BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

national histories, for example, Kevin Cramer has observed a striking contrast between
nineteenth-century British and German reevaluations of early modern developments. British
historians, he wrote, could mythologize the creation of a legitimate modern, religiously and
politically unified parliamentary state at a critical moment in history—through revisionist
interpretations of Oliver Cromwell, the English Civil War and subsequent Glorious Revolution
of 1688 leading to the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 and later Acts of Union with Ireland in
1801. German historians, divided in their Protestant and Catholic sympathies and frustrated by
German disunity before Bismarck, differed in their assessments of the role played by ambitious
“warlord” and Catholic commander Albrecht Wallenstein during the Thirty Years War.
According to rumor and Friedrich Schiller’s extremely popular literary portrayal, Wallenstein
attempted to bring about German unity during the Thirty Years War before his assassination by
Habsburg agents. Not only did Germans lack a unifying and triumphal linear narrative like that
cherished by the British, Cramer argued, but the image of an “unrealized nation,” the obsession
with atrocity stories and the necessity for a “bold repudiation of old ways of thinking” also
became embedded in a national myth of redemption through sacrifice that persisted into the Nazi
era. 85
If a historical sense of providential triumphalism became a significant component of
British identity, something of the reverse occurred in Germany through the influence of Friedrich
Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s essay on The Use and Abuse of History (1874) coupled happiness and
freedom of action with the ability to forget or “feel unhistorically,” and his posthumously popular
85 Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century,
Studies in War, Society, and the Military (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 96-97,
100, 186, 188.
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