The State, the Nation, and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany

10. Nationalism and the Reich of 1871

Next to antisemitism and liberalism,nationalism is the third major category that is needed to put the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute into perspective. The specific history of the formation of the Reich of 1871, whose consolidation provided the immediate context of the Dispute, needs to be explored. Although one of the defining characteristics of the modern nation is that it is an ethnic-cultural and political entity at the same time, one of the dominant themes of nationalist discourse, and also of scholarly and other discussions about them, is the effort to establish a dichotomy between two types of nationalism: ethnic or cultural, sometimes dubbed German or “Eastern European,”versus civic, political, patriotic, or“Western”nationalisms .Within the liberal context, this distinction is connected to the notion that the “civic” is normatively superior (tolerant of cultural diversity, e.g., and non-racist) to the“ethnic.”This discourse, which identifies France and Germany as opposite paradigms,seems to be traceable to the border dispute following the German conquest of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871.1 As the discourse of the two opposed types of nationalism is also closely connected with the question of how nationalism and antisemitism, especially in the German case, relate to each other, and also because there are striking parallels between the dispute on Alsace-Lorraine and the Treitschke Dispute,it is worth looking at it more closely. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was advocated as a war aim of 1870–71 by most German liberals,including Treitschke and Bamberger,and increasingly Ten.NationalismandtheReichof1871 NationalismandtheReichof1871 253 also by the general public in Germany.2 Although Bismarck seems to have been rather reserved about the idea, not even the democratic press was unanimous in defending the popular sovereignty of the Alsatians.Treitschke wrote in 1870 that the Alsatians could not possibly know“what is good for them” because they had to live under despotic French cultural influence; the German state should “return to them their own self against their own will.” Their German features would soon be reanimated by “nature itself, the voice of the blood.”3 (He did not fail to mention,however,the economic benefits of annexation.) In the aftermath of the war,David Friedrich Strauss and Theodor Mommsen went public, similarly invoking language, culture, race,and history for their argument that the Alsatians were German and that the Prussian military had only corrected the“historical anomaly”of French tutelage that had resulted from French seventeenth-century conquest.4 The most notable respondent on the French side was Ernest Renan, a moderate republican and part of the intellectual establishment of the French Third Republic.5 Renan had—until then—shared German historicism’s concept of the nation and its scorn for Enlightenment contractarianism.6 He had held that it was a“dangerous sophism”to assume that the individual existed prior to the nation.7 However, the experience that after French military defeat representatives of the (ethnically German) Alsatians expressed their wish to remain French seems to have converted him to a more contractarian concept of the nation: the case of the Alsatians appeared to prove that ethnicity did not determine political will. Renan avoided the dispute about what the“real”ethnicity of the Alsatians was and argued instead that ethnic-cultural-racial “abstractions carry much less weight than the right of flesh and blood Alsatians to submit only to an authority enjoying their consent.”8 He claimed with this formulation the virtues of concreteness for the republican concept of the nation and discredited the ethnic concept as being based on (typically German) abstractions, a line of argument that resonated well with an intellectual context that adored the concrete and abhorred abstraction. (His German opposites would obviously claim that the ethnic is concrete and that republicanism is based on abstractions.) The circumstantial necessities of the patriotic cause converted the Renan 254 The State, the Nation, and the Jews who had been “the real scientific inspiration behind the Aryan myth in France,” the author of the words that “the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, represents a truly inferior version of human nature,”9 to the progressive liberal who is now mostly remembered for having de- fined (in a famous speech of 1882) the nation as a“daily plebiscite.”Renan’s reaction to German triumphalism became emblematic for the subsequent canonization of a conception of the nation that implied a notion...