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Retracing the Sattelzeit: Thoughts on the Historiography of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2018

George S. Williamson
George S. Williamson*
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Extract

The era of the French Revolution and the Napoleon Wars left a deep mark not only on political, social, and cultural life in German-speaking Europe, but also on German academic historiography as it emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. Both before and after the formation of the Kaiserreich, professional historians like Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke sought in their scholarship to justify Prussia's leadership role in Germany, and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic years figured centrally in this effort. For Friedrich Meinecke, writing in the Wilhelmine years, a remembrance of this era was crucial if Germany was to retain its intellectual and moral bearings: “One thing is clear: the survival and continuity of German intellectual life is somehow related to the events between 1807 and 1815—the liberation of Germany from foreign rule, and the transformation of Prussia, her most powerful state, into a freer, more national political entity.” In Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung (1906), Meinecke related the process by which the formerly apolitical, individualistic musings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte were given practical, political implementation in the reforms of Karl vom Stein, Karl von Hardenberg, and Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and then in the Wars of Liberation: “By descending to the state, the spirit not only preserved its own endangered existence as well as that of the state, it secured a reservoir of moral and psychological wealth, a wellspring of creative power for later generations.”

Type
Part II: Reflections, Reckonings, Revelations
Information
Central European History , Volume 51 , Special Issue 1: Special Commemorative Issue: Central European History at Fifty (1968–2018) , March 2018 , pp. 66 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2018 

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References

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3 Ibid., 3.

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17 Blanning noted that “modern Germany has usually been deemed to begin in 1815, so the period which immediately preceded the Vienna settlement has been studied with a view to what it started.” This situation was reflected, in fact, in most of the major surveys of German history at this time. See Blanning, T. C. W., “The French Revolution and the Modernization of Germany,” CEH 22, no. 2 (1989): 109–29Google Scholar. The volumes under discussion were Nipperdey, Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866, vol. 1: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1 (1700–1815), vol. 2 (1815–1848/49) (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987)Google Scholar.

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22 “If modernity began for the Germans with Napoleon,” Blanning asked, “why was he followed by a surge of cultural manifestations which appear more medieval than modern?” See Blanning, “French Revolution,” 118. Blanning revisited these topics in The Romantic Revolution (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010)Google Scholar.

23 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1:545.

24 Blanning, “French Revolution,” 127.

25 The special issue grew out of the conference “German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice, and Technique,” which was held at the University of Chicago in early October 1989, but the essays were heavily revised in light of subsequent developments.

26 On this point, see Geyer and Jarausch, “The Future of the German Past,” 232–41.

27 This was less the case in Germany given the division of history faculties into modern (neuere) history and contemporary (neueste) history, which effectively meant the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

28 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971)Google Scholar; idem, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Pantheon, 1978)Google Scholar.

29 Hull, Isabel V., Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; see also idem, “Feminist and Gender History Through the Literary Looking Glass: German Historography in Postmodern Times,” CEH 22, no. 3/4 (1989): 279–300Google Scholar.

30 Hagemann, Karen, “Of ‘Manly Valor’ and ‘German Honor’: Nation, War, and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising against Napoleon,” CEH 30, no. 2 (1997): 187–220Google Scholar; idem, “Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre”: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002)Google Scholar.

31 Aaslestad, Katherine, Place and Politics: Local Identity, Civic Culture, and German Nationalism in North Germany during the Revolutionary Era (Leiden: Brill, 2005)Google Scholar; Planert, Ute, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg: Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden: Alltag, Wahrnehmung, Deutung, 1792–1841 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007)Google Scholar.

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34 Vick, Brian E., The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a recent article in CEH, Scott Berg emphasized Metternichian Austria's relative success (when compared to Prussia) at encouraging Protestant-Catholic comity. See Berg, Scott, “‘The Lord Has Done Great Things for Us’: The 1817 Reformation Celebrations and the End of the Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg Lands,” CEH 49, no. 1 (2016): 69–92Google Scholar.

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36 Over the past decades, Germanists specializing in the so-called Goethezeit have produced a wide range of works relevant for historians of this era. See, e.g., Purdy, Daniel, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Goethe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Wurst, Karin, Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780–1830 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Tautz, Birgit, Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Zhang, Chunjie, Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

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38 See, e.g., Lowe, Lisa, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 139–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.