties remained in vestigial form, with another ‘national’ paper arguing that ‘in the people itself no sharp delineation of parties has occurred’, deputies and journalists did reach agreement on many questions.⁶⁵ First, the use of national rhetoric, which was barely contested by 1848, tended to imply acceptance of popular participation, however limited, in government. Even conservatives such as Stahl, for all their dislike of ‘revolution’ as a form of political rationalism going back to 1789, admitted that the National Assembly had been legitimate before it went on to countenance illegal acts, most notably failing to consult the princes and to resurrect the old machinery of the Bund in its drafting and enactment of the 1849 Reich constitution. Stahl’s work on Die deutsche Reichsverfassung (1849) demonstrated his commitment in principle to German unity, helping to maintain and strengthen his belief, dating back to the pre-revolutionary period, that the old conservative notion of ‘estates’, representing corporations, should be replaced by a more modern assembly, representing the Volk, with some say over legislation. Such powers, especially the right to scrutinise the budget, constituted one of ‘the demands of the times’.⁶⁶ Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s issuing of patents on 18 March, which instituted a constitutional system of government and agreed to the convocation of the United Diet (Vereinigter Landtag) on 2 April, proved to Stahl ‘that the people (Volk), as a whole, itself has a part in the rule of the highest echelons, and is a joint carrier of the one public power, and that its representation is not just a representation of the independent circles, the estates, but at the same time also of people, of individuals in these estates, and thus – save for the hereditary chamber – issues from a vote. This is the archetype of the new state.’⁶⁷ Stahl’s programme for the ‘Conservative Party’ in the elections to the Prussian assembly during the spring of 1849 contained seven points, starting with an acknowledgement that ‘We recognise the new order in the state’, and continuing with assurances that ‘We want the unity of Germany’ and ‘We seek the power of preservation (the conservative element) not in an outstanding estate, but in all estates through well reinforced institutions, which unite them, and bind the individual and his interests to the whole and to its order.’⁶⁸

The new ‘facts’ of the situation after 1848, recognised quickly by Stahl and more haltingly by Ludwig von Gerlach, had been largely shaped by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who helped to create the close linkage in conservatives’ minds between nationalism and popular participation in government, having been obliged to parade through the streets of Berlin behind a black, red and gold flag and to deliver his proclamation ‘An Mein Volk und an die deutsche Nation’ in late March 1848, at the same time as promising electoral reform and repeating his acceptance of constitutional government. From his later correspondence and actions, it is evident that Friedrich Wilhelm IV had felt forced into such precipitate statements and decisions, raising the possibility of ‘dictatorship’ as early as July and backing the counter-revolutionary government of Brandenburg on 2 November.⁶⁹ Having concurred in the imposition of a conservative Prussian constitution on 5 December, the King proceeded on 28 April 1849 to reject the title of ‘Kaiser of the Germans’, which he had already confided privately had a ‘whorish smell of revolution’.⁷⁰ However, throughout the early months of the revolution, Friedrich Wilhelm IV linked constitutional and parliamentary concessions to the greater cause of the German nation, explaining the former through reference to the latter. As Leopold von Gerlach recorded in his diary on 13 April 1848, ‘the king excused his weakness and his concessions; constitutionalism had had to be acknowledged because of Germany’.⁷¹ The King had acted, as he announced to the veteran nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt in March 1849, ‘as a German (teutsch) man and prince’.⁷² He could argue that, by making concessions to the people and its representatives, he was helping to unite the German nation. Conservatives’ belief in this national mission, which had widely been associated with the work of the assemblies in the early months of the revolution, helps to explain how much of the right in Prussia came to accept, through the imposed constitution of December 1848, the establishment of a second chamber, elected by universal manhood suffrage, which had important budgetary powers and a sanction over legislation, unlike in Austria, where the Reichstag was dissolved and ‘absolutism’ resurfaced.⁷³ Many Prussian conservatives also accepted Joseph Maria von Radowitz’s call for a German Volkshaus, with a three-class franchise, as part of the courtier’s Erfurt Union plan.⁷⁴

A representative assembly was a necessary component of a constitutional monarchy, which became a second point of agreement in debates about a German nation-state. The right’s changing understanding of constitutions was related to shifting notions of government. In contrast to the pre-revolutionary era, when opponents of constitutionalism such as Carl von Voss, Carl von Canitz, Carl Wilhelm von Lancizolle, Carl Ernst Jarcke and Victor Aimé Huber were prominent at the Prussian Court, Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s and the government’s main legal advisers in 1848, in addition to Radowitz and Ludwig von Gerlach, who was the only lawyer in the preponderantly military camarilla, were Stahl and the Berlin jurist Friedrich Ludwig Keller, both of whom championed constitutions. Indeed, Stahl was introduced to the Minister-President Brandenburg as someone who would be ‘very useful’, being ‘experienced in constitutionalism, since he has been a deputy in the Bavarian chamber’.⁷⁵ His work on the ‘monarchical principle’, published while he was at Erlangen in 1845, outlined how ‘the innermost urge of the age’ was ‘the progress … from the patrimonial character of the constitution (Verfassung) to a state or constitutional (constitutionell) one’.⁷⁶ This transition had entailed the definition and specification of the King’s powers, which had become central to the monarchical principle, but it had also allowed a strengthening of the Crown’s position vis-à-vis an opposing parliamentary principle, where there were no constitutional or other checks on an assembly’s jurisdiction.⁷⁷ By 1848, Ludwig von Gerlach and Radowitz concurred with much of Stahl’s interpretation, with the latter, who had previously advocated a ‘monarchy of estates (ständische Monarchie)’ in preference to an ‘absolute monarchy’ or ‘parliamentary’ or ‘republican’ government, now contending that ‘the momentum towards a constitutional system of representation’ was ‘ineluctable’, since the concept of estates had ‘increasingly gone into decline’ ‘in the majority of those living’.⁷⁸ Like Stahl, Radowitz understood representation to refer to the whole Volk, not merely to particular corporations. Such representation required, on a German as well as on a Prussian level, a constitution to keep it in check.

