Recent Work on German National Identity: Regional? Imperial? Gendered? Imaginary?

Central European History

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 273-289

  Reagin, Nancy R ^a  

^a Pace University   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 85009593206     PISSN: 00089389     EISSN: 15691616     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156916104323121483     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, (revised ed. New York, 1991).
2. Vanchena's book also discusses the creation and popularization of better-known poems and songs, such as ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ Her analytical framework could be more sophisticated, but her study includes one extremely attractive feature: an attached CD that includes the texts of hundreds of these songs and poems in their entirety, with a detailed and clever set of indexes designed to be used to search these texts by author, content, metaphor, location, etc. The CD alone will justify the purchase price for many university libraries, since it provides an extremely useful set of primary sources, which could be used in teaching.
3. The imperial government was not able to make use of songs that came from the ‘wrong’ class, as well as those from the wrong side of the German-Austrian border. Vernon Lidtke's research on songs that were popular among the working class during the imperial period shows that workers’ songs were sometimes ‘patriotic’ (in a broad sense) but also espoused values of democracy and equality that put them at odds with the government. Such songs were also excluded from official usage or acknowledgement. See Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford, 1985), 124-27.
4. Leora Auslander, who is currently working on a comparative history of consumption and the role of the state in early twentieth-century Germany and France, has also noted the ways in which the Heimat and provincial identities are particularly intrinsic to German national identity, which she argues formed a sharp contrast to the construction of French national identity. See Auslander, ‘“National Taste?” Citizenship Law, State Form, and Everyday Aesthetics,’ in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (New York, 2001), 117-18. A more interesting comparison to Germany's construction of national identity might be Italy. Italy's strong regional loyalties and cultures (which to this day often supercede identification with the nation as a whole) and its late national unification would seem to make it an even more fruitful choice than France for a comparative study with Germany that focused son national vs. local or regional identities.
5. See Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, and Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton, 1995) and his edited anthology, Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1880-1914 (New York, 2002).
6. Quoted in the chapter on Imperial Germany written by Kaplan in Marion Kaplan, ed., Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1650-1945 (forthcoming).
7. Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1866-1914 (Boston, 1984).
8. Examining popular reception of the efforts to promote loyalty to a particular regional dynasty, or the popularity of a particular monarch, would indeed be a challenge, and an interesting research topic. Popular attachment to local rulers would appear to have declined during the Kaiserreich (along with the popularity of particularist political parties), at least to judge by the rapid collapse of all these regional dynasties in November 1918. Almost no one seems to have defended them, although this might be yet another result of Germans’ widespread war-weariness and sufferings, which led to the discrediting of almost all authority figures. Regional rulers might therefore have continued to enjoy broad support in some areas up through 1914.
9. For a discussion of the 1913 citizenship law, the varied communities of ethnic Germans abroad, and metropolitan Germans’ fascination with the Auslandsdeutschen, see Nancy Reagin, ‘German Brigadoon? Domesticity and Metropolitan Perceptions of Ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe During the Interwar Period,’ paper given at conference on ‘The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness,’ at the Center for European Studies, New York University, 19-20 November, 1999. See also Krista O'Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin, eds., The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).