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This chapter focuses on the nineteenth-century formation of Germany. Organizational innovation was the assembly by Prussia of geographically disparate German principalities under the new constitutional umbrella of Reichstag, Bundesrat, and chancellery. Organizational catalysis was the emergence of political parties and interest groups—and underneath those, of German nationalism—to manage the constitutional core. The multiple-network invention was dual inclusion: namely, the stapling together of the deeply contradictory principles of democracy and autocracy through “Prussia is in Germany, and Germany is in Prussia.” This deep contradiction built into the heart of the German state generated a sequence of new political actors in German history.

This chapter resumes discussion begun in the first chapter, focusing on the changed outlooks of Brahms and his Viennese colleagues in the 1890s. Prominent citizens who had earlier objected to signs of Czech nationalism now recognized consequences of German nationalism. Hanslick, who had grown up in Prague, exemplified contradictions of Liberalism in his simultaneous admiration for and unwitting condescension toward Dvořák. Discussion of reception of Dvořák's music by Hanslick and Theodor Helm highlights differences between the older and newer German nationalism. Brahms's library and an overlooked archival collection afford insights into his views. An orthodox Liberal, he rejected the cultural despair of German tribalism but voiced discouragement about the future of music. Liberal economics were being unmasked as second nature, as would absolute tonal music slightly later. Yet Brahms's late music is beautiful because it responds to demands of music-historical lateness while conveying the peculiar expressiveness of a late style.

Emphasizing the 1880s, this chapter begins to establish contemporary contexts by demonstrating continuities between the German nationalism of Brahms and Liberal colleagues in Vienna (Billroth, Hanslick), and the more radical nationalism of the burgeoning anti-Liberal movement. It discusses the significance of Wagnerism (Viennese Academic and New Richard Wagner Societies) for the new anti-Liberal politics and for Bruckner's emergence as a rival. Critics understood musical logic and Liberal valorization of reason in opposition to melody, as a matter of instinct, and anti-rationalist tendencies of the new politics. Whereas Liberal critics such as Hanslick characterized Bruckner's music as illogical, anti-Liberal critics adopted “sharper-key” political rhetoric to attack Brahms. Because Jews were linked to Liberalism, one tactic was to depict Brahms, his associates, and his music as “Jewish”. Discussions of an article by Schenker and a review of Dvořák by Hanslick provide more nuanced perspectives on questions of melody and musical logic.

The chapter discusses the second part of the 19th century when nationalism took on a new direction. It turned to the right and defined itself as the enemy of socialism. The doctrine of List responded to the Industrial Revolution by accepting the ideals of the French Revolution. Nationalism had adopted a strong pro-industrialization stand in its overall program for a unified national state. German nationalism changed as it adopted the Prussian state and the noble class. It drew on Marxism as a guide. In other parts of the world where Listian nationalism was practiced, nationalism departed from the classical European model. It was spreading quickly in Europe and Asia. Japan liked List's advocacy of free trade. List also found followers in India. However, it was in Russia that the first nationalization of communism took place. It was there where Marxism found itself in power.

Acknowledging both the general aging of music that Adorno heard in Brahms and observations that most of his oeuvre sounds “twilit”, this chapter asserts “late style” as nonetheless meaningful. Rejecting cause and effect, it draws on Freud's concept of overdetermination to address the emergence of late-style features and proposes an addendum to late-style dialectics: late works are at once an expression of their time and alienated from the contemporary context. The significance of German nationalism to works from the mid-1880s and others from the 1890s is explored, as is the politicization of “late style”. Rather than simplifying late style, the chapter uses diverse manifestations — e.g., mannerism, blending of technical and expressive features — as hermeneutic points of entry. Special emphasis is placed on Brahms's mastery of ways and degrees of asserting a key in tonality's late period, and on moments of expressive complexity that model psychological process, evoking Freud's Vienna.

This chapter examines republicans' rhetorical defense of the republics. Countering claims by the political right that the new republics were un-German, republicans argued that parliamentary democracy and German nationalism were not at odds. To prove their point, they cited the revolution of 1848 and their support for an Anschluss, or a political union between Germany and Austria. In doing so, republicans attempted to create their own form of nationalism by contrasting their großdeutsch nationalism with right-wing alldeutsch (pan-German) nationalism and conservative nationalism. Even though republicans at times harbored prejudices, they used großdeutsch nationalism to support democratic rights and practices, to reconcile national and international allegiances, and to create a national community that cut across religious, political, and social divisions.

