The German National Experience

I. Introduction: The German National Experience

It is a peculiarity of history that while the German people have existed with a distinct historical identity since Western civilization began to emerge out of the Dark Ages over a thousand years ago, a unified German nation-state came into being only in the last century. Through most of the preceding centuries, "Germany" had meaning in terms of language and culture, but was politically a pure abstraction, the purely nominal Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation consisting in fact of several hundred independent ministates.

An even stranger peculiarity of history is that in the early Middle Ages, Germany was markedly precocious in what might be called proto-state formation. After the breakup of Charlemagne's empire, its western reaches--France--remained weak and effectively fragmented for several centuries. In Germany, in contrast, a line of Saxon emperors appeared within about a century of the fading of the Carolingians. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, the German Emperors were the greatest sovereigns in Europe, at a time when the Kings of France controlled little more than the region around Paris. In seeking to secure their "Roman" claim to rule Italy, however, the Emperors gradually ceded effective control over Germany itself. In early modern times, foreign adventures like those of France strengthened the monarchy; in medieval times, the Em

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militant impulses against Germany. After the Second World War, containment of Germany, as well as of the Soviet Union, contributed to British Europeanism. How this will develop in the post-Cold War era remains to be seen, though the British public and government do not seem to share the anxiety about German reunification that has been felt in France. C. Denmark In the nineteenth century, and through the Second World War, Danish nationalists retrospectively created a thousand-year long history of struggle between Danes and Germans. This long struggle was in fact almost whole fictitious, compounded of Viking-era and feudal struggles that had far less of a "national" quality than did (say) medieval wars between England and France. Nevertheless, it is true that the Germans, who shared Denmark's only land border, were traditionally the foreigners par excellence, to the degree that the Danish word for "German" was also the word for "foreigner" (Verheyen and Soe, 1993, p. 114). In the nineteenth century, German inroads into Danish territory also contributed in large measure to the formation of modern Danish national identity. In the Middle Ages and early-modern times, the Danish monarchy had contested for control of all of Scan
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Approximate Word count = 2842
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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