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Book Reviews
al and state parliaments allowed different political styles to persist at
the national and the state level, where, for instance, the national liberals
had a much stronger, and the social democrats a much weaker,
position than in the Empire. �ew monuments to Emperor Wilhelm I
were erected outside Prussia, and the boundaries of formerly independent
territories such as Hanover remained important in political
terms. �inally, regionalism could easily be resurrected at times of crisis.
Like any seminal book, Abigail Green’s re-reading of the 1850s
and 1860s in the context of a wider discussion of state-building and
nation-formation in nineteenth-century Germany raises further questions.
Because the structural developments she describes did not
make national unification on the Bismarckian model a predictable
and logical outcome, day-to-day politics and particularly the military
sphere must take centre stage for the explanation of how and why
unification came about. It would thus be interesting to know more
about the military aspect of state-building, to examine how this
‘school of the nation’ worked. This could be relevant at the level both
of the officer corps (which had to identify possible enemies inside
and outside the German Confederation while being linked to other
confederate states through training and federal fortresses) and of
conscripted soldiers, who became part of another major state-building
institution. A second remaining blank is the German Confederation
itself. Recently, some doubts have been raised, by Jürgen
Müller (notably in his introductions to volumes 3/1 and 3/2 of Quellen
zur Geschichte des Deutschen Bundes, published in 1996 and 1998
respectively) and others, about whether the Confederation was really
the complete failure in the 1850s and 1860s as which it appeared in
retrospect. Not only the rulers of individual states were able to surprise
visiting gymnasts by putting German colours on prominent display,
but the German Confederation’s forces ended up fighting with
black–red–gold cockades in 1866 as well. This had little effect in the
long run, and Green shows that the importance of the federal level
was very limited in the states she studied most intensely. But this
may have been different in the very small political entities.
Regardless of the answers to these additional questions, Abigail
Green has succeeded in moving the goalposts for any enquiry into
the growth of nationalism and the persistence of particularism in
Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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