Arguably, the role of representation within a system of constitutional government was challenged more fundamentally by the left than by the right. ‘This left believed that it was there by the grace of God more than anyone,’ declared Carl Theodor Welcker to laughter from democrats and cheers from the centre of the Frankfurt Parliament in December 1848, during a debate about an absolute veto for the Reich’s head of state: ‘This left believed that it could do everything it wants, and one cannot place a veto in its way.’⁷⁹ Both the centre and the right were worried by what the latter called democratic ‘absolutism’. Certainly, democratic rhetoric gave the impression that checks on the principle of popular or national sovereignty were unjustifiable, as Johann Jacoby explained to Prussian deputies in May 1848: ‘Whoever wants the unity of Germany should back the power of the popular parliament (Volksparlament). Whoever stands against this power, whoever restricts or weakens it, is an enemy of the fatherland.’⁸⁰ A significant number of radicals seemed to be against the monarchy altogether: ‘Can the German people (Volk) want a constitutional monarchy?’ asked Julius Fröbel at the start of the revolution: ‘No! Does it want absolute monarchy? No! Does it want a feudal monarchy? No! What is left for it to want? The republic!’⁸¹ This potential opposition to a monarchical form of government was vital because of the growing strength of the radical camp: 20 per cent of Frankfurt deputies belonged to the left in Prussia, 29 per cent in Austria, 62 per cent in Württemberg and more than 75 per cent in Baden and Saxony.⁸² The question of radical attitudes to monarchy came to a head during the tortured debate about the title and nature of the ‘Kaiser of the Germans’ in March 1849, on which the entire Reich constitution came to depend. In December, against the backdrop of a ‘coup’ in Berlin leading to the imposition of the Prussian constitution on 5 December, democrats had refused to grant an absolute veto to the head of state, despite having agreed to do so in the realm of constitutional affairs during the first reading. In March, with the rest of the constitution complete, radicals and some spoilers on the right voted down a bill to make the emperorship hereditary by 263 to 211. The constitution only passed in its entirety at the second reading, by 267 votes to 263, because Heinrich von Gagern, the leader of the Erbkaiserlichen, had formed a pact with Heinrich Simon and his faction of democrats, according to which 114 supporters of the Erbkaisertum pledged that they would back a suspensive veto even in matters concerning the law and suffrage in exchange for a written promise by 15 followers of Simon to back the hereditary principle.

Such figures on their own, however, gave a misleading impression of the strength of republicanism, since they were mixed with anti-Prussian sentiment and miscellaneous other points of principle, as Radowitz observed.⁸³ North German democrats had been largely in favour of constitutional monarchy from the start, remarked Biedermann in Frankfurt.⁸⁴ Thus, it was natural for the Hamburg radical Gabriel Riesser, even though he came from an oligarchical republican city-state, that the head of the Reich should be a monarch, since the population was monarchical.⁸⁵ Of the South German radicals, the republicans were concentrated above all in Baden and Württemberg, which together provided only 42 democrats out of the 812 deputies elected to the National Assembly in 1848–49. Some of these, as Ludwig Simon, from Trier, explained to the parliament on 27 April 1849, had had to accept the King of Prussia as hereditary head of a monarchical system of government in order to pass the constitution and safeguard a German nation-state.⁸⁶ Others such as Friedrich Hecker, claimed Gagern, had given backword and reverted to republicanism, leading to their exclusion – by a majority – from the National Assembly.⁸⁷ Hecker, who had been elected – and then re-elected – to a Badenese constituency of the Frankfurt Parliament, had been refused the right by other deputies of taking up his mandate. ‘It is of great importance’, wrote Droysen, that the insurrection in Baden, led by Hecker, failed, with the result that followers ‘left the Paulskirche in masses’, once their hero had been repudiated, and they did not declare a republic.⁸⁸ Subsequently, the goal of the revolution – republic or monarchy – was not in doubt, unlike in France; what was in dispute were the means to achieve desired reforms within the framework of a national and constitutional monarchy.⁸⁹

The dispute between republicans and monarchists was judged by radicals such as Ludwig Bamberger, who remained agnostic, to be subordinate to the federal question.⁹⁰ Although Bamberger himself, at least retrospectively, believed that it had been necessary to let the federal state ‘fall as an unavoidable sacrifice on the altar of a German rebirth’, many of his democratic colleagues remained wedded to the idea of a German Bundesstaat, to the extent that it became a third point of agreement in the debate about the future political form of a German nation-state.⁹¹ To a minority of radicals, of which Fröbel was the most well-known, ‘the democratic republic rests on the principle of brotherhood (federation). The Bundesstaat is its form.’⁹² Switzerland and the United States were important models, although Fröbel himself became convinced during the revolution that constitutional or ‘parliamentary monarchy’ was more suited to German conditions, at least temporarily.⁹³ Other democrats and radicals were influenced more by the French model and were more inclined to demand unitary government in the name of the German people, yet they, too, were obliged to moderate their demands during the course of the revolution, as they came to terms with the local sympathies of their voters, the continuing existence of the German states and the difficulty of integrating Austria. Facing a barrage of petitions – 9,000 in Leipzig alone – in favour of monarchy and the integrity of the Saxon state, Blum was forced to admit, after much prevarication, that state rights were threatened by the right, not the left.⁹⁴ Likewise, Riesser put himself forward as a mediator between the centre and the states, and between republicans, who ‘pursued unity more crudely and ruthlessly than us’ and particularists, who ‘do not desire ideas of unity, because they do not want to let the independence, the particular life of the individual states, especially the power of the princes, be limited in any way’.⁹⁵

By contrast, during the final debates about the Reichsverfassung, Riesser was less worried about the sensibilities of his own electors than about the necessity of maintaining links with Austria and integrating Prussia. In his opinion, it was obvious that Germany would be a federal state, attracting Austrian Germans over the longer term, even if they had had to be excluded for the meantime: ‘We harbour the confident hope that precisely then, when our Bundesstaat has come strongly and powerfully into being, Austria will enter into as close an alliance (Bündnis) as possible with a united Germany of equal status for their mutual well-being.’⁹⁶ Only a federal state could accommodate Prussia, whose power and political framework was needed for German unification, and other anti-Prussian populations. Like Riesser, the Cologne radical Franz Raveaux was convinced that Prussia was the active element in Germany: ‘there, they act, and here, we wait’.⁹⁷ Unlike Riesser, he believed that Prussia had to be resisted, yet his goal of establishing a federal state arguably remained the same: ‘Prussia has a different policy from you’, he warned Bassermann: ‘Prussia wants to be the central point, the sun around which all the small planets should turn; it wants to fashion Germany in this way, and not otherwise, and if you don’t counter Prussian arrogance preventatively, you won’t ever succeed in realising the Bundesstaat that you have set out in the constitution.’⁹⁸ Here, Raveaux agreed with Ludwig Simon, one of the most radical deputies, a critic of ‘weedy liberalism’ and a defender to the death of the Provisional Central Power in Frankfurt: in late April 1849, a call to the Volk, rather than reliance on ‘inimical governments’ to pass the Reich constitution, did not imply the desire for an Einheitsstaat, he declared, against the charge put forward by moderate liberals such as Karl Mathy; in the same way, the Reich ministry’s earlier seizure of power and use of violence did not betray a desire for ‘a constitutional unitary state’, ‘only a constitutional Bundesstaat’.⁹⁹ Simon could not be said to be a supporter of a decentralised federal state, but nor was he prepared to be labelled an advocate of a unitary state.

