Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (review)

Nation-state formation has been a phenomenon at the heart of historical inquiry ever since the invention of the discipline. Whatever their specific explanatory framework, studies accounting for the appeal of nationalism far outnumber those that address the obverse questions: What was the appeal of particularism? Was there more to it than conservatism? Why did so many people continue to believe that it was a viable option in an age of dramatic and highly visible "modernization"?

Green's book provides much-needed and long-overdue answers to these questions. In nineteenth-century Germany, she argues, the modernizing policies of administrations in Hanover, Saxony, and Württem- berg made subnational states viable focal points for progressive patriotism. Her approach thus differs from (the few) existing studies on particularism, which typically located particularist sentiment in specific political movements (such as pre-1848 liberalism) or confessional milieus (notably Catholicism). Thematically and methodologically, Greenmakes the case for the primacy of the state in regionalist identity formation.

Green's sources are by necessity relatively traditional: the holdings of three government archives plus some published material from the period, notably newspapers. Green starts her survey at the top of the political hierarchy, examining the role of dynastic loyalties in individual-state consciousness. As the figure of the monarch was invested with more personal virtues, such as gentleness, benevolence and warmth, royal public relations became ever more important, amounting to what Green calls "a democratisation of royal ceremony" (91). This equation may overstate the difference with Enlightenment notions of princely paternalism and sentimentality, but it does underscore important structural similarities between developments in the "Third Germany" and the evolution of monarchical populism under the two Prussian Williams.

The next chapter examines how states used cultural sponsorship to promote particularist patriotism. Yet their sporadic support for museums, festivals, etc., did not amount to a concerted cultural policy. More dramatic changes can be observed in their dealings with the print media. The relaxation of press censorship and a veritable explosion of local newspapers in the 1850s and 1860s in the three states under examination produced the beginnings of a modern-style news management. The new media society—newspapers now reached about half the male adult population—was partly a result of successful educational reform, to which Green devotes another chapter. Efforts in the smaller states peaked after 1848, and often surpassed reform effort in contemporary Prussia.

The most original chapter is that on railway construction. Modernization theorists have long claimed that this was the single most important factor in promoting national unity. Green shows how railway construction strengthened, rather than weakened, regional peculiarity by polarizing economic differences between industrial, artisanal, and agricultural areas. Moreover, individual state governments financed thebulk of railway construction in Germany, and railway connections between states more typically followed political alliances than economicnecessities. paradoxically, however, this particularism led to a polycentric railway network that proved beneficial in the long run;fewer regions were bypassed altogether than anywhere else in Europe. Moreover, the states' involvement in railway building—traditionally apet project of German liberals—created an important area of consensus between conservative state governments and their progressive critics.

In many such areas, individual-state development fostered particularist identities while helping the nation-building process. Although each state was different, the differences were conceptualized as variations of the whole, not as an alternative to it. The mutually reinforcing coexistence of the particular and the national was a defining feature of German political culture well before the outset of Green's study, and, as she shows, the rise of popular nationalism did little to change it. In the 1990s, the work of Applegate and Confino revolutionized our understanding of the relationship between localist and national sentiments.¹ Heimat (homeland), they suggested, mediated between the abstract category of the nation and the tangible experience of one's immediate social and geographical surroundings...