Nationalism in Germany, 1848–1866: Revolutionary Nation (review)

The reassertion of conservative political authority as the critical force of German nation-building is an interpretive commonplace among historians. The magnetic pull of Otto von Bismarck and his brand of conservative nationalism are hard to resist. But Mark Hewitson’s fine study avoids this temptation to focus on the dominant political impulses that compelled Bismarck to recast himself as a “white revolutionary.” By reexamining the role of nationalism in German politics between revolution and unification, and the wide array of actors and interests that shaped this protean doctrine, Hewitson assigns liberals and democrats leading roles in the drama of German unification. The ideas, sentiments, and institutional frameworks that reorganized Germany were, he argues, a “largely liberal and democratic project” (358). To demonstrate this claim, Hewitson’s study underscores the long-lasting impact of the Revolution of 1848–1849, whose ideals, principles, and print networks not only created a liberal public sphere, but also affected “the assumptions of the most resistant ministers and diplomats of a supposedly reactionary age” (72). “The revolution of 1848–49,” he writes, “had altered the geographical, political, and cultural foundations of the German question” (63). Hence the thrust of the book’s subtitle: in spite of immediate defeat, the revolution did not fail. “The national and political legacy of the first unification of Germany in 1848–49 left a significant imprint on the second one after 1866” (355).

To connect these two political periods, Hewitson meticulously documents the pervasive liberal public opinion of these decades. Having consulted numerous newspapers, hundreds of treatises and articles, and an impressive array of diaries, correspondence, and government paper, Hewitson renders a fine-grained portrait of bourgeois nationhood. In spite of postrevolutionary press laws that hindered free opinion, the author uncovers a flourishing oppositional liberal press that set the terms for defining the political nation—a range of perspectives largely informed by 1848–1849. In bringing the reader into close contact with public opinion, Hewitson illuminates a political pluralism during the 1850s that runs counter to the decade’s moniker, “the Reaction.” Liberal and democratic publicists remained confident and optimistic and in no way viewed the setbacks of 1849 as irrevocable.

In doing so, Hewitson furthermore rearranges the era’s set pieces. Contemporaries, for example, did not perceive the Punctation of Olmütz as a pivotal moment of shame à la Borussian historians; on the contrary, both conservatives and liberals viewed the treaty as an “honorable and successful negotiation” (71). Nor did contemporaries necessarily view Austria’s military defeat in 1859 as a dramatic turning point in the German question. The Crimean War, Austrian federalism, and the Bund’s role in Austria’s foreign policy incrementally estranged liberals from Grossdeutschland as a path toward German nationhood. With chapters on the Austrian question in international affairs, German public opinion of the Hapsburg option, and contemporary discussions on reforming the German Confederation, Hewitson displays the open-ended contingencies of the 1850s, yet demonstrates why radicals and liberals ultimately embraced a Prussian-led North German Confederation. Hewitson’s copious sources underscore above all the multidimensional and multidirectional nature of the Prussian state, whose political character remained unfixed for liberals and democrats.

During the New Era and the Constitutional Conflict, the revolutionary lineages of national reform deftly come to light. Oppositional opinion dominated the press (see the useful table on newspaper circulation, 119–21); radicals participated in both the Nationalverein and the Fortschrittspartei; and, to an extensive degree, liberals and radicals cooperated “by resurrecting their constitutional and political plan for a nation-state of 1849” (240). Contemporaries, the author notes, often confused liberal and radical platforms. Through party and press, the liberal-radical agitation for a constitutional nation-state with democratic representation clearly formed the momentous initiative against which Bismarck and the Prussian crown reacted and adapted. In this fashion, Hewitson places the power and presence of liberal-democratic nationalism center stage. Unlike conventional accounts, which are wont to underscore the liberal surge of this era...