The left, claimed Raveaux, was often accused by liberals of being in coalition with the right against the constitution of a national Bundesstaat. This was not true, he protested.¹⁰⁰ Similarly, the right objected to such charges and displayed its support for a federal state. Conservatives, proclaimed the Neue Preussische Zeitung as late as March 1849, were in favour of a German Bundesstaat, not a French-inspired Einheitsstaat: ‘Germans wanted a Bundesstaat, but not an Einheitsstaat, for they had absolutely no talent for creating one – it thoroughly contradicts a German sense of independence which, in spite of long dilution through the aping of France, is still so strong.’¹⁰¹ In order to work, a German nation-state needed some sort of central authority, as Reich ministers rightly insisted, but one based on the real powers of existing German states, not merely described in words, as in Frankfurt: ‘A central power must be strong, and Germany in particular needed a genuinely strong central power for many reasons; but it will not become strong by increasing competencies to the point of omnipotence on paper (just as one doesn’t knock out a single man with an army on paper), but by being granted such power in reality by all sides, by being raised and carried by all the individual states.’¹⁰² Only Prussia could underwrite such a design, since it was by far the largest power in Germany, with 16 million inhabitants, of whom 14 million were ‘of German descent’.¹⁰³ The other 27 princes and 10 million Germans would join the national effort, as soon as Prussia gave its consent and agreed to act.¹⁰⁴ Many contemporaries from various parties and different individual states had reservations about the federal, constitutional and representative nation-state agreed in Frankfurt, but it had nevertheless been enacted with majority support in the Reichsverfassung of March 1849.

Unifying Germany

The national ramifications of the Reich constitution threatened to derail it. In addition to his conservative and legitimist disdain for a product of the revolution, Friedrich Wilhelm IV was unwilling in April 1849, as he rejected the National Assembly’s offer to become ‘Kaiser of the Germans’, to frame a smaller German nation-state to exclude the Austrian monarch and a dynasty of former emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Yet the King of Prussia’s later reluctant backing of Radowitz’s smaller German ‘Erfurt Union’ plan, put forward between June 1849 (Gotha) and November 1850 (Olmütz), suggests that he was motivated more by political reasons – especially hatred of the revolution – than by national ones.¹⁰⁵ In this sense, the ‘temporary’ exclusion of German-speaking parts of the Habsburg monarchy foreseen by the constitution might, in itself, have been acceptable to the monarch, as might the borders discussed in the debates of the Frankfurt parliament in 1848.

Liberal expectations of a German nation-state – the coincidence of politics and culture, the integration of other nationalities, the peaceful coexistence of Europe’s nations and the existence of uncontested borders – were soon challenged and resisted, after briefly holding sway during the ‘March days’. The ensuing debates about territory and culture, or nationality, arguably always shaped – and often dominated – those concerning the constitution, polity, rights and citizenship. The question of who was a citizen, with full political and legal rights, was linked from the start of the revolution to the question of who was a German, which in turn rested on definitions of German culture, descent and territory. All the parliamentary discussions of basic rights and systems of government took place against the backdrop of a war with Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein, a long-standing national cause, which had begun with the Danish annexation decree of 21 March 1848. In May, Prussian troops suppressed the Polish uprising in Posen, leading to the creation of ‘German Posen’ by the Prussian government commissioner on 4 June, a decision later sanctioned by the Frankfurt Parliament. In the Austrian Kaiserreich, meanwhile, national conflicts flared up constantly: in Prague on 12–16 June, in Northern Italy between June and August, and in Hungary and Croatia in October 1848. Opinions on the viability of different forms of government and the territorial extent of a German nation-state were critically affected by these conflicts.

National conflicts also had an impact on definitions of citizenship. From the Vorparlament, which jettisoned the phrase ‘every German’ in favour of ‘every citizen (Staatsangehörige)’ from its election regulations at the behest of Anton Wiesner, via Titus Mareck’s proclamation in support of group rights and the extension of Germans’ rights to non-German citizens in the National Assembly in May 1848, and Johann Fritsch’s attempt once more to replace ‘German’ with ‘citizen’ in the June draft of the basic rights, to Alois Boczek’s and Carlo Esterle’s objections to different aspects of Paragraph 47’s nationality rights in the final constitutional debates of February 1849, it was above all Austrians who brought up the questions of citizenship and belonging, mindful of the likelihood of further national uprisings in the Habsburg lands. The decision of the Constitutional Committee in the summer of 1848 to omit a citizenship clause guaranteeing rights to non-Germans and to avoid constitutional provisions concerning naturalisation can only be understood in this context. As a result, citizenship remained, temporarily at least, within the preserve of the individual German states. The provision was only altered on 6 November 1848, when the Constitutional Committee agreed to add the qualification that ‘The German people consists of the citizens of the states that form the German Empire’ to the existing statement about ‘every German’ possessing citizenship and, therefore, rights. The addition was made in order to facilitate the entry of Austria, with its many non-German citizens, into the German nation-state, after the Frankfurt Parliament had asked the Habsburg monarchy to make its intentions clear in late October. It was legally and diplomatically convenient, and in accordance with liberal tenets concerning participatory government, to grant citizenship rights to all responsible residents. Such an account, however, does not explain why parliamentarians refused to replace references to ‘jeder Deutsche’, which lay at the heart of the basic rights and constitution, with ‘jeder Staatsangehörige’, as they were asked to do on repeated occasions. Arguably, a significant number wanted to make Germans – in a cultural sense – of all citizens and to consolidate the national foundations of the new state. At the very least, a nation-state required a lingua franca to make it work and to ensure social and political cohesion.

