BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

supposed “right to take back the scattered members of the Germanic family,” a pointed allusion
to the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. 14 Renan asserted place and history as the
main criteria for nationality in opposition to the ethnolinguistic determinism of German writers,
notably nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke who sought to legitimate German
occupation of former French territory on that basis. Treitschke’s argument coopted elements of
the organic tradition built upon Johann Gottfried von Herder’s definition of nations as
historically continuous and autonomous ethnic, linguistic and cultural communities. But while
Herder’s defense of cultural pluralism and relativism did not preclude his own cosmopolitan,
humanitarian and pacifist Enlightenment values, later writers adopted a more chauvinistic tone. 15
In particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s nationalistic and antisemitic Addresses to the German
Nation (1807-8), written and delivered under the pall of French occupation, denigrated “neo-
Latin” European countries that had inherited the dead language and corrupt culture of Rome.
Fichte extolled German language and culture for reflecting the “living spirit” of a people and
wrote that Germans alone, as the original Teutonic people described by the Roman historian
Tacitus in 98 CE, “had retained all the virtues of which their country had formerly been the
14 Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, originally delivered on 11 March 1882 at the Sorbonne, also
appeared in Discours et Conferences (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1887), 277-310, excerpted in Kohn,
Nationalism: Meaning and History, 136-138. See also Smith, Nationalism, 35-38.
15 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking,
1976), 156-58, refused to label Herder a revolutionary-turned-reactionary patriot/romantic
irrationalist according to a commonly perceived German response to the Jacobin Terror and
Napoleonic wars. Berlin asked ironically, “Was not this the path pursued by Fichte (above all
Fichte), Görres, Novalis and the Schlegels, Schleiermacher and Tieck, Gentz and Schelling, and
to some degree even by the great libertarian Schiller?”
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