This introductory chapter illustrates that there were multiple understandings of Germanness during the Weimar era, hence emphasizing how the triumph of Nazi ideology after 1918 was far from certain and pointing out how historical understandings of Nazism has overlooked the vital historical relationship between Germany and Austria. It examines the state of Germany in both the nineteenth century and the immediate postwar situation, from which the more contemporary contests that emerged between republicans and their opponents over the nature of German nationalism and politics that this book studies had emerged. The chapter contextualizes the shifting boundaries of Germanness against this backdrop, at the same time highlighting the long-neglected connections between Germany and Austria and the importance of exploring the exchange of people and ideas across the Austro-German boundary.

This book examines the affective management of German nationalism, or what it calls “the management of hate,” in Germany after reunification, taking as its point of departure the daily realities of young right-wing extremist groups in the East Berlin district of Treptow-Köpenick. It explores the governance of right-wing extremism within a project of German nationhood and how the troubled enterprise of the country's national question proceeds under the sign of broader contemporary processes. Topics include the ways that young right-wing extremists articulate their relations to cultural and ethnicized difference; the juridical production of the so-called “political delinquency”; how the management of hate seeks to inoculate and fortify broader affective publics against illicit forms of nationalism; and “national vision.” This chapter reviews the relevant historical background and provides an overview of some of the crucial theoretical frameworks that guide the study as well as the fieldwork and research methods.

This chapter explores how the Kulturkampf pushed Mennonite leaders to articulate their relationship to German nationalism. Emerging from the formation of the German Empire, including the abolition of military exemption in Prussia, spokespersons disagreed over the appropriate response. While conservatives found military service and by extension German nationalism incompatible with Mennonite faith, progressives argued that such logic only confirmed the charges from patriots. Torn between the poles of non-resistant theology and nationalist ideology, Mennonite communities descended into chaos. Defending the sanctity of human life, pacifists argued that it would be un-Mennonite and un-Christian to support a militarist Germany and abandoned their homeland. Meanwhile, progressive Mennonite leaders advanced a specifically Anabaptist version of German nationalism.

This concluding chapter discusses the subsequent Nazi appropriation of the Anschluss and briefly recounts the differences between the republican and Nazi ideas about an Anschluss and nationalism. It expands on the republican use of großdeutsch nationalism: in allowing diverse groups to participate in a national community that was compatible with a democratic and pluralistic society, großdeutsch nationalism became a critical aspect in republicans' energetic attempts to legitimize the embattled republics. While it is true that republicans on both sides of the Austro-German border were never able to convince the political right that they were loyal Germans or that parliamentary democracy was a German form of government, the chapter argues that their inability to do so does not mean that their attempts to create a democratic and peaceful großdeutsch nationalism should be dismissed.

The most important reception of IT in cultural history is Goethe's verse tragedy Iphigenie auf Tauris (1786). Goethe's Greeks do not rob the barbarians of their unique statue. The victory won in all earlier versions of the play by guile and force is replaced by persuasion and the achievement of consensus. This shift has been the source both of the enormous admiration Goethe's play has elicited, from the founding father of Esperanto (Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof) among others, and also, since the 1960s, of criticism from a postcolonial standpoint. The chapter traces the identification with the play of the emerging German state and National Socialism, and its impact on Gerhart Hauptmann's Iphigenie in Delphi (1940). But it also argues that in Iphigenie Goethe was struggling with the tension between German nationalism and his more progressive urge, a product of the radical Enlightenment, to encourage the global creation of a new Weltliteratur which could transcend all national and racial categories.

This chapter examines how Germany's young right-wing extremists articulate their relations to cultural and ethnicized difference as they discursively constitute their own political selves, focusing in particular on their identification and self-identification as easterners. It considers some developments that have reshaped the extreme right in Germany over the past couple of decades, paying attention to the contemporary legacy of the East–West divide in the post-reunification era and its political significance both nationally and, more specifcally, for the young right-wing extremists. It also analyzes the vulnerability of Ossis (East Germans) to right-wing extremism right-wing extremism in today's Germany and concludes with a discussion of important trends that have reconfigured far right nationalism across the Continent, including Germany, in recent decades.