Very few deputies or commentators doubted that German would be the language of state in the new Germany, to be used by all citizens on the national level, for example within the Frankfurt Parliament, and by officials in most instances, particularly those relating to the activities of a ‘central power’. ‘German is, indeed, the language of state’, ran the original version of Mareck’s proclamation.¹⁰⁶ For Georg Beseler and other North and West German liberals, this predicate was obvious, since there was no doubt ‘who is the dominant people in Germany’.¹⁰⁷ For most South Germans and many Austrians, however, the need for a common, ‘national’ language was also accepted, partly because of the perceived menace of the dissolution of the multilingual Habsburg monarchy. It was probably for this reason, in addition to scepticism about parliaments generally, that the Austrian Prime Minister Prince Felix Schwarzenberg avoided the creation of a genuine Volkshaus in his plans for Germany in early 1849. Anton von Schmerling, the leader of the Austrian delegation in the Frankurt Parliament, rejected such plans, on the grounds that they were too reactionary, paying too little attention to the necessary German foundation of any new order, but he, too, found it difficult to envisage Rhinelanders and Ruthenians sitting together in an assembly without a lingua franca.¹⁰⁸ Likewise, the Austrian reform conservative Count Friedrich Deym could only imagine the ‘Babylonian confusion’ of a single multilingual German–Habsburg parliament, preferring instead two separate but linked assemblies.¹⁰⁹ For Germans outside Austria, including the Bavarian deputy Johann Eisenmann, it was better for Germany to detach itself from the Habsburg monarchy’s Poles, Italians, Croats, Slovaks and Hungarians altogether, because of the danger that they posed to the linguistic and cultural unity of the new state.¹¹⁰ For his part, the liberal leader Carl Welcker labelled the idea of a multilingual Austrian Reichstag, effectively giving up a language of state, as ‘crazy’.¹¹¹ Even radicals, who went furthest in their defence of language rights, usually admitted that a common German language was nevertheless required. The Bohemian left liberal Gustav Gross supported the language rights of ‘Slavs’, but ‘when this principle is given a broader extension in a German state, then I must declare myself against it’.¹¹² Esterle, the South Tyrolean democrat who argued for greater political and administrative autonomy, continued to accept that ‘The borders of Germany are to be found where the German tongue ceases to be heard.’¹¹³ For this reason, he preferred the name ‘German Reich’ – a largely but not exclusively German territory and state – to ‘Germany’.¹¹⁴ North and West German radicals were much less guarded. How could Schmerling’s concept of a German–Habsburg Volkshaus possibly work, given the deputies’ different languages, asked Ludwig Simon? ‘We are finally acting in earnest against the attempts of the nationality-lets to seek an independent existence among us and, like parasitic growths, to annihilate our own existence’, resounded the opinion of the left-wing Hegelian Wilhelm Jordan.¹¹⁵

The majority of deputies, it could be contended, believed that a superior German culture would prevail in the long run. This could be seen in Schleswig-Holstein, the oldest and most prominent of Germany’s national causes. On 21 March 1848, King Frederik VII of Denmark had announced his intention of annexing Schleswig in order to forestall the full independence of the duchy, along with the Duchy of Holstein, and in order to appease Danish nationalists, for the monarch had ceded absolute power and promulgated a constitution on his accession in February 1848.¹¹⁶ For the majority of deputies and newspapers in Germany, Denmark had acted in contravention of history and international law, according to which the two duchies were to remain in tandem and Schleswig was never to be taken by Denmark – a provision dating back to 1326 in the opinion of the Grenzboten.¹¹⁷ The populations of the duchies had rightly called for German aid, with black, red and gold colours quickly replacing the red, white and blue of Schleswig-Holstein in the major towns: on 18 March, the estates of Schleswig-Holstein, meeting in Rendsburg, had called for a separate constitution for the duchies and for Schleswig to join Holstein in the German Confederation; on 23 March, a provisional government was set up by conservatives, national liberals and radicals to protect the rights of the duchies against the ‘unfree duke’, who had been constrained, as King of Denmark, by Danish nationalists.¹¹⁸ At this stage, the course of history, legality, local patriotism and German nationalism appeared to be complementary. In this spirit, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, prompted by Christian August, the Duke of Augustenburg, who was a contender in the succession to the duchies, issued a proclamation on 24 March pledging his support for the duchies against a Danish attack in accordance with the Confederation’s decision in September 1846. On 12 April, the Bundesversammlung, which had previously recognised the provisional government of Schleswig-Holstein, as had other German states, declared that the war between Denmark, the duchies and Prussia, which had begun at the end of March, was a Bundeskrieg, involving Germany as a whole, through the Confederation. Accordingly, the Tenth Federal Army Corps, with troops from Hanover, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Brunswick and the Hansa towns, was deployed alongside the Prussian army. With the demise of the Bund, the Provisional Central Power and the National Assembly in Frankfurt formally endorsed the conflict as a ‘German’ or ‘Reich’ war. Deputies from both Schleswig and Holstein were elected in May to the Frankfurt National Assembly, despite the fact that the former territory lay outside the old Confederation. Even liberal-minded, cosmopolitan conservatives sceptical of the German cause, such as Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, believed that ‘Our war against Denmark is a just war.’¹¹⁹

The ‘German’ parties involved in the conflict soon fell out. Prussia had entered the war without the formal approval of the Bund, the March ministries or the Heidelberg ‘Committee of Seven’. When Friedrich Wilhelm IV and the Prussian government, under pressure from Britain and Russia, unilaterally ended the war with the truce of Malmö on 26 August 1848, in contravention of the Central Power’s conditions, the Frankfurt Parliament voted against it by 238 votes to 221 in early September, but General Friedrich von Wrangel, the Prussian commander of all German troops in Schleswig-Holstein, had already begun a withdrawal. Under such circumstances, with history and law read by Danes and Germans in different ways, given that Schleswig was outside the German Confederation but was indissolubly linked to the confederal state of Holstein, the principle of nationality quickly became pivotal. It was predicated on the existence of unambiguous cultural and territorial boundaries between nations, which did not, in fact, exist. A division of Schleswig-Holstein on national grounds would benefit Germany, it was widely assumed. The population of the duchies ‘only wants to be German’; ‘the majority, not only of a head count, but also of the educated, the majority of education is in Schleswig-Holstein decisively German’, claimed the Grenzboten in June 1848.¹²⁰

