Download - German Historical Institute London

State-Building in 19th-Century Germany
which are primarily targeted at an English-only audience, but it is
very strange indeed in scholarly works.
The publisher’s decision is all the more regrettable as few works
deserve even a tinge of parochialism less than Abigail Green’s wideranging
book on state-building in nineteenth-century Germany. She
calls into question many key assumptions regarding the process of
German nation-building in an elegant, persuasive, and eminently
readable fashion by casting new light on the relationship between
particularism and nationalism. She does this by examining the
process of state-building in non-Prussian Germany between the revolution
of 1848 and German unification, with particular emphasis on
the three kingdoms of Hanover, Saxony, and Württemberg. These
were very different in location as well as in economic development—
Hanover remaining relatively rural and backward, Saxony industrializing
most rapidly, Württemberg dominated by crafts. They also
experienced very different political developments, with Hanover
torn by a series of constitutional crises but relatively unaffected by
the revolution of 1848, while Württemberg and Saxony were more
stable constitutional states with a higher, but short-lived, revolutionary
potential.
They were comparable, however, in their relative weight within
the German Confederation. In this, these middle-sized states contrasted
with the more important kingdom of Bavaria, whose nationbuilding
attempts have been studied by Manfred Hanisch in �ür
�ürst und Vaterland: Legitimitätsstiftung in Bayern zwischen Revolution
1848 und deutscher Einheit (1991). Green asks how these states coped
with the task of forming viable states with an at least semi-invented
tradition in an age when German nationalism appeared more and
more of a threat, and industrialization increased social tensions.
Because all states were centred around their monarchs, and a
sense of tradition could most easily be centred on the monarchy,
which was much older than the states in their present form, Green
begins by introducing the kings themselves, carefully pointing out
the importance, but also the limitations, of the differences in their talents,
ages, and abilities. In an era when direct contact between a
monarch and the populace was a major tool of political communication,
it was crucial to have a presentable and popular king. The fact
that Hanover’s Georg V was blind, or that King Karl of Württemberg
did nothing to disguise his homosexual inclinations, were serious
73