This chapter explores the evolution of the Black Viennese cultural field in the late 1920s and 1930s from a period of relative consensus through its tensions in the early Austrofascist state to the eventual triumph of the radicals before the Anschluss. An examination of the conservative intellectual landscape through its leading publications—Das neue Reich, Die schönere Zukunft, and Der christliche Ständestaat—and the scholarly works published by central thinkers such as Hans Eibl, Johannes Messner, and Eric Voegelin, reveals the ideological rift in Black Vienna. While a contingent of intellectuals supported the Ständestaat and accepted the opportunities it provided, most tolerated the new government only grudgingly. As the Austrian state struggled to consolidate its power and Hitler's Germany continued its ascendancy, the calls for a völksich revolution only increased. Austrofascist ideology never achieved the status of a cultural dominant—the more radical Black Viennese ideas of German nationalism, fascism, and anti-Semitism predominated. Despite a general uneasiness about the Nazis, the vast majority of Black Viennese intellectuals, because of the ongoing radicalization of their conservative ideology, bear some responsibility for the Nazi triumph.

Twenty-five years after Anton Bruckner’s death, groups formed in Germany to revise the composer’s biography, highlighting Bruckner as a German mystic in the medieval tradition of Meister Eckhart and his successors, and thus a figure newly divorced from the facts of his (Austrian) life. Through reference to monographs from this 1920s Bruckner renaissance—by Karl Grunsky, Oskar Lang, Erich Schwebsch, and Richard Wetz —this chapter demonstrates that, despite their ‘anti-modern’ rhetoric, these authors engaged mystic doctrine to advocate connection to a new sense of community above the individual self, expressed in terms of narrow, pro-Christian nationalistic feeling. This advocacy envisaged cultural consequences, even new symphonic performance practices. It influenced other Bruckner commentators of the decade, including those who have rarely been placed in such a context, and the chapter turns to Ernst Kurth’s Bruckner monograph (1925) and the central role that a specifically German mysticism plays within Kurth’s musical and biographical interpretations.

Concepts of a German people (Volk) long predated Germany as a nation-state. Because of the centrality of Volk in Schlink’s vision, this chapter uses conceptual history to trace the development of the term and explore its various contemporary meanings. During the Protestant Reformation, the idea of the German people was primarily in linguistic terms, as the result of Luther’s Bible translation. Despite diversity of citizenship among them, German speakers developed a common culture by the Romantic era, in which many thought of themselves as possessing a shared spirit and destiny. This idea intensified in the German nationalism that erupted during the German Empire. Increasingly during the Weimar Republic and especially during the Third Reich, some saw Germans not merely as an ethnicity but also as a race, embracing racism as a dominant ideology. By the midtwentieth century, Volk could denote racial, ethnic, or national identity, or any combination thereof.

This chapter draws on psychoanalytically inflected theories of ideology to offer a new explanation of the apparent inconsistencies of Arnim's antisemitism. Slavoj Žižek's concept of the “social fantasy” and Homi Bhabha's notion of “colonial mimicry” both stipulate that ideologies can incorporate a great deal of inconsistency and ambivalence without losing their effectiveness. These post-Freudian theories shed new light on Arnim precisely because ambiguity and ambivalence proliferate in his writings around the motif of interreligious love. It is shown that romantic attachments are the means by which Arnim figures the possibilities and the limits of Christian-Jewish rapprochement. It is also argued that interfaith love stories fulfill a distinct function in Arnim's political thought, which combines German nationalism with a critique of rising industrial capitalism. Arnim wrote several texts that either stage the emergence of a German community that excludes Jews or depict the corrosion of such a community through French occupation and rising industrial capitalism. These texts include the openly antisemitic speech “On the Distinguishing Signs of Jewishness,” the unpublished prose fragment “Reconciliation in the Summer Holiday,” and the complex novella Gentry by Entailment (Die Majorats-Herren). In each of these texts, the dramatization of failing Christian-Jewish love affairs serves to gloss over the tensions that trouble Arnim's visions of social harmony and political unity.