One of the main reasons given by liberals for refusing to split Schleswig in early 1848 was their doubt about the viability of Denmark as a small state – giving only the ‘appearance of an independent state’, according to one article – and about the attractiveness of ‘Danishness’: ‘How would one partition? According to sympathies and antipathies? That is not possible, for only a small part will want to become Danes … Or according to language? The language which is spoken in the northern districts can be called Danish as little as it can be called German; it is a poor bastard’, declared the Grenzboten.¹²¹ Even here, it was obvious to the same publication, the ‘educated part of the population’, to which one had to turn ‘if one wants to research true opinion’, was German: ‘all who are educated in Schleswig (with the exception of certain Flensburg merchants) belong to the German element’.¹²² What was more, whereas German Schleswiger were ‘chained to Holstein through the links of the law, all state institutions, the material interests of trade, and so on, Danish Schleswiger are connected to Denmark through none of these things’, went on the periodical.¹²³ Other liberal newspapers made similar claims.¹²⁴ Most agreed that all of Holstein was German and that ‘two-thirds of the population [of Schleswig] are German, one third Danish’, in the words of the Grenzboten. Such figures were based on misleading statistics about language of worship, yet figures for popular usage of German in Schleswig lay between 120,000 and 128,000 people, Danish approximately 145,000, and Frisian about 26,000 people.¹²⁵ No language predominated in central Schleswig, where between 47,000 and 60,000 people lived. Even if Frisians, on the North Sea coast, were held to be ‘German’, which was usually the case, about half of Schleswigers spoke Danish as their main language.¹²⁶ This fact was routinely ignored by German liberals, and others, who called for the incorporation of the larger – and most populous – part of Schleswig and the whole of Holstein by the new German nation-state.

A similar set of assumptions about the cultural superiority of the Germans underpinned most commentators’ responses to the national dispute in Posen. National self-determination, it was widely believed, would benefit Germans in the territory. On 4 June 1848, the Prussian government commissioner General Ernst von Pfuel had divided two-thirds of the territory from the province, calling it ‘German Posen’. The Poles were simply not able to swallow half a million Germans argued the Regierungsrat and Posen deputy Ernst Viebig.¹²⁷ His liberal compatriot Adolph Goeden agreed, arguing that the existence of half a million Germans left no other option than to split the province in Germany’s favour.¹²⁸ According to the Kölnische Zeitung, in the Grand Duchy, there were 790,000 Poles, 420,000 Germans and 80,000 Jews in 1843; in the province of Prussia, there were 560,000 Poles and 1,666,000 Germans; and in Silesia only Oppeln had an overwhelmingly Polish population from a total of 518,000 inhabitants.¹²⁹ ‘It is a key result of these figures that as a consequence of a reorganisation on a national basis – the only one that can be acknowledged as justified – not the present provincial borders but the borders of the nations must be definitive,’ continued the same publication:

Still we must also add that the Poles in Prussia and Silesia, notably also in East Prussia, are already so alienated from the nationality of the Poles, and partly from religion, that the desire for a division of Germany will come from them only reluctantly; we must add that, if one leaves these stretches of land to themselves, without any pressure, Germanisation would soon have succeeded.¹³⁰

The newspaper ignored the implications of its own figures – the fact that Poles were preponderant in 15 Kreise and Germans in 16 Kreise in the mixed areas of the province of Prussia – and refused to reconsider the earlier inclusion of East and West Prussia in the German Bund. Like other publications, the newspaper concentrated exclusively on Posen, refusing to sacrifice the 500,000 Germans there who had defended Germany for so long against the East.¹³¹ On 27 July 1848, 342 Frankfurt deputies to 31 voted for Prussia’s division of Posen and retrospectively sanctioned the Bundestag’s inclusion – on 22 April and 4 May – of this western part in the German Confederation. The bill put forward by the left, criticising the division of Poland as an ‘ignominious injustice’ and calling for the ‘recreation of an independent Poland’, was defeated by 331 votes to 101.¹³² The majority of deputies had not been willing to compromise Germany’s national interests, it could be suggested, for the sake of culturally inferior Poles. As in Schleswig-Holstein, a maximising interpretation of ‘national interest’ was only likely to be compromised because of the opposition of a Great Power.¹³³

Such opposition and compromise were most salient in the National Assembly’s treatment of the nationality principle in Austria, especially in the Bund lands of Bohemia and Moravia. Here, confronted by 2.6 million Czechs, the representatives of Bohemia’s 1.7 million Germans recognised that they were in a weaker position than Germans in Posen and East and West Prussia, not least because their Czech counterparts – together with other Czechs in Moravia (4 million in total) – were able to exploit the traditions of Bohemia as a semi-independent crown land and to champion the monarchy itself, which permitted them to act in concert with other nationalities in the Habsburg lands such as the Slovaks (almost 2 million), Croats (1.5 million), Serbs (1.5 million), Slovenians (1 million), Ruthenians (3 million) and Poles (2 million) against the representatives of the territory’s 8 million Germans and 5 million Hungarians. The Pan-Slav Congress in Prague during April, May, and June 1848, which issued in the refusal of Frantisek Palacky, the author of the celebrated History of Bohemia (1836 onwards), to participate in the preparations for the Frankfurt Parliament as ‘a Bohemian of Slav race’, combined with the re-establishment of a Bohemian provisional government under the governorship of the supposedly Slavophile Count Leo Thun on 29 May and the convocation of the Bohemian Landtag on 7 June, not only suggested to German onlookers the seriousness of Czech resistance – with the radical Constitution commenting that ‘the Czechs have thrown off the mask, showing the grimacing face of their national hate’ more than a month before the Prague uprising – but also the complexity of the national question in the Habsburg monarchy as a whole.¹³⁴ Palacky’s own recommendation to the Reichstag at Kremsier identified eight national units of territory – German Austria, Czech Austria, Poland, Illyria, Italy, the lands of the southern Slavs, Hungary, Romania – which were themselves to be divided into national administrative Kreise in areas of mixed settlement. The final constitutional draft adopted in March 1849 by the Kremsier Reichstag, based on the proposals of the German Moravian Cajetan Mayer, retained the crown lands rather than adopting Palacky’s national units, but it divided such lands into national Kreise – nine in Bohemia, ten in Galicia, four in Moravia, three in Lower Austria, two in the Tyrol, and two in Styria – and it foresaw an Upper Chamber of the Lands made up of representatives of both crown-land diets, with six deputies each, and the Kreise, with one deputy for every two units. The imposed constitution of March 1849, devised by Franz Graf von Stadion, likewise emphasised Kreise, as well strengthening the central power of the Habsburg monarchy at the expense of the autonomy of the crown lands. In all these intricate designs, there was no room for cross-cutting obligations to Grossdeutschland.¹³⁵ ‘Germany can never come to an understanding with Austria,’ proclaimed Ludwig von Löhner, one of the leaders of the German Austrians and a former advocate of Grossdeutschland: ‘Let us take Austria out of Germany to make at least an agreement between the others possible.’¹³⁶

