Ecumenism, Memory, and German Nationalism, 1817-1917

1 For the Sake of the German Fatherland

1 1 For the Sake of the German Fatherland Church Unity and the German National Idea at the 1817 Reformation Anniversaries on october 14, 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte passed through the university town of Jena after crushing the vaunted Prussian army at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt. A witness—the young philosophy professor G. W. F. Hegel—remarked that Napoleon represented a world-historical soul who seemed to dominate the entire world from horseback, and Hegel confessed that it was impossible not to admire the French emperor. Hegel’s would prove to be a minority opinion among Germans. In that same fateful year, the Holy Roman Empire would be dissolved; Napoleon would march triumphantly through Berlin; and French troops would be garrisoned throughout the Prussian Kingdom, which became a client state of the French Empire. Hegel’s admiring views of the emperor notwithstanding, the disastrous events of 1806 unleashed a wave of anti-French sentiment and German patriotism throughout the Old Reich. In his Speeches to the German Nation (1808), the philosopher J. G. Fichte roused his fellow Germans—which he defined in terms of a shared language and culture—in defense of their fatherland. The fitness guru Friedrich Ludwig Jahn founded social clubs that combined physical education, patriotic song, and moral education in order to foster a Prusso-German patriotism in which Prussia took pride of place among the German lands. And the writer Erntz Mortiz Arndt—who 2 Ecumenism, Memory, Ger m an Nationalism exclaimed that he hated all the French without exception, in the name of God and his people—envisioned the lesser German polities dissolving into an Austro-Prussian German state. These combined sentiments later manifested themselves as a nascent German nationalism.1 Anti-French and protonationalist feelings were stoked even more when Prussia rejected French rule and joined an alliance including Austria, Russia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Spain that would help to defeat Napoleon in a series of conflicts known in Prussia as the Wars of Liberation (1813–1815). After the allied victories and the emancipation of Prussia and other German client states from French rule, demands for social and political reform, nostalgia for the old Reich, and the desire for a unified German nation-state became more prominent. In response to these demands, the Prussian statesmen Karl vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg pursued a course of reforms that was intended to convert Germans from compliant subjects into active citizens.2 Popularly known as a revolution from above and undertaken during the Napoleonic occupation while the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III (r. 1797–1840) was weak, these policies sought to modernize the Prussian state and its administration and to unite the Prussian people against the French revolutionary threat. The Stein-Hardenberg era was inaugurated with meritocratic reforms of the Prussian military that were designed to address the defeats at Jena and Auerstedt.3 In addition to the overhaul of the Prussian army, serfdom was abolished, restrictions on the sale of land to non-nobles were lifted, taxes were made uniform between town and country, and some political liberties were extended to Jews. The Stein-Hardenberg reforms had begun during the Napoleonic occupation and proceeded through the Wars of Liberation. But by the fall of 1817, the process of reform had begun to stall. The restored Prussian king had failed to make good on some promises—most notably a Prussian constitution—and the competing interests of the monarchy, aristocracy , and bureaucracy limited additional reforms. This led reformers within the Prussian Kingdom to grow ever more impatient. The Ger m an Fatherland 3 Thus on October 18, 1817 a group of German university students with liberal and nationalist tendencies, many of whom were veterans of the Wars of Liberation, assembled at the Wartburg Castle in Eisenach. United under the mantra of “Honor, Freedom, Fatherland ” (Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland) the students agitated for a reform of German colleges, demanded the liberal constitution that King Friedrich Wilhelm had promised, and envisaged a unification of the German states. The occasion for the Wartburg Festival itself was heavy with nationalist sentiments. October 18, 1817 was in fact the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, a decisive Prussian victory over Napoleon. Moreover, the year 1817 was the tercentennial of the Protestant Reformation, and the students’ demands and the Wartburg Castle itself were steeped in memories of Martin Luther and the Reformation.4 The...