History, too, became part of the idea of national rebirth. It was important to discover the ‘true’ German past because, as Friedrich von Schlegel put it, only people with ‘great national memories’ have survived in history, ‘history is the self-consciousness of a nation’. The real Germany was said to have existed far back in the Middle Ages, a perfect age when Germans had pursued pure and noble goals. The Berliner Ludwig Tieck had explored the monasteries and villages of the Mark Brandenburg with his friend Wackenroder in search of a medieval past; like so many of his generation he became enamoured of Dürer – his 1798 story Frank Sternbald’s Wanderungen was a fictitious tale about one of the master’s pupils. The reverence for the medieval past had religious undertones and was connected not only to the new reverence for Luther as the ‘father of the German language’ but to German Pietism, which held that religion was above all a deeply personal, emotional experience rather than one dictated by empty formal institutions admired by the previous generation. Adam Müller, a member of the Berlin salons and the Christlich-Deutsche Gesellschaft, believed that Germany was essentially Christian; in order to survive it had to rediscover the community of the faithful, united once again by an emotional sense of belonging to the nation, the feeling which had once produced a ‘beautiful brilliant’ Christian age. Such vague Romantic ideas had not initially been part of a single political message but were soon channelled into a specific national political programme by those united against Napoleon. One of the most important was the revolutionary nationalist prophet and propagandist, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It was he who articulated the link between Romantic notions of history and culture with a new concept of German nationalism. He used the lecture halls of Berlin as his pulpit.
Fichte was born in Rammeau in 1762 and first studied theology before becoming a student of Kant’s. In 1794 he was appointed to a chair of philosophy at Jena, where he met Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers and the Humboldts, but he was dismissed for being an atheist. Instead he moved to that ‘Godless city’ Berlin, where he became the first elected rector at the new university. It was there that he turned against the Enlightenment and against Kant, and moved towards a Romantic view of German history and the German nation. For him Germans – the Urvolk – were morally superior to other races, not least because they had remained uncorrupted by other cultures, especially those of the Latin and Roman worlds. It was this vision which prompted Fichte to write his Speeches to the German Nation, delivered in Berlin during French occupation in 1806–7.46
The speeches came at an important time. The Spanish had revolted against the French and some, including vom Stein, hoped that Berliners might also rise up against Napoleon. In his addresses Fichte asked, ‘What is to be done with Germany?’ and in fourteen lectures proceeded to outline a new vision of German nationalism. He asked what made a German ‘German’; why, despite the fact that Rome had been a superior civilization, had the ancient Germans resisted it for so long? His answer was that freedom meant rejecting foreign cultures and ‘just remaining Germans’. There, in the heart of occupied Berlin and with French officers in the audience, he asserted that ‘only the German has character’ and went on to stress that individuals must be taught to feel part of this national group. The key to this was education, which would teach young Germans that fulfilment in life would only come about if they were at one with the German nation. The message was clear: Berliners might not be as sophisticated as the French but to be true to themselves they had to rid themselves of the occupiers and re-create a glorious past through the resurrection of folk tales and medieval history. It was a provincial idea born of humiliation and loss of prestige, an idea which would later be twisted into the service of racists and chauvinists whom Fichte would have hated. And yet with his help Germanic fairy tales, the Gothic cathedrals, the poetry of ‘longing’, the patriotic songs, the slanted versions of history and the many other trappings of German Romanticism became mixed up with the new political movement – nationalism.
By 1808 other patriotic Germans had joined Fichte in the effort to rouse Berliners against the French. Schleiermacher, who had been exiled from Berlin by Napoleon, returned and spent his time whipping up popular support for war against France, for ‘one could not abandon the nation to the foreigner’ but had to create ‘one true German Empire, powerfully representing the entire German Volk’. Kleist said of the French in 1808:
Bleach every space, field and town,
White with their bones;
Spurned by crow and fox,
Deliver them unto the fishes;
Dam the Rhine with their bodies;
Let her, swollen with their limbs
Flood the Pfalz with foaming waves,
May she then be our frontier.47
Ernst Moritz Arndt cried, ‘let the unanimity of your hearts be your church, let hatred of the French be your religion, let freedom and Fatherland be your saints, to whom you pray!’; and in his 1813 speech ‘What is the German’s Fatherland?’ he spoke of the need to unite Germans in a great nation. For him, Germans did not appreciate their own country: ‘We live in a beautiful large rich land, a land of glorious memories, undying deeds, unforgettable service to the world in remote and recent times.’48 It had been lost, now it must be recovered. Publications, too, began to reflect the new mood. As early as 1807 Wilhelm Gubitz, a teacher at the Academy of Arts, had attempted to publish a nationalist newspaper Der Vaterland, although the first edition was seized and he was imprisoned. In 1808 Kotzebue published a number of anti-Napoleonic articles in Der Freymüathige; the paper was banned after K. M. Müller submitted an inflammatory article called ‘Über die Nemesis’, but the papers continued to circulate underground.
Anti-French feelings began to take more practical forms after news of the Spanish Uprising and the Austrian Wars of Liberation in 1809, the return of the king from Königsberg at the end of that year and the death of Frederick III’s consort Queen Luise in July 1810 – a woman who was revered for her stance against Napoleon and whose death brought people together in mourning. A plethora of illegal and secret organizations sprang up: Reimer’s bookshop on the Kochstrasse became a centre of clandestine activity for anti-French groups; men from Chamisso to Savigny, from Varnhagen to Arndt continued to meet at the Herz salon to discuss possible moves against France. One of the most powerful organizations was the Tugendbund, started in April 1808 in Königsberg, with a chapter in Berlin. It called itself the ‘Moral and Scientific Union’ for ‘the revival of morality, religion, serious taste and public spirit’ but was in fact a secret society directed against the French. Friedrich von der Marwitz said that they got ‘intelligence from all quarters, to create irritation against the French … and then to make report how discontented the people are here’.49 Schleiermacher was the leader of the Berlin Committee, which included military men amongst its members and which met secretly even when ‘the enemy was still in the land’. The groups communicated between Königsberg and Berlin using codes to deceive the French; in one the king and queen were referred to as ‘Quednow and his wife’, vom Stein was called ‘Christ’, and Gneisenau was referred to as ‘the Call’.50 In 1812 the Hauptverein or Berlin Central Club was founded to further the nationalist cause and in November 1810 the Deutsches Bund or German Confederation was formed by the student Friedrich Friesen and the teacher Friedrich Ludwig Jahn to ensure ‘the survival of the German people in its originality and self-sufficiency, the revival of German-ness, of all slumbering forces, the preservation of our nationhood … aiming at the eventual unity of our scattered, divided