At some point between December 1848 and March 1849, the majority of deputies in the National Assembly – and, arguably, most commentators and much of public opinion – came to accept the exclusion of Austria from Germany on national and political grounds. By 12 March, as he put forward his bill to pass the constitution and offer Friedrich Wilhelm IV the title of Kaiser, the leading liberal Welcker was sure, ‘on objective grounds’, that Austria did ‘not want to enter a German Bundesstaat’.¹³⁷ It was now evident to the editor of the Staatslexikon that ‘we may not expect the unification of Austria within a German federal state’, not least because of ‘the work of the ministers with their own hands’ and because of ‘their Babylonian constitution’.¹³⁸ For Welcker, mindful of the sensibilities of governments and public opinion in the South German states, blame should be attached to ‘the Austrian cabinet, not the Austrian people, us, our work or our crowned heads’.¹³⁹ By 20 March, Gagern, too, had publicly accepted that Austria would not join Germany in the near future. The alternatives were now: ‘should a German Bundesstaat completely separate itself from Austria, or can a wider alliance with the Gesamtmonarchie exist?’¹⁴⁰ The liberal Minister-President could ‘not follow those who, from an historical standpoint, set their sights on distant possibilities, and derive conclusions from them; from a political point of view, one must stick to present facts, and a constitution must adapt to these facts’.¹⁴¹ Other liberal deputies such as Karl Mathy and Friedrich Römer agreed: Austria would only enter a ‘Bundesstaat’ of its own choosing – that is, not a real one acceptable to the Frankfurt Parliament.¹⁴² In truth, Austrians has only played a minor role – in terms of office-holding (see Map 2) – in the decisions of the Reich Central Power and the German National Assembly.

Map 2 Participation of Office-Holders of the Provisional Central Power and Members of Committees of the Frankfurt Parliament.

Source: Adapted from H. Best, Die Männer von Bildung und Besitz (Düsseldorf, 1990), 289

Deputies and journalists from radical, Catholic and conservative camps remained more ambivalent and divided about the ‘Austrian question’, with significant numbers still supporting either Grossdeutschland or a looser German confederation. Nevertheless, most radicals were critical of Schwarzenberg, who was associated with the execution of Robert Blum on 9 November 1848, and they shared Ludwig Simon’s belief in March 1849 – even if they disputed his conclusion that ‘Kleindeutschland is here’ – that ‘we truly stuck it out with our German brothers in Austria, we (pointing to the Left) offered them the hand of a brother until the last flicker of a possibility; we lost one of our best and most noble for them’.¹⁴³ Schmerling, declared Simon, was a hypocrite, who had supported a united Germany in Frankfurt but had placed the Austrian Gesamtmonarchie above everything in Vienna.¹⁴⁴ Austrian deputies had been prohibited from taking part in the constitutional deliberations of Frankfurt by their own government, asserted the radical deputy a month later: with such a government no cooperation was possible, especially given that the Schwarzenberg Ministry had made clear that the German Bund continued to exist and the National Assembly was illegal, that an Austrian Kaiser would ‘never and under no conditions subject himself to a foreign legislative power’ and that ‘the Austrian government will not enter a Bundesstaat with a representative constitution’.¹⁴⁵

Catholic deputies, such as the Rhineland leader August Reichensperger, disagreed fundamentally with the premises of radicals’ arguments, viewing the opening paragraphs of the Reichsverfassung, which democrats perceived to be necessary foundations of a nation-state, as an act of war against the Habsburg monarchy, making the constitution unworkable.¹⁴⁶ Yet even Reichensperger conceded that many mistakes had been made by the Austrian government, although not as many as by the Frankfurt authorities, as a result of its ‘ignorance of the nature of this assembly and of German conditions’.¹⁴⁷ Austria had been left to adopt the idea of ‘a separate constitution’ and had been prevented from joining ‘a rejuvenated Germany’ at a later date – the chance of founding a German nation-state with the other German states was ruled out by the Catholic politician.¹⁴⁸ Reichensperger appears to have concurred with Prussian conservatives that, in 1848, Austria was too distant from German affairs – ‘put on another course by its composition and its position in the world’ – ‘to be a part of a German Bundesstaat’ from the outset.¹⁴⁹ Though there was vacillation on the part of Catholics and conservatives over the political elements of the Austrian question, there were also doubts about the possibility, nature and likelihood of Austrian involvement in German state-building.¹⁵⁰

The principle of nationality, seen by many commentators as the fundamental principle of the revolution in Germany, initially over rode other considerations, obscuring complications and conflicts of interest. Although the Habsburg monarchy was eventually excluded from Germany on national grounds, in conjunction with other political, constitutional, military and diplomatic obstructions to incorporation, it was assumed for much of 1848 by the majority of deputies and journalists that Austria’s German-speaking lands would be included in the new nation-state. Such inclusion was championed most ardently by democrats and Catholics, but it was also accepted by liberals and conservatives.¹⁵¹ From the start of the revolution, commentators and politicians of all affiliations had given voice to their dreams of a German nation-state extending at least as far as the old Confederation and, if possible, beyond, in keeping with Arndt’s famous Lied – still the most widely cited text amongst nationalists in 1848 – ‘Des Deutschen Vaterland’ (1813). Austria was the main site of such dreams: after asking ‘What is the German’s fatherland?’, each stanza of Arndt’s song suggests another set of territories, starting from ‘Preussenland’ and ending – tellingly – with Austria, before culminating in the conclusion towards the end of the song that the German fatherland should extend ‘As far as the German tongue is spoken’.¹⁵² From the call of the Viennese deputy Karl Moering for an ‘Anschluss with the territories of Austria not belonging to the German Bund’ and the creation of ‘a powerful, united, free Mitteleuropa’ a week after the National Assembly had been inaugurated in May 1848, a large number of deputies and journalists – with Austrians most prominent – put forward their plans for the consolidation of German culture and a German state in the territories of the Habsburg monarchy.¹⁵³ It went unquestioned by most deputies in the spring and summer of 1848 that Germany would stretch at least to the borders of the German Confederation. This aspiration persisted in Paragraph 1 of the Reichsverfassung, passed by a coalition of liberal Kleindeutschen and radicals, which continued to maintain that the territory of the German Reich included, in theory, Bohemia, Moravia and ‘old Austria’ as lands of the old Bund. The clause was supposed, recalled Reichensperger, to give us ‘a claim on German Austria’.¹⁵⁴

