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The chapter gives a short but extensive autobiography of Friedrich List. He contributed greatly to the movement for economic and political unification of Germany. He was mostly remembered as a promoter of the railroad. He considered the railroad as an essential precondition for Germany's economic unification. Even when he was young, he shared the ideas and values of political and cultural nationalists which can be shown clearly by his reform plans for the German confederation. List was an ideologist of industrialism and industrialization. He was the only thinker who welcomed the Industrial Revolution and its political, social, and cultural consequences. He called for reform and not revolution. He wanted to give the Germans a new life and a sense of purpose. The last major cause that he participated in was the movement for raising the Zollverein tariff to stimulate industrial growth.

The traditional view that the Reich expired unmourned is inaccurate: the new sovereign German states of the German Confederation tried to extinguish the memory of the Reich, but many of its traditions endured. As the views of Humboldt make clear, the Reich had created the German nation. That was something that the Prussian-German historians sought to deny as they applauded the role of Prussia in the creation of the Second Reich (1871). After the disaster of the Third Reich, historians gradually began to reassess the significance of the first Reich, the Holy Roman Empire. Arguments that the Reich prefigured the Federal Republic, the Berlin Republic or the European Union are unhistorical. The Reich was not unlike other early modern polities: it facilitated the development of a culture of freedom, an ability to live with federal structures and a national identity, which continued to shape German history long after its dissolution.

This chapter examines the years 1866–76 as a period of far-reaching liberal achievements in Germany’s Second Reich, and more modest, temporary liberal successes in Saxony. The first section provides a close examination of the Reichstag elections of February 1867, when Germans confronted the novelty of mass politics. It considers principal campaign themes and key races in order to convey the look and feel of this election contest, and discusses reactions to the election outcome in light of the political parties’ future prospects. A second section examines Saxony’s important but uncertain role in the North German Confederation, and the Reichstag election of August 1867. A third section is devoted to Saxony’s Landtag suffrage reform of 1868. Liberals, Conservatives, and the Saxon government put forward competing agendas for reform. The final reform reflected a mix of liberal and conservative ideals, and the general election of 1869 inaugurated a fragile liberal era.

This chapter focuses on Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1839) and Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones (1835), and shows how a new pan-European effort to “possess the past” in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars interacted with the differing political geographies in the French Hexagon and the German Confederation. In France, where the Bourbon Restoration created a unified state and a common public sphere, citizens nevertheless perceived reality quite differently, often depending on when they were born and what their formative experiences had been. Stendhal pays tribute to this with a novel in which characters impose different plots onto the same events. The internal division of Germany, on the other hand, meant that such plots could be safely segregated in one and the same novel, resulting in a more picaresque approach to the Bildungsroman.

This study re-evaluates nineteenth-century Germans’ attitudes and responses to the violence and suffering of war. It asks how far the establishment of mass warfare between 1792 and 1815 affected contemporaries’ conceptions and expectations of military conflict as the omnipresent, if occasionally concealed, challenge facing the states of the German Confederation. After the conflagrations of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, the possibility of war remained the primary challenge confronting governments and their subjects, with armies consuming the greater part of most states’ budgets and the onset of hostilities menacing the very existence of the state and the lives of individual citizens. The term ‘people’s war’, which was used at the time, hinted at the shifts which had taken place. In these respects, a re-evaluation of contemporaries’ responses to war entails a rereading of the history of the German lands in the nineteenth century. The study examines the relationship between nationalism, politics, memory, and history.

The concluding chapter draws together the various main argumentative threads laid out in the preceding chapters and ultimately asks head on: In whose name, then, do international courts speak the law? The chapter finds that from the perspective of the book’s public law theory of international adjudication, international courts decide, even if they do not know it, in the name of the peoples and the citizens. This formula, which connects to both peoples and citizens, does not reflect conceptual uncertainty but stands for a plural understanding of democratic legitimation. In conclusion, the chapter flags remaining questions that still need to be answered and offers a number of suggestions for further research that can be carried out across the disciplines.