Chapter 15 - National Politics

Summary

When Wagner was born in 1813, Germany did not exist. Saxony was part of Napoleon’s ‘Confederation of the Rhine’, a collection of puppet-states. By the time he died, the German Empire was the most powerful and prosperous state in continental Europe. This sensational transformation was marked by periodic domestic upheaval (the revolutions of 1830 and 1848–9), a demographic explosion, an industrial revolution and three victorious wars for Prussia (against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870). The accompanying political, social, and cultural changes were on a commensurate scale. Nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and political Catholicism all emerged as mass movements, responding to radical changes in the public sphere driven by urbanisation, mass literacy and a communications revolution. By the time Wagner died in 1883, Germany had changed more than during the previous millennium.