By October 1848, when Paragraph 1 was passed by a large majority, it was already apparent, before Schwarzenberg’s counter-revolution, that such undefined national yearnings might come into conflict with each other and with the interests of the individual states, especially those of the largest and least German state, Austria. Reichensperger was critical of Paragraph 1 precisely because it constituted a ‘sleeping lion’, unacceptable to the Habsburg monarchy. The lion ‘sleeps on the condition that it will be woken up when circumstances allow it to seem appropriate’.¹⁵⁵ Some Catholics and South Germans, who felt closer to Austria than to Prussia, continued to support the Habsburg monarchy even at the cost of rejecting the Reich constitution. The ‘Austrian’ question had, as Biedermann later wrote, altered national politics: alongside the ‘Austrian party’, which met at the Hotel Schröder, were ‘the so-called “Grossdeutsche”, a mixture of ultramontanes, particularists and several ideologues who … wanted solely to keep Austria in Germany at any price – even at the price of this “Grossdeutschland” receiving as loose a form as that which the German Bund had had.’¹⁵⁶ In October 1848, the Bavarian deputies Ernst von Lassaulx and Hermann von Rotenhan were amongst four dissenting voices in the Constitutional Committee to Paragraphs 2 and 3, which insisted that the administration and ‘constitutional government’ of the ‘German’ parts of a multi-national entity belonging to the Reich must be separate from those of the non-German parts, and the head of state – the Habsburg monarch – should either reside in the German parts or formally split his role.¹⁵⁷ The constitution and legislation of the Reich were to have binding force in the German parts of the monarchy.

In the subsequent National Assembly debates, Lassaulx and Rotenhan were joined by the Munich church historian Johann Nepomuk Sepp, who argued for the union of Germany and Austria within Mitteleuropa, creating an ascendancy over France and Russia, and permitting the peaceful Germanisation of the Habsburg lands. In December, not only the Austrians opposed Gagern, wrote Duncker to his wife, ‘there are also ultramontanes, who do not want a Prussian Kaisertum, there are Bavarians, for the most part stirred up by the Austrians – it is the whole fear of the South of the North’.¹⁵⁸ In January 1849, Duncker estimated that Gagern was already opposed by ‘all the Austrians, three-quarters of the Bavarians, three-quarters of the ultramontanes’.¹⁵⁹ The opinions of the latter were represented during the constitutional debates of March 1849 by the Catholic politician Franz Josef Buss, who contended that only the incorporation of the whole of the Habsburg monarchy into Germany would strengthen it sufficiently to play a mediating role between the ‘Slavs’ and the ‘Romance’ peoples.¹⁶⁰ ‘Only when we have Austria, which is now educating the Slavs through its free constitution and which draws them to it through German freedom and education, will we neutralise the dangers with which Pan-Slavism threatens us.’¹⁶¹ Throughout the revolution, deputies such as Sepp and Buss were backed by Catholic and South German publicists and officials such as the Bavarian Minister-President Ludwig von Öttingen-Wallerstein, who wrote of Germany dominating Central Europe with Vienna as its capital, and the Württemberg national economist and deputy, Moriz Mohl, who outlined his vision of a Reich of 70 million inhabitants, uniting Germany and the whole of Austria in one state, ‘if Germany wants to be the most powerful state in the world’.¹⁶² Many South Germans, in particular, were reluctant to sever ties to Austria, with which they had greater religious, cultural and, in some cases, economic affinities than with Prussia and North Germany.

Despite enduring scepticism of Prussia, however, many liberals and democrats in the most receptive South German states of Württemberg and Bavaria accepted Gagern’s verdict and opposed their pro-Austrian monarchs. In the former, the majority of deputies and the public had supported the Frankfurt Parliament until at least September, when radicals’ loyalty was weakened by the National Assembly’s perceived weakness over Schleswig-Holstein and the truce of Malmö. The democrats, though, maintained their backing of Frankfurt – perceived by the Beobachter as the wish for ‘unity at any price’ at the time of Archduke Johann’s election as Reichsverweser and the implicit sanctioning of a German nation-state as a constitutional monarchy – and they voted, along with liberals, for Welcker’s and Gagern’s Prussian hereditary Kaisertum, jettisoning their call at the mass meeting of Ulm on 24 February for an elected head of state and the incorporation of German Austria in a German Reich.¹⁶³ As the radical Friedrich Theodor Vischer put it after the vote, ‘I have fought a terrible inner battle’, resolving ‘not to help the bloke [Friedrich Wilhelm IV], but also not to hinder him, but only, like dear God with evil, to allow it’.¹⁶⁴ The liberal Minister-President Friedrich Römer was able to use such public opinion and political support to force King Wilhelm of Württemberg to accept the Reichsverfassung and the offer of the title of Kaiser to the King of Prussia. The governments and monarchs of Bavaria and other refractory states would be required by their populations to come to the same decision, claimed Römer. In the event, the Minister-President was wrong. Maximilian II and the Bavarian government, guided by the conservative Foreign Minister Ludwig von der Pfordten, rejected the Reich Constitution in April 1849. Yet Bavaria’s second chamber, dominated after elections in December 1848 by the left and centre, refused to endorse the government’s decision. Pro-Austrian monarchs in other states in the ‘third Germany’ such as Saxony and Hanover, where Ernst August insisted on decorating the counter-revolutionary Austrian generals Windischgrätz and Jelacic, were likewise countered by assembly majorities and public opinion, which came to countenance the possibility of Germany without Austria.¹⁶⁵

The corresponding shift towards Prussia and, after the turn of the year, what came to be known as ‘Kleindeutschland’ was, of course, neither inevitable nor irreversible. It took place against a background of national awakening in 1848 during which virtually all protagonists – except the old ruling elites – believed in the unproblematic application of the principle of nationality and, as a consequence, in a German nation-state which stretched at least as far as the borders of the old Bund. Such expectations and hopes proved difficult for many forty-eighters to relinquish and were retained even in the Reichsverfassung of 1849. They make the turn towards Kleindeutschland all the more remarkable, especially in the context of contemporaries’ many-sided scepticism of Prussia. Friedrich Oetker, a deputy from Kurhessen, testified to the unexpectedness of the change in his memoirs: Gagern’s programme, introduced a few days after taking office on 15 December, was the first ‘official’ formulation of a solution to the German question based on Prussia.¹⁶⁶ Gagern’s five sentences, ‘according to which Prussia and the smaller states should in future form a Bundesstaat and stand in an “indissoluble alliance” (Bundesverhältniss) with Austria’, thus caused a sensation.¹⁶⁷ Franz Duncker wrote to his wife on 20 December of the session that ‘the ship is breaking up and the waves are crashing down’.¹⁶⁸ The left, in particular, rose up ‘lividly, with Jakob Venedey the dreamer at their head’: ‘From right and left the applause rang out – one no longer knew who was a friend and who a foe’, he concluded.¹⁶⁹ After a four-day debate, the new Minister President’s programme was passed by 261 votes to 224 on 13 January. By most accounts, changing position to vote for the programme was difficult. Amongst many conversions, Arndt’s was the most famous, remarked Oetker: ‘Old Arndt voted for it, whereupon the left, amidst great agitation in the Assembly, called out to him: “Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein”’, from his song ‘Des Deutschen Vaterland’.¹⁷⁰

The shock was comparable on 12 March 1849 when Welcker, possibly Germany’s most well-known national liberal as editor of the Staatslexikon and a prominent advocate of Grossdeutschland in the debates initiated by Gagern’s Ministry, put forward a bill declaring that the National Assembly ‘is ready to preserve existing national and fraternal relations, but not to the detriment of the independence of the German Reich constitution, as long as difficulties still stand in the way of a definitive realisation of the full entry of the German–Austrian lands into the German Reich constitution’.¹⁷¹ The pronouncement produced, in the words of the official record, ‘a great, enduring sensation and movement in the Assembly’.¹⁷² In the entire speech, Welcker concentrated almost entirely on Austria, which had proved unwilling to join the Reich, omitting to mention Prussia at all, other than by implication, through ‘the transfer’ of ‘the hereditary title of Kaiser’ to the King of Prussia.¹⁷³ Welcker, from Baden, was mainly concerned to demonstrate that there was no alternative to a Bundesstaat without Austria, to be created immediately because ‘the fatherland is in danger’.¹⁷⁴ ‘Public opinion will therefore be for us’, he concluded, since ‘our brothers in South Germany, which this division touches especially painfully’, knew that Germany had not been torn up ‘hastily or selfishly’: ‘I am convinced the Bavarians, and even the Austrians, and the Catholic Württemberger and Badenese, too, are all suffused with the conviction that the saving of the fatherland can no longer be post-poned.’¹⁷⁵ In the same way, just over a week later, Gagern was anxious to prove his South German credentials and to deny any relation with or predilection for Prussia, concealing the fact that he had written about a Prussian-led Germany even before the revolution. Yet, given Austrian opposition, he declared in his speech to the National Assembly, there was no alternative to Kleindeutschland, ‘as it is called’.¹⁷⁶ Prussia would not be the centre of the new German nation-state – although it would obviously be the biggest single component of it – and it would experience ‘decentralisation’ and ‘a fusion with Germany’ as a ‘necessary, gradual consequence’ of joining the Reich.¹⁷⁷ The Prussian state was composite in nature, containing a ‘South German’ Rhine province, many from the Saxon ‘tribe’ and the Austrian border land of Silesia, and it had already ‘fully flowed into the main stream of German life’, contrary to the claims of anti-Prussian commentators.¹⁷⁸ ‘We cannot imagine it separate from us’, asserted the Minister-President, implicitly contrasting an integral Prussia with an excluded Austria.¹⁷⁹

To Gagern’s Pomeranian collaborator on the Reich constitution Droysen, who went on to found the ‘Prussian school’ of history with his Geschichte der preussischen Politik (1855–86) but who was more critical of Prussia as a professor in Kiel until the 1850s, Austria had ruled itself out of Germany, since it could not, as a multi-ethnic monarchy, enter a German nation-state. De facto, the will of Germany to unite in 1848 had reversed the historical relationship of the Habsburg monarchy and the German lands, by which the former had ensured for 300 years that the latter were ‘rotten’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘impotent’.¹⁸⁰ ‘Granted, the Austrian monarchy is a form of geographical or ethnographic necessity’, wrote Droysen in October 1848: ‘But look more closely: only the standstill of all maintains the whole; every movement endangers the edifice.’¹⁸¹ For its part, Prussia had become ‘the standard-bearer’ of a ‘new spirit in the nation’, partly because it had become more ‘western’ in 1815, with the acquisition of the Rhineland, at the same time as Austria had become more ‘eastern’, giving up lands in Belgium and western Germany, or ‘the old territories through which it was rooted deeply in western Europe’.¹⁸² With the establishment of Frankfurt as an ideal, national centre of Germany, and with the weakening of Austria, Prussia now had the power, unlike before 1848, to decide ‘the fate of Germany within a few weeks, and in the most salutary way’, if it agreed to reshape Germany ‘into a true Bundesstaat’ and to defend that state militarily.¹⁸³ Prussia might balk at such collaboration with the new idea of national unity, preferring to revert to the Bund, which ‘was nothing other than the Confederation of the Rhine, now with the double protectorate of Austria and Prussia’, admitted Droysen in a memorandum from Christmas 1848.¹⁸⁴ Yet such a restored Staatenbund would be bound to fail, after the national and democratic changes of 1848.¹⁸⁵ The only remaining option was collaboration between Frankfurt and Berlin. The point, in Droysen’s opinion, was that Prussia was in a position for the first time, after several failed initiatives from 1840 onwards, to become a central part of a federal German nation-state.

The revolution of 1848–49 had altered the geographical, political and cultural foundations of the German question, raising unexpected difficulties and suggesting novel solutions concerning the creation of a German nation-state. The most pressing issue was how revolutionaries’ vision of the Hohenzollern monarchy’s central role in any solution to the German question, given the political exclusion of Austria, would fare after Friedrich Wilhelm IV had refused the title of Kaiser, the revolution had been replaced by reaction, and Prussia had been forced to give up any notion of a Prussian-led Kleindeutschland at Olmütz on 29 November 1850. The following chapters explore different aspects of this question: what would happen to the national settlement – or blueprint – of the revolution during the years of an Austrian-led counter-revolution?